[HN Gopher] Personal Encyclopedias
___________________________________________________________________
Personal Encyclopedias
Author : jrmyphlmn
Score : 787 points
Date : 2026-03-25 19:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (whoami.wiki)
(TXT) w3m dump (whoami.wiki)
| bawolff wrote:
| That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting
| way to preserve family history.
|
| I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part
| of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have
| technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like
| an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first
| part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing
| everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is
| also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross
| reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts,
| shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
|
| Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool
| project, thanks for sharing.
| marcofloriano wrote:
| We are the last human AI free generation that lives on. It's
| your basic human instincts kicking in.
| nicbou wrote:
| I am usually grossed out by AI when it fakes humanness, but not
| here, I think.
|
| Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to
| enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against
| which I measure all technology.
|
| I think that in this case, it helped someone make something
| deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a
| computer should do: aid a human with their task.
|
| Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while
| now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of
| why I was so excited about it.
| eleveriven wrote:
| What makes this example land differently for me is that the
| intent stays human all the way through
| theptip wrote:
| Yes! What do we want technology to do for us? In my opinion
| one important promise that was never fully realized is
| helping us to live a more enriched life. Social media does
| help people stay connected but it brings a lot of negatives
| that are well-known at this point.
|
| If you build this encyclopedia as a purely robotic collector
| of facts that nobody reads, it's probably more dystopian
| horror.
|
| If you build it as a fun inner loop that reconnects you with
| people and memories and makes you more human, then it's
| great.
|
| We should endeavor to craft experiences that do the latter;
| right now we are back in the hacker days when small teams can
| build big new ideas, and big tech hasn't taken over.
| naravara wrote:
| I don't even know how much it helps people stay connected
| anymore since the shift to mobile. I was in an antique
| store recently and came upon a vintage "correspondence
| desk" which is basically a desk specialized for sorting and
| preparing mail. Back when people used to keep in touch by
| writing letters to each other this is what people with
| active remote friendships did. They'd spend a couple of
| hours at this desk reading letters they've received and
| sitting down to compose replies.
|
| This is basically how social media was when you needed a
| computer to go online. You'd sit and sift through your
| feeds and there'd be message chains you respond to. You're
| not really doing anything else while you're doing that and
| you're putting it out of mind once you step away. When
| Twitter first started getting big it was sort of a joke
| that people are talking to you while on the toilet. The
| idea that you were only ever half engaged with anything
| you're doing was remarkable enough to be worth pointing out
| instead of taken for granted.
|
| It's just a lot more focused and intentional when you're
| dedicating time and headspace to the task instead of
| "microdosing" on connection via a dopamine lottery. Even if
| you took away the ads and the interpolation of creator-
| content crowding out the connections with people you
| actually know, I think designing for an infinite scroll
| just inherently makes the thing less human-centered. It
| sets it up so you're interacting with these atomized bits
| of 'content' rather than people.
| visarga wrote:
| That is because platforms both enable us and exploit us,
| they exploit both those who create/comment and those who
| read. They perform a necessary function but extract the
| value from it for their own good.
| nicbou wrote:
| I love Robin Sloan's idea of apps as home-cooked meals.
| This is the only thing about AI that doesn't make me want
| to burn a datacenter to the ground.
|
| https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
| djeastm wrote:
| >We should endeavor to craft experiences
|
| It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to
| be with other people.
| ceuk wrote:
| 100% agree I just had exactly the same reaction. I love the
| idea and would definitely like to do the first part e.g.
| documenting key people (family members and other important
| relations etc), key events like weddings etc.
|
| What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and
| recollections given by the subjects themselves.
|
| The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For
| a number of reasons:
|
| 1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards
| documenting based on the quality and availability of the
| sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you
| might not have much info about some really special childhood
| event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it
| shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word
| essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D
| printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of
| WhatsApp messages on the subject.
|
| 2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think
| if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave
| of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction
| that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are
| partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really
| important to preserve the experiences, stories and
| recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc
| are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of
| subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even
| is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big
| collective story we tell ourselves.
|
| 3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people
| know what I mean
| pona-a wrote:
| I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage
| with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a
| wrong way.
|
| There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the
| emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many
| ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds
| better left forgotten, different framings, and all that
| emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to
| remember.
|
| The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information
| isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is
| what computers have been doing for generations-except for the
| privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-
| corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply
| personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
| rapnie wrote:
| Personal wiki's impersonally compiled. I gauge LLMs for the
| extent they fray the social fabric that hold people and
| society together. And the way AI is introduced for max
| disruption causes me to be generally against the technology,
| despite that there are also obvious merits. Here it depends
| on how much value, say, a family gets out of reading in their
| family encyclopedia.
|
| It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it may serve to
| strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where
| everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as
| "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more
| a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much
| better served by family members writing down their own
| experiences.
| physicles wrote:
| I'm curious, do you agree with the statement, "it would be
| better for this personal wiki not to exist, than for it to
| have been built with AI"?
|
| Because without AI it probably wouldn't exist.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-
| school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about
| the end product being just an item with a function vs it having
| some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the
| parallel work?
| evelant wrote:
| IMO it does not. At least to me the meaning and value of
| something is in the creative human design behind it, not the
| tools used to build it. I don't think AI changes much there.
