This is basically what Microsoft wants to do with Recall and they got slammed for it. Which drives me nuts because it's the only feature from the recent AI hype wave that excites me because it's the only thing so far that sounds like it will actually make my life better. But then I thought about it a bit more and I realized that what I really want is not AI, I just want my computer to have a detailed local history and search functionality.

My computer should remember everything I did on it, period. It should remember every website I visited, exactly how far down I scrolled on each page, every thought I typed and subsequently deleted before posting... And it should have total recall! I should be able to rewind back to any point in time and track exactly what happened, because it's a computer. I already have a lossy memory of stuff that happened yesterday and that's inside my head. The whole point of having my computer remember stuff for me is that it's supposed to do it better than me.

And I want the search to be deterministic. I want to be able to input precise timestamps and include boolean operators. Yes, it would be helpful to have fuzzy matches, recommendations and a natural language processing layer too, but Lucene et al already did that acceptably well for local datasets 20+ years ago. It's great we have a common corpus, but I don't care about getting tokenized prose from the corpus, I care about the stuff I did on my own computer!

From my perspective LLMs don't bring much value on the personalized search front. The way I understand it, the nature of their encoding makes it impossible to get back the data you were actually looking for unless that data was also stored and indexed the traditional way, in which case you could have just skipped the layer of indirection and queried the source data in the first place.

I am also curious to see how all of this develops. I get a sense that the current trend of injecting LLMs everywhere is a temporary stop-gap measure used to give people the illusion of a computer that knows everything because researchers haven't yet figured out how to actually index "everything" in a performant way. But for the use case of personalized search, the computer doesn't actually need to know "everything", it only needs to know about text that was visible on-screen, plus a bit of metadata (time period, cursor position, clipboard, URL etc). If we currently still need an LLM to index that because snapshotting the actual text and throwing it into a traditional index requires too much disk space, okay, but then what's next? Because just being able to have a vague conversation about a thing I kindasorta maybe was doing yesterday is not it. Total recall is it.

> My computer should remember everything I did on it, period. It should remember every website I visited, exactly how far down I scrolled on each page, every thought I typed and subsequently deleted before posting...

Sheesh.

As someone who uses web browsers that delete all session data when they're closed, and routinely wipes any "recently used" lists and temporary files in all operating systems I use, the thought of the machines I'm using remembering my usage behavior to such an extent is terrifying to me.

I mean, I get why those features would be appealing. I just have zero trust in the companies that build such software, because they've violated my trust time and time again. Yet I'm expected to suddenly trust them in this case? Not a chance. Not when the data that I would be entrusting them with for the features you mention are a literal gold mine for them. Trusting a trillion-dollar corporation with a history of privacy violations and hostility towards its users is just unthinkable for me, no matter what features I might be missing out on.

It's unfortunate that computing has come to this, but I choose the hardware and software I use very carefully. In cases where I'm forced to use a system I don't trust, I try my best to limit my activity and minimize the digital footprints I leave behind. I prefer using open source software for this reason, but even that is carefully selected, since OSS is easily corruptible by unscrupulous developers, and companies that use it as a marketing tactic.

The only way I might use software with that level of intrusion is if I've inspected every line of it, I run it inside a container with very limited permissions, or if I've written it myself. Needless to say, it's more likely I'll just miss out on using those features instead, and I'm fine with that.

Well i mean what microsoft wanted to do was a great idea, what they delivered was bullshit and poorly executed just asking for a data leak the way it was implemented they didn't even properly vault the data lol

> It should remember every website I visited

I don't know about other browsers, but Safari does this. It's come in handy when I'm like "what was that site I visited two years ago?" and I can open my history and query to filter the list of pages, and there it is, January 17, 2023, yoda ate my balls retrospective