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Posted by jrmyphlmn 1 day ago

Personal Encyclopedias(whoami.wiki)
717 points | 146 commentspage 2
eternauta3k 12 hours 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.
bonoboTP 11 hours ago||
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.

navigate8310 11 hours ago||
It's your wiki, you do as you please
Anonasty 12 hours 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.

yayadarsh 2 hours 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?
pzoonic 11 hours 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_Know...

ljsocal 6 hours 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.
sdoering 8 hours 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.

cgsmith 12 hours 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.

m-hodges 7 hours 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.

antiresonant 3 hours 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.
arjie 11 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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_K...

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