Mentions personal use of Beeper Desktop.

Transcript context

…Helpful. And then, yeah, and so then you asked, like, am I mirroring data, right? So yeah, so I built one of the projects is called Mirror, by the way, only just now realizing that everything I've been talking to, you know, half the listeners will only be listening and not seeing. So I'll describe a little more. So this is just listing all of the different data things I've integrated with to pull data out of. So it's pulling my Google contents, Google Calendar, sorry, Contacts, Google Calendar, Gmail, WhatsApp, Slack. Twitter, Google Docs, Signal, and SMS messages off of my phone. And so this is, again, the kind of thing I would have never built myself. There's this whole status dashboard of how many records have been imported and how's that going and whatever. I don't even look at this. I only used this briefly when I was first getting it working. So the idea is, now I'm building up this rich database of all that content that I can use for context. I haven't actually done much with it other than driving the real-time inbox view. But, you know, and there's a whole, you know, web UI for searching and, you know, viewing backups and all this toolkit, which again, I used briefly while I was troubleshooting to begin with. Then it's done. There's like- Is that real time view, by the way? Is it polling? I mean, because I've done some of these integrations and some of them have been quite painful. I use Beeper Desktop to try to like aggregate a half dozen or so of them. That's also kind of painful. I feel like Beeper Desktop is, Good idea crashes a lot for me. And I haven't gone as far as getting pings in. So if I want to take inspiration from this and I'm like, oh, how do I get to a real time view? What I currently have is a batch process that I run a couple of times a day to kind of update my database. What have you found in terms of what actually works well for getting closer to real time, if not fully to real time? So this has been far and away the hardest part of everything I'm presenting, and a lot more grief, like, far and away the biggest time sync, and there's eight different solutions, and, you know, just each one was different. It is generally pretty real-time, and I pushed to get that, 'cause I wanted to have this attention firewall inbox view. So, like, Gmail, like, there are great APIs, they're a pain to use, but that's Claude's pain, not mine, and so, yeah, there's some kind of real-time sync And I think the calendar is also-- Google provides a sync API for the calendar. I don't even remember about contacts, but that doesn't need to be real-time. WhatsApp, there are a bunch-- as it sounds like you've found, there are lots of bad solutions for WhatsApp, and it's hard to find a good one. But it turns out-- and I hope that no one from Meta is listening to this-- but what I'm about to describe is not a secret, or I would have never found it out. If you install WhatsApp Desktop on your Mac, and I imagine on Windows, it is obviously syncing down all of your messages. Turns out it stores them in an SQLite database, which is not encrypted, so you can read it. So you're just... I'm just piggybacking off of WhatsApp's own real-time sync. There are a lot of WhatsApp integration solutions out there that... actively talk to some internal WhatsApp API, and there's a lot of stories about people getting their accounts banned, and other stories of people saying, I don't know what you're talking about, it's fine. I don't know exactly how dangerous it is to use those kinds of hacks, but I didn't want any dangerous. But this is, you know, there's no way for WhatsApp to know that you're looking at its read-only access to its database file. So I have just a cron job that runs probably once a minute, I don't remember. And this is on my Mac. So again, you know, there's pieces of this everywhere. There's inside the Docker container, there's outside the Docker container, there's up in the cloud, there's on my phone. So this one is running on my Mac outside the container looking at the WhatsApp SQLite database, Slack. is another API integration. Twitter is the worst, hardest one. I found some very shaky fly by night -- fly by night's an exaggeration, but some very kind of shady borderline looking service that will let you query Twitter And I don't know how they do it and I don't want to know. It's not like reading my feed, which would be nice. I have to manually poll every individual who I follow, but that's only about 80. And so this is the slowest one. It probably rotates through them about once an hour. It would start to cost noticeable money in API fees if I were polling more often than that. And this was like glitchy to get working. But they're all working now, like, you know, it's not like they break every day. Google Docs, again, is an API. Signal, I don't remember. And SMS is an Android app that's watching notifications on my phone. Signal might be similar.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.