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Personal Encyclopedias

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Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#51

Post by rapnie »

pona-a wrote: post #31
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 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 may serve to strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much better served by family members writing down their own experiences.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#52

Post by carschno »

> On top of that, I exported my location timeline from Google Maps, my Uber trips, my bank transactions, and Shazam history. I would ask Claude Code to start with the photos and then gradually give it access to the different data exports.

Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but sharing all my financial and location details with any service seems like opening the floodgates to my house.

My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing all my most private data with any service. There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#53

Post by arjie »

Tier2Capital wrote: post #50
arjie wrote: post #20

This is awesome, dude. I love it. One of my personal points of friction is that I want almost all of my life to be public in whichever way it is, but I don't want to subject my friends to that without asking, and my life is pretty intertwined with that of my friends. I suppose I could add a new namespace and protect it, but for now I just keep my private notes in my Google Drive and my public notes on my blog. My blo…

Perhaps a tangent question, but coming from a country with an authoritarian regime I am very careful about what information is public about myself. How do you feel for example about encryption in your chats? I do not mind to make most of my life public, but I care that companies do not use this for what I feel is not right. Example being Meta, using people's lack of care for their privacy to perfect their addiction a…

Haha, it's funny. I'm not that worried about targeted ads and so on but I'd prefer that the government not be privy to my chats. In general, I'd rather not fight the government. My position is that if they need me to believe something so that I can live then they won't hear me say a word to contradict that thing.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-07/A_Confused_K...

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#54

Post by jhrmnn »

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…

Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#55

Post by klondike_klive »

h4ch1 wrote: post #24

I 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…

that is beautiful. and inspirational. although I know that I don't have anywhere near enough energy to carry through on this kind of thing!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#56

Post by nonameiguess »

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 had the same reaction, but to me, it seems like a downside of automation and scale in general. I'm analogizing in my head to experiences when I was a teenager I used to go to skid row in LA and hand out cash to random homeless strangers because that felt like a good thing to do, but as a late-30s adult decades later dealing with spine injuries where walking was my only available form of exercise, I lived in another downtown with a large homeless problem and became overwhelmed any time I went out for a walk and never gave anything to anybody, simply because there were so many people asking that if I stopped to pay attention to all of them, I'd have spent all of my time doing that and none of it actually walking. Or the businesses that feel like it's well-meaning and harmless and helpful to them if I can give just 30 seconds of my time for feedback on how I felt about the transaction. Fine when that's really just 30 seconds here or there, but when it's every single business I've ever made so much as a two dollar transaction with over the past decade, now it's 30 seconds time 500 businesses a day, and if I paid any attention to their e-mails and texts, it would be all I ever do.

Similar with this, when you're hand curating old photographs and personally interviewing relatives, you're learning something. You're deepening relationships and your own personal understanding of these people you love, spending time reflecting on your own life. But when you send an LLM at it and it produces the volume of real Wikipedia, now an automated process is producing more text than you can ever possibly read if all you did for the rest of your life is read.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#57

Post by 72deluxe »

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 spend decades creating.

I might put a SD card taped in the front of each one with a video too, so someone can watch it in the future.

As a separate aside, I also found old Canon photo printers (Selphy models) on ebay for about £5! Some need the little white gear inside glueing back on (there's a video on YouTube about it), and they DO NOT work with Windows anymore, but gutenprint supports them fine on Linux, so I have been printing photos (postcard size) at home. The colour isn't going to win awards and the saturation needs boosting slightly in the printer options compared to default, but it's a wonderful way to finally get some photos from trips on the walls.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#58

Post by solstice »

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…

I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some templates or other tips on how to do this?

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#59

Post by evelant »

jhrmnn wrote: post #54
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…

Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?

IMO it does not. At least to me the meaning and value of something is in the creative human design behind it, not the tools used to build it. I don’t think AI changes much there. It’s a (very powerful) tool but still IMO the value lies with the creativity and skill of the operator.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#60

Post by 72deluxe »

solstice wrote: post #58
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…

I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some templates or other tips on how to do this?

I did spend some time getting some LLM to write a generator (in C++) of a scribus XML file for automatic layout, but it wasn't effective. I need to get back to looking at that, as it would be very useful. As my photos range in aspect ratios and formats (4:3 and 3:2) and I have thousands and thousands of RAW photos to process and "finish", it's an ongoing work! So for now I am just doing it manually, with the help of some layout scripts.

As I store everything in a local Vikunja instance for notes and WIP, here's the list of links I assembled relative to this (hopefully useful; it includes calendar templates so that I can make them for my mother-in-law):

https://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources

https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678

https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest

https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard

https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribu...

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di...

https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook...

https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts

https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus

https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f...

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums

https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates

https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0

http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/

When you find a print shop, they'll talk about margins and bleeds, so it might be worth finding a print shop first to know what bleed zones you want on the pages and whether they expect left page first, or right page first.

Once you know that, you can set up Scribus appropriately.

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