James R Kirk

There was a Ted Talk a while back (I can’t remember who) where they said “I have always wanted to give a Ted Talk… what I realized I really wanted was to say I had given a Ted Talk”. Meaning they want to be known as someone who had given a Ted Talk, not actually go through the process of writing and delivering the Talk.

People who write open source code do it because they like the process of writing, just like an author enjoys writing books. LLMs are for people who just want to be able to say they have written a book. People who slop-code aren’t actually interested in learning how to code. Which is a fine toy for them to play with, but not sustainable (or reliable for others to use).

Thrift stores often have old laptops for cheap

There are nice friendly frontends for this, Yunohost or CasaOS spring to mind but might be too simplistic if you already are familiar with Docker.

That was actually super helpful, thank you.

That’s cool, it just… does those things? How does it connect to those apps? I can’t even get Gemini to set a reminder and that’s on a Google device.

OP said coding AND “some automation”, what is being automated?

Just curious, what does “some automation” entail? I thought LLMs could only work with text, like summarize documents and that sort of thing.

This may be a dumb question but isn’t OTA TV still basically exactly what you describe?

CWA largely removes the need for running Calibre.

I use CWA for the main book “hub” and upload everything (audiobooks and comics too) to it. Then I have audiobookshelf scan the calibre directory, and Komga do the same because the app I use for comics (cdisplayex) doesn’t sync with Koreader yet.

On the client side I use Koreader, Lissen and Cdisplayex.

It works fine but it would be nice to have one app that syncs all progress. And my holy grail is one that can sync ebook and audiobook progress like Amazon’s whispersync!

Booklore was discovered to be vibe-coded and riddled with security issues. The dev shut down the project when discovered. Best avoided for now.

KOReader is not “fake epaper”, it’s an app designed to be used on ereaders which means it’s UI is high contrast. FWIW I agree it’s not ideal for an OLED phone screen, but it’s definitely not fake epaper (more like the opposite) and makes me think you might be accidentally using something else?

(Also KOReader is not for “certain” devices, it’s FOSS and installs on basically any ereader, including Kindle, Kobo and anything running android like Boox).

What CWA does is it integrates a KOreader sync server (can also be ran independently). In future updates CWA’s web reader will sync with this progress, but for now it only shows up in the UI like this:

THAT ALL SAID, if you are only using the WebUI and don’t want to wait for CWA to update their web reader, Komga is a simple app (originally designed for Manga but will work fine with books) that has a web reader that will also remember your progress (and fwiw there is a KOReader plugin in case you want to sync that progress with an epaper device in the future).

It was the UI he didn’t like so it’s not going to be much different.

Yunohost seems the community pick these days. I also played around with CasaOS and found it very user friendly. Though development on that one seems to have stalled.

This is cool, so I could theoretically just set up a Plex/Jellyfin library and not need a youtube account?

They seem to be working on uh, syncing all the sync features. There have been some updates recently.

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much his “choice in tools” it was privacy concerns surrounding that choice.

I think CWA is the one to watch. It’s progress has been slower but steady.

Crazy. It had a meteoric rise.

I guess CWA is the one to use now. In a way I’m glad the space will have only a single major player.

Damn 99% of the time someone says not to use an open source product it’s because of some obscure drama unrelated to the actual program.

But in this case the dev appears to not just be using AI code (not great but debatable) but using mostly AI code and using AI to reply to bug reports. Not something the average person wants to be running in a live environment.

I haven’t used Booklore but the excitement around it was nudging me there. I think I’ll stick with CWAs slower rollout.

That’s not a reason to consider CWA unsafe