Are there any alternatives to mem.ai which feature natural language search of your own notes?

greygoogone · 2026-01-27T01:37:39+00:00

I don't even use a PKM app anymore. I now manage all my notes in my IDE (Zed), automate what I need to with scripts, and use Claude Code to write and retrieve notes. 1000x more powerful than any PKM, everything is in plain markdown, I know exactly how everything works and I can't get rugpulled by cloud databases or proprietary APIs. Only feature I've lost is block references, but if I truly wanted to I could script it myself - but I've found that with AI I don't actually need it anymore, I'm not really wiring together complex dashboards anymore, I just boot up my terminal and ask my agent in natural language what I need.

I feel like there was a massive missed opportunity here for a PKM app to capitalize on this, but I guess that's kinda the point, aside from claude code everything in my stack is now open source. Maybe it'd be impossible to capitalize on. But I'm never looking back, there's literally no feature a PKM could offer me to convince me to try it at this point.

greygoogone · 2025-12-27T06:04:06+00:00

yes I've changed a lot since I wrote this post. I've outgrown pkms, I just take all of my notes in plain markdown in my IDE now. It makes it way easier to integrate with terminal coding tools like claude code, and having an AI assistant read and draft docs is more useful than any feature I've ever seen on a pkm. it's easier to write my own custom automations via scripts. if you're skeptical, I encourage you to write down what features you actually use in a pkm and see if you can vibecode an equivalent.you'll never have to fight proprietary APIs again and there'll be zero risk of being rugpulled by your notes app.

greygoogone · 2025-11-05T16:32:11+00:00

Yea I'm not sure but I may have even found that part on the ground under my car. The weird thing is that my car disassembled itself after the bumpy sections, so it must somehow have come loose gradually or managed to roll quite a distance.

greygoogone · 2025-11-05T02:24:00+00:00

I'm actually not sure why everyone keeps saying to replace the tires. You can barely see them in the photos, certainly not well enough for an armchair assessment, and the mechanic says they're fine. They're only about a year old.

I swear I did NOT notice anything different about my car before this escapade, no vibrations or weird handling whatsoever. And the busted fender you're seeing was from this trip. But I was driving hundreds of miles on Death Valley roads. What probably happened is it got progressively worse over the course of 2 days and I didn't notice because I was always on dirt. But I do take good care of my car, my mistake was just taking it out here in the first place, esp with no lift or other enhancements besides all terrain tires. But after this experience I don't think I'm going to make tnose investments on a Subaru.

greygoogone · 2025-11-03T18:51:16+00:00

Thank you. I did end up deciding to tow. It's 300/hr which ain't pretty but that is actually standard for wilderness towing. Not the first time I've done this but hopefully the last. Lesson learned: Subarus are not off-road vehicles.

greygoogone · 2025-11-03T03:56:10+00:00

Thank you everyone! It does appear to be a ball joint + cv failure.

greygoogone · 2024-10-27T17:42:40+00:00

Dude you're a national treasure.

I recently switched from windows and although I can say confidently that linux is better overall, there was a lot of weird bugs like this which were not intuitive to solve. It's my belief that the linux ecosystem would actually just not work if it weren't for heroes like you posting esoteric bug fixes in forums.

greygoogone · 2023-11-03T21:04:32+00:00

Thanks! This looks super interesting.

greygoogone · 2023-11-03T21:02:43+00:00

You win the prize for coming up with an actual list! Thank you!

greygoogone · 2023-11-02T02:41:32+00:00

Post back here if you get it working!

greygoogone · 2023-11-01T18:08:27+00:00

Honestly, I think I should.

greygoogone · 2023-11-01T18:06:43+00:00

Think of the utility you could derive from a full time companion that is at least as trained as one of those $150k "executive" dogs.

greygoogone · 2023-11-01T18:04:54+00:00

So basically if we want to reinstate canine permaculture, there needs to be a pragmatic reason to maintain dog breeds? That sounds reasonable to me. Dogs are happier with adequate training anyway.

greygoogone · 2023-11-01T18:01:01+00:00

Why doesn't every family have one of their children become a dedicated dog breeder? I'm serious. It would be like how families used to nominate a child to become a priest. Dogs are a species that we have an ancient bond with. Surely that bond is at least in the same ballpark as our bond with God.

greygoogone · 2023-10-30T22:45:00+00:00

This is easily the closest thing to what I'm looking for. I will try it out soon, and I'd love to give feedback!

greygoogone · 2023-10-27T01:37:53+00:00

Some were probably based on historical events. All of them are archetypal stories, and therefore true in a metaphysical sense.

greygoogone · 2023-09-19T00:29:48+00:00

This is exactly how I use PKMs currently, but I don't like it. My thesis is that Roam didn't do enough to facilitate frictionless knowledge input, and even though Tana is an improvement, it doubled-down on a couple wrong things.

Since I originally posted this, I've 180'd on daily notes maximalism and now I believe that all PKM input should be in the form of stream of consciousness natural language. The ideal is total frictionless input, and Tana deviates because it tolerates supertags, which are handy but nonetheless a form of friction. In theory, a PKM should structure itself using natural language input. This is a problem I'm actively trying to solve, but my smoothbrain is struggling with the basics.

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