Newsletter 05 - The story of your life

Preface

This is a record and reflection of life from 2024-09-01 to 2024-09-08.

The project that has been busy for more than half a year had an ASPICE pre-audit this week, and team consensus is very important. Added support for markmap and mermaid to the blog framework, although the function is small, it took some time. Studying deep learning-based object detection algorithms, which will be used in the upcoming project. From “Where Does My Language Come From” to “Catfish: What is a Frank and Sober Life”, considering whether to start writing a memoir.

The art of language

Some people speak in a very interesting way, but it is rare to meet such interesting people in life, so you have to think about how to make yourself speak more interestingly.

I am not the kind of person who speaks interestingly, which may be related to the living environment since childhood, and personality is also one aspect. For a long time, I was basically an introvert person. I would rather not speak if possible, worrying about not speaking well, and also thinking that some things don’t need to be said much. But at this age, I do hope to learn to speak well and become that interesting person. The beginning was Li Dan’s this podcast, which made me reflect on my childhood and later school years, not taking language and speaking seriously, of course, I didn’t understand back then. Growing up in a rural area, the people in the village worked silently or yelled loudly, and everyone didn’t seem to care much about speaking. There was no internet at that time, few TV channels, and no books to read. Later, I went to the city for high school, although I read some extracurricular books, most were youth pain literature, which made me more introvert, living in my small world and giving up speaking. But there were some sporadic moments, reading some interesting sentences, such as Liu Liangcheng’s book of “One Man’s Village”, I still remember sitting on the stone bench at the door, feeling that this person’s text was interesting. But overall, it was minimal, not inspiring my speaking ability much.

I am not talking about people who can speak elegantly and readily, that’s too difficult, nor the noisy people who are good at small talk, which is annoying. Instead, I am talking about whether to strip away those utilitarian intentions and tool attributes and see if the person still has their own language.

Memoir and the story of your life

In this issue of “Weekly for Tech Enthusiasts”, the author mentioned:

Everyone’s life is a story, about the journey taken, battles experienced, troubles and confusions felt. However, most people’s stories are not recorded and are buried with time. They don’t write themselves, and no one writes for them. If there was a service which could turn everyone’s life into a story and preserve it, that would be wonderful.

And found a realization based on this idea, using AI to write a biography for you: The Infinite Audio Book. The idea is to use a homemade photo device to take photos of your surroundings and generate a narrative tone description through the ChatGPT API service. If these descriptions are connected in chronological order, they form your biography.

I tried a photo of my run yesterday afternoon:

The prompt is as follows:

You are the narrator of a movie about Koh. Koh is in Shanghai Jiading. When you see the attached scene photo, you should describe the photo from Koh’s perspective, using third-person for all characters. Koh jogging past the neighborhood…

Here is ChatGLM’s¹ response:

When Koh jogged past the neighborhood, he saw a bustling scene. On this sunny day, several stalls were set up on the sidewalk, attracting many residents. The stalls were filled with various goods such as toys, books, and small accessories, dazzling and eye-catching. On the left, there was a stall under an orange tent, with a sign that read “One Ball One Chopstick Building a Book House Dream,” and next to it was a large cardboard cutout of a cartoon character. On the right, there was another stall with an orange canopy, reading “Long Pearl Small Fair.” There were also other stalls around, each with its own unique features and merchandise. Besides the stalls, people were bustling on the street. Some were selecting goods, others chatting with friends or enjoying the surrounding scenery.
The whole scene was vibrant and joyous, making Koh feel the warmth and beauty of community life.

Well, I think it’s quite something. Of course, I provided very little information here. If I could add a bit of feeling at the time or form context through multiple frames of photos before and after, the generated results might be more fitting.

Actually, many years ago, I had a similar idea, recording daily life snippets in some way, so when I get old, I can reminisce about the past and avoid being forgotten. Initially trying to keep a diary, but expression was weak, and some things changed once written down, already processed by the brain. Later found an app called 1 Second Everyday. With this app, you take 1 second of video every day, then combine them into about 5 minutes of footage for a year. If you keep it up, by the time you’re old, it can almost be the length of a movie, and this can be considered the movie of your life.

When studying abroad, I shot intermittently for a while, but always forgot, and there wasn’t always something interesting happening every day. Later, after starting to work, life became more monotonous, and there was even less motivation to shoot.

From my personal experience, letting AI write a biography for you daily is indeed feasible. If combined with current AI wearable devices, such as AI glasses, realizing non-sensing shooting and recording, then everyone having their “life story” would be not far off.

Additionally, Apple’s built-in Journal now has some of this in mind. Once Apple Intelligence becomes available, it should integrate well. However, considering the current AI capabilities, maybe keeping good records is more important. Take more photos of daily life, save them, and when AI becomes smarter, use it to generate the story.

Fun stuff

This section will record some interesting inputs, such as articles read, podcasts listened to, fun items purchased, etc. Although most of the content will be automatically synced in the “Toots” column, some of it will still be selected and listed here.

Books and media

• 13. Where Does My Language Come From? - Li Dan
• Vol.246 Catfish: What is a Frank and Sober Life - Limited Culture
• How to Speak | MIT OpenCourseWare: An old video, watched it again after seeing it pop up
• What I learned from “How To Speak” by Patrick Winston (MIT) | by Ratip Uysal
• American Novels: Watched a movie at home, a realistic satire of the political correctness of certain groups in Western society, best paired with the next video
• How Far is Africa from Freedom in the Cage of Imperialism?