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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.
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.
I agree. When my mother died I got access to her emails, diaries etc. I read some and as you would expect there are a whole range of emotions and opinions in there, many of which I did not care to engage with. So I asked my wife to read some and she said said she thought it was worth keeping so we do. I will not read it, but perhaps someone else will get some value from it someday. It's no effort to keep (no boxes or terabytes of data).
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.
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.
I am usually grossed out by AI when it fakes humanness, but not here, I think.
Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against which I measure all technology.
I think that in this case, it helped someone make something deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a computer should do: aid a human with their task.
Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of why I was so excited about it.
What makes this example land differently for me is that the intent stays human all the way through
Yes! What do we want technology to do for us? In my opinion one important promise that was never fully realized is helping us to live a more enriched life. Social media does help people stay connected but it brings a lot of negatives that are well-known at this point.
If you build this encyclopedia as a purely robotic collector of facts that nobody reads, it’s probably more dystopian horror.
If you build it as a fun inner loop that reconnects you with people and memories and makes you more human, then it’s great.
We should endeavor to craft experiences that do the latter; right now we are back in the hacker days when small teams can build big new ideas, and big tech hasn’t taken over.
I love Robin Sloan's idea of apps as home-cooked meals. This is the only thing about AI that doesn't make me want to burn a datacenter to the ground.
>We should endeavor to craft experiences
It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to be with other people.
I don’t even know how much it helps people stay connected anymore since the shift to mobile. I was in an antique store recently and came upon a vintage “correspondence desk” which is basically a desk specialized for sorting and preparing mail. Back when people used to keep in touch by writing letters to each other this is what people with active remote friendships did. They’d spend a couple of hours at this desk reading letters they’ve received and sitting down to compose replies.
This is basically how social media was when you needed a computer to go online. You’d sit and sift through your feeds and there’d be message chains you respond to. You’re not really doing anything else while you’re doing that and you’re putting it out of mind once you step away. When Twitter first started getting big it was sort of a joke that people are talking to you while on the toilet. The idea that you were only ever half engaged with anything you’re doing was remarkable enough to be worth pointing out instead of taken for granted.
It’s just a lot more focused and intentional when you’re dedicating time and headspace to the task instead of “microdosing” on connection via a dopamine lottery. Even if you took away the ads and the interpolation of creator-content crowding out the connections with people you actually know, I think designing for an infinite scroll just inherently makes the thing less human-centered. It sets it up so you’re interacting with these atomized bits of ‘content’ rather than people.
That is because platforms both enable us and exploit us, they exploit both those who create/comment and those who read. They perform a necessary function but extract the value from it for their own good.
I agree. I do admire the concept as a framing device to engage with your family history, but the "AI" part strikes me in a wrong way.
There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to remember.
The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is what computers have been doing for generations-except for the privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
Personal wiki's impersonally compiled. I gauge LLMs for the extent they fray the social fabric that hold people and society together. And the way AI is introduced for max disruption causes me to be generally against the technology, despite that there are also obvious merits. Here it depends on how much value, say, a family gets out of reading in their family encyclopedia.
It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it may serve to strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much better served by family members writing down their own experiences.
I’m curious, do you agree with the statement, “it would be better for this personal wiki not to exist, than for it to have been built with AI”?
Because without AI it probably wouldn’t exist.
thank you :)
I understand the bittersweet feeling because I did all the editorial work for the wedding page and the first few others and I did feel like a historian trying to connect the dots after stumbling into some primary/secondary materials and spending a couple months doing all the editorial work
after I began experimenting with agents, it sped up my process that otherwise would've taken many more months for every page given that the kinds of data sources also increased over time
I did still spend significant amounts of time like a wikipedia contributor would deciding on what to keep, enhance or delete from the page based on my own personal preferences and what I was comfortable with seeing on the page
the dystopic feeling is also fair and unsettling, I think this ironically also made me realize how important safeguarding my personal data is, we leave digital trails of ourselves everywhere so a powerful agent can string them together to create a story of who you are
It reads like AI was just collaborator. Author did the fun part, AI did the tedious connecting of band records, Shazam recordings to places, songs.
That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.
Making those connections are what builds a narrative: writing history is looking at the sources and constructing a narrative around that you think is significant. And if you really do find a connection so tedious, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the, for example, list of songs played one night at some event doesn't have any significance at all, it's just an unimportant detail pointlessly padding out the story.
AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's personally important to the human creator, but rather the availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And then in turn the output shapes the human author's own perspective, changing even what the human will write on their own.
