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I put my whole life into a single database
151–160 of 239 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too don't want to be a martyr hermit who don't travel and consume just to cur my CO2 emissions in half, while someone else generates 10x of that living a full life. That's just dumb, and I consider this whole movement rich people telling poor people that they should be considerate and sacrifice themselves. If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
It's an "all hands on deck" situation, yet everyone seems to think that someone else has to do something. You don't need to be a martyr, just to make an effort. At the very least don't brag about not giving a crap.
I don't give a crap, in the most boastful way possible. Sorry if my zealotry isn't your zealotry.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#153The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
I did something similar - I put 18 years of comments on reddit, HN, slashdot, and 3 years of LLM chats in the system. I ended with a similar conclusion - it was less useful than I expected. My intent was to do RAG over my corpus, have a LLM get direct access to what I commented over the years, but unfortunately this much information has a negative effect on LLM creativity. Its responses started to fall in line too much with my ideas and it lost its spark. In the end my conclusion was that all that data was facing towards the past while I desire LLMs to improve in the other temporal direction.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#154A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying. Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more. Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful. Air travel works for people if the benefits outweigh the costs. The only thing that changes behavior is to change the costs. And even if costs were 10x there are still plenty of people who will fly tons, because it would still be economically productive. There are always going to…
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
I don't see any shaming. It was all matter of fact, free from judgement.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, other people throw litter on the floor and rob elderly folks in their homes. Those people hardly ever get caught, but neither you nor I are are going to start copying their actions.
I wasn't thinking about assaulting the elderly, but flying more often to see family and friends.
On the scale of unacceptability, you're firmly in failing to wipe down the hand basin after using it territory. You get a pass.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my main takeaway as well. How do you do this without any shame? My man is emitting an amount of CO2 on par with an small African country
Most people don't spend a lot of time wistfully considering their CO2 usage, myself included. The religious zeal by which people feel the need to tell me about the ever-warming planet is honestly more off-putting than most actual religions. Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
And this is it. This is why we are where we are today. That it is seen as taking a religious zeal to realize how flying very frequently is disastrous for the climate. That's our bar and what we have to work with. Yes, we are properly fucked.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an "all hands on deck" situation, yet everyone seems to think that someone else has to do something. You don't need to be a martyr, just to make an effort. At the very least don't brag about not giving a crap.
I don't give a crap, in the most boastful way possible. Sorry if my zealotry isn't your zealotry.
Thank you for destroying the Earth!
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#158Bravo. This is my dream and also my nightmare. I was super into the quantified self movement a while back, before Apple Watch, writing Withings Scale API wrappers in Ruby and Fitbit days.
Every time I try to seriously track metrics of my life, the excitement of the insight gets worn away by the friction of recording and managing. I expect LLMs can help reduce the cost of this by an order of magnitude but then, as you mention, the question is, what do you do / change / learn because of the data?
I recently started tracking nutrition macros with an iOS app MacroFactor which I really like. This is the first time taking my weight doesn't feel like a IDK SHRUG moment and I can actually map my food intake to my weight.
Finances is probably the other highly actionable data source that is such high friction to manage (downloading CSVs, OFXs, monthly...) that it has always been a false start for me. I finally wrote a service to talk to Plaid directly and I successfully used it to categorize my business expenses at tax time. I finally have programmatic access to my bank account data!
You conclusion is definitely a cautionary take: > the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time.
But, perhaps a subset of that data you find useful.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#159The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
I did something similar - I put 18 years of comments on reddit, HN, slashdot, and 3 years of LLM chats in the system. I ended with a similar conclusion - it was less useful than I expected. My intent was to do RAG over my corpus, have a LLM get direct access to what I commented over the years, but unfortunately this much information has a negative effect on LLM creativity. Its responses started to fall in line too mu…
I did the same but with GPT embeddings. My primary problem was different though. I wanted to find when I talked about a related subject somewhere. Search works really well.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#160Mmm... yes. It definitely looks like he's in the market for a new mattress.