>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.
The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.
This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.
Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.
> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.
Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.
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.
I always had enough storage to more or less never be concerned about deleting stuff. I have almost every backup of every phone, computer, relevant app, forum private messages, emails, and so on going back ~25+ years. I found my Yahoo Messenger chat logs and I had the exact same cringe reaction. I didn't delete them but one thing's for sure, my writing style and thinking have changed so much that those artifacts are unrecognizable.
This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.
I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.
I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come.
Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.
I was gonna say something like "If it's MSN chats, unlikely Bitlocker even existed at that point" but seems they are actually closer than I remember, only a ~10 year difference when they launched, MSN in 1995 and Bitlocker in 2006.
I think me and most of my friends were using MSN all up until the "Windows Live" rename, then I think we started using Ventrilo instead, but looking up the year that was around 2005 sometime.
Ultimately, guess it wouldn't be impossible that their MSN logs were encrypted with Bitlocker after all :) I think I started using TrueCrypt around that same time, seems more likely, I think Bitlocker for many, many years was basically only used by enterprises.
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.
Tbh I wish all messaging apps worked like this. While it’s kind of cool to make charts like this, the privacy implications are pretty terrible for keeping conversations forever.
A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.
If the chat is truly E2E there is no way a data breach can happen on the server side. The same applies if the app is only saving chat logs locally. [1]
Now, if the threat scenario is someone implanting a compromised version of the IM app on every device out there, and siphoning data from the device itself, then it's a completely different scenario.
[1] although this could be intercepted by an attacker compromising the IM servers, if the app is not distributed/P2P
Logs are stored on local devices and many people back them up in whatever cloud (majority not encrypted).
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
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?
Be angry then, IM communication is not a contract with terms unilaterly decided by one party. Or put a confidential signature with every message, see how well that works for you
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 do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app.
For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.
You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.
The "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.
The question-rate finding is the most interesting bit. Also the most platform-confounded. When my closest friends moved to voice and video the text question rate dropped to zero, but the underlying asking didnt. So part of the advice-friend signature is really a who-still-types-with-you signature. The author probably has the data to test that but the post doesnt say.
As a hypothetical example, what happens if you could train a custom LLM with your own chats. And it responds to people, and gives the same response as you would. Would that be a form of mental cloning?
I do wanna do the same, but at times I fear about getting too aware from the insights of the analysis, I fear my opinions my faith might change in certain people.
I don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month.
I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.
>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.
The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.
This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.
Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.
> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.
Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw
29 isn't remotely close to too late, dude.
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.
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 always had enough storage to more or less never be concerned about deleting stuff. I have almost every backup of every phone, computer, relevant app, forum private messages, emails, and so on going back ~25+ years. I found my Yahoo Messenger chat logs and I had the exact same cringe reaction. I didn't delete them but one thing's for sure, my writing style and thinking have changed so much that those artifacts are unrecognizable.
This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.
This made me laugh out loud.
I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.
I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come.
Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.
Well if it's bitlocker encrypted I have some good news (potentially) Yellowkey (CVE-2026-45585) is able to bypass it.
I was gonna say something like "If it's MSN chats, unlikely Bitlocker even existed at that point" but seems they are actually closer than I remember, only a ~10 year difference when they launched, MSN in 1995 and Bitlocker in 2006.
I think me and most of my friends were using MSN all up until the "Windows Live" rename, then I think we started using Ventrilo instead, but looking up the year that was around 2005 sometime.
Ultimately, guess it wouldn't be impossible that their MSN logs were encrypted with Bitlocker after all :) I think I started using TrueCrypt around that same time, seems more likely, I think Bitlocker for many, many years was basically only used by enterprises.
I envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
Honestly, it sounds exhausting. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...
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.
Tbh I wish all messaging apps worked like this. While it’s kind of cool to make charts like this, the privacy implications are pretty terrible for keeping conversations forever.
A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.
If the chat is truly E2E there is no way a data breach can happen on the server side. The same applies if the app is only saving chat logs locally. [1]
Now, if the threat scenario is someone implanting a compromised version of the IM app on every device out there, and siphoning data from the device itself, then it's a completely different scenario.
[1] although this could be intercepted by an attacker compromising the IM servers, if the app is not distributed/P2P
Logs are stored on local devices and many people back them up in whatever cloud (majority not encrypted).
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
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?
Be angry then, IM communication is not a contract with terms unilaterly decided by one party. Or put a confidential signature with every message, see how well that works for you
Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.
They might not be doing it on purpose, remember that microsoft windows "take a screenshot every few seconds and send it to an llm" thing?
Signal pushed a fix for that: https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/
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 do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app.
For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.
You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.
Wordclouds per person are also fun!
Huh, the export function in Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/) is still there. Click on the three dots while in a chat and then Export.
I'm not at the desktop right now. Check if the option to do a full (all chats) export still exists.
Was any explanation given as to why the export functionality was removed?
The "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.
The question-rate finding is the most interesting bit. Also the most platform-confounded. When my closest friends moved to voice and video the text question rate dropped to zero, but the underlying asking didnt. So part of the advice-friend signature is really a who-still-types-with-you signature. The author probably has the data to test that but the post doesnt say.
I really though i was your friend… acquaintances… whatever man
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
Finally, a good use for LLMs. I would be so embarrassed to read old messages, yet LLMs just psychopatically chug along without flinching or cringing.
As a hypothetical example, what happens if you could train a custom LLM with your own chats. And it responds to people, and gives the same response as you would. Would that be a form of mental cloning?
I do wanna do the same, but at times I fear about getting too aware from the insights of the analysis, I fear my opinions my faith might change in certain people.
I don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month.
I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.
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?