I don't know that "preserve" is the correct term here. It's certainly an interesting way to collate family history, but this encyclopedia will last only as long as the OP is interested in and able to maintain it. Once OP gets bored, or falls ill, or dies, unless there's someone else interested in it, the history is gone, reverted back to oral memory.
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
100% agree I just had exactly the same reaction. I love the idea and would definitely like to do the first part e.g. documenting key people (family members and other important relations etc), key events like weddings etc.
What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and recollections given by the subjects themselves.
The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For a number of reasons:
1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards documenting based on the quality and availability of the sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you might not have much info about some really special childhood event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of WhatsApp messages on the subject.
2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really important to preserve the experiences, stories and recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big collective story we tell ourselves.
3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people know what I mean
I share this dilemma too. Just a thought -- I feel less okay with AI processing "data made for humans" (i.e. the images themselves, audio recordings of speech) and more ok with it processing "data made for software" (exif data, shazam logs).
We are the last human AI free generation that lives on. It's your basic human instincts kicking in.
Normally, memory work is you pulling things out of your mind. Here, it's the system pushing things back at you
there is an activation energy cost to so many activities - so those things just never got done. many times it is because the cost-benefit wasn't clear at the start (unknown unknowns) so it never got done. kudos to op for experimenting and showing us one way of making something like this happen.
Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?
IMO it does not. At least to me the meaning and value of something is in the creative human design behind it, not the tools used to build it. I don’t think AI changes much there. It’s a (very powerful) tool but still IMO the value lies with the creativity and skill of the operator.
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.
why is there need for an emotional reaction? It's just a tool. Philosophically, it's no different than using photoshop to touch up old photos. It's just a more "high-tech" version.
I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it.
Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
I do something similar with a journal. I bought a little Instax printer recently so I can still use my phone as a camera but print out the pictures and stick them in it.
I was thinking the other day I need to go back to a physical recipe book too. I don't cook that many different things that I need to reference it for, but there was a charm in my old one of remembering the best recipes were the ones covered in spilled ingredients and filled with marginalia.
Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and organized.
Oh I had no idea it was formalised to such a degree, we just thought we were doing an extreme form of scrapbooking haha.
Thanks for the resource!
The value isn't just in the recorded content, it's in the ritual
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!
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.
This is an incredibly cool idea. I'm gonna talk to my wife about doing this with my girls. Thanks for sharing!
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.
I love making Zines, but I don’t make enough of them. That might be a nice medium for something like this.
I’ve also done some light-fast testing. Laser prints (both B&W and color) survive a long while in direct harsh sunlight left in the window of my Utah home. All types of pen I tried were faded within a couple years but Pencil survives.
A 360 degree stapler is a fantastic tool for quickly binding them.
Won't the SD card data decay in a relatively short time? Maybe convert some part of that video into a flipbook for another piece of physical media?
Yes, I would definitely make backups on two or three different disc types.
physical books are a greate idea.
I do something similar but with email and more pro-active [1]. I have created my son an email address when he was born and I'm sending him things from our lives and ask family members to to the same. Just to write them about themselves and send photos of their current homes and gardens and partners.
I imagining him looking through his email when he's 18 and reading personalize messages sent by family members who might no longer be with us then.
[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2024/leaving-a-digital-legacy.html
I've also started thinking about this. Can you share some templates or other tips on how to do this?
I did spend some time getting some LLM to write a generator (in C++) of a scribus XML file for automatic layout, but it wasn't effective. I need to get back to looking at that, as it would be very useful. As my photos range in aspect ratios and formats (4:3 and 3:2) and I have thousands and thousands of RAW photos to process and "finish", it's an ongoing work! So for now I am just doing it manually, with the help of some layout scripts.
As I store everything in a local Vikunja instance for notes and WIP, here's the list of links I assembled relative to this (hopefully useful; it includes calendar templates so that I can make them for my mother-in-law):
https://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources
https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678
https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest
https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard
https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribu...
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di...
https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook...
https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts
https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus
https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f...
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums
https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates
https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0
http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/
When you find a print shop, they'll talk about margins and bleeds, so it might be worth finding a print shop first to know what bleed zones you want on the pages and whether they expect left page first, or right page first.
Once you know that, you can set up Scribus appropriately.
wow, thank you!
Feels like a nice middle ground between what the article describes and something more tangible
How's the cost for the books? I'd be tempted to DIY those to save cost but Ive been a bit short on time in recent months.
