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Comment by throwuwu | Hacker News Reader

I like this a lot. We need more hard records of personal correspondence. It would be cool to do this as a service.

Honestly when I read the title I thought it was going to be about using message history as a basis for generating a narrative account of the events using an LLM.

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Me too. But the real story is way better! Now I want to do the same with my Telegram chat history.

One of the great disadvantages of private emails (& texts) is the massive amount of correspondence that is lost to future historians. I have books of letters published by Feynmann, Feyeraband, Einstein, etc. Everything is now email that is behind a password, which means we'll likely never have troves of personal letters from which to contextualize modern people who become historical figures in the future.

How would you solve for this?

I love it as art, but it's usefulness is questionable. If you want a hard copy, just copy it to a microsd. Or three if you are worried about losing it.

"Hard copy" means "a collection of paper sheets bound in some fashion" in the context of books. So they probably didn't mean it in a way where microSD is equivalent.

> I love it as art, but it's usefulness is questionable. If you want a hard copy, just copy it to a microsd. Or three if you are worried about losing it.

Hard copy means paper. Also microsd is a terrible for long term storage.

> Also microsd is a terrible for long term storage.

How come? I would have thought flash would be better than e.g. a regular hard drive.

Flash memory relies on cells keeping charged, but the electrons can slowly leak and discharge the cells over time. It looks like the commonly claimed number is 10 years, but there's no clear answer. Hard drives also aren't great as a "set and forget" method. In either case you should refresh the data regularly (~yearly). Optical media is a great option for digital long-term storage, but paper is a very tried-and-true method, if stored in the right conditions.

Magnetic storage still rules all.

Get a tape backup system and be happy. I rotate three tapes between offsite, my safe, and an active one in the tape drive. Don’t overthink “offsite”, your work office is good enough. Or your parents house. Or your neighbor on the other side of the neighborhood.

Or backup once and throw the tape in the back of the closet. At least you can restore the magnetic backup. I would not be happy with the error rate of transcribing data from paper :-)

Very true! I have a friend with a tape backup system and it serves him well.

Ditto. Exactly what I pictured from the title and I was already thinking how interesting that would be. I’m curious to try something like it now.

The same, I expected a whole criminal AI generated novel based on a history of a chat.

With the EU's DMA law and the preceding GDPR, some services have to offer an API so that your hypothetical service can pull this data. However, iMessage was notably excluded from this law, and then there's the encryption thing where you can't just pull data from e.g. whatsapp.

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