10 ms·

Personal Encyclopedias

897 points by jrmyphlmn 6mo ago

hirako2000 6mo ago
A good story I stopped reading when it became agentic. The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we are getting into. What really pinch is that this project could have easily been done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at zero cost, with total privacy.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  There is no possible way some light scripting could cross reference data from pictures (not the metadata, the actual pictures) with web information, bank information and personal anecdotes.
  - hirako2000 6mo ago
    I didn't bother reading the entire article, I'm sure multi modal LLMs can do things scripting can't do. But such project can be done without an LLM. It would in fact make fore a better result, a family wiki with content that's AI generated may overall look accurate, but the sloppy parts ridiculous. If I find an archive I would rather assemble the information myself.
- andersonpico 6mo ago
  the things people are comfortable delegating are really surprising, but the emotional reaction here is even more so: people are genuinely moved, it is bizarre
  - hirako2000 6mo ago
    I believe it has something to do with the desire to show something is done than appreciating what is done. e.g what is more important for most travelers, to travel or to get likes on their holiday shots on Instagram?
iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
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 ).
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  yes! you can use it through opencode and a local model, that also works!
carschno 6mo ago
> 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.
- subpixel 6mo ago
  Not uncomfortable just deeply uninterested. I’m into preserving family stories - I’m not into the navel-gazing that is all manner of ‘quantified self’ endeavors
- svat 6mo ago
  > There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later. As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think of every service as potentially storing forever all the data that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter, services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude Code terms say that your data will not be used for training, you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by “significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later”) would be even more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated to compliance with users' “wipeout” settings. You can take a look at https://myactivity.google.com https://myactivity.google.com and https://myadcenter.google.com https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3 months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after that time. Every single team that stores user data is required to comply with this.) I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to find out what the terms are — for a given usage of their services whether and for how long the details will be stored by them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g. not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).
72deluxe 6mo ago
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.
- eleveriven 6mo ago
  Feels like a nice middle ground between what the article describes and something more tangible
- solstice 6mo ago
  I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some templates or other tips on how to do this?
  - 72deluxe 6mo ago
    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://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678 https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678 https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribus https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribu... https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_directory_of_images_using_a_script https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di... https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobookwithscribus https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook... https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0 https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0 https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_from_a_directory_using_a_script https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f... https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0 https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0 http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/ 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.
vasco 6mo ago
This plus messaging and you could kill Facebook
suoer 6mo ago
[flagged]
znpy 6mo ago
MediaWiki mentioned! I started running an private MediaWiki instance during the pandemic as I wanted something with a nice editing experience rather than editing markdown documents. I almost went with a self-hosted Confluence instance :P Mediawiki is very very nice and it has a lot of cool features i've been loving over the years. One of the things i like the most is the ability to embed a PDF document so that it's both downloadable and browsable from the wiki page itself (it embeds the browser pdf engine). This means that i can, say, have a page for my microwave oven and have its user manual easily available. Lately I've been thinking how to connect that with some LLM, most likely there's a chance to do some interesting things :)
terminalgravity 6mo ago
I do something similar to a personal encyclopedia but using org-roam. I don’t use an LLM yet to do any work but eventually i plan to use a local model to correlate things and pull together things that were not manually connected. Also I’m glad that LLMs can easily parse org docs so that if any future family member wanted to look through they wouldnt have to be familiar with emacs esoteric conventions.
stephenlf 6mo ago
This is beautiful, and incredibly polished. Thank you.
b800h 6mo ago
I've been looking for a solution for this problem for a long time, and this is a particularly innovative approach. I'll look into this more: Most appreciated, thank you.
sdoering 6mo ago
> Her face lit up as she narrated the backstory behind the occasion, going from photo to photo, resurfacing details that had been dormant for decades. I had started something similar with my mom over Christmas in '24. About half way through the collection she asked to stop. We would do the rest on her next visit. Well. It never came to that as she passed away completely unexpected in March last year. I’ll never get the chance to record the other stories. The stories from the second half of the photo collection. I cheer for projects like this.
