A friend of mine had a partner accidentally draw blood when he (consensually) bit them. It got infected and they needed quite serious hospital care. I suppose that counts.

Oh, I love the vicarious enjoyment from introducing a friend to something I love. It feels like the closest I can get to re-experiencing something afresh without losing my memory. I am envious of Drag for this opportunity.

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The key is considering who is going to be using these systems. Certainly Google search AI is never going to be useful in this way because the kind of info a patient needs is very different to what a doctor would find useful.

And if we do make systems for doctors, then it’s pretty damn important that we consider things like you have, taking into account that doctors are already overwhelmed and spending way too much effort juggling medical notes. I read a thing a while back which highlighted how many doctors are struggling with information management and processing all the info they need to because of how IT systems have tended to be enforced on them from the top down, with some doctors even saying paper notes were far easier to deal with (especially for complex cases). Digitisation definitely has huge benefits, but it seems like the needs of doctors have been largely ignored.

Even besides doctors, I feel like the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been way too focussed on ways of wringing out more money from people, with not enough focus put on how we can make technology that empowers people. It’s no wonder why: If I were a HCI researcher, I know what kind of project would be more likely to get research funding, and it’s the ruthlessly capitalistic ones.

“An 80% false positive is still quite useful, so long as the 20% helps and the rest is easy for a human to filter.”

This gets at a key point, in my opinion — even when one ignores the straightforwardly scammy “AI” nonsense, a lot that remain are still overly focussed on building systems that do stuff for people (usually in a way that would eliminate or reduce people in the process. Many examples of this exist, but one is “AI teachers” which still requires a human in the room, but only as a “learning facilitator” or some nonsense). I work in a field where machine learning has been a prominent thing for years, so I’m in a weird place of being sick of hearing about AI, and also impressed by what we do have. Mainly though, I’m exasperated because we could be doing so much more with the tech we have if we made tools that were intended to be used by humans.

Humans are dumb and emotional and silly, but we are also pretty cool and we can make awesome things when given the opportunity to. I will always be cynical about tech that seems over keen to cut humans out of things

Thanks for this breakdown, I can see why people are protesting. The situation is fucked

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

That sounds beautiful. You really captured the moment

No it won’t. Eco-fascist rhetoric like this is unproductive because it ignores the fact that the people who are most shielded from the harms of climate change are the ones most responsible for it.

Billionaires and others who are profiting most from pillaging the planet’s resources are not the ones at risk here.

(N.b. I am not calling you an eco-fascist, just that this framing is commonly used by eco-fascists. Part of why I highlight this is because your use of this rhetoric may not be intentional)

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

I think being aware of the ongoing maintenance (and one’s ability to do it) still feels productive in a prepping sense. It’s sort of like meta-prepping? Like, I’d expect that in a disaster, your knowledge would be helpful in organising within your community. Certainly you’d fare better than me, as someone who has been fortunate enough to never have to consider emergency supplies.

I have a variety of blankets near my bed, of varying weight, warmth and texture. It’s mostly because of autism related sensory preferences that vary across situations, but it’s also great when hosting guests.

I’m not sure what definition you’re referring to, but I don’t see any reason why visualisation is necessary.

By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he’d gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).

I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn’t just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn’t rely on himself to test how well he’d done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.

I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they’re operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.

With all due respect, I don’t believe aphantasia is a real thing. The way people imagine things is so varied, weird, strange, and unique that I don’t think it makes sense assigning labels

Labels should always be used with caution, but for me, learning about aphantasia led to me reconsidering the ways in which I imagine things, and this had a beneficial impact on how I communicated with people close to me. For example, I seem to be an odd mixture of relying on visual stimuli for thinking (so I have visual reminders all over, and reading complex info is way easier for me than hearing it), but also seem to lack the ability to visualise. This means that if my partner asks “hey, do you remember which drawer the mini screwdrivers are in?”, I would usually be unable to answer, despite being able to walk in, take a glance at the drawers and go “that one, there”. We didn’t realise how frustrating this was for both of us until we reflected on the possibility of me having aphantasia. Whether I do or not doesn’t matter. More relevant is the fact that now, when he asks me questions of where things are, it’ll often be accompanied by a photograph of the location, which drastically improves my ability to recall and point to where the item is.