| It's a (very powerful) tool but still IMO the value lies with
| the creativity and skill of the operator.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I had the same reaction, but to me, it seems like a downside of
| automation and scale in general. I'm analogizing in my head to
| experiences when I was a teenager I used to go to skid row in
| LA and hand out cash to random homeless strangers because that
| felt like a good thing to do, but as a late-30s adult decades
| later dealing with spine injuries where walking was my only
| available form of exercise, I lived in another downtown with a
| large homeless problem and became overwhelmed any time I went
| out for a walk and never gave anything to anybody, simply
| because there were so many people asking that if I stopped to
| pay attention to all of them, I'd have spent all of my time
| doing that and none of it actually walking. Or the businesses
| that feel like it's well-meaning and harmless and helpful to
| them if I can give just 30 seconds of my time for feedback on
| how I felt about the transaction. Fine when that's really just
| 30 seconds here or there, but when it's every single business
| I've ever made so much as a two dollar transaction with over
| the past decade, now it's 30 seconds time 500 businesses a day,
| and if I paid any attention to their e-mails and texts, it
| would be all I ever do.
|
| Similar with this, when you're hand curating old photographs
| and personally interviewing relatives, you're learning
| something. You're deepening relationships and your own personal
| understanding of these people you love, spending time
| reflecting on your own life. But when you send an LLM at it and
| it produces the volume of real Wikipedia, now an automated
| process is producing more text than you can ever possibly read
| if all you did for the rest of your life is read.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| I share this dilemma too. Just a thought -- I feel less okay
| with AI processing "data made for humans" (i.e. the images
| themselves, audio recordings of speech) and more ok with it
| processing "data made for software" (exif data, shazam logs).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It reads like AI was just collaborator. Author did the fun
| part, AI did the tedious connecting of band records, Shazam
| recordings to places, songs.
|
| That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-
| lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Making those connections are what builds a narrative: writing
| history is looking at the sources and constructing a
| narrative around that you think is significant. And if you
| really do find a connection so tedious, maybe it doesn't
| matter. Maybe the, for example, list of songs played one
| night at some event doesn't have any significance at all,
| it's just an unimportant detail pointlessly padding out the
| story.
|
| AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least
| a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It
| selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It
| has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's
| personally important to the human creator, but rather the
| availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And
| then in turn the output shapes the human author's own
| perspective, changing even what the human will write on their
| own.
| localhost wrote:
| there is an activation energy cost to so many activities - so
| those things just never got done. many times it is because the
| cost-benefit wasn't clear at the start (unknown unknowns) so it
| never got done. kudos to op for experimenting and showing us
| one way of making something like this happen.
| jrmyphlmn wrote:
| thank you :)
|
| I understand the bittersweet feeling because I did all the
| editorial work for the wedding page and the first few others
| and I did feel like a historian trying to connect the dots
| after stumbling into some primary/secondary materials and
| spending a couple months doing all the editorial work
|
| after I began experimenting with agents, it sped up my process
| that otherwise would've taken many more months for every page
| given that the kinds of data sources also increased over time
|
| I did still spend significant amounts of time like a wikipedia
| contributor would deciding on what to keep, enhance or delete
| from the page based on my own personal preferences and what I
| was comfortable with seeing on the page
|
| the dystopic feeling is also fair and unsettling, I think this
| ironically also made me realize how important safeguarding my
| personal data is, we leave digital trails of ourselves
| everywhere so a powerful agent can string them together to
| create a story of who you are
| adesanmi wrote:
| why is there need for an emotional reaction? It's just a tool.
| Philosophically, it's no different than using photoshop to
| touch up old photos. It's just a more "high-tech" version.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Normally, memory work is you pulling things out of your mind.
| Here, it's the system pushing things back at you
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I don't know that "preserve" is the correct term here. It's
| certainly an interesting way to collate family history, but
| this encyclopedia will last only as long as the OP is
| interested in and able to maintain it. Once OP gets bored, or
| falls ill, or dies, unless there's someone else interested in
| it, the history is gone, reverted back to oral memory.
|
| If instead, the OP had collected this information into a
| physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book
| gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some
| grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the
| family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in
| continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a
| computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all
| learned in kindergarten.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you
| to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from
| there.
| casparvitch wrote:
| I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption'
| and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking
| different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call
| 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be
| creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between
| these in my life.
|
| This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as
| with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is
| going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not
| really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be
| less negative :D
| MrScruff wrote:
| I would say thinking about the indended audience for your
| creative outlet is a good discipline - even if it's only one
| person. It often gives the project more of a focus which helps
| with motivation and makes it more enjoyable.
| Anonasty wrote:
| This is perfect example how to solve problem which should have
| been solved in our digital lives already decades ago. The issue
| is that our personal lives have been outsourced to social media
| platforms (looking at you Facebook...)
|
| Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories
| and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems
| like weird mishap.
| lkm0 wrote:
| I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you
| beat me to it. Love it!
| saretup wrote:
| So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is
| cool)
| eternauta3k wrote:
| I like the idea, but I'm curious where to draw the boundary. If
| only I can read it, it can be my full recollection of everything.
| If I add my siblings, parents, cousins, etc, then some articles
| become painful or controversial (e.g. divorce, disease). Or I
| just ommit all the unhappy parts.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| It's your wiki, you do as you please
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I agree, and now all that stuff is on Anthropic's servers.
|
| It is stalker-ish to write up biographies like this about your
| relatives. It's one thing to write up the weddings and upbeat
| things like this, but not all families lives are just sunshine
| and rainbows.
|
| How about that relative of the family who spent time in prison?
