I have a custom agent that I call my "G.S.D." (Get Stuff Done) agent.
It is explicitly not a foreman, task routing, or an orchestrator agent. It has a bias toward direct action and is instructed to only delegate when necessary.
I've found that this approach yields significantly faster results, without much of a quality trade-off, than an agent whose primary impulse is to delegate.
In contrast, HydraFusion starts with a task routing step, then sequential planning, execution, and review stages. My guess is that this workflow is best for people who are prioritizing cost over speed for the same level of quality.
> No child whose parent or other person responsible for his care allows the child to engage in independent activities without adult supervision shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child, provided that (a) such independent activities are appropriate based on the child's age, maturity, and physical and mental abilities and (b) such lack of supervision does not constitute conduct that is so grossly negligent as to endanger the health or safety of the child. Such independent activities include traveling to or from school or nearby locations by bicycle or on foot, playing outdoors, or remaining at home for a reasonable period of time.
I would think that in order to justify a conviction, prosecutors would have had to overcome the above by showing evidence that this particular child is INCAPABLE of safely walking to a nearby location within his neighborhood, or that the child ACTUALLY DID put himself in danger, i.e. by entering the pond.
Something tells me that evidence does not exist, and the judge ruled based on something other than a correct reading of the law.
Surely the author must have anticipated some heightened level of risk in pegging important parts of his personal and business life on a nonstandard TLD like this.
It's a pretty bizarre exception to the normal, intuitive ways that domains work.
I'll admit that it's a crappy situation and I would be frustrated in his place. But if I were in his place, I probably would have also thought it prudent to have a backup plan.
.name is in no way a "nonstandard TLD." It has been in existence for a quarter of a century and was part of the first batch of new gTLDs approved after the dot-com boom had begun, in 2000.
For the first couple of years of .name's existence, it only allowed registration of third-level domains, and the ability to register second-level domains was added later (and only if no third-level domains existed for that second-level domain).
The author is in no way at fault here, and I don't think I would have assumed there was a heightened level of risk if I were him.
What exactly is non-standard about an ICANN-approved TLD? Yes, the multi-level structure is a little odd, but given that ICANN approved it in the first place, one has a reasonable expectation that they would work as advertised.
Even though .science was launched in 2014 (more than a decade ago), I still consider it a non-standard TLD and still deal regularly with difficulties around its use. (For instance, you wouldn't believe how many online services reject email addresses than end in .science because they use regexes that exclude TLDs with 7 letters.)
Likewise, I've registered .lol and .fun domains but never would have assumed that just because they're available now, they will be available in perpetuity.
In that sense, .name as a third-level TLD is even more non-standard, because the standard way domain registration works is by choosing a single "second level" domain name, then adding subdomains.
> Likewise, I've registered .lol and .fun domains but never would have assumed that just because they're available now, they will be available in perpetuity.
Why wouldn't you assume this?
> the standard way domain registration works is by choosing a single "second level" domain name, then adding subdomains
The entire ccTLD systems of the UK, China, Germany, France, Japan, and many others would beg to differ.
I don't think those are comparable, because when you register a .co.uk domain, you are selecting one name that precedes .co.uk, similar to how you register one name that precedes .com.
Whereas with .name, you are choosing what appears to be a subdomain, followed by what appears to be a domain name. But under the hood, you do not own all subdomains for that domain name; you own only the combination of first_name.last_name.name.
I'm not sure I understand. How is registering first.last.name not also selecting one name ("first") that precedes last.name, similar to how you register one name that precedes .com?
(And yes, I am aware that you can also register last.name by itself, but only if there are no third-level domains using it, so for practical purposes it doesn't change my question above. Plus, when the OP originally purchased his domain, you could only buy third-level domains for .name.)
Present these two domain names to the average person:
1) benedict.cumberbatch.name
2) drstrange.co.uk
I expect the average person would assume that for the domain 1, .name is the TLD, cumberbatch.name is registered by a private entity, and benedict (and any other subdomains associated with cumberbatch.name) is a subdomain fully controlled by that private entity.
Whereas for domain 2, I think the average person will view ".co.uk" the same way they view ".com", even though technically it is both a ccTLD and a second-level domain.
The average person doesn’t have the foggiest idea how TLDs, DNS, or domain registration work at all.