To some degree, I agree that it’s nonsense to assign labels when in nature and in humans, variation is the norm. Certainly it can lead to reductionism and ignoring wide swathes of that variety if one is on a quest to sort people into boxes. However, there is still a lot that we don’t know about how the brain works to process things and labels can be instructive either in researching aspects that we don’t yet understand, or for regular people like me who find benefit in a word that helps me to understand and articulate that there are ways that my partner thinks and processes information that seem to be impossible for me to emulate. “Aphantasia” helped both of us to be more accepting of these differences.

Framing a phenomenon as either real or not isn’t especially useful though, largely because of the ambiguity in the phrasing. An example in a different domain is that I’ve seen a wide variety of people claim that they don’t think autism is a real thing. This tends to be received as offensive to many people, not least of all autistic people who feel like their lived experience is being directly attacked and questioned. Sometimes it is, and their anger is justified. However, I’ve also seen the “autism isn’t a real thing” sentiment come from (often autistic) people critiquing the label and how it’s used, especially in a clinical context. They argue that it perpetuates a binary framing of autistic and not autistic, which further marginalises people who do have a diagnosis, and isolates some people who have autistic traits but are overall sub-clinical in presentation (who may have benefitted from understanding these traits from an autistic perspective). Regardless of one’s view of the arguments, it’s pretty clear that these are two very different stances that might be described by “autism isn’t a real thing”.

I make this example because debating of the utility of labels can be a great and fruitful discussion that helps to improve our understanding of the underlying phenomena and people’s experiences of them. Framing that debate as what’s real or not can lead to less productive arguments that are liable to cause offence (especially on the internet, where we’re primed to see things in a more adversarial manner)

I have known people with aphantasia who were avid readers of fiction, and I’ve read accounts that more or less say “good writing allows me to somewhat vicariously enjoy a sense that I don’t have, perhaps similar to how deaf people can enjoy music.”. Besides that, fiction is so diverse that the necessity of visualisation ability likely varies across genres, authors, time periods etc…

My gut says that aphantasia would almost certainly affect how people would engage with fiction, but that it’s not a determinant of whether they do or not. Ditto for autism (indirectly responding to OP: I have anecdotally found that autistics are rarely ambivalent on fiction — we either can’t get enough of it, or can’t engage with it at all. Some people I have known have directly attributed their love of fiction to their autistic modes of being)

I don’t think I’m clear on what you’re asking? Is it that you’re confused as to how a person can be a fantasy or sci-fi author with aphantasia?

If that is what you’re asking, then as someone with aphantasia, I likely can’t explain how that can happen anymore than people who don’t have aphantasia (like you, I presume) could explain to me what it’s like to visualise things. What I can say is that whilst I don’t tend to read fiction much nowadays, I used to be an avid reader of both sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve found that immersive writing tends to involve descriptions that involve more senses than just sight, and also that the environment can be effectively described through how characters interact within the world. A well described world might be easy to visualise, but I don’t think that being able to visualise things is necessary for producing that.

Not least of all because all the best writers also read a lot, and fiction is predominantly written by and for people who don’t have aphantasia. Through this, I would expect that an author with aphantasia would become proficient in writing that facilitates readers’ visual imaginations, even if they themselves didn’t engage with fiction in that manner.

Background: I did this experiment with the pre-existing belief that I likely have aphantasia.

Starting with the important question, no, I didn’t know the answer to these things before being asked

The ball was red, but I don’t think my initial “rendering” involved a colour of a ball at all, because the colour isn’t relevant to how it rolls. The ball felt cold, because that’s one of the ways I understood its weightiness, and thus how it rolls. The ball was small enough to hold in one hand, but in “visualising” its size, I imagined how it would feel in my hand. The ball I imagined was a bit larger than a tennis ball and much heavier. I can imagine the force my fingers would need to exert to grasp it.

The person who pushed the ball had no gender because it wasn’t relevant. When I considered the person’s gender, they were a woman, but that information seems to have gotten lost when I “looked away” by considering other questions; when I reread the questions, I “forgot” what gender the ball pusher was, and this time they were man. I suspect that because the information wasn’t relevant to the manner the ball was being pushed, the person pushing the ball was in a sort of superposition of gender, where they are both and/or neither man and/or woman, because it was liable to change whenever I “looked away”.

