[AIT] paperless-ngx 3.0.0

Paperless-ngx is an extensive document management system. 3.0.0 has just been released.

It seems from a user/admin perspective that a lot of obsolete stuff under the hood got removed and they did some performance stuff, but it’s also full of AI features. There’s too many changes to read them all though, I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.

Personally I’ll stay with 2.X for some days at least to see what people say about the new version. I’m not interested to have AI parse my documents, the alrogirthmic auto tagging etc works quite well.

github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/releases/tag/v3.0.0
paperless-ngx 3.0.0
Breaking Changes

[BREAKING] Remove the positional arguments from the pre/post consume scripts @stumpylog (#12573)
[BREAKING] Decouple OCR control from archive file control @stu...GitHubRelease Paperless-ngx v3.0.0 · paperless-ngx/paperless-ngxpaperless-ngx 3.0.0 Breaking Changes [BREAKING] Remove the positional arguments from the pre/post consume scripts @stumpylog (#12573) [BREAKING] Decouple OCR control from archive file control @stu...
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Replying to @⁨tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden⁩

FYI: they use Claude Code.

Just in case anyone has an issue with that.

…nct() (#13182)

DocumentViewSet.get_queryset() annotated num_notes via a LEFT JOIN to
documents_note plus Count(), which requires the database to aggregate
every matching document's note count...GitHubFix (beta): compute num_notes via a subquery instead of Count()+disti… · paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx@d8d8872…nct() (#13182) DocumentViewSet.get_queryset() annotated num_notes via a LEFT JOIN to documents_note plus Count(), which requires the database to aggregate every matching document's note count...

Replying to @⁨tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden⁩

Last time I looked at Paperless-NGX it insisted on taking the source files and moving/renaming them so it could manage them itself. In fact IIRC the only way to add files was to give them to the app (or upload via web UI) so it could take them over.

Does it still do that?

I don’t like tools that demand to take over the original files. I’d prefer it if it could watch a read-only folder for new files. Immich for example or Jellyfin can do that.

Replying to @⁨tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden⁩

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #60 for this comm, first seen 23rd Jul 2026, 10:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Hachyderm.ioImran Nazar ~ عمران نزر (@Two9A@hachyderm.io)2.8K Posts, 301 Following, 262 Followers · Front-end #typescript developer and general keyboard tapper; author of Internet RFC 7168 (Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for teapots); occasional plumber, more than occasional #c64 #retrocomputing enthusiast, terrible at classical #piano. Header photo is a verdant scene looking over the landscape near Buxton, England, taken from a single-track country road.

Replying to @⁨lambisio@feddit.cl⁩

Paperless and Papermerge have always done a lot more than just OCR. If that’s all they were, most people can do that already on the software that comes with their scanner. The core selling point of these applications is automatic categorization, sorting and tagging, and those have always relied on machine learning tools. Literally the first thing you do after setting Paperless up is start training the AI.

Replying to @⁨tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden⁩

I think you’re under the impression that the difference between those things is far greater than it actually is. Large Language Models work by developing statistical maps of associations. That’s discrimination. They’re a direct evolution of categorization models. The ability to associate a hash of a JPEG with “cat” is the same as the ability to associate “How are you?” with “Great, how about you?” It’s all associative mapping. LLMs are just the current leading edge of that technology. If you want to, for example, generate a list of tags that describe a document, an LLM is the best tool we currently have for doing that.

To put it another way, what you term “discriminative AI” is “generative AI.” It’s generating a category or list of categories in response to an input. That’s not functionally different than generating a sentence in response to a sentence, it’s just an order of magnitude less complex. You can argue terminology but the technology exists on an evolutionary curve, with no real hard boundaries.

Replying to @⁨lambisio@feddit.cl⁩

I’m going to go ahead and try to use this comment as a teachable moment.

For one, this comment barely skirts the line to me as acceptable. If you aren’t interested in AI topics, thats what the [AIT] and [AIP] tags are for - for you, as a user, to choose what you are interested in and what you are not.

