Lifelogging, an Inevitability (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Lifelogging, an Inevitability (2007)

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37 pointswalterbell29 comments

https://Rewind.ai has a MacOS app which claims to "find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard", e.g. recording meetings and app interactions to local storage and doing offline speech-to-text and OCR conversion. Their query interface uses OpenAI and roadmap includes Apple headset.

2022-11 launch: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1587415342896148480

2023-04 pitch claims ~2.5K paid subs and ~25K free tier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqgdnW_J-vQ

Amazing app I hear. They put a lot of emphasis on privacy.

I still find it very very creepy that they log and thus see anything I do. It’s a weird feeling not supported by any facts.

Supposedly you can define which apps are logged, exclude private browsing, etc.

Looks like they are sending a subset of the local data to OpenAI, which rules out most corporate use.

Hopefully Apple will support the open-source devs working on LLMs that can run entirely on Apple Silicon devices.

Before Rewind.ai launched, I had made a counterpart for Windows, but just for web browsers: https://irchiver.com/

Completely local, no network traffic at all.

> The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.

Some things are best left forgotten to time. Reminds me, I need to write in my journal.

The quote: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." turns out to be apocryphal according to the history stack exchange [1]. However, the quote is as true now as it was when we thought Richelieu said it.

The author sounds pessimistic though. I think the the natural customer for a LifeLog apparatus today is someone who is just trying to get by in a crazy world, has a job managing processes, has nothing to hide, and who can forgive flawed individuals for getting swept up in events, or take a few knocks when the forces of history get out of hand, then be ready to carry on when the dust settles.

There was an adage about how 20th century history could be described by how one-third of people could be relied upon to do nothing while another third attempted to exterminate a remaining third, and I think that middle group history relies upon will be the early adopters for convenient personal monitoring technologies like this.

At the end of the day, some of the people being monitored by a LifeLog really are bad, and who couldn't be against something bad, except maybe bad people? Being against something bad costs nothing and you'd have to make an effort not to be. Bottom line is, you just have to leave the complicated stuff to the people who live it every day and have the background for it, and why rock the boat, it's bad, what are you going to do, defend it? It's just how the cookie crumbles, and net-net we get chevre and sundried tomato omlettes from broken eggs.

It's not that they are against one side or the other, it's that they don't believe anything strongly enough to get involved, so they just go along. Maybe they get a job that uses their attention to detail, like organizing information, or scheduling trains.

[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-did-r...

> Is total recall fair?

That's what corporations and governments can do already. You might not remember what you purchased 20 years ago, but they certainly do.

> Can I take back a conversation I had with you?

On an increasing number of platforms, the answer is yes. Messages can be recalled on Facebook (no time limit), WeChat (limited to the first few minutes), and others.

> You might not remember what you purchased 20 years ago, but they certainly do.

In the US, there's an "open banking" federal proposal to require banks to publish transaction history via APIs, upon consumer request and control, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34137709#34144877

Would love to have this as a personal thing. Any amount of institutional attention would be scary though. The tech has come a long way since 2007, records like this should be easy to search and filter. Something like Roam.

The dream is building up a "life corpus" that can be analyzed later for trends, and balances cost (gathering/storing too much raw data) vs being future-proofed against new ways of looking at it. Think of social moneyball - which friends bat above replacement?

If I was going to get started with it, I would go for a hidden microphone, always on, auto-transcribed with location data. Think the (il)legality comes out in the wash if you aren't using the data for anything official.

It's hard not to look at this and think of Stephen Wolfram's post on the "personal analytics of his life".

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...

I have to admire the foresight that went into this as well as the analytics, but have to wonder how actionable it is.

2013 literature review on lifelogging, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247772294_Challenge...

> The history of lifelogs so far shows a clear academic, corporate and governmental interest ... This article maps the main ethically relevant challenges and opportunities associated with the further development of lifelog technologies as discussed in the scholarly literature ... Whilst the current debate focuses mainly on lifelogs held by individuals, lifelogs held by governmental institutions and corporations pose idiosyncratic ethical concerns as well. We have provided a brief taxonomy of lifelog technology to show the variety in uses for lifelogs.

Lifelogging is a needed counterbalance to companies and governments collecting personal data for their own purposes. No one should know more about me than I do.

This.

As people collect more and more personal data about themselves, which they do unconsciously already, the only thing that's missing is an offline system (software) on the local computer/device that enables processing and making sense of all this data, ideally _without_ companies also obtaining the data.

Such software appears to be possible in the near future with all these neural network, NLP, image processing, .. systems.

I think developers of open-source apps ought to agree on some standard data format so that data from different apps/sources can easily be aggregated without additional processing.

