Among the things running on the little server by the router is Paperless-ngx,
a self-hosted document system that the internet speaks of in reverent tones.
You scan your post, it does the OCR, and — I told the household, with some
confidence — it files everything itself. Titles, tags, who sent it. The
filing cabinet thinks now. We live in the future.
I had scanned four documents. All four were sitting in the system under names
like scan_2026-06-30.pdf, untagged, unfiled, and unthought-about. The
future, it turned out, had not been switched on.
Worse: reading the documentation properly (a thing I do after making claims
to the household, as is traditional), I learned that the future was never
going to switch itself on. Paperless-ngx does have automatic tagging, but
it’s a classifier that learns from your own manual filing. It can only
ever apply tags you’ve already created and taught it by hand, across dozens
of documents. It cannot invent a tag. It will never write a title. With four
documents, it had precisely nothing to learn from and no intention of
starting.
So the machine that was supposed to be doing the thinking was waiting for me
to do the thinking, thoroughly, for several months, first.
There was, however, another option. I already had a small AI model running
in the house on a mini PC — the one that answers questions and doesn’t send
my prompts to California. What if it read the post instead?