The first part of your comment, by itself, I would have simply removed. You asked for alternatives, and are being rightfully replied to pointing out that this is all under the subject of automation, which (to me) barely puts this above low effort.

If you don’t want to see AI discussions in the future, use the tags to filter. If I see more comments like this that are barely, and entirely subjectively just above low-effort, the bar is going to raise just a hair and they will be removed, as they will come across like trying to skirt the rules.

Replying to an earlier post

Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.

The current version of Tesseract does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.

It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.

Tesseract OCR — Open Source Text Recognition EngineTesseract OCRTesseract OCR — The World's Best Open Source OCR EngineTesseract OCR is the leading free, open-source OCR engine. Extract text from images and PDFs with 99%+ accuracy across 100+ languages. 100% offline and secure.

Replying to @⁨tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden⁩

At the risk of getting internet-assaulted I am one of the primary devs, feel free to ask me about it. To address some of the issues already raised:

  • All the new “AI” (LLM) features are opt-in, meaning if you dont enable them you wont see them, literally. At all.
  • All of them can also be run local-only, of course.
  • There are a ton of other features as well.
  • One of our devs has made use of Claude especially around database schema improvements, which is a particularly tricky thing to work on. I dont like AI, I wish I could go back to the world before it, but I cant. So at this point it is almost absurd to not use LLM tools to some degree in programming. AI slop or vibe-coding is to do so indiscriminately, and I hate that too. Believe me we get tons of PRs from people with basically no dev experience or abilities slinging up a Claude PR they dont understand… and we dont accept them. We expect the same from ourselves. We use it sparingly and very specifically, interrogate it aggressively and stand behind it after it’s merged. To somehow object to any / all use of it at this point either implies a) you dont do programming or b) you dont understand the nuances of how tools can be used in programming. Used properly, it’s no more offensive than using an IDE instead of a bare text editor, is that something you care about?
    • Also, leaving Claude as a co-author I would argue seems more transparent, not doing so or not disclosing it in the PR seems like the shadier choice.
  • The ethical concerns about LLMs, compute use etc are real, but I dont think one OSS project somehow needs to bear the entire weight of this societal problem.

Again, Im happy to discuss more, as long is its not the guy who opened the raving “issue” in our project.

Replying to @⁨shamoon@lemmy.world⁩

Thanks for chiming in! I don’t fully agree with your reasoning re the usage of AI but I can accept your stance and am glad that you implemented it opt in with no intention of annoying me into using it. I also know many people have been asking for those features for a while though.

The person creating the issue has been downvoted here as well, even though this is a largely anti-ai place in my perception.

By now I also found the upgrade guide which lists the main features - I usually read the release notes, but this time it was a whole lot and hard to take it all in.

Replying to @⁨shamoon@lemmy.world⁩

database schema improvements, which is a particularly tricky thing to work on

Not, if you know what you’re doing.

I dont like AI, I wish I could go back to the world before it, but I cant.

You do know that you can use LLMs to get inspiration and suggestions but then still implement those things by hand? Which is also a great way to make sure it doesn’t change something else in the background. Also, if you use Claude like you’ve used StackOverflow and Google before, you don’t even have to mention it as a Co-Author.

Replying to @⁨ddd@feddit.org⁩

and that’s why you never ever use the latest tag, just below your comment: lemmy.ml/comment/26842059

lemmy.ml[AIT] paperless-ngx 3.0.0 - LemmyPaperless-ngx is an extensive document management system. 3.0.0 has just been released. It seems from a user/admin perspective that a lot of obsolete stuff under the hood got removed and they did some performance stuff, but it’s also full of AI features. There’s too many changes to read them all though, I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes. Personally I’ll stay with 2.X for some days at least to see what people say about the new version. I’m not interested to have AI parse my documents, the alrogirthmic auto tagging etc works quite well.