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Map of my personal data infrastructure

beepb00p.xyz

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Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#31

Post by generalizations »

karlicoss wrote: post #18
generalizations wrote: post #2

The way I see it, if you need a map then it's too complicated.

Hi, author here. Yes, it's complicated and this is exactly one of the points of this map, to illustrate how ridiculous it is -- that I have to jump over all these hoops to do something useful with the data that's already somewhere in my phone/was in my browser, but hidden and siloed (from myself!) for various reasons.

Fair enough. The effort and quality of your work is apparent - well done.

I guess for me, I would have opted for greater inconvenience and simply let some of what you graphed slide, rather than deal with the mental overhead of actually tracking it all. But I would also not have enjoyed building that graph. :)

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#32

Post by for_i_in_range »

karlicoss wrote: post #17

Hey author here. Happy to answer your questions!

Big fan of yours. I think this is the second time I’ve come across your site on HN. I’ve been getting deep into developing my own Second Brain lately. I glanced briefly at your Exobrain Repo and it seems you’re using a custom system. Have you tried out using https://obsidian.md or the whole Wikilink/Zeitelkasten Personal Knowledge Management methodology? Curious to hear your experiences.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#33

Post by karlicoss »

brutusborn wrote: post #29
karlicoss wrote: post #17

Hey author here. Happy to answer your questions!

Thankyou so much for sharing your work. Finding this post was like finding something I didn't know I was looking for. Have you considered monetizing this in some way? As a person of limited technical skills, I would definitely pay for a set of tools that would help me aggregate my data.

Monetizing.. not really. Many reasons:

- I don't really see a good way (not that I'm entrepreneurial in this aspect though), maybe except for providing some infrastructure etc

- dealing with others' data is a completely different kind of headache with legal and security responsibilities

- I don't really have a product or anything -- more of a vision which I want to communicate, a bunch of patterns, techniques and repositories. Maybe know some esoteric gotchas.

- It's a very niche thing to think about and 'want' in the first place (although I am trying to change it through my communication :) ). Most 'regular' people don't do backups, let alone this!

But it would be very cool if someone comes up with a business model to provide such service.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#34

Post by karlicoss »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Hello author, hope you don't mind the negative comments since this isn't for everyone including myself. I found your dedication to organization very impressive and only shows that you'd do the same professionally.

Hi, thanks for kind words :)

I don't really see them as negative (or at least don't get offended). It seems that people are on a spectrum of organization from not even using a calendar and never taking notes ("if it's important I'll remember") to what I do (and maybe even more extreme??). And it's okay! Some people suffer from information overload, some people suffer from inefficiencies and forgetting things, and you can be productive/unproductive, or happy/unhappy either way -- there are many other factors at play too.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#35

Post by borisjoffe »

I love the emphasis on data export / analysis and ownership of your data. I also love the quantified self aspects of this.

However as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's incredibly freeing to at least partially let go of some of your data and not worry if it gets lost or erased.

Tracking and managing all of this sucks up a lot of time and mental effort, that you could be using to progress in other areas of your life. I prefer to focus on the present instead of letting the past occupy so much of my mind.

On one hand, keeping backups of important files and automating that as much as possible is good. Tracking your top 2-10 most important habits (e.g. sleep, workouts) can also be very good.

But for social media sites (like Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, YouTube, etc), it's just too much of a pain to manage. And they can kick you off in a heartbeat for any reason. I personally treat all content on those sites as potentially being erased at any time.

If I have anything important (e.g. a good post, comment, or image that I want to save), I make sure to save that locally, usually in a personal outliner/wiki that I use called zim-wiki (it's like Evernote/Notion/Obsidian, but it's all just flat wiki-formatted plain text files and folders that are easily greppable and scriptable). You can also post the best content on your own site. None of this requires regular social media exports, APIs, or any programming - you can just copy/paste/save this content as you create it into your own categorized section of your filesystem or PIM tool.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#36

Post by mikelago »

Thank you for sharing this! This genre of software tool is something that has been on my mind since at least 2010. Here* is a quick summary of my idea. I even applied to the first YC Fellowship in 2015 with the idea, but I didn’t make it past the application. I’ve come across many related ideas over years of reading HN (the general consensus is to just use org mode, so far I’ve been strictly a vim user xD), but this post is particularly inspirational!

