Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try Zenfetch. It's designed for this use case.
Thanks for mentioning Zenfetch :) Happy to answer any questions
What is Zenfetch?
Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I make it available via the web, I can probably sell access to other scientists and engineers in my field. Out of curiosity. Does this statement come from complete ignorance of or complete disregard to copyright of the author?
> complete ignorance of or complete disregard to copyright A question that could be appended to many LLM discussions!
but the LLM is no different than a human doing that & outputs COMPLETELY unique strings! - said the profiting robot parked at the gray zone law area waiting for lobyists turn it white
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#43Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#44I work in a very interdisciplinary, and somewhat niche, tech/engineering field. For the past 15 years, I've been saving every relevant PDF that I can find -- mostly studies of the sort published by Elsevier and Springer, but also books and presentations. I now have around 10k, which probably makes it the largest private library focused on this particular domain of expertise. It has been extremely useful, especially b…
> If I make it available via the web, I can probably sell access to other scientists and engineers in my field. Out of curiosity. Does this statement come from complete ignorance of or complete disregard to copyright of the author?
I see you have encountered the first reality of "personal library".
Of course, the idea of selling access to your private digital collection (or a derivative model) is relatively more absurd than the idea of monopolizing the original published work... Even so, this is as good a time as any to reconsider the practicality of copyright.
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could argue that personal computing (desktop) software piracy lead to web-based SaaS subscription licensing. In theory, mobile app stores solved device software piracy, at the cost of high distribution fees, policy restrictions and telemetry. Thanks to Linux being used at scale in Android and WSL, it's now maintained and capable on the desktop, as a hypothetical foundation for personal computing innovation. But e…
Unfortunately so far Qualcomm was hard at work avoiding making an open platform ARM-based laptop/tablet - to the point of squeezing around MS rules on that through special drivers etc to make Windows think it's dealing with EFI-compliant hardware.
That's disappointing, since mainline Linux support has made progress, https://www.linaro.org/blog/qualcomm-and-linaro-enable-lates...
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#46Years ago I spent thousands of hours trying to figure out how to organize a digital library.
My final answer was to use the Library of Congress catalog system. They need to add some sub-categories for how-to explanations.
Then have a field for media type (video vs. PDF vs. image)
Then note the style of presentation (academic vs. folksy vs. a manual vs. a dad showing you how to do this)
Then note the language
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately so far Qualcomm was hard at work avoiding making an open platform ARM-based laptop/tablet - to the point of squeezing around MS rules on that through special drivers etc to make Windows think it's dealing with EFI-compliant hardware.
That's disappointing, since mainline Linux support has made progress, https://www.linaro.org/blog/qualcomm-and-linaro-enable-lates...
The main issue is that what's upstreamed is essentially drivers for the SoCs - but the firmware of Qualcomm-powered laptops tends to be not fully compliant.
So it's easy to make a device powered by one when you control how linux is booted on it, but for whatever reason things like EFI NVRAM interface on windows qualcomm powered laptops was done non-standard and the only reason windows works is because there are drivers shipped which work around it - and I seriously doubt its intended by Microsoft, because Microsoft actually benefits from devices following their official, documented, hardware-interface specs - it makes for easy upgrades, reinstalls, etc. etc.
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#48I work in a very interdisciplinary, and somewhat niche, tech/engineering field. For the past 15 years, I've been saving every relevant PDF that I can find -- mostly studies of the sort published by Elsevier and Springer, but also books and presentations. I now have around 10k, which probably makes it the largest private library focused on this particular domain of expertise. It has been extremely useful, especially b…
> I'd add that these days it totally makes sense to download libgen's entire archive, because (1) storage has never been cheaper, and (2) you can use it to train local LLMs. Hardly. Data hoarding comes with most downsides of hoarding physical objects. It's just smaller, cheaper & easier to process. There's people that get rid of any physical object they haven't used in the past year (or 2, or 5, whatever). This makes…
> Data hoarding comes with most downsides of hoarding physical objects. It's just smaller, cheaper & easier to process.
So the same downsides, except ... much better?
> There's people that get rid of any physical object they haven't used in the past year (or 2, or 5, whatever)
> Data is no different. ... you either use it from time to time
I suppose the real question then is what timeframe do you consider "using it from time to time"? It seems to me that this depends very much on the person, and likely on the objects themselves - probably a large appliance you haven't used in a year is likelier to be thrown away than a small item you haven't used in several. Considering data storage is smaller, cheaper, and easier to manage, I suppose a reasonable timeframe for keeping it, just in case, would be a lot longer than physical items.
This of course says nothing of the societal and cultural value such archivists safeguard.
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A local LLM will make it 100x more useful. Also, it might not even need be "local." If I make it available via the web, I can probably sell access to other scientists and engineers in my field. That's not legal. Just because you own some files does not mean that you own the IP of the content within.
It is, however, the right thing to do.
Profiting off it is not the right thing to do.
Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
#50For me, on macOS, FoxTrot Professional has been my personal file data indexer. Its essential go-to feature for me is sophisticated searching, including a form of regex. Also, true wildcards, no stopwords, and proximity searches put it far out in front of anything else I have tried, including many recent LLM local-docs tools. I have millions of files in dozens of formats in hundreds of GB gathered over decades (many digitized by me) and it handles it all like a champ, though an SSD drive and a late-model Mac is a must at that size. And backups, cause ain't nobody want to lose that.