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Personal Encyclopedias

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Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#131

Post by garciansmith »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #76
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…

It reads like AI was just collaborator. Author did the fun part, AI did the tedious connecting of band records, Shazam recordings to places, songs. That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.

Making those connections are what builds a narrative: writing history is looking at the sources and constructing a narrative around that you think is significant. And if you really do find a connection so tedious, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the, for example, list of songs played one night at some event doesn't have any significance at all, it's just an unimportant detail pointlessly padding out the story.

AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's personally important to the human creator, but rather the availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And then in turn the output shapes the human author's own perspective, changing even what the human will write on their own.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#132

Post by michaelmcdonald »

jcmontx wrote: post #81

Extremely cool. I'm into genealogy and can trace my family 10 generations back (250 years) to their arrival to Argentina. Documentation is lost or lacking once you reach Europe, other branches of the family with more recent arrivals to the country are very hard to trace. In part due to mismatching surnames and in part due to the wars. We have started asking old family members to send us whatsapp audios with tales and…

Are you documenting this with any particular software? Any interesting resources you can share that have made this project easier? I have a bunch of paper records for one side of my family that was passed along to me and would love to work on the other half but am not sure where to start.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#133

Post by andersonpico »

hirako2000 wrote: post #48

A 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.

the things people are comfortable delegating are really surprising, but the emotional reaction here is even more so: people are genuinely moved, it is bizarre

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#134

Post by thesuitonym »

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 don't know that "preserve" is the correct term here. It's certainly an interesting way to collate family history, but this encyclopedia will last only as long as the OP is interested in and able to maintain it. Once OP gets bored, or falls ill, or dies, unless there's someone else interested in it, the history is gone, reverted back to oral memory.

If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#135

Post by bloomingeek »

fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #67
72deluxe wrote: post #57

I 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…

Won't the SD card data decay in a relatively short time? Maybe convert some part of that video into a flipbook for another piece of physical media?

Yes, I would definitely make backups on two or three different disc types.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#136

Post by nicbou »

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 love Robin Sloan's idea of apps as home-cooked meals. This is the only thing about AI that doesn't make me want to burn a datacenter to the ground.

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#137

Post by visarga »

naravara wrote: post #125
theptip wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 read…

That is because platforms both enable us and exploit us, they exploit both those who create/comment and those who read. They perform a necessary function but extract the value from it for their own good.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#138

Post by antiresonant »

If devices were truly private, we could simply set our mics to always-on and massive Personal Wikis would build themselves over time. Imagine that, an autobiography for everyone. Of course the downside is massive, arguably useless storage for humans. Would be pretty valuable training data though.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#139

Post by runj__ »

My grandfather left five moving cartons of diaries written by typewriter, every single day of his adult life documented, an achievement, to be sure. When he passed away he left them to my mother to be scanned, transcribed and moved online, something that weighed her down for the last 15 years of her life.

When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning.

When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything.

The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing.

My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre).

Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#140

Post by aanet »

jcmontx wrote: post #88
maltris wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 is a lot given the circumstances. From which country did they originate?

Main family tree from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In the times of the Virreinato del Río de la Plata.

This is too coincidental.

My partner's ancestors came from Sitges (in fact, one of them was the mayor of the town), back in 1820s or 1830s - to Argentina, and from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. Among the various marriages in the generations, there's a Scottish clan, and English ancestry intermixed with Spaniards. She can trace her roots back to some of the founding members and prominent political families there.

The last time we were in Scotland, we found the clan she's from - but couldn't ascertain the ship they took to Argentina :-/ That's left as an exercise for some future trips.

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