| Grandpa in war? Many old people don't naturally talk about some
| parts of their lives either because they suffered some
| injustice like (what as an Eastern European I can think of)
| their properties taken away by Nazis and Soviets, or they did
| something they aren't proud of. Are you going to oral history
| interview/interrogate them to fill in all the gaps? Do you tell
| them you're going to upload all they say to some servers where
| who knows who will have access to it?
|
| There are also longlasting family feuds between sides of
| families, like how one son was tricked out of the inheritance
| maybe wrongly, maybe he was an ass to his parents. People
| holding grudges and explaining their life failure and
| derailment by wrongly or rightly blaming others.
|
| Maybe your aunt is presenting a story that doesn't quite add up
| when you triangulate it from all OSINT and private sources.
| Maybe your cousin isn't the daughter of who you think she is.
| Is it your business?
|
| Even if no such big thing factor in, a biography of a person
| will be very subjective. You can narrate the same life in many
| ways so they appear more or less successful or an asshole.
|
| Its fine to keep these things as oral history and memory that
| fades.
|
| I don't really care about what the regular people who were my
| great grandparents and their cousins did. Maybe if I could read
| all the drama, I'd end up hating a bunch of relatives. These
| things have a natural life cycle of forgetting. That's fine.
|
| Again, it's all well if you live in a family where everyone is
| nice and everyone was successful and helpful. Otherwise it's a
| can of worms. Nerds can be a bit blind to this as they just
| want to play with the toys and treat it like some logic puzzle.
| manfredz wrote:
| Great project! I can also see other use cases; investigative
| journalist or criminal investigators using this to create a
| detailed profile of persons (eg Epstein files), authors setting
| up detailed profiles of fictional characters for stories.
| soaringbebop wrote:
| This is really neat! Beyond being a personal encyclopedia,
| remember the Spotify documentary where each episode was someone
| else's POV? I'd love to document a trip with friends and everyone
| else to do the same and see/compare what everyone experienced!
| submeta wrote:
| What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki
| to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that
| work? Anyone attempted something like that?
| cgsmith wrote:
| I like the overall project and goal. I personally would like a
| way to ask questions to those that are living or have a template
| that I can use for filling in family history.
|
| Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history
| page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.
|
| Thanks for sharing.
| maltris wrote:
| That is actually pretty cool. I started doing that with the photo
| collections of family members, but only to add explanations to
| the metadata of the pictures. I might reconsider that approach
| now.
| Tepix wrote:
| The project itself is cool _if_ you have access to a LLM API
| endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server).
|
| I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my
| private photographs.
| neonstatic wrote:
| Would you give it to an LLM run by Chinese, Russian, or
| European corporation?
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm not OP, but I find the American threat more real and
| immediate than the more abstract Chinese and Russian threats.
|
| From my perspective, the American President has threatened to
| annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly
| violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and
| American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No
| other country has demonstrated such an ability and
| willingness to collect information about me and use it
| against me.
| aa-jv wrote:
| Same.
|
| Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights
| at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to
| be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off
| the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China
| builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the
| world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's
| military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs
| them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing
| American AI.
|
| Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the
| moment - at scale too, I might add.
|
| If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is
| running out, however.
| antonyh wrote:
| As a European, yes I'd prefer an EU LLM.
|
| What I don't want to do is give it to services with an agenda
| to abuse the data, particularly those profiling individuals
| for profit. Frankly, I'd trust a Chinese service more than I
| would an Adtech based one, but that's still not much.
| qq66 wrote:
| He put many of the photographs right there in his blog post -
| he obviously does not see them as secrets
| yellowpug wrote:
| https://confer.to/
| MetroWind wrote:
| "Trust me bro"
| vasco wrote:
| Which US smartphone operating system do you use?
| GJim wrote:
| A reputable company will follow the GDPR and not share my
| personal data without explicit opt-in consent. Dodgy LLMs are
| anybody's guess.
| vasco wrote:
| Is the NSA GDPR compliant?
| GJim wrote:
| *sigh*
|
| Dodgy companies are a bigger danger to my (and your)
| privacy and wellbeing than the American NSA will ever be.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Perfect example of the "Yet you participate in society" meme.
|
| https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
| fsflover wrote:
| Not the parent, but PureOS.
| janandonly wrote:
| I guess PPQ.AI or OpenRouter.AI be of use to you here? Or maybe
| Apfel (Apple on-device AI) is powerful enough to do this?
| bawolff wrote:
| I'd be more worried about the bank statements than the photos.
| arjie wrote:
| This is awesome, dude. I love it. One of my personal points of
| friction is that I want almost all of my life to be public in
| whichever way it is, but I don't want to subject my friends to
| that without asking, and my life is pretty intertwined with that
| of my friends. I suppose I could add a new namespace and protect
| it, but for now I just keep my private notes in my Google Drive
| and my public notes on my blog. My blog etc. is in Mediawiki and
| I expressly like the interwiki linking form so it's seamless
| what's in the Wikimedia universe. The best part about the
| interwiki thing is that anything from the Wikimedia world can
| directly be hotlinked on your wiki too. That's really fun.
|
| I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and
| maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on.
| Great work, dude! I love it.
| Tier2Capital wrote:
| Perhaps a tangent question, but coming from a country with an
| authoritarian regime I am very careful about what information
| is public about myself. How do you feel for example about
| encryption in your chats? I do not mind to make most of my life
| public, but I care that companies do not use this for what I
| feel is not right. Example being Meta, using people's lack of
| care for their privacy to perfect their addiction algorithms.
| If I can use a secure private messenger like Signal, then I
| will. Curious how you feel about this?
