As a wee lad I was neurotic about losing information: reading about the Library of Alexanderia physically hurt, I’d lay awake at night crying in bed about the inevitable nostalgia I’d experience after growing up, and a frequent emotional state I’d refer to in my diaries (I’d write this in a red font, mind) was “burning libraries in my mind”. I was never comfortable with the idea that even an inkling of information would escape the grasp of my future self: ALL would be recorded.

Muh childhood

And so to the question “what are you tracking in your head?” I would answer “how many bits of information I’m saving every time I do something” or “what my information-wake is”. Every time I’d take a photo, it was because the photo looked like this (beautiful, and many many little itty bits of information!):

Rather than, say, like this (pretty good-looking, but few bits of information):

Or, God forbid, images Famous Monument X or Famous Painting Y.

And it became a game; just how much information can I store in a picture? Just how many timestamps are attached to things I do? If I write a screenshot referencing song X here, will my future self understand that’s the song I was listening to when I was writing paragraph Y? Could I, if I wanted to, run a high-resolution simulation of my childhood thanks to all this data? A superintelligence may not be able to intuit general relativity from 2 frames of a falling apple, but would it be able to gather more or less exactly who I was given the records I left behind?¹

And so a habit of casual archiving began. Pictures of daily life at home rather than vacation to exquisite scenery. Writing mundane observations, rather than fiction. Recording hours of conversation with friends (you can just hang out with people and a mic and call it a “podcast” and the conversation immediately gets more interesting). Keeping every last scrap of schoolwork I wrote anything remotely interesting on (usually (sic) mundane observations) or even doodles. Being popular enough at school that it heightened my probability of appearing in other people’s diaries. Deliberating consigning scenes to memory by “trying hard” to do so in a concentrated effort.

Object level: casually archiving information about yourself

• Export your Twitter archive
• Export your Claude conversations
• Keep all your interesting scribbled doodles/thoughts in a big chest in the corner of your room
• Journal digitally rather than on paper
• Get into the training data
• Use archive.is on interesting websites you encounter
• Go overboard and set something up like Gwern has
• Take pictures of high-perplexity, high-bit-content stuff (like daily situations, messy rooms, bookshelves, sprawled desks, breakfast, screenshots of your 650 open tabs, the bed or couch you unceremoniously dumped a bunch of objects on)
• Scenes and narratives: your family doing obvious, repetitive daily things that would particularly please a historian (rather than the comparatively prosaic umpteenth picture of them at Famous Location)
• Cities: alleyways, graffiti, unkept grounds, town hall billboards, torn affichage, denizens doing denizen things, particularly grating/funny instances of civilizational incompetence, items tied to an adventure you went through (keyed with a descriptor of your adventure),
• Get into the habit of writing thoughts down (adding explicit Chain of Thought to your life/decisions) and get a higher WPM
• a websites-you’ve-been-to-for-how-long recorder
• frequent screenshots of your phone screen using the default Markup app (assorted with paragraphs-long explanations of your thought process / emotions / commentary)
• voice recorder / video of your feet/surroundings every time you walk away from a conversation, commentating on everything you can remember
• writing down a conversation right after it happens, assorted with links and thoughts c.f. Yuxi.ml/logs
• a diary, of course
• description of yourself / compliments to yourself made by others
• extensive, verbalized introspection
• backing up your messages (as e.g. WhatsApp has a tendency of deleting these), messages are extremely high information-dense but tend to get forgotten immediately
• make sure your bank keeps your receipts somewhere (ideally you can back this up yourself)
• backed up computer (e.g. my entire Mac is backed up on my google drive)
• Keep pieces of schoolwork/paper you scribbled anything original at all on as a kid: c.f. the chest on the side of the room, you underestimate the physical size of your childhood-remnants!

  Meta level: casually archiving information about yourself

• a general belief that information being deleted is terrible
• “my life is an ancestor simulation run by my future self and I need to acausally help him make the simulation more authentic by racking up as much data about my life as possible” (worked for me in my own childhood See ¹!)
• a love of the mundane, the vanilla, the everyday, as a source of infinite “wedges” in which to crack open a world
• inability to grow bored at reality, inability to believe in magic or desire magic (more important than you’d think! You will not think true-reality worth observing if you keep wanting to believe “there’s got to be more to it than just these atoms”; right under your nose!)
• a better awareness of time, e.g. “I took this screenshot of music playing at 6:37PM, so my future self will intuit that when I took that picture of a street at 6:39 PM, I was listening to that song, and the screenshot associated with the picture with the words “I love life!” would let him simulate/remember/commemorate the particular shade of happiness that was racking through my body”, i.e. timestamps as ~the most important metadata people don’t think about, luckily our civilization is competent enough to slap timestamps onto everything by default!
• when you hesitate to add an extra detail in a sentence, add it in; this will become automatic, and paired with better typing speed you’ll never want to look back
• gain a better appreciation for the rule “every chunk of reality is more or less a smaller, tiled version of the macro whole” in full generality at all levels i.e. there’s almost as much interesting stuff worth looking at and thinking about within a one meter radius sphere around me as any other sphere like that on the ground, as far as human interest is concerned, and “reality extremely interconnected such that changing one rule would domino ripple everything else” is key to grokking why things are so dense
• write about anything you’re reading, while you’re doing it (or you’ll never do it), scribbled notes are fine
• do not worry about the quality of the substrate you’re recording things on, so long as it is recorded: there are entire lives stored within discord conversations, slack channels, scribbled novel notes, post-its, whiteboards-you-took-photos-of, google docs, screenshots, videos, recorded conversations, LLM conversations, whatever: if you hesitate to write, simply because you’re worried the substrate is ugly or beneath you, you simply will not get anything written ²

Similar links

• Twitter (croissanthology)
• Lifelog (Wikipedia)
• The Case for Life logging as life extension (Matthew Barnett)
• Could a superintelligence deduce general relativity from a falling apple? (titotal)³

Notably “get into the training data” isn’t among my list of reasons, given LLMs didn’t exist for most of my childhood. That did not mean I wasn’t exceedingly excited when I realized that NotebookLM could read all my works and simulate me fairly well.