Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Personal Encyclopedias

whoami.wiki

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 197 posts

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#81

Post by jcmontx »

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 things they remember from long-passed away family members; and what was life like in the 1930-40-50s. I want to start organizing all the info and data we have, my father has built a couple family trees, but this wiki format is indeed very promising. I'll keep an eye on this and see if we can use it.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#82

Post by IanCal »

neogodless wrote: post #79

Overall this is a neat result, and the interviews are a nice part of the process. I've tried to (on occasion) make a habit of asking about more (mundane) details from my elders. But knowing what to do with that data... And that brings me to my point. I've been thinking a lot lately about digital legacy. When I was a kid, it was neat to see photo books that showed my parents as kids, living their lives, having fun. Th…

The benefit of digital things is that they can be copied much more cheaply than physical things. There’s perhaps migrations and upkeep though.

On the technical side perhaps the shared nature of this helps - if you can have something replicated so that you and several other members are all running replicas there’s a

On the non technical side, take some photos and print them on good paper. Print out stories on paper.

That doesn’t cover video and perhaps other things but it’s simple and does actually work for lots and lots of stories and pictures. It’s also immediately doable right now without anything new.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#83

Post by koliber »

I have a friend whose grandma wrote a book about their family. She printed 50 or so copies of it. Not a chart-topping best seller, but each one is a cherished collector's item.

Right now, my wife and I are sticking to annual photo albums. They're already fun to flip through and we're not even that old yet.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#84

Post by ruptwelve »

This is very interesting. As a person who meticulously daily diaries into Obsidian, my hope is to have a relatively accurate look-back at things I've done in the past. And having a Wiki to show that, feel very interesting now!

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#85

Post by maltris »

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…

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

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#86

Post by sneak »

> So I started pointing Claude Code at other data exports. My Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp archives held around 100k messages and a couple thousand voice notes exchanged with close friends over a decade.

> The model traced the arc of our friendships through the messages, pulled out the life episodes we had talked each other through, and wove them into multiple pages that read like it was written by someone who knew us both. When I shared the pages with my friends, they wanted to read every single one.

This is a stunning violation of the privacy of your friends.

If someone uploaded every single private conversation I had had with them to Anthropic, they would no longer be my friend.

Re: Personal Encyclopedias

#88

Post by jcmontx »

maltris wrote: post #85
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…

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.
Post reply on HN