I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it
I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.
> 15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
To me meaningful is just the 15, and 15 close friends is a lot nowadays. Of all the people I know, there’s probably one person that gets close to this and they have a bit of a unstable personality. I don’t think OP‘s numbers are off, but I’m not sure what they mean by active. Is it just online chat, is it grab a beer on a Friday. To me it’s mostly the second. I find it highly subjective.
I mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.
there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.
I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?
I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.
I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it
I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.
This made me laugh out loud.
Sometimes I feel bad that I lost years of chat history from then too, but you made me realize that might be a good thing.
I envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
But they don’t, or? From the article:
> 15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
To me meaningful is just the 15, and 15 close friends is a lot nowadays. Of all the people I know, there’s probably one person that gets close to this and they have a bit of a unstable personality. I don’t think OP‘s numbers are off, but I’m not sure what they mean by active. Is it just online chat, is it grab a beer on a Friday. To me it’s mostly the second. I find it highly subjective.
Damn this is a nice reminder that even private chats I sent to someone else 10 years ago aren't safe from being harvested by AI
I mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.
there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.
I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?
fucken yep. don’t do this.
Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.
Yeah I use NotesNook for big notes or projects.
I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.
I would like to do something similar, but I lost a lot of whatsapp historical chats switching phones...
Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?
If you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone
Do you still have those phones/Android files?