mindforger VS foam

Rear is a really interesting project with admirable goals. I believe this is just the beginning, but you have already done a great job!

I have been working on my note-taking application (https://github.com/dvorka/mindforger) for some time and wanted to go in the same direction. However, I gave up (for now). I used ggerganov/llama.cpp to host LLM models locally on a CPU-only machine with 32GB RAM, and used them for both RAG and note-taking use cases (like https://www.mindforger.com/index-200.html#llm). However, it did not work well for me - the performance was poor (high hardware utilization, long response times, failures, and crashes) and the actual responses were rarely useful (off-topic and impractical responses, hallucinations). I tried llama-2 7B with 4b quantization and a couple of similar models. Although I'm not happy about it, I switched to an online commercial LLM because it performs really well in terms of response quality, speed, and affordability. I frequently use the integrated LLM in my note-taking app as it can be used for many things.

Anyway, Reor "only" uses the locally hosted LLM in the generation phase of the RAG, which is a nicely constraint use case. I believe that a really lightweight LLM - I'm thinking about a tiny base model fine-tuned for summarization - could be the way to go (fast, non-hallucinating). I'm really curious to know if you have any suggestions or if you will have any in the future!

As for the vector DB, considering the resource-related problems I mentioned earlier, I was thinking about something similar to facebookresearch/faiss, which, unlike LanceDB, is not a fully-fledged vector DB. Have you made any experiments with similarity search projects or vector DBs? I would be interested in the trade-offs similar to small/large/hosted LLMs.

Overall, I think that both RAG with my personal notes as a corpus and a locally hosted generic purpose LLM for the use cases I mentioned above can take personal note-taking apps to a new level. This is the way! ;)

Good luck with your project!

Please share your suggestions, ideas or constructive criticism! You may install or update from GitHubreleases or PPA.

I finally managed to complete new MindForger release:

https://www.mindforger.com/NimbusnoteWikidpadBecause you mentioned writing:

Neat, the Similarity type reminds me of MindForger's Associations feature that also displays similarity scores between your current note and other existing notes

[Mindfrogger](https://github.com/dvorka/mindforger)

Mindforger: https://github.com/dvorka/mindforger/

Source: (1) A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode - Foam. https://foambubble.github.io/foam/. (2) A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode. https://github.com/foambubble/foam. (3) Loam - Visual Studio Marketplace. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ciceroisback.loam.

You should have a look at Foam: https://github.com/foambubble/foam

I started using Foam[0] a few years ago, but the more I used it, the more I dropped all the tedious bits, and it became nothing more than a big, evolving markdown repo.

When I switched from vscode (back) to vim, it has worked as well or better than it did before. I follow my own rules. I like the Zettelkasten idea of one idea per card, but if I put more related things in the same .md file, that's OK. I didn't like the flat directory structure, and so I have dirs organized by category. My /bar directory is inside my /cooking directory, and for whatever reason, that makes sense to me. Ripgrep doesn't care, and I always find what I'm looking for.

This markdown hierarchy, that still lives in a repo called "foam", has become indispensable to me.

[0] https://github.com/foambubble/foam

Probably use foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam

So I switched to FOAM and it's just clean & organized markdown files in a git repo. Self host a code server instance and I can reference it without installing something to the work machine.

Recently I started to configure my digital garden. Foam is a good option, Hugo Doks, No Style Please, Git-Wiki, Researcher, Thinkspace, and other themes are good for zetteltasken pages.

I use foam and VSCode and regularly am wow'd with what I am having it do next. I feel I am still just getting started too.

I've wondered about using obsidian with foam as a web editing fallback.

Since the data store is markdown and can be synced with Git, you can already work with an Obsidian vault using Foam in VSCode. I do.

You do need to align some options in each, such as file naming, a header, a particular style of links, and ensure frontmatter behavior. All necessary settings exist.

https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

https://github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/46

This supports basic static file and links functionality, not extended data tools etc., of course.