I got my first job in software in 2017 and to this day I’m growing constantly. Before this first job I struggled to keep the motivation to practice and work on projects. I finally have the abilities to make projects come to life, and I’ll definitely be studying your project carefully as I get going on building one of my own.

*https://web.archive.org/web/20160806063444/http://mindengei.... What's "MindEngei"? Engei (園芸) is the Japanese word for gardening. I plan to build applications that help us organize our thoughts, experiences, and knowledge in a pleasant way. Too much of what we learn and experience gets sucked up by the applications we used and maintaining that information is either a hassle or impossible. I want to make applications that log everything we want to remember in a simple and relaxing way, allowing the user to pull in data from services, take notes, and document knowledge and provide quick and pleasant ways of viewing and sharing their content.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#37

Post by karlicoss »

for_i_in_range wrote: post #32
karlicoss wrote: post #17

Hey author here. Happy to answer your questions!

Big fan of yours. I think this is the second time I’ve come across your site on HN. I’ve been getting deep into developing my own Second Brain lately. I glanced briefly at your Exobrain Repo and it seems you’re using a custom system. Have you tried out using https://obsidian.md or the whole Wikilink/Zeitelkasten Personal Knowledge Management methodology? Curious to hear your experiences.

Yep, exobrain is using org-mode export + some tweaks. I've settled on emacs + org-mode a few years ago (perhaps on the fifth attempt it finally clicked). Before it was gitit/Zim/sublime text/random scripts, whatnot. All the shiny apps like Obsidian/Roam/etc have appeared over the last couple of years (and it's awesome!). But I'm too hooked onto emacs now, maybe the only thing I should use more is org-roam [0]. For me the most useful org-mode features perhaps are tags, agenda, org-capture and org-refile. Search is very important, I have a whole post about it [1].

I started a draft describing my 'process' [2], but it's pretty incomplete.. there are some bits scattered across exobrain too.

Also lately I started playing with Logseq [3] to get a more interactive representation of exobrain [4] (warning, it's pretty heavy, needs some optimization and I might have messed up the physics). Logseq could be a great gateway for people who want to get into org-mode but not ready to go 100% Emacs, highly recommend to try it it!

[0] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm_processing.html

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html

[3] https://github.com/logseq/logseq#logseq

[4] https://beepb00p.xyz/logseq/#/graph

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#39

Post by karlicoss »

3np wrote: post #25

Thanks a bunch for sharing this. I think the way we move forward from here is more posts like this. It's an uphill battle where companies are actively adding friction to people being in control of their own data, but together we can do it :) ...Personally I just decided to boycot services that are smartphone-only. My last mistake was Revolut. Even the (arguably non-existing) process of getting a yearly statement from…

I really hope my next phone to be a real Linux phone like Pinephone/Librem (or apparently you can even install Linux on my Oneplus 6T), so I could run android-only stuff in the VM and have a real computing device in my pocket.

Re: Map of my personal data infrastructure

#40

Post by xupybd »

borisjoffe wrote: post #35

I love the emphasis on data export / analysis and ownership of your data. I also love the quantified self aspects of this. However as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's incredibly freeing to at least partially let go of some of your data and not worry if it gets lost or erased. Tracking and managing all of this sucks up a lot of time and mental effort, that you could be using to progress in other areas of your…

Everyone needs a hobby. If this is the authors, great!

It's cool and meets exactly the nerdy cool factor I look for in articles on HN.

Would I invest time into doing the same, nope but then I don't think many out there would spend the same time I spend on my hobbies.

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