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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You know what I really look forward to?

AR glasses with facial ID and rolodex features, and fuck the privacy concerns.

I have ADHD, and for the life of me I can't remember names and faces of someone I don't see every day unless I make a concerted effort to memorize it. My brain would rather accrue all sorts of garbage insight porn and random trivia than something like that. This a problem I'm sure many of you face, or at least the insight porn addiction, but it's a pain in the ass for someone with an enormous family who has to familiarize themselves with an ever rotating cast of characters in their hospital.

I am deeply envious of anyone for whom this comes naturally. Just give me something innocuous that reminds me that X is my aunt's cousins nephew's dog's trainer's dog or something, and appends records of our conversation.

I've already forgotten the names of half my classmates in med school, let alone actual school.

What is it that allows some of us to remember names and faces? In university I was roommates with a guy who had his own band and was very gregarious and beloved. I would regularly be out with him and people would approach, I'd whisper ("That's John Johnson you met him last year at X's party, he's with Debbie Debson she's Y's friend) and my friend would proceed to say their names at their greeting and thus become more beloved (I myself was not remembered by said John and Debbie).

I have been teaching for more than 20 years and I can name every student in my first class in Japan in 1998. I am not exaggerating. I have upwards of 300 students now and although classes began on April 2nd I know probably 60% of their names. I saw a girl (woman I suppose) whom I used to teach probably in 2010 the other day and although I would not have summoned her to memory had I not randomly run into her, I knew both her first and last (maiden now) names, and said them immediately. She did remember me by name, as well, but it's not so hard to remember the guy who stands up and lectures for 90 minutes twice a week.

Prosopagnosia is when you cannot recall faces. I suppose there's a lite version as well. I am whatever the opposite is.

My situation is certainly not so bad that it'll end up listed as a neurological condition or in the DSM manual, by itself.

It's probably a failing arising purely from my ADHD, as is my tendency to simply zone out when traveling and not remember the route I took. With conscious effort, I definitely can remember those things, but I'm simply jealous of people as lucky as you, and I'm not sour-grapes enough to invent a term for it, heh. Many things in psychiatry are quantitative and not qualitative, so I just drew the short straw.

At least I'm very good at bullshitting till I figure out who they are from context. And it's likely somewhat genetic, given that my mom has a milder form of the same problem whereas my dad and grandpa keep track of everyone (and they know a lot of people).

Rejoice in being superhuman in that regard. That's not a disease. Or if it is, it's one I wish I had. ADHD just sucks, I'm lucky mine is mild.

Well yeah a persistent database connected to your brain and vision would be tremendously useful for a lot of things including remembering people's names. Lol

I would really like if I never had to pull out my phone from my pocket again or even never look at my watch again. Just fucking overlay the time, gps directions, email and group chat into my natural vision at this rate.

C'mon, someone remake Google Glass again, but good. Don't tell me a literal decade and change of improvements to batteries, chips and laser projection/translucent displays can't make it happen.

My impression (never owned one) was that the problem with Google Glass wasn't the tech, but social acceptance. It was at best seen as dorky, and at worst met with open hostility (e.g. the "glasshole" epithet). I think that's the issue you would need to solve. I hate to say it, but the solution is probably to have Apple make one. There won't be any meaningful improvement, but suddenly people will think it's cool because has a fruit logo.

Things have gotten better. Snapchat's version with recording features (I don't think it has a display) was generally quite popular. It looked like fun glasses rather than something cybernetic.

Apple probably wants to get it down to a similar form factor, but they simply can't, hence why their current MR product is whatever the fuck it is. They simply ask too much of it, whereas all I want is a camera, facial ID, notes, navigation and the like. It can even be relatively dumb and connect to my phone or an external computing device for the smarts and processing power.

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