Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for building it.
Personal Encyclopedias
111–120 of 197 posts
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#112This is very interesting. As a person who meticulously daily diaries into Obsidian, my hope is to have a relatively accurate look-back at things I've done in the past. And having a Wiki to show that, feel very interesting now!
With video gen AI you might even get an animated movie out of it...
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#113This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd really hoped it would become.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#114I built something very broadly similar approximately 20 years ago.
Then I forgot about it. It’s not like the data is lost, but availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably do it in a full day of work.
What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is a must. I don’t think HTML will cease to be easily readable in our lifetimes.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#115This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling, genealogy and lifelogging
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#116A good story I stopped reading when it became agentic. The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we are getting into. What really pinch is that this project could have easily been done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at zero cost, with total privacy.
There is no possible way some light scripting could cross reference data from pictures (not the metadata, the actual pictures) with web information, bank information and personal anecdotes.
I didn't bother reading the entire article, I'm sure multi modal LLMs can do things scripting can't do. But such project can be done without an LLM.
It would in fact make fore a better result, a family wiki with content that's AI generated may overall look accurate, but the sloppy parts ridiculous. If I find an archive I would rather assemble the information myself.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#117That 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…
Normally, memory work is you pulling things out of your mind. Here, it's the system pushing things back at you
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#118That 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…
What makes this example land differently for me is that the intent stays human all the way through
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#119I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it. Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, disc…
The value isn't just in the recorded content, it's in the ritual
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#120I am starting to do this with actual physical books. I have thousands of photos going back over my life, and I am putting them together in Scribus to then go and print a physical book for each year or event or holiday along with some relevant text. Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spen…
Feels like a nice middle ground between what the article describes and something more tangible