neogodless 6mo ago
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. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to stick around? First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but subscription-based expense in perpetuity. What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years after you. Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to household. I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family. And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with "reasonably" durable.
- IanCal 6mo ago
  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.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo ago
> After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia It's magical watching people learn about hyperlinks. Even technical people don't always seem to know the power of a string that says, "Go to this server and fetch this document". Love it
jcmontx 6mo ago
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.
- maltris 6mo ago
  10 is a lot given the circumstances. From which country did they originate?
  - jcmontx 6mo ago
    Main family tree from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In the times of the Virreinato del Río de la Plata.
    - aanet 6mo ago
      This is too coincidental. My partner's ancestors came from Sitges (in fact, one of them was the mayor of the town), back in 1820s or 1830s - to Argentina, and from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. Among the various marriages in the generations, there's a Scottish clan, and English ancestry intermixed with Spaniards. She can trace her roots back to some of the founding members and prominent political families there. The last time we were in Scotland, we found the clan she's from - but couldn't ascertain the ship they took to Argentina :-/ That's left as an exercise for some future trips.
- michaelmcdonald 6mo ago
  Are you documenting this with any particular software? Any interesting resources you can share that have made this project easier? I have a bunch of paper records for one side of my family that was passed along to me and would love to work on the other half but am not sure where to start.
koliber 6mo ago
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.
ruptwelve 6mo ago
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!
- solstice 6mo ago
  With video gen AI you might even get an animated movie out of it...
sneak 6mo ago
> 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.
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  Yes, though unless you used non-mainstream platforms, all messages are already on the servers of Meta or Google. Not sure how much worse Anthropic is.
  - Throudin 6mo ago
    The difference is the friends chose to use those platforms.
esafak 6mo ago
For longevity, which is a consideration in such a project, one might prefer something based on Markdown files, like https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd to Mediawiki, which uses a database. Then again it does support sqlite, which is open source, so it is not a big deal.
ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago
That sounds great! This chap made it a labor of love.
saintaardvark 6mo ago
What an absolutely delightful project. This put a smile on my face. Thank you.
hustleracer 6mo ago
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raghavbali 6mo ago
Amazing work there @jrmyphlmn . Very recently I was thinking about how to preserve photographs I have collected over last 10 years in my external drive and instagram and unchecked SSD cards. Time to weave them all together. Bonus for me to be the 100th github starer on your repo
fathermarz 6mo ago
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!
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  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
m-hodges 6mo ago
This is a really fun project and the family interview transcripts + LLM workflow feels like a genuinely good use of the technology. I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam history." Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category say some variation of: > it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it I don’t think people fully appreciate the tension in those claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users are implicitly accepting.
sxldier 6mo ago
> Private by default > Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely. Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs exist but that’s seemingly not supported here and I think the statement on privacy could be clearer.
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  fair point, I've added a disclaimer to the landing page + docs to make this clearer you can also use opencode with local models for a fully offline setup
pizzafeelsright 6mo ago
I love the idea. Each year I have the wife take curated photos from our shared accounts with an overview of the event photographed. This is then bound into a 1/2 inch book with 50 pages. We now have a dozen years of annualized memories that we can pass around with physical access. She has done this for others with great success. The personal touches make it well worth what she charges.
ljsocal 6mo ago
Fascinating idea! So wish I had parents and grands around so I could record all the old family stories that were told over the years. If you readers take no other action after reading this post, start recording your own oral history/stories; yours, parents, kids, friends, etc.
MattCruikshank 6mo ago
I'm like, "Here's all of the obituaries," and Claude is like, "I'll make all the pages of all of the people and link them together." Pretty neat.
mottiden 6mo ago
Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for building it.
d-us-vb 6mo ago
This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd really hoped it would become.
lysace 6mo ago
I built something very broadly similar approximately 20 years ago. Then I forgot about it. It’s not like the data is lost, but availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably do it in a full day of work. What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is a must. I don’t think HTML will cease to be easily readable in our lifetimes.
eleveriven 6mo ago
This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling, genealogy and lifelogging
systemerror 6mo ago
this is incredible, I have been thinking about this exact project for quite some time but a little wary of which approach I might take. Thanks for posting this.
MattCruikshank 6mo ago
