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 everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
why is there need for an emotional reaction? It's just a tool. Philosophically, it's no different than using photoshop to touch up old photos. It's just a more "high-tech" version.
I don't know that "preserve" is the correct term here. It's certainly an interesting way to collate family history, but this encyclopedia will last only as long as the OP is interested in and able to maintain it. Once OP gets bored, or falls ill, or dies, unless there's someone else interested in it, the history is gone, reverted back to oral memory.
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption' and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between these in my life.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D
This is perfect example how to solve problem which should have been solved in our digital lives already decades ago. The issue is that our personal lives have been outsourced to social media platforms (looking at you Facebook...)
Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.
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.
Great project! I can also see other use cases; investigative journalist or criminal investigators using this to create a detailed profile of persons (eg Epstein files), authors setting up detailed profiles of fictional characters for stories.
This is really neat! Beyond being a personal encyclopedia, remember the Spotify documentary where each episode was someone else's POV? I'd love to document a trip with friends and everyone else to do the same and see/compare what everyone experienced!
What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that work? Anyone attempted something like that?
I like the overall project and goal. I personally would like a way to ask questions to those that are living or have a template that I can use for filling in family history.
Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.
That is actually pretty cool. I started doing that with the photo collections of family members, but only to add explanations to the metadata of the pictures. I might reconsider that approach now.
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 blog etc. is in Mediawiki and I expressly like the interwiki linking form so it's seamless what's in the Wikimedia universe. The best part about the interwiki thing is that anything from the Wikimedia world can directly be hotlinked on your wiki too. That's really fun.
I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.
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, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back.
Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
I do something similar with a journal. I bought a little Instax printer recently so I can still use my phone as a camera but print out the pictures and stick them in it.
I was thinking the other day I need to go back to a physical recipe book too. I don't cook that many different things that I need to reference it for, but there was a charm in my old one of remembering the best recipes were the ones covered in spilled ingredients and filled with marginalia.
I like my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.
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 too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.
Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 86.1 ms ] threadI 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 everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D
Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.
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.
Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.
Thanks for sharing.
I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.
I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.
Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
I was thinking the other day I need to go back to a physical recipe book too. I don't cook that many different things that I need to reference it for, but there was a charm in my old one of remembering the best recipes were the ones covered in spilled ingredients and filled with marginalia.
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 too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.
Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.
timeline view is interesting, I’ll hack around!
Though from the title I didn't expect family history, I thought it was going to be more of a project like this: https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...
Video >photo >audio >text