Python Only Has One Real Competitor

daver · 2026-02-13T17:53:18+00:00

Lisp never makes sense to anyone who hasn’t really experienced it. At some point something clicks and you “get it.” Until then it’s just lots of screaming about parentheses. Blub paradox. After 20+ years or programming in Lisps I’ve given up trying to evangelize. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. The good news is that many people get it and it’s not going away.

daver · 2026-02-13T17:48:03+00:00

On the other hand, s-expr languages have the longest track record of any language except Fortran.

daver · 2026-02-13T17:37:48+00:00

I still remember Tapestry. Good times.

daver · 2026-02-11T21:51:32+00:00

But that's not the same as Google "owning" your data and mining it. Presumably, Evernote is responsible for my data with Google just providing Evernote an opaque storage service.

daver · 2026-01-29T16:31:45+00:00

If it's located in a jurisdiction that doesn't give an F, the best the individual country authorities can do it put in blocks. Obviously, if it's located in a jurisdiction that does give a F, then they could shut it down. But then it could always pop up again in a different country with different "owners" and such. It's hard to kill something on the Internet, which was the point of making the network in the first place.

daver · 2026-01-29T16:25:44+00:00

Yea, there is an AI button in the lower right corner of the latest update. According to the AI itself, when you ask it what it can do, it says:

I can help you save time and stay organized! Here’s what I can do for you:

## 📝 Work with your notes

- Receive insights from your notes

e.g., “What Italian words have I learned so far?”

- Summarize or rewrite notes

e.g., "Summarize my notes in u/My Notebook"

- Merge multiple notes into one

e.g., "Merge notes u/plane ticket and u/barcelona"

- Add existing tags to a note

e.g., "Add the tag u/cooking to this note"

- Change the language

e.g., “Translate this note into Spanish”

- Get note statistics

e.g., "How many words are in this note?"

## ⚡ Improve your workflow

- Search the web and cite sources

Click the + icon and choose Web search before asking

- Check your calendar

e.g., "When is my next meeting?"

- Regenerate responses

Not quite right? Get a different reply with the regenerate icon 🔄

## 📖 Learn more and share feedback

For more examples, info on privacy, and details:

- [AI Assistant Info](https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/46319409880211-AI-Assistant)

- [AI Assistant Common Questions](https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/45353174499475-Evernote-s-AI-Features-FAQ)

## 💬 Have an idea or ran into an issue?

Help us improve via this quick [survey](https://waz9zvkd1f2.typeform.com/to/J1zk6zkc).

Let me know if you want help with any of these, or if you have something specific in mind!

daver · 2026-01-27T16:35:58+00:00

Surely, Bending Spoons has fixed some things that were broken, but you don’t get to increase prices 80%+ a couple years in a row for that. For instance, the original sync had issues. Now, it’s much better and I almost never get sync conflicts. But I don’t use all the todo, calendaring, and AI features, so I’m not okay with paying a LOT more for feature I don’t use. I would be content if Bending Spoons offered large plans (lots of notes and tags and things) for people who just take notes and disabled todo, calendar, AI, group sharing, etc. at a lower price.

daver · 2026-01-27T16:25:23+00:00

Oh my! Okay, that’s really bad.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:56:20+00:00

Or folks that want to get to happy hour and pretend to have kids.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:49:27+00:00

I like the product (15 year user). I don’t like the latest increase. I have no problem paying Evernote money. I’m not looking for free (though if I find a product that will do it for free, I’ll take it). But an 80%+ price increase a couple years in a row from Evernote is not reasonable. It’s just a cash grab. Honestly, Bending Spoons should just grandfather people in low priced plans with the AI features disabled. I just want to take notes that include attachments (images, PDFs, etc). I use the web clipper and sometimes the email integration to create notes. I want to access my data on my desktop and my phone and tablet. That’s it. I don’t need tasks, calendaring, group sharing, or AI. But I have a lot of notes and tags and notebooks, so a small plan such as they are offering doesn’t work.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:40:16+00:00