And I just taught Claude to read the Discussion notes on a page, and to make updates to the page accordingly...
NoSalt 6mo ago
I wish all of this technology could have been around when my grandparents were still alive. :-( The family has a TON of videos and photos, but no resource to guide us through what is what.
bronlund 6mo ago
Fantastic idea!
antiresonant 6mo ago
If devices were truly private, we could simply set our mics to always-on and massive Personal Wikis would build themselves over time. Imagine that, an autobiography for everyone. Of course the downside is massive, arguably useless storage for humans. Would be pretty valuable training data though.
runj__ 6mo ago
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 my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning. When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything. The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing. My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre). Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.
- Rooster61 6mo ago
  Friendly spelling correction. Diaries, not dairies. Dairies are where one produces dairy products. And I'm sorry your mom experienced that weight towards the end of her life. That sounds like a significant thing to grapple with, especially considering some of the not so pleasant content mentioned.
- wdrw 6mo ago
  I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable text, I can't imagine doing this to family records that one of my ancestors specifically wanted to be preserved. Not criticizing your personal decision of course, but just offering a different perspective, i.e. for me it would be unimaginable to do this.
  - 6mo ago
aanet 6mo ago
First off, this is a super cool project. Kudos to getting it started and up and running. Family history, and memorabilia and organizing all that stuff is super challenging, and just having a proper site to look at is worth its own effort. Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen. In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi. I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that. (no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!) That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me. Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories. Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well. [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
stronglikedan 6mo ago
It's like Facebook meets Wikipedia
Plutarco_ink 6mo ago
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yayadarsh 6mo ago
I just completed an 18 month travel sabbatical with my wife - would this be useful to catalog and cluster all of our photos based on geolocation and prompt us to collect memories?
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  yes!
tolerance 6mo ago
Disappointed because I thought this was about building a personal alternative to Wikipedia.
arikrahman 6mo ago
This is pretty wholesome. This takes Personal Knowledge Management to a whole other level.
inanutshellus 6mo ago
I did the same thing and came away with a different opinion. The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it. They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it. I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.
- jjice 6mo ago
  Yeah, I think marked down files and a printed version ends up being a good idea. I've never worked with media wiki directly, but I wonder if you could do an easy nightly dump of markdown contents somewhere.
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  You may like DokuWiki. It's a wiki you can browse and edit in a browser but stores its data as human-readable files, not in a database.
fitsumbelay 6mo ago
Excellent post. Something I think about a lot in this exact context along the same lines as personal/community/local social nets. The industrial-scale things (manufacturing, content generation, human/world history record keeping ...) eventually shrink down to human-scale things
forthwall 6mo ago
I'm concerned about your copy that says "Private by default" and "Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely.", yet you recommend to use Claude, which means your data is being stored remotely in most cases. I do like the idea though! Will try with local models
T-A 6mo ago
Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-album, but then things will get more complicated. People will begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you fall in love or become very close with someone you will share your “Book of Life”. Jann Burner, "The book of life", December 26, 2008 https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#sthash.BQuYIPrl.dpuf https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#s...
leflob 6mo ago
This sounds like a great futre project form me. What an awersome project!
wunderlotus 6mo ago
This is so freaking cool and part of me wants to try it, but the other part is scared of the privacy implications. Even though I love (and for now, trust) Anthropic, knowing that obviously Claude Opus is the best model (as stated in the docs), I'm just not sure I want to give it access to everything about me? But at the same time, I'm so curious as to what it would come up with.
argee 6mo ago
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blackhaj7 6mo ago
Incredible. Always wanted to do this. Would be lovely to even just have details of the places I have visited. Something to keep secure though. With AI scams taking off, this kind of context could make it very easy for someone to scam your friends/family
deleted 6mo ago
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stonecharioteer 6mo ago
When does a man die? When he is shot in the heart by a gun? No. When he eats a soup made of a poisoned mushroom? No. You cannot kill me. A man does not die until he is forgotten! I might stop breathing today, but I will live on in memory. Dr. Hiruluk
bawolff 6mo ago
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.
- jhrmnn 6mo ago
  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?
  - evelant 6mo ago
    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.
- nonameiguess 6mo ago
  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.
Brajeshwar 6mo ago
This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from there.
casparvitch 6mo ago
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
- MrScruff 6mo ago
  I would say thinking about the indended audience for your creative outlet is a good discipline - even if it's only one person. It often gives the project more of a focus which helps with motivation and makes it more enjoyable.
Anonasty 6mo ago
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.
lkm0 6mo ago