| arjie wrote:
| Haha, it's funny. I'm not that worried about targeted ads and
| so on but I'd prefer that the government not be privy to my
| chats. In general, I'd rather not fight the government. My
| position is that if they need me to believe something so that
| I can live then they won't hear me say a word to contradict
| that thing.
|
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-07/A_Confused_K.
| ..
| AndrewVos wrote:
| This is so inspiring, thank you for writing it. I've been wanting
| something to track my daughters life and this is exactly what I
| need!
| h4ch1 wrote:
| I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year
| we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little
| notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of
| clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year.
| She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we
| visited and loved) and decorates it.
|
| Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt,
| discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented
| with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and
| everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that
| year.
|
| I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into
| it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply
| because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little
| routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun
| reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some
| _really_ interesting reading a few years down the line.
|
| I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that
| transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living
| different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something
| about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
| vogelke wrote:
| Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written
| extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and
| organized.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Oh I had no idea it was formalised to such a degree, we just
| thought we were doing an extreme form of scrapbooking haha.
|
| Thanks for the resource!
| klondike_klive wrote:
| that is beautiful. and inspirational. although I know that I
| don't have anywhere near enough energy to carry through on this
| kind of thing!
| eks391 wrote:
| It only takes a little bit of energy once a day (or per week
| if you haven't realized yet how eventful your life actually
| is). The highest energy first day making it is a fun date
| with your spouse, or parent child time if you are separated.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| @parent don't get too worried about not writing in it
| religiously and having a schedule. That removes all the joy
| about doing it in the first place.
|
| For example our 2026 notebook has only one page filled in
| yet where I wrote a recipe for a chocolate cake I made on
| the fly and was worried I'd forget the measurements.
|
| There are some days when I am bored and I pick it up and
| backfill it as well.
| marknutter wrote:
| This is an incredibly cool idea. I'm gonna talk to my wife
| about doing this with my girls. Thanks for sharing!
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Great to hear :) I hope it brings y'all much joy through the
| years!
| threetonesun wrote:
| I do something similar with a journal. I bought a little Instax
| printer recently so I can still use my phone as a camera but
| print out the pictures and stick them in it.
|
| I was thinking the other day I need to go back to a physical
| recipe book too. I don't cook that many different things that I
| need to reference it for, but there was a charm in my old one
| of remembering the best recipes were the ones covered in
| spilled ingredients and filled with marginalia.
| eleveriven wrote:
| The value isn't just in the recorded content, it's in the
| ritual
| fleebee wrote:
| I _like_ my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated
| articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia
| tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.
| hejira wrote:
| Yeah, that's my feeling too. It's an impressive and interesting
| project, but I don't want to do that with my life. It has had
| its ups and downs and some things I just don't want to dive
| back into like that (and don't want others to read either).
|
| The genealogy part - researching my ancestors' life - feels
| more useful.
| danw1979 wrote:
| Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning
| yourself ?
|
| I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I
| would love to read all about the events in the lives of my
| ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back
| generations.
|
| Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental
| ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing,
| where they spent their first holiday together...
| hejira wrote:
| Good point! I already write some stuff down that I never
| intend to read myself but hope would be of some use for
| future generations. It's not always easy knowing what's worth
| recording. And sometimes really boring stuff can be
| interesting 100 years from now, but you wouldn't know.
| subpixel wrote:
| That's the direction this developer went in but I think you
| could also go in a more personal direction and leverage
| automation where it's effective but avoid all generative text.
| jc-myths wrote:
| I actually spent a weekend last yr doing something similar. Went
| through a box of old photos with my dad and wrote things down
| before the stories were lost. Never thought to structure it as a
| wiki though. Way better than the Google doc I ended up with.
|
| The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out
| which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if
| this could pull in social media exports too. Point it at your X,
| IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.
|
| Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth
| but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.
| jrmyphlmn wrote:
| I did use some of my facebook and instagram exports! I was
| active on those platforms during college so it dug out a lot of
| fun stories from there haha
|
| timeline view is interesting, I'll hack around!
| jandragsbaek wrote:
| I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos
| that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums
| pzoonic wrote:
| What a lovely read, at least up until the AIfied bit.
|
| Though from the title I didn't expect family history, I thought
| it was going to be more of a project like this:
| https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...
| brador wrote:
| You're gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma
| telling those tales.
|
| Video >photo >audio >text
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Take more videos, including random moments of your daily life.
| Just short ones are fine. Your future self will thank you.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| A good story I stopped reading when it became agentic.
|
| The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the
| title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we
| are getting into.
|
| What really pinch is that this project could have easily been
| done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at
| zero cost, with total privacy.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| There is no possible way some light scripting could cross
| reference data from pictures (not the metadata, the actual
| pictures) with web information, bank information and personal
| anecdotes.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| I didn't bother reading the entire article, I'm sure multi
| modal LLMs can do things scripting can't do. But such project
| can be done without an LLM.
|
| It would in fact make fore a better result, a family wiki
| with content that's AI generated may overall look accurate,
| but the sloppy parts ridiculous. If I find an archive I would
| rather assemble the information myself.
| andersonpico wrote:
| the things people are comfortable delegating are really
| surprising, but the emotional reaction here is even more so:
| people are genuinely moved, it is bizarre
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I like the idea. I like the way it uses existing framework. If I
| was going to offer a suggestion, I would try to incorporate a way
| to use local inference ( or is that accomplished through
| opencode? I have not used it yet so I don't really know ).
| jrmyphlmn wrote:
| yes! you can use it through opencode and a local model, that
| also works!
