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Personal Encyclopedias

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Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#121

Post by Throudin »

bonoboTP wrote: post #109
sneak wrote: post #86

> 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 k…

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.

The difference is the friends chose to use those platforms.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#122

Post by theptip »

nicbou wrote: post #18
bawolff wrote: post #2

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 eve…

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…

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.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#125

Post by naravara »

theptip wrote: post #122
nicbou wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#126

Post by NoSalt »

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.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#128

Post by svat »

carschno wrote: post #52

> 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 s…

> 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).

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#129

Post by GJim »

vasco wrote: post #63
GJim wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reputable company will follow the GDPR and not share my personal data without explicit opt-in consent. Dodgy LLMs are anybody's guess.

Is the NSA GDPR compliant?

*sigh*

Dodgy companies are a bigger danger to my (and your) privacy and wellbeing than the American NSA will ever be.

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