tbabb

Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse, someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise: Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it. And so on.

For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.

That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".

They don't mention Twitter, but that's where Willison got it from.

Recruiters use automated tools to scrape LinkedIn profiles and send what amounts to customized spam.

On the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, clock time is entirely a social construct whose whole purpose is to coordinate social and business activity, so it should be specifically designed around social customs in order to serve that purpose.

Aha! That was a bonehead miss on my part. Very nice, and very slick interface. :)

Pixar used RCS at the time. Problem is, when you run `rm -rf /`, that deletes the RCS directories as well.

Ed Catmull.

> I play sports. I may be able to catch a ball with one eye

I would love to see a sports game where one team can use both eyes, and the other team only has one eye uncovered. I imagine it'd be downright funny.

> Humans don’t really use stereopsis beyond the reach of their arms

This is outright false. A person with acute vision can perceive stereopsis out to 1/4 mile. Trivially, 3D movies are projected onto screens which are 10m away.

> which is why we can also understand pictures

We don't drive using pictures.

The failures will continue indefinitely, until Tesla decides to use stereopsis for ranging.

> Requiring multiple sensors means that all of your sensor systems need to notice a danger

This is the opposite of true. In well-designed sensor fusion algorithms, every new piece of sensor data, however noisy, helps to overconstrain the estimate. Each sensor reading helps to inform the interpretation of the other readings. If your system is designed such that more information worsens your inference, you have designed a terrible system.