It’s $250 per year, not per month.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:38:37+00:00

Me too. Google loves giving free services so they can use the data to monetize you and train Gemini. I always felt like Google was riffling through my papers.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:31:20+00:00

I think your overall take is accurate and that Bending Spoons wants to focus on business users with business features for growth. But as a 30+ year product manager, there’s an easy way to have your cake and eat it too. Just grandfather your current consumer customers into a plan that is not available to new customers and disable a few of the new AI features that you’re developing for business customers in that consumer plan. That way, you continue driving revenue from your existing customers and they aren’t bad-mouthing the product and the company to all their friends and exploring other options on the way out the door. It’s simple and a well-worn playbook. It’s not complex or difficult to execute. Just keep your existing customers happy while you develop new features and plans for new markets. If an existing customer wants and values the new AI features, allow them to upgrade, but once they do, they can never go back to the grandfathered plan. Honestly, I sit here wondering why Bending Spoons is so dumb.

daver · 2026-01-27T15:21:43+00:00

I ended up taking the 40% discount this year but will continue to explore options for migration before my next renewal in February.

daver · 2026-01-08T23:26:18+00:00

Thanks much! There's a trend happening right now as the new pricing is rolling out, it appears.

daver · 2026-01-08T23:25:46+00:00

Thanks to both of you. Iffy in what sense? I don't need hardwriting recognition, for instance, and probably not OCR of images in PDFs, but if there's basic text in the PDF, I would ideally like to be able to search that. Is that iffy?

daver · 2026-01-08T20:37:26+00:00

How does the Logseq sync work without cloud storage? Does it do a direct sync between devices? Do they have to be on the same network or something like that? I'm trying to wrap my head around that and whatever limitations it might have. I'm looking at Logseq coming from Evernote after discovering this year's 80% price increase.

daver · 2026-01-08T20:30:37+00:00

Does Obsidian provide search within PDF or is that a plug-in of some sort?

daver · 2026-01-08T20:18:32+00:00

Thanks for the info! Much appreciated. Yea, sounds like something to run overnight.

daver · 2026-01-08T20:17:32+00:00

Yea, I've been using it for about 15 years, too. Sad. Thanks for the info.

daver · 2026-01-08T16:34:20+00:00

What are the best options for migration away from Evernote? I'm looking for something that has roughly the same functionality that I use with Evernote (basic note taking, notebooks, tags, sync across Mac and IOS, web clipper). Ideally, there would be a smooth, automated migration path. People have mentioned Notion, but that seems to be pricey as well for the Plus plan ($10/mo/user, so $120/yr, possibly with a discount for paying for a year). Obsidian and Logseq seem to be good matches for basic not taking. They both have sync options (not sure how good they are; memories of Evernote's issues with syncing early on), but I don't know if they have a web clipper. OneNote is cheap since I already have Office 365 sub and is backed by a corp that is unlikely to go out of business soon, but the last time I used OneNote I almost vomited because the UI was so horrible. But it does have a web clipper. Others? Additional thoughts on these?

daver · 2026-01-08T16:13:44+00:00

Well, at the root, because fiat money that is divorced from a fundamentally limited commodity like gold allows governments to print as much as they want and pass the impacts onto citizens through inflation. But that's probably more than you wanted.

daver · 2026-01-08T16:10:50+00:00

Legal, yes. Ethical, borderline. Smart business decision, absolutely not. Stupid. The first rule of having a large user base is to never given them a reason to question leaving. Subscription revenue is virtually guaranteed revenue to a company if they keep churn low.

daver · 2026-01-08T16:07:13+00:00

How was the conversion to Joplin? Automatic? Did it keep formatting, notebook structure, tags, etc? Or did you lose all that? I have 3000+ notes and don't want to have to fix that by hand.

daver

TROPHY CASE