How could it be his whole life if he hasn't catalogued his thoughts? He doesn't show that he has metrics about the thoughts he has.
“Felix is thinking about: himself”
I put my whole life into a single database
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Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#12This post is interesting, but the whole project seems like a vanity project to put on your resume. I’d argue that it’s peak vanity project. Once you have the basics of collect>summarise>publish metrics, it’s trivial to add just one more. Do people really need every single aspect of their lives measurable to this degree? Does anyone (other than your mother) really care? I, for one, would hate for this to become a thin…
I also feel like it gets to a roundaboutway of 'proving' things people already know. More sleep is nicer, unless it's so long it's bc you're sick. Drinking more means more dancing. Days when you sit all day working are less fun than walking around with friends (and, of course, not working then)
I feel like keeping a rough journal and manually revisiting would be more helpful than quantifying and correlating. But financial tracking can be useful, to a smaller degree, and tracking mood changes over big life changes can be valuable I guess. Otherwise, does feel vanity
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#13This post is interesting, but the whole project seems like a vanity project to put on your resume. I’d argue that it’s peak vanity project. Once you have the basics of collect>summarise>publish metrics, it’s trivial to add just one more. Do people really need every single aspect of their lives measurable to this degree? Does anyone (other than your mother) really care? I, for one, would hate for this to become a thin…
If you read to the bottom of the site, you'll find that the author agrees with you that the end result was not particularly useful:
> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
But calling it a vanity project seems overly dismissive. Sometimes you start a project and don't know how it's going to end up. Sometimes it's the journey and not the destination that makes a project worthwhile. I think Felix deserves a lot of credit for writing up his conclusions and sharing them.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#14My version of this: Human Programming Interface https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI It's a bit heavier on the automatic data aggregation side, but has some manual inputs as data sources too. I'm hoping to make it easier to interface with existing tools for data analysis, dashboards, notebooks etc.
https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html is, to me, the definitive go to "look how ultra we could be" site of yours, @karlicoss. i show this off to people on the regular, it's so impressive.
i feel like there's such a gap, that it takes such dedicatiom & effort to have the digital world we interact with report back & give us the facts of whats occured. i dont know what futures this obstructs but it's a drain on general human possobility & energy that man-made reality, unlike the gods, is so deeply resistant to revelation & exploration.
i've seen comments calling the submission a vanity project, and it admits to it's owm uninterestingness to a certain degree. i think karlicoss's far broader spanning digital self sensing & ordering has a far higher chamce of helping us distill out meaning & sense from the world. but what a bold & hard sojourn just to start, just to begin to marshal the data. critics abound but i for one think we have so much, are only just starting to understand & calobrate ourselves in a technoaugmemted mode.
currently the technology all resists technoaugmentative exploration. this is a crime against humanity, against our base human spirit. we dont know what is possible, what we could do. we cannot explore better possibilities. we have now two examples of goong far, but all the systems around us resist this open exploration: we are all chained to the wall of plato's cave, and few bother to break free. i await & pursue an emergence.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#15[deleted]
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#16Neat, and interesting that his conclusion is that it's too much effort to do for oneself.
My take on this is Timelinize[0], which is capable of downloading all your data from various digital records like social media, your phone, arbitrary files and unstructured folders, your Google account, etc. So it can aggregate data from Google Photos, Location History, Twitter, Facebook, text messages, and more, onto your computer, organized into a single timeline.
(It is the successor to Timeliner[1].)
I suppose Timelinize can support personal body metrics from various devices, and it is planned to support manual entries as well like journals. Analyses like his would also be possible.
Data can be automatically imported on a regular basis via APIs (like, backing up your new tweets every day). The arbitrary file importer can also be scheduled to watch a directory for changes: just write a file or folder to that directory, and Timelinize will automatically import it (and optionally delete it when finished).
Timelines are stored locally on your own computer, as plain files on disk, with a sqlite database as an index, so it should be a breeze to back up and use/read without proprietary software.
The idea is to:
- Back up your precious data that is otherwise held more-or-less hostage on somebody else's computers
- While creating a detailed, personal journal for your family history
- In a way that can show you your life in context with others' timelines and the wider world.
[0]: https://twitter.com/timelinize (No actual website yet.)
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#17Now I want to see the secret databases that companies and governments have on people for comparison.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#18What a great timing. I've recently started a side project to do something similar. It's todo/habit/tracking app made to scratch my own itches.
1. I've tried out many todo apps and they all aren't quite right for me (atm it's just a pen and paper), so I want to try design UX that's tailor made for me.
2. I found that arbitrary points and day streaks go a long way in making my habits stick. So I want to have an app that can add points/ streaks to anything that I do. (e.g. I complete "go to the gym" from my todo list, and it automatically adds a log to a table. Then that log is parsed to show some arbitrary point & streaks for going to the gym)
3. I want the app to have a REST endpoint that I can use to integrate with other apps to automate data entry.
Honestly, it's more of a procrastination thing than a productivity thing :p but have a lot of fun thinking about/ building the app.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#19This is excellent and hugely appreciate that it’s open source. My previous startup attempt was a self-hosted personal metrics app so similar to this. Instead I pivoted to making self-hosting web apps easier: will be adding a template for this asap.
My wife tracks just about everything in her life - and me almost nothing. I’d like the narrow the gap just slightly!
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#20This is super cool. In case you don't make it through to the project's webpage howisfelix.today, and read through to the end, here is the creator's conclusion: Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first s…
> There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
This is my general feeling towards all quantified-self projects. Perhaps it creates interesting insights for some people, but I can imagine the kinds of conclusions I'd actually get from it will be things like "I'm happier on sunny days" and I'll say "yeah..."