Comment by eternauta3k

16 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.

4 comments

eternauta3k

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gwern  2 hours ago

A good wiki like MediaWiki supports various levels of visibility. For example, you could define a namespace for each group of readers like 'Family:'. Or use transclusions from subpages. (This might sound like a bit of a hassle but you can use a template to set it up once and for all: a page transcludes a public sub page followed by the distant relatives material followed by parents / siblings followed by your-eyes-only.) And I'm sure one could come up with other approaches too.

A real example: Said Achmiz (obormot.net) uses PMWiki for his D&D campaigns, and PMwiki lets you control who can see a page, so he can do access control tricks like a page for a location, where only the DM can see all subpages with all the secrets, while each player can see their own 'notes' subpage. So everyone in their own web browser can go to the same page and see the same thing overall, but will see just their private additional information. And this is quite flexible so you can encode whatever patterns you need. You don't need some WotC fancy custom CMS for your D&D campaign to keep track of information and silo appropriately, you just need a design pattern on wikis.

  • jrmyphlmn  29 minutes ago

    when I learnt about namespaces, I included them as part of the system and they worked great! I've documented them here https://whoami.wiki/docs/namespaces

    the transclusion pattern for layered visibility is something I haven't implemented yet but stumbled upon when I was evaluating mediawiki

    thanks for pointing to pmwiki's approach, I'll look at how said set it up!

bonoboTP  16 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.