The problem is: commercial apps/platforms don't have any incentive to enable private personal data collection and companies will always have a head start over the individual in different ways: amount of data, processing power, brain power, ..

And people don't appear to realize that companies are constantly optimising against the individual and therefor the individual needs better tools to gain a better position.

You can keep keep a journal and that's already probably too much information. Who goes back and reads that stuff? What is the point of logging every step you ever too when it doesn't matter in the slightest? I keep track of some details in regards to exercise, but I throw the sheets away at the end. And the values I keep are just to reference how much I am doing and if I should increment. Is there really anything interesting about going back to check on that? Does a big long Apple Watch streak equal a life lived?

For what it's worth, future historians would be pretty happy about it, assuming the information gets preserved that long.

It's amazing how many of the questions and concerns are the same regarding data longevity and portability, the pain of losing part of that exobrain, and the primacy of digital content in many of our lives.

Also noteworthy is how many of those links are dead now.

I've been a long time bookmarker, but recently added rewind.ai to my toolset. Not affiliated in any way (except as a user), but it has been game changing for my augmented memory use cases.

Do you like that it only stores X months or would be better if it stores forever?

I just set it to store forever

I've looked at lifelogging, at least the part where you write down a lot and keep statistics on yourself. Not so much about recording life with a camera.

You can do this manually with pen and paper, or free form notes like on a google doc. You can even use a spreadsheet, but those are more of a pain to use. The phone apps I've used aren't much better.

Has anyone found a good solution that works for them?

Append a Notes.txt file in a shared folder between your devices

You could write stuff in a daily markdown file. This app is amazingly small and yet powerful.

I keep its folder synchronized to my computer with syncthing, to be able to write there as well.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.billthefarmer.diary

This one lets you track simple things about your day, like whether you did something or not. It doesn't get any simpler. Just one tap/tick. Makes nice plots of the data.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.smasi.tickmate/

This one is similar but can do a bit more. It can record time spans of activities and more. Also does plots.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.samco.trackandgraph

<< Some form of this total recall is inevitable, at least for some people.

Eh. Nothing is inevitable. Even death might one day be conquered. There is an argument to be made that things do appear to be moving in that particular direction, but it is hardly a given. I will show one simple way of it becoming 'evitable'. For once, consider how fragile our civilization truly is..

Forgetting is a wonderful gift. "remember no more" the low parts of a relationship is a goal.

Sure. I think that inevitably life logging will be possible. So what. Or does the author mean that inevitably everybody will be doing it. Nope, i disagree there. If by inevitable the author means legally required. Well, I'll fight like hell against getting ear tagged.

yes this is all of a sudden super relevant with LLMs. the challenge of lifelogging was search and summarization.

I remember reading this at the time. It kindof made sense as a trajectory at the time.

But this was pre-Snowden - the stuff Snowden leaked really changed things. Like everyone suspected it before then (like everything Stallman ever said) but Snowden's leaked docs really brought it all into focus and that was when things like ubiquitous https and really checking openssl for bugs and end-to-end encryption in messaging started to get talked about. This led to things like GDPR and just a general pretty-good understanding of privacy from consumers. You can trace all of that back to the change of mindset after the Snowden leaks.

Now its more like data is a liability, third parties will snoop it and use it to try and sell you things. Now the attention grabbing features are deletion and forgetting (e.g. Whatsapp auto-delete)

biggest question of lifelogging for me is whether or not i have a lifelog camera on me and what consent looks like here. anyone have takes on if its worth considering?

Most of the customers of the life-logging cameras (like http://getnarrative.com) used it for tourism, or photographing their children (so they could play with them and still have some photos). Among the hardcore lifeloggers I think each one needs to figure out what constitutes a socially acceptable way of wearing them, in my own experience you don't wear them in a social context but it's fine wearing them if you're on a busy street in a big city for example where there are so many people taking random photos anyway or if you're out on touristy trips in general.

obligatory Steve Mann reference: http://wearcam.org/myviews4.html

"WearCam has been an experiment in connectivity, starting early 1994, running on and off until September 15, 1996 (shut down when I went to ICIP 96 in Lousanne, due to poor net connection from there). After the conference, I decided that extensive revisions were in order: with further development of the pencigraphic image compositing algorithm that assembles the images transmitted from my wearable computer system to the base station on the roof of building 54. The hope is to have near-realtime performance using a 64-processor system."

also narrative (and of course related products like glass, spectacles, etc) - http://getnarrative.com/ - (2014) https://www.cnet.com/reviews/narrative-clip-review/ - (2016) https://www.fastcompany.com/3064785/why-some-wearable-camera...

unclear how humane will toe the privacy line - https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/humane-the-secretive-ai-st...

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