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Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it
(theconversation.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Bear in mind, though, that the technology for dealing with these things are rapidly advancing.
I have an enormous amount of digital archives I've collected both from myself and from my now-deceased father. For years I just kept them stashed away. But about a year ago I downloaded the Whisper speech-to-text model from OpenAI and transcribed everything with audio into text form. I now have a Qwen3 LLM in the process of churning through all of those transcripts writing summaries of their contents and tagging them based on subject matter. I expect pretty soon I'll have something with good enough image recognition that I can turn loose on the piles of photographs to get those sorted out by subject matter too. Eventually I'll be able to tell my computer "give me a brief biography of Uncle Pete" and get something pretty good out of all that.
Yeah, boo AI, hallucinations, and so forth. This project has given me first-hand experience with what they're currently capable of and it's quite a lot. I'd be able to do a ton more if I wasn't restricting myself to what can run on my local GPU. Give it a few more years.
You said you released it on your writing. How did you go about doing that? It's a cool use case, and I'm intrigued.
If you’re interested in “chatting” with your writing there’s a couple of out of the box solutions right now, like Kortex or Reflect Notes. They are AI first note taking apps. I don’t use them out of privacy concerns but if you don’t care that much they might allow you to do what you want. They claim to be E2E encrypted and the AI unable to phone home but these are companies that sprung out of nowhere so I don’t trust they necessarily have done all their homework to actually provide full privacy.
Alternatively there’s an Obsidian plugin that I believe allows you to do such a thing as well with local LLMs if you wanted to which is the privacy first way to this. I’ve just moved to Obsidian from Capacities so I have yet to try it out as I’m still setting up my vault.
Privacy first is my only path. There are a lot of privacyless solutions for this, and they're all dead to me. The obsidian route is pretty cool. Personally, I don't care to chat with it, but I like the auto-tags and auto-summaries.
Looked through the plugins and found this: https://github.com/niehu2018/obsidian-ai-tagger-universe