I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!
saretup 6mo ago
So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is cool)
eternauta3k 6mo ago
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.
- gwern 6mo ago
  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.
  - jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
    when I learnt about namespaces, I included them as part of the system and they worked great! I've documented them here https://whoami.wiki/docs/namespaces https://whoami.wiki/docs/namespaces the transclusion pattern for layered visibility is something I haven't implemented yet but stumbled upon when I was evaluating mediawiki thanks for pointing to pmwiki's approach, I'll look at how said set it up!
- navigate8310 6mo ago
  It's your wiki, you do as you please
- 6mo ago
manfredz 6mo ago
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.
soaringbebop 6mo ago
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!
submeta 6mo ago
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?
cgsmith 6mo ago
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. Thanks for sharing.
maltris 6mo ago
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.
Tepix 6mo ago
The project itself is cool if you have access to a LLM API endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server). I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.
- bawolff 6mo ago
  I'd be more worried about the bank statements than the photos.
- neonstatic 6mo ago
  Would you give it to an LLM run by Chinese, Russian, or European corporation?
  - antonyh 6mo ago
    As a European, yes I'd prefer an EU LLM. What I don't want to do is give it to services with an agenda to abuse the data, particularly those profiling individuals for profit. Frankly, I'd trust a Chinese service more than I would an Adtech based one, but that's still not much.
  - nicbou 6mo ago
    I'm not OP, but I find the American threat more real and immediate than the more abstract Chinese and Russian threats. From my perspective, the American President has threatened to annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No other country has demonstrated such an ability and willingness to collect information about me and use it against me.
    - aa-jv 6mo ago
      Same. Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing American AI. Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the moment - at scale too, I might add. If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is running out, however.
arjie 6mo ago
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.
- Tier2Capital 6mo ago
  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 algorithms. If I can use a secure private messenger like Signal, then I will. Curious how you feel about this?
  - arjie 6mo ago
    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_Kolmogorov https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-07/A_Confused_K...
AndrewVos 6mo ago
This is so inspiring, thank you for writing it. I’ve been wanting something to track my daughters life and this is exactly what I need!
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  I'm glad to hear :)
h4ch1 6mo ago
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.
- klondike_klive 6mo ago
  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!
  - eks391 6mo ago
    It only takes a little bit of energy once a day (or per week if you haven't realized yet how eventful your life actually is). The highest energy first day making it is a fun date with your spouse, or parent child time if you are separated.
    - h4ch1 6mo ago
      @parent don't get too worried about not writing in it religiously and having a schedule. That removes all the joy about doing it in the first place. For example our 2026 notebook has only one page filled in yet where I wrote a recipe for a chocolate cake I made on the fly and was worried I'd forget the measurements. There are some days when I am bored and I pick it up and backfill it as well.
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fleebee 6mo ago
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.
- subpixel 6mo ago
  That’s the direction this developer went in but I think you could also go in a more personal direction and leverage automation where it’s effective but avoid all generative text.
- hejira 6mo ago
  Yeah, that's my feeling too. It's an impressive and interesting project, but I don't want to do that with my life. It has had its ups and downs and some things I just don't want to dive back into like that (and don't want others to read either). The genealogy part – researching my ancestors' life – feels more useful.
- danw1979 6mo ago
  Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ? I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations. Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holiday together…
  - hejira 6mo ago
    Good point! I already write some stuff down that I never intend to read myself but hope would be of some use for future generations. It's not always easy knowing what's worth recording. And sometimes really boring stuff can be interesting 100 years from now, but you wouldn't know.
  - tartoran 6mo ago
    There are more than 500 years from the 1500s, let's say roughly 500. That makes around 20 generations and about 2^20 = 1048576 ancestors. There are historical records that give you an idea what people similar to you if not your own ancestors were going about but details would be overwhelming to count and sift through. I welcome that details fade away and that we don't need to carry the whole baggage but just some bits that stayed. Things will take their natural course and whatever prominent will preserve if it's worthy.
PaulKeeble 6mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 6mo ago
  Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jc-myths 6mo ago
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.
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  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!
  - jc-myths 6mo ago
    [dead]
jandragsbaek 6mo ago
I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums
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pzoonic 6mo ago
What a lovely read, at least up until the AIfied bit. 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_Knows.html https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...
brador 6mo ago
You’re gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma telling those tales. Video >photo >audio >text
- uyzstvqs 6mo ago
  Take more videos, including random moments of your daily life. Just short ones are fine. Your future self will thank you.

