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Comment by ezst | Hacker News Reader

Taking screenshots of your whole desktop every other second and sending it to a third part, just in case their OCR and cheap search built on top of it might come up with something useful? I haven't found a single situation where I would rather take that above more conventional and established approaches (browser history search, bookmarking, file management hygiene, etc)

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The problem of "where did I see that" is something I suspect most people have encountered before. How that's actually done, though, is the devil. The vision -- semantic search of human experience -- is cool. The implementation -- always recording cameras piping every minute of your life to TotallyTrustworthyPeople's servers -- not so.

this happens to me less than once a week, not worth any real effort to avoid

general ai chatbots can usually answer any question that would be solved by magically summoning the exact page i looked at 2 weeks ago anyway

General chatbots are great for things they have general data about. "What was that movie where..." type things. They don't help with individualized information, unless you feed the same type of information as Recall type solutions gather anyways. Perhaps you don't have much individualized information, or perhaps you just remember it all very aptly - it shouldn't be hard to imagine differently though.

My main usage problem with Recall type solutions is less with lack of something to promise and more with lack of ability to deliver. Especially for local-only solutions. The concept can be great as can be, but it needs to be damn near foolproof to beat out how much we already remember.

>I haven't found a single situation where I would rather take that above more conventional and established approaches (browser history search, bookmarking, file management hygiene, etc)

But all of those are terrible for the use case at hand. It's like searching for the book that contains a passage without being able to search passages, rather searching by title, author or subject.

Aren't screenshots just one implementation specific variant of the possible solutions? Recall immediately made me think about a universal API that all kinds of applications write history to. That data can then be searched, or you could possibly even have global undo/redo.

Screenshots are just "easier" to use, because you don't need to implement anything for individual apps. "Easier" only if you have data centers full of compute and the capital to very inefficiently throw a bunch of silicon and electricity at the problem.

Yes. The Mac closed source version saves full video locally.

In the end, age comes for us all. I pay for the Mac version of this software. I bought concert tickets to something, but couldn't find the confirmation email, but did find the credit card charge. So where did the tickets go? Did I hallucinate buying them? In the end, I rewound to the late night buying session to find that I'd misspelled the email address and the platform didn't confirm my email before sending.

Of course, that would never happen to you, but it saved my bacon.

For what's worth, I have a "form history save" add-on for Firefox that retains this kind of info for a time, that doubles with a password manager (bitwarden) which I suspect would have caught it as well.

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