Do you keep a journal? Why/Why not?
If so, in what format (online, paper, other)? For how long have you kept at it? How honest/full-disclosure are you?
I’m an over-50 gay man thinking about taking it up again.
Thanks
Do you keep a journal? Why/Why not?
If so, in what format (online, paper, other)? For how long have you kept at it? How honest/full-disclosure are you?
I’m an over-50 gay man thinking about taking it up again.
Thanks
Yes, though not a “traditional” one. I’ve got a voice recorder, I use it when I’m walking my dog to ramble on about whatever’s on my mind. The day’s events, my personal thoughts, to-do lists and notes, whatever. When I get home I dump the recording into a folder where some scripts I’ve written process the audio to produce a transcript (using the Whisper model from OpenAI) and then an LLM to create summaries and subject tags and so forth from it (currently Qwen3), entirely local on my computer. I’ve got an index for searching through them based on those AI-generated tags and summaries so I can more easily find old stuff if I need them or am curious for whatever reason.
I use entirely local AI because I am completely open and honest in there. Probably a bunch of blackmail material to be found if you dug deeply enough. I’m very careful with data security, none of this ever leaves my local systems.
I’ve been doing this for over ten years now, almost daily. I’ve always had a vague plan that someday I’d feed it all into an AI, it;s only just the past two years where that’s actually started to become a reality. This weekend I’m going to experiment with upgrading my transcription AI to WhisperX, if it does a significantly better job I may have to rerun the whole dang thing through it all. Could take weeks, maybe months. I’m almost hoping it doesn’t work. :)
How much storage does it take up? How much ram does the llm use?
My main recordings folder is 175 GB, for a little over ten years worth of recordings. That’s not really all that much - consider how much a terabyte hard drive costs these days, it’s a trivial expense. Even when you include the various backups I keep (definitely don’t want a crash to take all that out).
My GPU’s reasonably hefty, an RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM. But AI is a rapidly changing technology right now so who knows what the next six months will bring. Someone might come out with an awesome lightweight model, someone might announce they’re going to be selling a cheap AI-specific card. My view has always been “save the data now because you can’t save it later if you didn’t save it now. You can process it any time.”
How often do you find a yourself searching through your memos?
Not that often, but my search tools aren’t very refined yet so it’s probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The technology is advancing rapidly right now so I’m not putting a whole lot of effort into polish yet, since in six months some dramatic new tool might come out that invalidates everything I did so far. Like that potential WhisperX switch.
Most recently, I remember a situation where I didn’t remember the name of some NPCs from a roleplaying game that were only in one or two adventures. I did a little searching and found them in a transcript from 2017. That was fun.