897 points by jrmyphlmn 6mo ago

hirako2000 6mo ago

A good story I stopped reading when it became agentic. The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we are getting into. What really pinch is that this project could have easily been done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at zero cost, with total privacy.

NetMageSCW 6mo ago
There is no possible way some light scripting could cross reference data from pictures (not the metadata, the actual pictures) with web information, bank information and personal anecdotes.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  I didn't bother reading the entire article, I'm sure multi modal LLMs can do things scripting can't do. But such project can be done without an LLM. It would in fact make fore a better result, a family wiki with content that's AI generated may overall look accurate, but the sloppy parts ridiculous. If I find an archive I would rather assemble the information myself.
andersonpico 6mo ago
the things people are comfortable delegating are really surprising, but the emotional reaction here is even more so: people are genuinely moved, it is bizarre
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  I believe it has something to do with the desire to show something is done than appreciating what is done. e.g what is more important for most travelers, to travel or to get likes on their holiday shots on Instagram?

iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago

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 ).

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
yes! you can use it through opencode and a local model, that also works!

carschno 6mo ago

> 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.

subpixel 6mo ago
Not uncomfortable just deeply uninterested. I’m into preserving family stories - I’m not into the navel-gazing that is all manner of ‘quantified self’ endeavors
svat 6mo ago
> There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later. As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think of every service as potentially storing forever all the data that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter, services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude Code terms say that your data will not be used for training, you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by “significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later”) would be even more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated to compliance with users' “wipeout” settings. You can take a look at https://myactivity.google.com https://myactivity.google.com and https://myadcenter.google.com https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3 months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after that time. Every single team that stores user data is required to comply with this.) I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to find out what the terms are — for a given usage of their services whether and for how long the details will be stored by them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g. not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).

72deluxe 6mo ago

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.

eleveriven 6mo ago
Feels like a nice middle ground between what the article describes and something more tangible
solstice 6mo ago
I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some templates or other tips on how to do this?
- 72deluxe 6mo ago
  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://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678 https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678 https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribus https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribu... https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_directory_of_images_using_a_script https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di... https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobookwithscribus https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook... https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0 https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0 https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_from_a_directory_using_a_script https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f... https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0 https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0 http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/ 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.

vasco 6mo ago

This plus messaging and you could kill Facebook

suoer 6mo ago

[flagged]

znpy 6mo ago

MediaWiki mentioned! I started running an private MediaWiki instance during the pandemic as I wanted something with a nice editing experience rather than editing markdown documents. I almost went with a self-hosted Confluence instance :P Mediawiki is very very nice and it has a lot of cool features i've been loving over the years. One of the things i like the most is the ability to embed a PDF document so that it's both downloadable and browsable from the wiki page itself (it embeds the browser pdf engine). This means that i can, say, have a page for my microwave oven and have its user manual easily available. Lately I've been thinking how to connect that with some LLM, most likely there's a chance to do some interesting things :)

terminalgravity 6mo ago

I do something similar to a personal encyclopedia but using org-roam. I don’t use an LLM yet to do any work but eventually i plan to use a local model to correlate things and pull together things that were not manually connected. Also I’m glad that LLMs can easily parse org docs so that if any future family member wanted to look through they wouldnt have to be familiar with emacs esoteric conventions.

stephenlf 6mo ago

This is beautiful, and incredibly polished. Thank you.

b800h 6mo ago

I've been looking for a solution for this problem for a long time, and this is a particularly innovative approach. I'll look into this more: Most appreciated, thank you.

sdoering 6mo ago

> Her face lit up as she narrated the backstory behind the occasion, going from photo to photo, resurfacing details that had been dormant for decades. I had started something similar with my mom over Christmas in '24. About half way through the collection she asked to stop. We would do the rest on her next visit. Well. It never came to that as she passed away completely unexpected in March last year. I’ll never get the chance to record the other stories. The stories from the second half of the photo collection. I cheer for projects like this.

neogodless 6mo ago

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. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to stick around? First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but subscription-based expense in perpetuity. What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years after you. Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to household. I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family. And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with "reasonably" durable.

