
The Human Log - sturza
https://neilkakkar.com/the-human-log.html
======
AndrewKemendo
In my opinion this is the entire selling point/core value of Augmented Reality
and is why it's been a pursuit of mine since 2006 or so.

And for clarity, it's the world facing camera that is the most critical part
of AR, in my opinion, not what is displayed to the user. The display simply
gives me most compelling reason to the user to adopt the technology. The
reason for this is because a world facing camera system is a tractable
tangible thing that we can build and actually deploy today. The current state
of object detection with CV, and the other long tail analysis you can do with
it, allows us to get really really good at making inferences of world and user
state, based on detected objects (+ some telemetry).

So today, you can get really close to a high resolution log, from strapping a
camera on your head and building an object detection pipeline. The challenge
here though is of course what you all expect, privacy, monetization,
influence, control etc... The world where everyone is logging everything about
themselves, which means they would also be logging their interactions with
others, is the no-privacy world that everyone is terrified of.

You can't create Laplace's Demon and also preserve the virtues of privacy.

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afc
Thanks for sharing! This resonates strongly with me.

One thing I did (and fairly recently too:
[https://github.com/alefore/edge/commit/6e93c2bb327f57d13d067...](https://github.com/alefore/edge/commit/6e93c2bb327f57d13d067b5d2ae19720526bb799)
says just 10 days ago) is adjust my text editor
([http://github.com/alefore/edge](http://github.com/alefore/edge)) to keep a
log per file of all the operations I do on that file. I expect to use this to
generate reports along the lines of "what files did I work on last Thursday",
"how much _active_ (for some definition) time have I spent modifying this
file" or "on how many different days have I opened this file". Perhaps I'll
also use this as a cluster to feed to the Bayesian filter ("I tend to edit
file X whenever I edit file Y") that I use to optimize my autocomplete
predictions/search history.

(I also plan to use this to see if I can find ways to optimize the types of
transformations that I bind to my keys if I notice special patterns (e.g.,
when I do transformation X, I very frequently do transformation Y immediately
after), but I haven't yet thought very much about how I'll do this.)

I'm somewhat curious as to how much value I'll actually derive from this. I
tried the Quantified Self in the past but ... I think it suffers from the fact
that reality tends to be too complicated to be predicted by ~simple models.

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frankish
I've been thinking a bit about solving this same problem, but I feel there is
too much overhead to log things manually.

What we need is better interfacing with computers so that we can just think
"log my weight is 190 lbs" or "log I ate 1 small chicken breast and a cup of
brocolli". Voice control and my phone are not sufficient for my needs so far.
I also want to be able to have full control over my own logs in plaintext.

I want to be a cyborg already...

~~~
aaukt
I used [https://open.nomie.app](https://open.nomie.app) when i had to take a
medicine for several months and wanted to know how my body reacted and how the
symptoms changed.

~~~
7lint
I used tickmate to track symptoms. It's a one bit journal for android.

[https://github.com/lordi/tickmate](https://github.com/lordi/tickmate)

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neilkakkar
An old discussion on this article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795526)

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brokensegue
Is this just a rebranding of quantified self?

~~~
sturza
I'm curious, can you give some details on this?

~~~
marcinzm
Quantified Self is basically about self-tracking and has been around for a
while now (I heard about it I think 10+ years ago).

[https://quantifiedself.com/get-started/](https://quantifiedself.com/get-
started/)

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
It's even older than that - that's just when it started to become more popular
in part because smartphone / other tech made it easier to engage in.

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bnj
I've been thinking about this on and off and at the moment I'm feeling like
automatically collecting log information is a good approach, at least for me,
so that I can set and forget until I'm ready to explore. I really like the way
that smart watches are making this easier.

I use an iPhone and I've been wondering whether there are any good tools that
can automatically collect some information about my activities on the device,
sort of like the screen time utility-- off the top of my head: * send an email
* time notetaking * time and address of web pages visited...

Keeping a uniform activity log of what I'm doing on my devices would be
something that I could use to go back over and figure out what I've actually
accomplished, review it against my goals...

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DFHippie
Something I wrote to facilitate keeping a personal log:
[https://github.com/dfhoughton/jobrog](https://github.com/dfhoughton/jobrog)

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mistermann
> Every important system has logs since they’re necessary to improve the
> system over time. That brings me to the most important system I know. One
> that we never designed - but use all the time. The human body.

I would argue that there are two more important systems:

\- Planet Earth

\- Human societies (and overall humanity itself)

Writing a similar essay but with these as the the subject would be a difficult
but fun and potentially fruitful undertaking.

I wonder: how might one go about this, considering the complexity of the
system?

~~~
carapace
Well we certainly log a lot of information about both of those.

The Seshat Global History Databank people are into this sort of thing (real-
world psychohistory):
[http://seshatdatabank.info/](http://seshatdatabank.info/)

(
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29)
)

~~~
mistermann
Hey carapace!

Now this looks very interesting, I am going to give it a read.

If you have anything else along these lines up your sleeve, I would love to
see it!

~~~
carapace
Ahoy!

These folks seem to me to be the least, uh, starry-eyed of the would-be
Foundationites, but my knowledge is not comprehensive, eh? I only know about
these folks because I'm interested in their underlying graph-based Prolog-
implemented database, TerminusDB. (
[https://terminusdb.com/](https://terminusdb.com/) )

\- - - -

FWIW, I view the Internet et. al. as a kind of GAI with humans for neurons.
From that POV Seshat is one of many ways in which we/it are becoming self-
aware.

------
carapace
> Why don’t we have a log for the most important system ever?

Aw, c'mon! It's called _memory_ and our systems spend a significant amount of
ATP on it.

~~~
meowface
If only it worked like a log, though. Unless you're a John von Neumann level
outlier, you can't query your memory for "what's everything I did between 9
and 10 AM on October 12, 2017?"

~~~
carapace
What have you tried?

~~~
meowface
Nothing. Just saying memory alone isn't sufficient for most people. Most would
need to rely on something else in addition, like remembering to manually make
note of things in the moment.

~~~
carapace
First, let me say that I'm not against e.g. "quantified self" et. al. at all.
It's fine. (IMO) And _writing_ has, in general, been a benefit, eh?

> Just saying memory alone isn't sufficient for most people.

I'm merely pointing out that the reason we (as evolving beings) have memory in
the first place is due to the adaptive advantage of "logging" experience. ;-)

FWIW, memory _has_ been sufficient for most people: we're here, therefore
every one of our ancestors did at least well enough to make a baby (who grew
up to do at least well enough to make another baby, and so on right up until
you, today.)

~~~
meowface
Right, I mean memory is sufficient for most sorts of things, but if you want
to do the sort of retrospective debugging and analysis the article talks
about, you either need to be born a savant or rely on some external system.
Eventually, when we have good neural interfaces, I think this will be done
automatically, but that may or may not happen in any of our lifetimes.

Natural selection is good for ensuring you make it to a bit past reproductive
age, but for everything else it's really hit-or-miss. As one would expect.
We're just the first known lifeforms that seem to have an imperative beyond
replication.

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bionhoward
Useful article and I want to do this but happiness might not be the best
utility function