| carschno wrote:
| > On top of that, I exported my location timeline from Google
| Maps, my Uber trips, my bank transactions, and Shazam history. I
| would ask Claude Code to start with the photos and then gradually
| give it access to the different data exports.
|
| Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great
| project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but
| sharing all my financial and location details with any service
| seems like opening the floodgates to my house.
|
| My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing
| all my most private data with any service. There is always a
| significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.
| subpixel wrote:
| Not uncomfortable just deeply uninterested. I'm into preserving
| family stories - I'm not into the navel-gazing that is all
| manner of 'quantified self' endeavors
| svat wrote:
| > _There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked
| sooner or later._
|
| As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think
| of every service as potentially storing forever all the data
| that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter,
| services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude
| Code terms say that your data will not be used for training,
| you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and
| storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by _"significant
| chance all of it is leaked sooner or later"_ ) would be even
| more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated
| to compliance with users' "wipeout" settings. You can take a
| look at https://myactivity.google.com and
| https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows
| and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3
| months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after
| that time. Every single team that stores user data is required
| to comply with this.)
|
| I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to
| find out what the terms are -- for a given usage of their
| services whether and for how long the details will be stored by
| them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely
| on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g.
| not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a
| giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I am starting to do this with actual physical books. I have
| thousands of photos going back over my life, and I am putting
| them together in Scribus to then go and print a physical book for
| each year or event or holiday along with some relevant text.
|
| Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when
| I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical
| form, unlike all the digital things we spend decades creating.
|
| I might put a SD card taped in the front of each one with a video
| too, so someone can watch it in the future.
|
| As a separate aside, I also found old Canon photo printers
| (Selphy models) on ebay for about PS5! Some need the little white
| gear inside glueing back on (there's a video on YouTube about
| it), and they DO NOT work with Windows anymore, but gutenprint
| supports them fine on Linux, so I have been printing photos
| (postcard size) at home. The colour isn't going to win awards and
| the saturation needs boosting slightly in the printer options
| compared to default, but it's a wonderful way to finally get some
| photos from trips on the walls.
| solstice wrote:
| I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some
| templates or other tips on how to do this?
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I did spend some time getting some LLM to write a generator
| (in C++) of a scribus XML file for automatic layout, but it
| wasn't effective. I need to get back to looking at that, as
| it would be very useful. As my photos range in aspect ratios
| and formats (4:3 and 3:2) and I have thousands and thousands
| of RAW photos to process and "finish", it's an ongoing work!
| So for now I am just doing it manually, with the help of some
| layout scripts.
|
| As I store everything in a local Vikunja instance for notes
| and WIP, here's the list of links I assembled relative to
| this (hopefully useful; it includes calendar templates so
| that I can make them for my mother-in-law):
|
| https://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources
|
| https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678
|
| https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest
|
| https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard
|
| https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-
| Scribu...
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di.
| ..
|
| https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook.
| ..
|
| https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts
|
| https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus
|
| https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f.
| ..
|
| https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums
|
| https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates
|
| https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0
|
| http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/
|
| When you find a print shop, they'll talk about margins and
| bleeds, so it might be worth finding a print shop first to
| know what bleed zones you want on the pages and whether they
| expect left page first, or right page first.
|
| Once you know that, you can set up Scribus appropriately.
| solstice wrote:
| wow, thank you!
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| Won't the SD card data decay in a relatively short time? Maybe
| convert some part of that video into a flipbook for another
| piece of physical media?
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Yes, I would definitely make backups on two or three
| different disc types.
| Nzen wrote:
| You could add an appendix with printed, scannable, binary
| data. You could create a page with a bunch of QR codes.
| Martin Monperrus vouched [0] for Twibright Optar [1].
|
| [0] https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper
|
| [1] https://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
| geek_at wrote:
| physical books are a greate idea.
|
| I do something similar but with email and more pro-active [1].
| I have created my son an email address when he was born and I'm
| sending him things from our lives and ask family members to to
| the same. Just to write them about themselves and send photos
| of their current homes and gardens and partners.
|
| I imagining him looking through his email when he's 18 and
| reading personalize messages sent by family members who might
| no longer be with us then.
|
| [1] https://blog.haschek.at/2024/leaving-a-digital-legacy.html
| modo_mario wrote:
| How's the cost for the books? I'd be tempted to DIY those to
| save cost but Ive been a bit short on time in recent months.
| codazoda wrote:
| I love making Zines, but I don't make enough of them. That
| might be a nice medium for something like this.
|
| I've also done some light-fast testing. Laser prints (both B&W
| and color) survive a long while in direct harsh sunlight left
| in the window of my Utah home. All types of pen I tried were
| faded within a couple years but Pencil survives.
|
| A 360 degree stapler is a fantastic tool for quickly binding
| them.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Feels like a nice middle ground between what the article
| describes and something more tangible
| vasco wrote:
| This plus messaging and you could kill Facebook
| znpy wrote:
| MediaWiki mentioned!
|
| I started running an private MediaWiki instance during the
| pandemic as I wanted something with a nice editing experience
| rather than editing markdown documents. I almost went with a
| self-hosted Confluence instance :P
|
| Mediawiki is very very nice and it has a lot of cool features
| i've been loving over the years.
|
| One of the things i like the most is the ability to embed a PDF
| document so that it's both downloadable and browsable from the
| wiki page itself (it embeds the browser pdf engine).
|
| This means that i can, say, have a page for my microwave oven and
| have its user manual easily available.