IanCal 6mo ago
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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo ago

> After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia It's magical watching people learn about hyperlinks. Even technical people don't always seem to know the power of a string that says, "Go to this server and fetch this document". Love it

jcmontx 6mo ago

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.

maltris 6mo ago
10 is a lot given the circumstances. From which country did they originate?
- jcmontx 6mo ago
  Main family tree from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In the times of the Virreinato del Río de la Plata.
  - aanet 6mo ago
    This is too coincidental. My partner's ancestors came from Sitges (in fact, one of them was the mayor of the town), back in 1820s or 1830s - to Argentina, and from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. Among the various marriages in the generations, there's a Scottish clan, and English ancestry intermixed with Spaniards. She can trace her roots back to some of the founding members and prominent political families there. The last time we were in Scotland, we found the clan she's from - but couldn't ascertain the ship they took to Argentina :-/ That's left as an exercise for some future trips.
michaelmcdonald 6mo ago
Are you documenting this with any particular software? Any interesting resources you can share that have made this project easier? I have a bunch of paper records for one side of my family that was passed along to me and would love to work on the other half but am not sure where to start.

koliber 6mo ago

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.

ruptwelve 6mo ago

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!

solstice 6mo ago
With video gen AI you might even get an animated movie out of it...

sneak 6mo ago

> 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.

bonoboTP 6mo ago
Yes, though unless you used non-mainstream platforms, all messages are already on the servers of Meta or Google. Not sure how much worse Anthropic is.
- Throudin 6mo ago
  The difference is the friends chose to use those platforms.

esafak 6mo ago

For longevity, which is a consideration in such a project, one might prefer something based on Markdown files, like https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd to Mediawiki, which uses a database. Then again it does support sqlite, which is open source, so it is not a big deal.

ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago

That sounds great! This chap made it a labor of love.

saintaardvark 6mo ago

What an absolutely delightful project. This put a smile on my face. Thank you.

hustleracer 6mo ago

[dead]

raghavbali 6mo ago

Amazing work there @jrmyphlmn . Very recently I was thinking about how to preserve photographs I have collected over last 10 years in my external drive and instagram and unchecked SSD cards. Time to weave them all together. Bonus for me to be the 100th github starer on your repo

fathermarz 6mo ago

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!

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
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

m-hodges 6mo ago

This is a really fun project and the family interview transcripts + LLM workflow feels like a genuinely good use of the technology. I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam history." Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category say some variation of: > it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it I don’t think people fully appreciate the tension in those claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users are implicitly accepting.

sxldier 6mo ago

> Private by default > Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely. Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs exist but that’s seemingly not supported here and I think the statement on privacy could be clearer.

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
fair point, I've added a disclaimer to the landing page + docs to make this clearer you can also use opencode with local models for a fully offline setup

pizzafeelsright 6mo ago

I love the idea. Each year I have the wife take curated photos from our shared accounts with an overview of the event photographed. This is then bound into a 1/2 inch book with 50 pages. We now have a dozen years of annualized memories that we can pass around with physical access. She has done this for others with great success. The personal touches make it well worth what she charges.

ljsocal 6mo ago

Fascinating idea! So wish I had parents and grands around so I could record all the old family stories that were told over the years. If you readers take no other action after reading this post, start recording your own oral history/stories; yours, parents, kids, friends, etc.

MattCruikshank 6mo ago

I'm like, "Here's all of the obituaries," and Claude is like, "I'll make all the pages of all of the people and link them together." Pretty neat.

mottiden 6mo ago

Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for building it.

d-us-vb 6mo ago

This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd really hoped it would become.

lysace 6mo ago

I built something very broadly similar approximately 20 years ago. Then I forgot about it. It’s not like the data is lost, but availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably do it in a full day of work. What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is a must. I don’t think HTML will cease to be easily readable in our lifetimes.

eleveriven 6mo ago

This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling, genealogy and lifelogging

systemerror 6mo ago

this is incredible, I have been thinking about this exact project for quite some time but a little wary of which approach I might take. Thanks for posting this.

MattCruikshank 6mo ago

And I just taught Claude to read the Discussion notes on a page, and to make updates to the page accordingly...

NoSalt 6mo ago

I wish all of this technology could have been around when my grandparents were still alive. :-( The family has a TON of videos and photos, but no resource to guide us through what is what.

bronlund 6mo ago

Fantastic idea!

antiresonant 6mo ago

If devices were truly private, we could simply set our mics to always-on and massive Personal Wikis would build themselves over time. Imagine that, an autobiography for everyone. Of course the downside is massive, arguably useless storage for humans. Would be pretty valuable training data though.

runj__ 6mo ago

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 my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning. When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything. The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing. My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre). Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.

