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Personal Encyclopedias

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Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#171

Post by Swizec »

T-RN-R wrote: post #163
bonoboTP wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave. You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past. Im perfectly conten…

This is frankly a selfish take. Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations. By deciding to destroy, you choose to destroy the past that the future generations might value.

> Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations

If you want to be remembered, live a life worth remembering.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#173

Post by jrmyphlmn »

jc-myths wrote: post #32

I actually spent a weekend last yr doing something similar. Went through a box of old photos with my dad and wrote things down before the stories were lost. Never thought to structure it as a wiki though. Way better than the Google doc I ended up with. The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if this could pull in social media exports…

I did use some of my facebook and instagram exports! I was active on those platforms during college so it dug out a lot of fun stories from there haha

timeline view is interesting, I’ll hack around!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#174

Post by jrmyphlmn »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #49

I like the idea. I like the way it uses existing framework. If I was going to offer a suggestion, I would try to incorporate a way to use local inference ( or is that accomplished through opencode? I have not used it yet so I don't really know ).

yes! you can use it through opencode and a local model, that also works!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#175

Post by gwern »

eternauta3k wrote: post #8

I like the idea, but I'm curious where to draw the boundary. If only I can read it, it can be my full recollection of everything. If I add my siblings, parents, cousins, etc, then some articles become painful or controversial (e.g. divorce, disease). Or I just ommit all the unhappy parts.

A good wiki like MediaWiki supports various levels of visibility. For example, you could define a namespace for each group of readers like 'Family:'. Or use transclusions from subpages. (This might sound like a bit of a hassle but you can use a template to set it up once and for all: a page transcludes a public sub page followed by the distant relatives material followed by parents / siblings followed by your-eyes-only.) And I'm sure one could come up with other approaches too.

A real example: Said Achmiz (obormot.net) uses PMWiki for his D&D campaigns, and PMwiki lets you control who can see a page, so he can do access control tricks like a page for a location, where only the DM can see all subpages with all the secrets, while each player can see their own 'notes' subpage. So everyone in their own web browser can go to the same page and see the same thing overall, but will see just their private additional information. And this is quite flexible so you can encode whatever patterns you need. You don't need some WotC fancy custom CMS for your D&D campaign to keep track of information and silo appropriately, you just need a design pattern on wikis.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#176

Post by rapnie »

physicles wrote: post #148
rapnie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The family diary I wouldn't want to have AI written. For the family encyclopedia I might be okay to be described as a biographer would about me.

A family diary would be most valuable to me. Knowing what family members did last week, adventures they had, and written down from the horse's mouth. And shared family events, where members make the diary notes together, add quotes on things that were said, etc.

I can also imagine an encyclopedia to be valuable, but it is a different use case entirely. Many people are keen to keep track of their family tree, and record the 'official history' of the family for generations after them. I might consult it before going to a family party to re-remember what university that niece went to again. But it is a more business-like use, less fun, less valuable. Here AI is perfect to do the boring chores of keeping stuff up to date.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#177

Post by rapnie »

bonoboTP wrote: post #168
T-RN-R wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is frankly a selfish take. Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations. By deciding to destroy, you choose to destroy the past that the future generations might value.

No, its the natural cycle. What passes away fades away. Anything that is kept up needs to be kept up actively by the generations. That which is valued needs to be preserved, such as wisdom, knowledge, art, science etc. All your drama and idle musings, maybe not. Unless you're deemed worthy by the next ones. I understand that this is a scary thought but our impact is only kept if we act such that the next generations…

Deeply agree. I think it is the other way round and it is selfish to expect those that come after you to carry that burden. The OP says it is "something that weighed her down for the last 15 years of her life", and that she felt the duty to scan the diaries even after the diagnosis of cancer. Wow, now that sacrifice is a beautiful precious gift, and anyone expecting such gift is utterly selfish imho.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#179

Post by jrmyphlmn »

runj__ wrote: 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…

sometimes the act of keeping something alive can become its own burden, I'm sorry your mother had to endure that

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#180

Post by jrmyphlmn »

fathermarz wrote: post #96

I quite love this idea. Both of my grandfathers died last year and going through their early memories was amazing. I would love to be able to preserve that and make it shareable with the rest of my family. Nice work!

thank you, I'm sorry for your loss

if you have photos or anything they left behind, I'd love to hear how it goes if you give it a try

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