|
| Lately I've been thinking how to connect that with some LLM, most
| likely there's a chance to do some interesting things :)
| terminalgravity wrote:
| I do something similar to a personal encyclopedia but using org-
| roam. I don't use an LLM yet to do any work but eventually i plan
| to use a local model to correlate things and pull together things
| that were not manually connected. Also I'm glad that LLMs can
| easily parse org docs so that if any future family member wanted
| to look through they wouldnt have to be familiar with emacs
| esoteric conventions.
| stephenlf wrote:
| This is beautiful, and incredibly polished. Thank you.
| b800h wrote:
| I've been looking for a solution for this problem for a long
| time, and this is a particularly innovative approach.
|
| I'll look into this more: Most appreciated, thank you.
| sdoering wrote:
| > Her face lit up as she narrated the backstory behind the
| occasion, going from photo to photo, resurfacing details that had
| been dormant for decades.
|
| I had started something similar with my mom over Christmas in
| '24. About half way through the collection she asked to stop. We
| would do the rest on her next visit.
|
| Well. It never came to that as she passed away completely
| unexpected in March last year.
|
| I'll never get the chance to record the other stories. The
| stories from the second half of the photo collection.
|
| I cheer for projects like this.
| neogodless wrote:
| Overall this is a neat result, and the interviews are a nice part
| of the process. I've tried to (on occasion) make a habit of
| asking about more (mundane) details from my elders. But knowing
| what to do with that data...
|
| And that brings me to my point. I've been thinking a lot lately
| about digital legacy. When I was a kid, it was neat to see photo
| books that showed my parents as kids, living their lives, having
| fun. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something
| you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them
| constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to
| stick around?
|
| First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've
| got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family
| photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind
| of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that
| hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but
| subscription-based expense in perpetuity.
|
| What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses
| dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a
| domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but
| eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to
| pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name
| could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years
| after you.
|
| Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a
| question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way
| to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you
| touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing
| out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind
| those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to
| household.
|
| I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several
| DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and
| thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family.
| And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with
| "reasonably" durable.
| IanCal wrote:
| The benefit of digital things is that they can be copied much
| more cheaply than physical things. There's perhaps migrations
| and upkeep though.
|
| On the technical side perhaps the shared nature of this helps -
| if you can have something replicated so that you and several
| other members are all running replicas there's a
|
| On the non technical side, take some photos and print them on
| good paper. Print out stories on paper.
|
| That doesn't cover video and perhaps other things but it's
| simple and does actually work for lots and lots of stories and
| pictures. It's also immediately doable right now without
| anything new.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Looking/thinking about this and all the digital photos that are
| spread across multiple phones and accounts led me to My Family
| Archive. I haven't pursued it yet, but they seem to have
| thought about some of this.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia
|
| It's magical watching people learn about hyperlinks. Even
| technical people don't always seem to know the power of a string
| that says, "Go to this server and fetch this document". Love it
| jcmontx wrote:
| Extremely cool. I'm into genealogy and can trace my family 10
| generations back (250 years) to their arrival to Argentina.
| Documentation is lost or lacking once you reach Europe, other
| branches of the family with more recent arrivals to the country
| are very hard to trace. In part due to mismatching surnames and
| in part due to the wars.
|
| We have started asking old family members to send us whatsapp
| audios with tales and things they remember from long-passed away
| family members; and what was life like in the 1930-40-50s. I want
| to start organizing all the info and data we have, my father has
| built a couple family trees, but this wiki format is indeed very
| promising. I'll keep an eye on this and see if we can use it.
| maltris wrote:
| 10 is a lot given the circumstances. From which country did
| they originate?
| jcmontx wrote:
| Main family tree from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In the
| times of the Virreinato del Rio de la Plata.
| aanet wrote:
| This is too coincidental.
|
| My partner's ancestors came from Sitges (in fact, one of
| them was the mayor of the town), back in 1820s or 1830s -
| to Argentina, and from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. Among
| the various marriages in the generations, there's a
| Scottish clan, and English ancestry intermixed with
| Spaniards. She can trace her roots back to some of the
| founding members and prominent political families there.
|
| The last time we were in Scotland, we found the clan she's
| from - but couldn't ascertain the ship they took to
| Argentina :-/ That's left as an exercise for some future
| trips.
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| Are you documenting this with any particular software? Any
| interesting resources you can share that have made this project
| easier? I have a bunch of paper records for one side of my
| family that was passed along to me and would love to work on
| the other half but am not sure where to start.
| jcmontx wrote:
| Big shout out to the Mormons, whom have been digitalizing
| ancient birth certificates all around the world. We got a lot
| of data from them!
| sdsd wrote:
| I'm Mormon, and doing family history research is one of my
| favorite church activities. Appreciate unexpectedly seeing
| us mentioned in a positive light online!
| koliber wrote:
| I have a friend whose grandma wrote a book about their family.
| She printed 50 or so copies of it. Not a chart-topping best
| seller, but each one is a cherished collector's item.
|
| Right now, my wife and I are sticking to annual photo albums.
| They're already fun to flip through and we're not even that old
| yet.
| ruptwelve wrote:
| This is very interesting. As a person who meticulously daily
| diaries into Obsidian, my hope is to have a relatively accurate
| look-back at things I've done in the past. And having a Wiki to
| show that, feel very interesting now!
| solstice wrote:
| With video gen AI you might even get an animated movie out of
| it...
