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Personal Encyclopedias

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141–150 of 197 posts

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#141
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.

Big shout out to the Mormons, whom have been digitalizing ancient birth certificates all around the world. We got a lot of data from them!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#142
post #139

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 m…

Friendly spelling correction. Diaries, not dairies. Dairies are where one produces dairy products.

And I'm sorry your mom experienced that weight towards the end of her life. That sounds like a significant thing to grapple with, especially considering some of the not so pleasant content mentioned.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#143
First off, this is a super cool project. Kudos to getting it started and up and running. Family history, and memorabilia and organizing all that stuff is super challenging, and just having a proper site to look at is worth its own effort.

Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen.

In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi.

I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that.

(no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!)

That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me.

Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories.

Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big shout out to the Mormons, whom have been digitalizing ancient birth certificates all around the world. We got a lot of data from them!

I'm Mormon, and doing family history research is one of my favorite church activities. Appreciate unexpectedly seeing us mentioned in a positive light online!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#148
post #51
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a wrong way. There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and h…

Personal wiki's impersonally compiled. I gauge LLMs for the extent they fray the social fabric that hold people and society together. And the way AI is introduced for max disruption causes me to be generally against the technology, despite that there are also obvious merits. Here it depends on how much value, say, a family gets out of reading in their family encyclopedia. It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it m…

I’m curious, do you agree with the statement, “it would be better for this personal wiki not to exist, than for it to have been built with AI”?

Because without AI it probably wouldn’t exist.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#150
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…

>We should endeavor to craft experiences

It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to be with other people.

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