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I analysed 20 years of my chats

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Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#21

Post by marak830 »

freehorse wrote: post #19
NDlurker wrote: post #2

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come. Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.

Well if it's bitlocker encrypted I have some good news (potentially) Yellowkey (CVE-2026-45585) is able to bypass it.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#22

Post by sixhobbits »

I do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app.

For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.

You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.

Wordclouds per person are also fun!

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#23

Post by Squeeeez »

dwedge wrote: post #14
saligne wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.

I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?

They might not be doing it on purpose, remember that microsoft windows "take a screenshot every few seconds and send it to an llm" thing?

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#24

Post by AdrianB1 »

I don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month.

I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#25

Post by rablackburn »

dwedge wrote: post #14
saligne wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.

I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?

Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#27

Post by captn3m0 »

Squeeeez wrote: post #23
dwedge wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?

They might not be doing it on purpose, remember that microsoft windows "take a screenshot every few seconds and send it to an llm" thing?

Signal pushed a fix for that: https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#28

Post by [deleted] »

Nition wrote: post #7
NDlurker wrote: post #2

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.

[deleted]

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#29

Post by jasonfarnon »

NDlurker wrote: post #2

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#30

Post by ZpJuUuNaQ5 »

>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances

Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.

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