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.
10 is a lot given the circumstances. From which country did they originate?
Main family tree from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In the times of the Virreinato del Río de la Plata.
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.
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.
Big shout out to the Mormons, whom have been digitalizing ancient birth certificates all around the world. We got a lot of data from them!
I'm Mormon, and doing family history research is one of my favorite church activities. Appreciate unexpectedly seeing us mentioned in a positive light online!
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.
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.
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.
He put many of the photographs right there in his blog post - he obviously does not see them as secrets
"Trust me bro"
I'd be more worried about the bank statements than the photos.
Would you give it to an LLM run by Chinese, Russian, or European corporation?
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.
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.
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.
I guess PPQ.AI or OpenRouter.AI be of use to you here? Or maybe Apfel (Apple on-device AI) is powerful enough to do this?
Which US smartphone operating system do you use?
Perfect example of the "Yet you participate in society" meme.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
A reputable company will follow the GDPR and not share my personal data without explicit opt-in consent. Dodgy LLMs are anybody's guess.
Is the NSA GDPR compliant?
*sigh*
Dodgy companies are a bigger danger to my (and your) privacy and wellbeing than the American NSA will ever be.
> 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.
> 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 and 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).
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
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.
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.
I agree, and now all that stuff is on Anthropic's servers.
It is stalker-ish to write up biographies like this about your relatives. It's one thing to write up the weddings and upbeat things like this, but not all families lives are just sunshine and rainbows.
How about that relative of the family who spent time in prison? Grandpa in war? Many old people don't naturally talk about some parts of their lives either because they suffered some injustice like (what as an Eastern European I can think of) their properties taken away by Nazis and Soviets, or they did something they aren't proud of. Are you going to oral history interview/interrogate them to fill in all the gaps? Do you tell them you're going to upload all they say to some servers where who knows who will have access to it?
There are also longlasting family feuds between sides of families, like how one son was tricked out of the inheritance maybe wrongly, maybe he was an ass to his parents. People holding grudges and explaining their life failure and derailment by wrongly or rightly blaming others.
Maybe your aunt is presenting a story that doesn't quite add up when you triangulate it from all OSINT and private sources. Maybe your cousin isn't the daughter of who you think she is. Is it your business?
Even if no such big thing factor in, a biography of a person will be very subjective. You can narrate the same life in many ways so they appear more or less successful or an asshole.
Its fine to keep these things as oral history and memory that fades.
I don't really care about what the regular people who were my great grandparents and their cousins did. Maybe if I could read all the drama, I'd end up hating a bunch of relatives. These things have a natural life cycle of forgetting. That's fine.
Again, it's all well if you live in a family where everyone is nice and everyone was successful and helpful. Otherwise it's a can of worms. Nerds can be a bit blind to this as they just want to play with the toys and treat it like some logic puzzle.
It's your wiki, you do as you please
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.
This is pretty wholesome. This takes Personal Knowledge Management to a whole other level.
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?
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_Know...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Haha, it's funny. I'm not that worried about targeted ads and so on but I'd prefer that the government not be privy to my chats. In general, I'd rather not fight the government. My position is that if they need me to believe something so that I can live then they won't hear me say a word to contradict that thing.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-07/A_Confused_K...
This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling, genealogy and lifelogging
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's like Facebook meets Wikipedia
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.
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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!
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!
With video gen AI you might even get an animated movie out of it...
And I just taught Claude to read the Discussion notes on a page, and to make updates to the page accordingly...
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!
This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd really hoped it would become.
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 ).
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.
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!
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.
Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for building it.
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.
I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
What an absolutely delightful project. This put a smile on my face. Thank you.
> 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.
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.
The difference is the friends chose to use those platforms.
I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums
This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from there.
Disappointed because I thought this was about building a personal alternative to Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
Looking/thinking about this and all the digital photos that are spread across multiple phones and accounts led me to My Family Archive. I haven’t pursued it yet, but they seem to have thought about some of this.
This is beautiful, and incredibly polished. Thank you.
That sounds great!
This chap made it a labor of love.
Fantastic idea!
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
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.
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.
For longevity, which is a consideration in such a project, one might prefer something based on Markdown files, like 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.
> 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
So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is cool)
This plus messaging and you could kill Facebook
You’re gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma telling those tales.
Video >photo >audio >text
Take more videos, including random moments of your daily life. Just short ones are fine. Your future self will thank you.
What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that work? Anyone attempted something like that?
I like 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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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.
Crafted by Rajat
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