The ball pusher(s) didn’t look like anything unless I really pushed myself on this question and then I’m like “erm, I guess they were brunette?”, but I think a similar thing happens as with the gender question — unless I have a way to remember what traits I assigned to the ball pusher, I’m just going to forget and have to regenerate the traits. I suspect that if I were actively visualising something, these details would stick together better, like paint to a canvas.

The table has a similar effect of nebulousness. My only assumption before you asked further about the table was that it was level (because the ball started at rest) and rectangular/square. When I tried to consider the table in more detail, I asked myself “what can a table be made out of”. Wood comes to mind most obviously, because I have a wood table near me. Laminated particle-board is another thing. I also remember some weird, brightly coloured , super lightweight plastic tables from school. It could also be metal. It could have four legs, or it might have a central base like the dining table at my last house. It might be circular, or oval, or rhomboid. I think I just modelled it as squarish because I’ve learned enough mathsy-physics that I’m inclined to think of spherical cows, and having a straight edge is easier to model for mathematically, and to draw.

Brains sure are wacky, huh?

I opened this question and realised with a sense of dread that I don’t think I have an answer to this question; often it feels like my days are slipping by without making meaningful progress in the things I care about.

That may or may not be true, but regardless, I’m going to use this space to improve at self forgiveness. It’s difficult to show myself the compassion I deserve as a human, but it’s easier if I try to think of myself as a dear friend. If I were my friend, I’d feel proud of me for my strength, and angry on my behalf at the fact I am having to endure so much bullshit that is holding me back. I’d feel sad, but hopeful for the hypothetical future where I might be more free to make progress on my goals.

Without a frame of reference, I don’t think this constitutes improvements on anything per se. However, by setting my flag down here and underscoring my intent to be kinder to myself, I am creating a future where I will be able to look back on this comment and think “wow, such progress”. The second best time to plant a tree is now, and all that.

I got the impression from the summary that “broadly welcomed” may include opinions like “there’s a lot of work to do on the implementation front, but this sounds like a step in the right direction”, as is common when there’s a big and complex problem. Unions are used to being given loads of assurances at the beginning when policies are declared, and then gradually over time, the concessions in a bill get eroded. “Broadly welcomed” could mean that 27 of the unions have sentiments that are roughly 65% positive on this, and 1 of them (the quoted one) is 60% negative. In this case, maybe including a quote from the mostly negative union also captures some of the sentiments of the 35% negatives from the main bulk. If this is the only quote included, it is weird, but I imagine the full article has more perspectives.

Edit: Reading the full article deepened this impression — apparently this is a big enough endeavour that it’s expected to be on the drawing board for at least 2 years? Another union (TUC) said that “this bill highlights Labour’s commitment to upgrade rights and protections for millions” — language like “highlights Labour’s commitment” is fairly fluffy, which suggests to me an angle of “starting this early in your elected window bodes well for your intentions, hopefully we can keep this up for long enough that we get a practical change”

In addition, the union who gave the negative quote are a small businesses union, and whilst I’m definitely on the side of the workers over businesses, I also think it’s important to recognise that legislation like this tends to put a disproportionate burden on small businesses compared to the mega-corporations (who can lobby more and also absorb impacts easier).

This announcement is good news, but Starmer has moved the goalposts on past promises so many times that any optimism I might feel is tempered by a “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Time will tell, I suppose. !Remindme 2 years (this is a joke, I don’t think Lemmy has a RemindMe bot)

This is only tangentially related to what you just said, but I find adaptations fascinating because of how permeable the concept of “staying true to the source material” is.

One of the best examples I can think of is the animated movie Nimona, based on a graphic novel (that started as a webcomic) by N.D. Stevenson. The movie changes a heckton from the graphic novel, but in a way that arguably leads to a more authentic adaptation of the “soul” of the graphic novel. An example from the inverse is Shyamalan’s adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender: there were parts that were copied over, shot for shot, from the animated show, and even this segments that closely followed the source material just didn’t work — things that worked in animation don’t work in live action and vice versa.

I don’t think there’s any one interpretation of what the “soul” of a piece of media is, but watching Velma was perplexing because I wondered whether Kaling had actually wanted to make an adapted spin-off, or whether this was a completely separate show that later had a Scooby Doo veneer put on top. I wish I could’ve better understood what her vision was, because I can’t see what, if anything, resonated with Kaling from the original media.

That’s actually helpful, thanks