Rooster61 6mo ago
Friendly spelling correction. Diaries, not dairies. Dairies are where one produces dairy products. And I'm sorry your mom experienced that weight towards the end of her life. That sounds like a significant thing to grapple with, especially considering some of the not so pleasant content mentioned.
wdrw 6mo ago
I understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable text, I can't imagine doing this to family records that one of my ancestors specifically wanted to be preserved. Not criticizing your personal decision of course, but just offering a different perspective, i.e. for me it would be unimaginable to do this.
- 6mo ago

aanet 6mo ago

First off, this is a super cool project. Kudos to getting it started and up and running. Family history, and memorabilia and organizing all that stuff is super challenging, and just having a proper site to look at is worth its own effort. Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen. In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi. I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that. (no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!) That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me. Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories. Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well. [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

stronglikedan 6mo ago

It's like Facebook meets Wikipedia

Plutarco_ink 6mo ago

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yayadarsh 6mo ago

I just completed an 18 month travel sabbatical with my wife - would this be useful to catalog and cluster all of our photos based on geolocation and prompt us to collect memories?

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
yes!

tolerance 6mo ago

Disappointed because I thought this was about building a personal alternative to Wikipedia.

arikrahman 6mo ago

This is pretty wholesome. This takes Personal Knowledge Management to a whole other level.

inanutshellus 6mo ago

I did the same thing and came away with a different opinion. The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it. They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it. I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.

jjice 6mo ago
Yeah, I think marked down files and a printed version ends up being a good idea. I've never worked with media wiki directly, but I wonder if you could do an easy nightly dump of markdown contents somewhere.
bonoboTP 6mo ago
You may like DokuWiki. It's a wiki you can browse and edit in a browser but stores its data as human-readable files, not in a database.

fitsumbelay 6mo ago

Excellent post. Something I think about a lot in this exact context along the same lines as personal/community/local social nets. The industrial-scale things (manufacturing, content generation, human/world history record keeping ...) eventually shrink down to human-scale things

forthwall 6mo ago

I'm concerned about your copy that says "Private by default" and "Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely.", yet you recommend to use Claude, which means your data is being stored remotely in most cases. I do like the idea though! Will try with local models

T-A 6mo ago

Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-album, but then things will get more complicated. People will begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you fall in love or become very close with someone you will share your “Book of Life”. Jann Burner, "The book of life", December 26, 2008 https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#sthash.BQuYIPrl.dpuf https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352#s...

leflob 6mo ago

This sounds like a great futre project form me. What an awersome project!

wunderlotus 6mo ago

This is so freaking cool and part of me wants to try it, but the other part is scared of the privacy implications. Even though I love (and for now, trust) Anthropic, knowing that obviously Claude Opus is the best model (as stated in the docs), I'm just not sure I want to give it access to everything about me? But at the same time, I'm so curious as to what it would come up with.

argee 6mo ago

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blackhaj7 6mo ago

Incredible. Always wanted to do this. Would be lovely to even just have details of the places I have visited. Something to keep secure though. With AI scams taking off, this kind of context could make it very easy for someone to scam your friends/family

deleted 6mo ago

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stonecharioteer 6mo ago

When does a man die? When he is shot in the heart by a gun? No. When he eats a soup made of a poisoned mushroom? No. You cannot kill me. A man does not die until he is forgotten! I might stop breathing today, but I will live on in memory. Dr. Hiruluk

bawolff 6mo ago

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.

jhrmnn 6mo ago
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?
- evelant 6mo ago
  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.
nonameiguess 6mo ago
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.

Brajeshwar 6mo ago

This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from there.

casparvitch 6mo ago

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

MrScruff 6mo ago
I would say thinking about the indended audience for your creative outlet is a good discipline - even if it's only one person. It often gives the project more of a focus which helps with motivation and makes it more enjoyable.