| sneak wrote:
| > _So I started pointing Claude Code at other data exports. My
| Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp archives held around 100k
| messages and a couple thousand voice notes exchanged with close
| friends over a decade._
|
| > _The model traced the arc of our friendships through the
| messages, pulled out the life episodes we had talked each other
| through, and wove them into multiple pages that read like it was
| written by someone who knew us both. When I shared the pages with
| my friends, they wanted to read every single one._
|
| This is a stunning violation of the privacy of your friends.
|
| If someone uploaded every single private conversation I had had
| with them to Anthropic, they would no longer be my friend.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, though unless you used non-mainstream platforms, all
| messages are already on the servers of Meta or Google. Not sure
| how much worse Anthropic is.
| Throudin wrote:
| The difference is the friends chose to use those platforms.
| esafak wrote:
| For longevity, which is a consideration in such a project, one
| might prefer something based on Markdown files, like
| https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd to Mediawiki, which uses a
| database. Then again it does support sqlite, which is open
| source, so it is not a big deal.
| saintaardvark wrote:
| What an absolutely delightful project. This put a smile on my
| face. Thank you.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That sounds great!
|
| This chap made it a labor of love.
| raghavbali wrote:
| Amazing work there @jrmyphlmn . Very recently I was thinking
| about how to preserve photographs I have collected over last 10
| years in my external drive and instagram and unchecked SSD cards.
| Time to weave them all together. Bonus for me to be the 100th
| github starer on your repo
| fathermarz wrote:
| I quite love this idea. Both of my grandfathers died last year
| and going through their early memories was amazing. I would love
| to be able to preserve that and make it shareable with the rest
| of my family.
|
| Nice work!
| m-hodges wrote:
| This is a really fun project and the family interview transcripts
| + LLM workflow feels like a genuinely good use of the technology.
|
| I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google
| Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam
| history."
|
| Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category
| say some variation of:
|
| > it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any
| model can read it
|
| I don't think people fully appreciate the tension in those
| claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is
| Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise
| language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users
| are implicitly accepting.
| sxldier wrote:
| > Private by default > Your wiki and archive live on your
| machine. Nothing is stored remotely.
|
| Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is
| being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs
| exist but that's seemingly not supported here and I think the
| statement on privacy could be clearer.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| I love the idea.
|
| Each year I have the wife take curated photos from our shared
| accounts with an overview of the event photographed.
|
| This is then bound into a 1/2 inch book with 50 pages. We now
| have a dozen years of annualized memories that we can pass around
| with physical access.
|
| She has done this for others with great success. The personal
| touches make it well worth what she charges.
| ljsocal wrote:
| Fascinating idea! So wish I had parents and grands around so I
| could record all the old family stories that were told over the
| years. If you readers take no other action after reading this
| post, start recording your own oral history/stories; yours,
| parents, kids, friends, etc.
| MattCruikshank wrote:
| I'm like, "Here's all of the obituaries," and Claude is like,
| "I'll make all the pages of all of the people and link them
| together." Pretty neat.
| mottiden wrote:
| Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for
| building it.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd
| really hoped it would become.
| lysace wrote:
| I built something very broadly similar approximately 20 years
| ago.
|
| Then I forgot about it. It's not like the data is lost, but
| availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably
| do it in a full day of work.
|
| What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is
| a must. I don't think HTML will cease to be easily readable in
| our lifetimes.
| eleveriven wrote:
| This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling,
| genealogy and lifelogging
| systemerror wrote:
| this is incredible, I have been thinking about this exact project
| for quite some time but a little wary of which approach I might
| take. Thanks for posting this.
| MattCruikshank wrote:
| And I just taught Claude to read the Discussion notes on a page,
| and to make updates to the page accordingly...
| NoSalt wrote:
| I wish all of this technology could have been around when my
| grandparents were still alive. :-(
|
| The family has a TON of videos and photos, but no resource to
| guide us through what is what.
| bronlund wrote:
| Fantastic idea!
| antiresonant wrote:
| If devices were truly private, we could simply set our mics to
| always-on and massive Personal Wikis would build themselves over
| time. Imagine that, an autobiography for everyone. Of course the
| downside is massive, arguably useless storage for humans. Would
| be pretty valuable training data though.
| runj__ wrote:
| My grandfather left five moving cartons of diaries written by
| typewriter, every single day of his adult life documented, an
| achievement, to be sure. When he passed away he left them to my
| mother to be scanned, transcribed and moved online, something
| that weighed her down for the last 15 years of her life.
|
| When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically
| (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in my mothers already
| cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a
| need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just
| scanning.
|
| When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not
| transcribed, not anything.
|
| The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing,
| seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was
| crushing.
|
| My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I
| wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing
| around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did
| the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we
| threw it away at the recycling centre).
|
| Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is
| preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Friendly spelling correction. Diaries, not dairies. Dairies are
| where one produces dairy products.
|
| And I'm sorry your mom experienced that weight towards the end
| of her life. That sounds like a significant thing to grapple
| with, especially considering some of the not so pleasant
| content mentioned.
| wdrw wrote:
| I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of
| something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations
| down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how
| easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that
| will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good
| the technology for sifting through mountains of text is
| becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable text, I
| can't imagine doing this to family records that one of my
| ancestors specifically wanted to be preserved. Not criticizing
| your personal decision of course, but just offering a different
| perspective, i.e. for me it would be unimaginable to do this.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I agree. When my mother died I got access to her emails,
| diaries etc. I read some and as you would expect there are a
| whole range of emotions and opinions in there, many of which
| I did not care to engage with. So I asked my wife to read
| some and she said said she thought it was worth keeping so we
| do. I will not read it, but perhaps someone else will get
| some value from it someday. It's no effort to keep (no boxes
| or terabytes of data).
