When I was doing a computer repair: I remember a woman coming in with a digital answering machine; the kind that stored its recordings in volatile flash. During a thunderstorm the night prior the machine lost power, and subsequently lost all the stored recordings. As it happens some of those lost recordings included messages from the woman's late mother.
That moment has stuck with me for many, many years. The heartbreak on her face, combined with my own frustration of knowing that no amount of luck (or skill) will ever be able to flip the bits of that flash chip back to a permutation which contains samples of her loved one's voice.
Fast forward to the present, my own grandmother passed away shortly after the start of 2019. I was able to salvage some of the many voicemails she had left me over the years, despite having had probably five or six cellphones during that period. Why? I used Google Voice, which is part of their Google Takeout data exfiltration program. I was able to download all those voicemails as MP3s, neatly categorized by caller. My grandma was very terse, so most of them are exactly the same: "Robert, can you please call me?", but in spite of that each one is unique and precious to me. A lot of developers think about getting data into their platform, but it seems to me that not as many think about users getting their data, sometimes precious & irreplaceable, back out of the platform.
My pet project I will likely never have the resources to work on would be AI-generated 3D virtual environments based on old photos / videos that you could navigate in VR and relive long lost memories
I'd pay a good amount of money to be able to relive certain experiences from my childhood with that level of immersion
That moment has stuck with me for many, many years. The heartbreak on her face, combined with my own frustration of knowing that no amount of luck (or skill) will ever be able to flip the bits of that flash chip back to a permutation which contains samples of her loved one's voice.
Fast forward to the present, my own grandmother passed away shortly after the start of 2019. I was able to salvage some of the many voicemails she had left me over the years, despite having had probably five or six cellphones during that period. Why? I used Google Voice, which is part of their Google Takeout data exfiltration program. I was able to download all those voicemails as MP3s, neatly categorized by caller. My grandma was very terse, so most of them are exactly the same: "Robert, can you please call me?", but in spite of that each one is unique and precious to me. A lot of developers think about getting data into their platform, but it seems to me that not as many think about users getting their data, sometimes precious & irreplaceable, back out of the platform.