One byproduct of me storing all my harddrives going back to 2001, is that I also have all my chat logs. Last fall I decided to invest in some HD adapter, as I was looking for pictures of my friend for his 40th birthday - miraculously all drives worked, though some would just power off at random intervals.

I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text.

I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US.

Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.