Related works:
personal data ownership quantified self universal knowledge graph personal search engine
Summary
Demo of it in action for the OCTO Speaker Series
generates map of all places his dog has been to using wolf emoji in swarm check-in message and then ingesting all swarm data
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- Key is using serverless hosting (which charges for traffic), like vercel and then bundling a static, read-only database with it.
- What would it look like to make this compatible with writes? Can it be an authorization-based thing?
- security is usually always an issue here and the trade-off with getting access to data, but in this case, it’s not a problem because the possibility for insecure has been removed with read-only database and ensuring that all data is public
- storage is solved by using sqlite.
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One of my favourite features is that a SQLite database is a single file on disk. This makes it easy to copy, send around and also means I can bundle data up in that single file, include it in a Docker file and deploy it to serverless hosts to serve it on the internet.
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- One pattern that emerges from this is scraping, an offline process of gathering data and updating it via a commit model like Github.
- Git scraping
- takes inspiration from Stephen Wolfram who built an entire software stack to keep track of his life Seeking the Productive Life Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
- love his naming of stuff, named it Dogsheep after wolf, ram, pun to be lesser than the legend
- Dogsheep Beta is the search engine named after wolfram alpha
- core issue is that needs to be democratized. this is all about personal data ownership and bridging the data moat
Awesome Parts
- super fast, performative, accessible data that is easily queried with SQL and can be exposed in a public API or automatically hosted in a public serverless site
- Gives you the power to download all of your data into a common format (sqlite)
- meant for data that is mostly unchanged after the initial commit.
Limitations
- limited to super developers to set up for themselves
- simon doesn’t think it is profitable or good for a hosted service to exist for this. People should own their own data. What is best way to approach this?
- coda theoretically could scale this to hosted service
- supports very limited set of updates and isn’t performative for huge database.