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Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

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Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#101
Memory is a funny thing. I do not remember anything that I do not actively use, except when I have to.

Like the case where I was on the Mexico-US border and I was asked by the kind border police to give the dates of all my travel to the US in the last 5 years. I was travelling from France to the US like every month or two. Well, the perspective to stay in Mexico brought back the travel dates pronto.

Or the case I was in a taxi with a Spanish speaking driver who had no idea which hotel to drive me to, in the middle of nowhere. My years of Spanish in high school bloomed up pronto as well. I was able to say "my hotel is mauve with a garden in front and back, there is a view on a white church surrounded by a cemetery" My teacher would have been so proud! (I was incompetent to put it nicely)

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#102

Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She moved out and severed all contact with me. She forgot a couple of her daily journals in a drawer. Well, I had to look because I was so confused as to what happened. Reading through it, I was blown away at how skewed her perception of reality was. The way she recalled events were absolute…

i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause.

this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality.

for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation.

what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else.

i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere.

this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#103
I highly doubt that this is a good thing to do.

Forgetting things seems to be a protective mechanism, otherwise, life becomes too stressful. Humans and other animals focus on negative things and if you do not forget them, your stress level will skyrocket.

Recorded cases of people who can't forget and experiments with rats shows us these phenomena.

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#105

This strikes me as possibly the most profound form of navel-gazing ever developed, wherein the navel becomes a black hole. If you spend each day remembering all previous days, eventually you'll just be remembering days you spent remembering other days. (Which is what the author is doing: Remembering remembering). Seems rather maddening. Why not learn a language or something?

Reminds me of the ending of 'The Masochistic Playpen' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338429.The_Masochistic_P...), in which the protagonist is forced to re-watch every single day of his life from conception, realizing that at some point if he lives long enough he will get to the point where has to re-watch himself re-watching his entire life, a sort of "squaring" of the tedium.

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#106
post #82

This strikes me as possibly the most profound form of navel-gazing ever developed, wherein the navel becomes a black hole. If you spend each day remembering all previous days, eventually you'll just be remembering days you spent remembering other days. (Which is what the author is doing: Remembering remembering). Seems rather maddening. Why not learn a language or something?

Reminds me of a Borges story ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious , https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pd... ) and the article also led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia — “Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse”.

I came here for this, and I'm glad you beat me to it. I never knew about hyperthymesia though, and it seems shocking that there have been persons affected by it, and it sounds like Borges was in fact prescient.

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#107
post #42

In 2016 I created a telegram bot to make it super easy for me to keep daily diary, and I still use it now: https://t.me/DaytobaseBot Similar to other folks in the thread, I sometimes go back to old entries and reflect on how my life has changed. I find that my memory constantly simplifies and idealizes the past, and getting to see how it really felt day to day is very helpful.

Do you happen to have the source code publicly available?

Yes ofc: https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase

It is extremely old but probably trivial to upgrade to recent Python. There is also a serverless version [1] and a recently attempted Rust version. I will most likely spend a few hours some weekend writing a Node version soon -- please let me know if you beat me to it :)

[1]: https://github.com/2mol/daytobase

Re: Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

#108
post #43

In 2016 I created a telegram bot to make it super easy for me to keep daily diary, and I still use it now: https://t.me/DaytobaseBot Similar to other folks in the thread, I sometimes go back to old entries and reflect on how my life has changed. I find that my memory constantly simplifies and idealizes the past, and getting to see how it really felt day to day is very helpful.

In October 2019 I made a bit that emails me every day and stores the replies in an SQLite database. I narrate each day the following morning, and aslo store random pieces of information (story of a debugging session, opinions on books I read or movies I watch, etc.) I have missed almost zero days since the beginning. One of the most useful feature of this system is to store things people that I meet rarely, tell me.…

Wow, very similar to what I have been doing but sounds like you had way more consistency. My bot does not remind me to write, it's a neat idea.

I was wondering about adding a trivial Langchain+LLaMa thing to it to chat to my old memories, would be cool to explore this indeed

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