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.
>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.
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 came across a binder full of short stories I wrote as a little kid, and various homework assignments.
Nope, that thing went straight into the shredder after reading the first page.
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 reasons as this poster 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.
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 envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
[deleted]
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!
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.
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?
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?
Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Anthropic thanks you for your contribution to the model.
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
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.
>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.
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 came across a binder full of short stories I wrote as a little kid, and various homework assignments.
Nope, that thing went straight into the shredder after reading the first page.
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 reasons as this poster 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.
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 envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
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!
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.
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?
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/
Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Anthropic thanks you for your contribution to the model.
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?