Anonasty 6mo ago

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.

lkm0 6mo ago

I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!

saretup 6mo ago

So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is cool)

eternauta3k 6mo ago

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.

gwern 6mo ago
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.
- jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
  when I learnt about namespaces, I included them as part of the system and they worked great! I've documented them here https://whoami.wiki/docs/namespaces https://whoami.wiki/docs/namespaces the transclusion pattern for layered visibility is something I haven't implemented yet but stumbled upon when I was evaluating mediawiki thanks for pointing to pmwiki's approach, I'll look at how said set it up!
navigate8310 6mo ago
It's your wiki, you do as you please
6mo ago

manfredz 6mo ago

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.

soaringbebop 6mo ago

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!

submeta 6mo ago

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?

cgsmith 6mo ago

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. Thanks for sharing.

maltris 6mo ago

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.

Tepix 6mo ago

The project itself is cool if you have access to a LLM API endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server). I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.

bawolff 6mo ago
I'd be more worried about the bank statements than the photos.
neonstatic 6mo ago
Would you give it to an LLM run by Chinese, Russian, or European corporation?
- antonyh 6mo ago
  As a European, yes I'd prefer an EU LLM. What I don't want to do is give it to services with an agenda to abuse the data, particularly those profiling individuals for profit. Frankly, I'd trust a Chinese service more than I would an Adtech based one, but that's still not much.
- nicbou 6mo ago
  I'm not OP, but I find the American threat more real and immediate than the more abstract Chinese and Russian threats. From my perspective, the American President has threatened to annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No other country has demonstrated such an ability and willingness to collect information about me and use it against me.
  - aa-jv 6mo ago
    Same. Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing American AI. Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the moment - at scale too, I might add. If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is running out, however.

arjie 6mo ago

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.

Tier2Capital 6mo ago
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 algorithms. If I can use a secure private messenger like Signal, then I will. Curious how you feel about this?
- arjie 6mo ago
  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_Kolmogorov https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-07/A_Confused_K...

AndrewVos 6mo ago

This is so inspiring, thank you for writing it. I’ve been wanting something to track my daughters life and this is exactly what I need!

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
I'm glad to hear :)

h4ch1 6mo ago

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.

klondike_klive 6mo ago
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!
- eks391 6mo ago
  It only takes a little bit of energy once a day (or per week if you haven't realized yet how eventful your life actually is). The highest energy first day making it is a fun date with your spouse, or parent child time if you are separated.
  - h4ch1 6mo ago
    @parent don't get too worried about not writing in it religiously and having a schedule. That removes all the joy about doing it in the first place. For example our 2026 notebook has only one page filled in yet where I wrote a recipe for a chocolate cake I made on the fly and was worried I'd forget the measurements. There are some days when I am bored and I pick it up and backfill it as well.

deleted 6mo ago

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fleebee 6mo ago

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.

subpixel 6mo ago
That’s the direction this developer went in but I think you could also go in a more personal direction and leverage automation where it’s effective but avoid all generative text.
hejira 6mo ago
Yeah, that's my feeling too. It's an impressive and interesting project, but I don't want to do that with my life. It has had its ups and downs and some things I just don't want to dive back into like that (and don't want others to read either). The genealogy part – researching my ancestors' life – feels more useful.
danw1979 6mo ago
Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ? I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations. Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holiday together…
- hejira 6mo ago
  Good point! I already write some stuff down that I never intend to read myself but hope would be of some use for future generations. It's not always easy knowing what's worth recording. And sometimes really boring stuff can be interesting 100 years from now, but you wouldn't know.
- tartoran 6mo ago
  There are more than 500 years from the 1500s, let's say roughly 500. That makes around 20 generations and about 2^20 = 1048576 ancestors. There are historical records that give you an idea what people similar to you if not your own ancestors were going about but details would be overwhelming to count and sift through. I welcome that details fade away and that we don't need to carry the whole baggage but just some bits that stayed. Things will take their natural course and whatever prominent will preserve if it's worthy.

PaulKeeble 6mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 6mo ago
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jc-myths 6mo ago

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.

jrmyphlmn 6mo ago
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!
- jc-myths 6mo ago
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jandragsbaek 6mo ago

I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums

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pzoonic 6mo ago

What a lovely read, at least up until the AIfied bit. 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_Knows.html https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...

brador 6mo ago

You’re gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma telling those tales. Video >photo >audio >text

uyzstvqs 6mo ago
Take more videos, including random moments of your daily life. Just short ones are fine. Your future self will thank you.