This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity in a more compute friendly format than MD files.
- It exposes the "database metaphor": your data is organized in collections of documents, each collection having a well-defined schema.
- It's all local in an app (no server component to self-host).
- It has an AI assistant on top that you can use to explore / create / update.
- It allows you to create small personal apps (e.g., a custom dashboard).
- It allows you to sync data from external sources (Strava, Google Calendar, Google Contacts.)
Cons:
- The database metaphor is quite "technical". A "normal" user is not comfortable with the idea of creating their own collections, defining a schema, etc. In fact, right now I only have developers and techies as a target audience.
- It's not optimized for any one use case. So, for example, as a notes-keeper Notion is obviously much better.
- It's still in early stages (I'm working on it alone), so:
- There's no mobile app yet.
- It doesn't yet support syncing between devices.
- There are just 3 connectors to sync from external sources.
There's a ton of these right now. I did some research the other day and found at least five "open source" (to various degrees, all of these are not strictly speaking open source but open core) notion alternatives, and they're all in some ways better, in some ways worse than notion. I settled on AFFiNE [0] because it felt the snappiest, but they've got a lot of telemetry and tracking so I forked to remove that and use my telemetry-removed frontend as a PWA.
I use it on mobile via the web browser, it's pretty good actually. They don't have an official mobile app yet but there might be an unofficial one, I forget exactly.
It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful capacity.
From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.
Fair enough, it's protocol is open source and the apps are source available. Modifications can be made by individuals for their own uses, though. I think it's as close as you can expect to get with a mostly full-fledged Notion competitor.
In any case, I don't particularly enjoy AnyType, despite coming back to it a few times to test it out (and still maintaining my own sync server, despite not actively using it, in case I go back to try it out again after some demonstrably updates). Just pointing out that it's a less restrictive alternative.
We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc).
I use Zim wiki for everything just now and I don't like it. I'm in the market for a replacement, and would even pay like with how Immich does it.
Unless the source code is available or you put it into legal escrow for when you go bust/abandon the software†, I will not invest my time and data into a system where I am entirely dependent on another organisation or service.
† And you will go bust or abandon the software before I die!
I'm still happy to use it. It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
I'd really like to see the team get rewarded for their work, too. I'd be sad if it went 100% open and they didn't so much as draw a market salary from it.
I think if it went open, they'd get nothing. That's the one thing I strongly dislike about open source is that only hyperscalers really economically benefit from it.
99.9% of the internet is closed source and we don't ask for it to be opened. From our ISPs, to Google, to the hyperscalers.
If anything, I think we should be asking those things to be open. If we're only asking the little guys, the big guys with trillion dollar market caps skate by. This is exactly how they want it. Fewer gradients for small players to grow.
I do ask for that and generally refuse to use closed source sw.
But... something being opensource doesnt always mean you can change stuff. Like signal-desktop that has build process so badly convoluted that even gentoo doesnt build it itself. (has it improved already?)
1) Modern 2010s era "OSI Approved open source" is a meme built by hyperscalers to get free work, poach the efforts of others (Amazon makes hundreds of millions on Redis, Elasticsearch, etc.) and eliminate the threat of smaller players.
There are great things like Linux and Blender and ffmpeg. But there is also a concerted battle waged by trillion dollar companies against us using "open" to salt the field of any kind of economic growth salient.
By being completely open and not keeping some leverage, you ensure you cannot make the same revenues the big companies can. And they will outspend and outgrow you. They will encircle and even find a way to grow off of your labor while you don't see so much as a dime.
2) You wouldn't be on the internet right now if you really refused to use closed source. The binary blobs in your hardware, your ISP, your wifi. Not even Stallman can do it.
I love open source. But I hate how difficult it is to make money. And I hate how the big players have used it to enrich and entrench themselves by making it just the crust of their closed source empires.
> From what I see of the pricing options in your business model, having your code released under a FOSS licence would make no difference to how you make money.
Except that making their client FOSS would help a lot to replicate the APIs and create a FOSS server, which would definitely make a difference on how they make money.
> It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
This.
I spend 6 months to export 100K notes from Evernote mostly because they intentionally throttle the exports to a limit and you can extract it only in their proprietary format that truncates some data.
I specifically like md, because I will always be able to open it and modify, even if the original app no longer exists. I use obsidian without any extensions.
I must admit that I don’t archive things like exercise activity. So maybe the simple mindset won’t work then.
You might be interested in Graphiti: https://github.com/getzep/graphiti.
With a self-hosted Graphiti MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge graph from all your data. You can then query and update the graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don’t know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun way!
> What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that represent them
I was asking the same question today after investigating XTDB¹ (a Clojure centric bitemporal DB) and went looking for a batteries included WebAssembly framework like Blazor²
There are lots of analysis you can do with a WGS, and lots of them involve a high level of expertise. But the basics are not that difficult, if you assume that you might be wrong (for example, you can try to do basic PGS for some conditions, but don't freak out if you score too high in some of them: take it as a hint worth of asking for professional guidance).
Assume you have your WGS files. BGI/Macrogen can already provide you with basic analysis (like the Variant calling), but next you can do is head to https://nf-co.re/ and look for pipelines that might be of your interest: sarek, raredisease, oncoanalyser, hlatyping... and have some fun. Next head to https://snakemake.github.io/snakemake-workflow-catalog/ and look if there is something you can be interested in (grenepipe, dna-seq-gatk-variant-calling, PopGLen...). With some help from a decent LLM you should be able to run your "admixture" that some people loves (the "I'm 3% asian, 24% african, 10% nordic..."). I don't know anyone that does à la carta analysis, we do all of them ourselves, but sure there are some.
Note that you enter a difficult world, and there is no absolutes there: is fun to play, the same way that is fun to track your own sugar levels with an app. But you shouldn't be diagnosing yourself or taking radical actions based on the results. You are not debugging yourself. Soon enough you'll be wondering about your RNA-seq under X or Y conditions.
YSEQ is a German mom and pop lab which does next generation sequencing for genealogists. It has rather little utility for genealogists, but some people are really into figuring out their place in the great Y chromosome haplotree, so apparently there is a market. Family Tree DNA also does some next generation sequencing, of the Y chromosome and mitochondria only - they have bigger trees than YSEQ, but YSEQ I believe gives you the option to get even more resolution on the Y chromosome.
YSEQ will do full genome NGS if you ask for it but it's expensive, can take six months or more, and the owners have apparently been known to cancel your order and refund you if you complain about the wait times.
I hear this and I also hear the lack of experience with enterprise (let alone commercial) software development.
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
There is a substantial difference between developing state of the art hot R&D technology and maintaining one js hook into C codebase, especially considering its only this one webRequest.onBeforeRequest binding we are interested in thats being degrade/blocked/deleted and not the underlying codebase https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544266
Why don't we put the file characteristics into the token set that represents the file: file name, extension, size, lines, last edited, character encoding, and so on