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I feel the same way, but I think my feelings may change if I
| didn't actually think the person was a good enough person
| that deserves to have their writing immortalized, like in
| this case. Of course, we only have his side, but the GP
| doesn't seem to think his dad was a good person and wrote
| some hurtful things in the diary about someone they cared
| about, which I feel as though is justification for their
| actions.
| runj__ wrote:
| I totally understand your way of thinking but there's just so
| much _stuff_, we already kept most of his paintings which
| takes up a lot of my limited storage space (I do appreciate
| them though, but it's possible to have conflicted feelings).
|
| It would cost around $3000 to have the diaries scanned today,
| this number was way higher a few years ago (which my mother
| didn't have). I know Americans have a lot more storage space
| in their houses and use storage facilities for a lot of
| things but there has to be a cutoff point. I have about 6m3
| of (already filled) extra storage space in central Stockholm
| and wouldn't want that much more. Throwing shit away is a
| part of life.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Pages could have been cut ( if written in a bound book)
| with a small guillotine type machine.
|
| A few years ago , There are auto sheet scanners that scan
| both sides of pages relatively quickly , like 1 or 2
| seconds a sheet, and can do at least 50 pages at once.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave.
| You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the
| kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see
| thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time
| on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the
| descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets
| retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past.
|
| Im perfectly content knowing just vague information about
| individual ancestors 3-4 levels up, and basically nothing on
| level 5, except the odd church record of births, marriages
| and deaths giving a rough indication of where some of them
| lived.
|
| The people 5 generations back deserve much less thought space
| than the community you cultivate around yourself today
| (including living family).
| T-RN-R wrote:
| This is frankly a selfish take. Society is a compact
| between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having
| a piece of someone's deepest thoughts is a treasure for
| future generations. By deciding to destroy, you choose to
| destroy the past that the future generations might value.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| No, its the natural cycle. What passes away fades away.
| Anything that is kept up needs to be kept up actively by
| the generations. That which is valued needs to be
| preserved, such as wisdom, knowledge, art, science etc.
| All your drama and idle musings, maybe not. Unless you're
| deemed worthy by the next ones. I understand that this is
| a scary thought but our impact is only kept if we act
| such that the next generations want to preserve it. 5
| generations down even your genetic impact is people who
| share 3% genes with you and 97% other people. Imagine a
| classroom with 32 people. For each of your descendants 5
| generations down (which can be zero or many, the count
| varying greatly based on choices made by not-you), you're
| one person out of that classroomful of ancestors.
|
| Sure it's kinda cool to see some fragments here and
| there. But would I want it to be the standard that we
| keep all the emails, chat messages, phone camera roll,
| GPS logs etc of people... Hell no. I'm not advocating for
| absolutely forgetting everything. But we have to filter.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Society is a compact between the dead, the living and
| the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone's deepest
| thoughts is a treasure for future generations
|
| If you want to be remembered, live a life worth
| remembering.
| aanet wrote:
| First off, this is a super cool project. Kudos to getting it
| started and up and running. Family history, and memorabilia and
| organizing all that stuff is super challenging, and just having a
| proper site to look at is worth its own effort.
|
| Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use
| of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I
| liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1],
| wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for
| writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of
| 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen.
|
| In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software
| I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude,
| ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen
| (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi.
|
| I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and
| videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as
| to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to
| lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the
| location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I
| think I might do that.
|
| (no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank
| statements! I draw a line there!)
|
| That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because
| the whole output resonates with me.
|
| Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences.
| I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post
| pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come
| back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places
| visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals
| consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences)
| causes them to be fresh in one's memories.
|
| Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well.
|
| [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's like Facebook meets Wikipedia
| yayadarsh wrote:
| I just completed an 18 month travel sabbatical with my wife -
| would this be useful to catalog and cluster all of our photos
| based on geolocation and prompt us to collect memories?
| jrmyphlmn wrote:
| yes!
| tolerance wrote:
| Disappointed because I thought this was about building a personal
| alternative to Wikipedia.
| arikrahman wrote:
| This is pretty wholesome. This takes Personal Knowledge
| Management to a whole other level.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I did the same thing and came away with a different opinion.
|
| The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no
| one in the family would've tried to resurrect it.
|
| They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think
| anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust
| and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it.
|
| I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image
| directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A
| consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a
| shelf and flip through, even in 2097.
| jjice wrote:
| Yeah, I think marked down files and a printed version ends up
| being a good idea. I've never worked with media wiki directly,
| but I wonder if you could do an easy nightly dump of markdown
| contents somewhere.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| You may like DokuWiki. It's a wiki you can browse and edit in a
| browser but stores its data as human-readable files, not in a
| database.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| Excellent post. Something I think about _a lot_ in this exact
| context along the same lines as personal /community/local social
| nets.
|
| The industrial-scale things (manufacturing, content generation,
| human/world history record keeping ...) eventually shrink down to
| human-scale things
| forthwall wrote:
| I'm concerned about your copy that says "Private by default" and
| "Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored
| remotely.", yet you recommend to use Claude, which means your
| data is being stored remotely in most cases. I do like the idea
| though! Will try with local models
| T-A wrote:
| _Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their
| lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-
| album, but then things will get more complicated. People will
| begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or
| exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you
| fall in love or become very close with someone you will share
| your "Book of Life"._
|
| Jann Burner, "The book of life", December 26, 2008
|
| https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#s...
| leflob wrote:
| This sounds like a great futre project form me. What an awersome
| project!
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