The only people who will make the assumptions you state are people who are tech-savvy enough to be familiar with those concepts, but not well-versed enough in them to understand the nuances we’re discussing.
And none of this does anything to advance the argument that .name is somehow nonstandard.
Even if I agree with you that the "average person" meets the 3 specific criteria you list (which I don't), I don't believe the claim that the typical security training includes specific instruction in how TLDs and domain registration work, at least not in enough detail for a person to be able to follow the discussion we're having here.
My insurance will not send emails to my first@last.family domain. Neither will several other systems. A number of systems flat out refuse to acknowledge that such a tld exists. (Improper assumptions about valid email addresses)
Non-standard as in "it's not up to my usual standards" not "is not part of a technical standard". I.e. it's a gTLD rather than a "standard" (in the previous sense) TLD.
I mean, we could say much the same of any other non-country TLD, and probably half the country TLDs. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t expect it to be administered responsibly
Anything other than .com, .net, .org, and well-known ccTLDs I see in search results subconsciously get skipped over as "probably SEO spam or other useless content". These new weird TLDs are like the .tk and .us of old.
> We have plenty of space to put them – less than 0.01 percent of the US is used for landfill, less than 0.001 percent of Australia is, and only about 0.02 percent of Germany is.
Not all space is equally viable. Landfills need to be close enough to populated areas to make waste transportation feasible, while far enough from populated areas to avoid being a blight.
So, sure, you can build a landfill in the very center of the Australian outback, but who's going to use it?
My kids grew up on Scratch and still occasionally play games there. It was a nice way to casually introduce them to programming concepts. My oldest is now 16 and an active member of Hack Club, so I'd say Scratch is one of the activities that may have given him the itch.
I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projector screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane.
That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.
He started by saying he initially couldn't even achieve phantasia (at school) but now can and that validates his experience which is he has made strides on mental imagery department.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
It's not, but you then must admit that there's a variety of experience that you may not experience, and that some people don't need to learn, or vice versa, cannot learn.
Fair enough but we're not discussing all under the heaven here.
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
Parent poster was rejecting the idea that subjective reports claiming impossibility were possible, I'm not going to extend them the benefit of the doubt in the opposite direction. "That's not a real thing" puts the onus on the demonstrator, you can't disprove subjective experience using subjective experience.
I believe in a plurality of human experiences, they do not, because they experienced one thing different. It's a specious argument, just like all the people rejecting the idea that other people can have a different subjective experience (based solely on their own personal experience) in this thread.
I think people can experience A, B, and C, he's saying "I was like A, but I learned to be like B, therefore A does not really exist". It's a bad argument. It's like claiming that, because you have dyslexia and learned to read, dyslexia doesn't exist, even though other people who are dyslexic can have a severity where they can't learn to read.
He desribed his own experience of learninig to visualise. That is entirely valid thing to say in the context of "is it learnable or unchangeable or something in between".
He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.
Also, dyslectic can learn to read. They have difficulty with it, including in later age. But "cant learn to read" is not that thing.
He rejected the idea of it being fixed for anyone else, based on it being changed for himself, which is uncharitable at best. Some people with dyslexia are incapable of learning to read, maybe you should check it out. That doesn't mean every dyslexic is incapable, but that's a real variation. And you're rejecting the idea of that yourself, which also feels pretty uncharitable.
FWIW, I don’t have aphantasia; I can visualize stuff in my head, but it’s nothing like actual vision, and neither is how I see in what I would call vivid dreams. My dreams and my wakeful “mind’s eye” are pretty similar, I would say. The point is, they are only faintly comparable to actual vision, but I would never characterize that difference as aphantasia, or say that I have trouble visualizing things.
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
Few people routinely mentally visualize with the same breadth and vividness as dreaming, unless perhaps they have poor dream recall or don't dream very vividly. It's probably more rare than aphantasia.
On the flip side, this means with some introspection and reflection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization as the dominant mode is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner, and the other modes are difficult to identify or articulate.
A fascinating thing about dreams I realized as a midlife adult after getting into ML is how coupled brain storage : dreaming is.
Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?
If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.
But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.
Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
I can smell phantom smells through my nose directly it seems, like I feel the sensation of detecting some smell directly in the neurons connected to my nose. Not sure if that's the same for you or others. It's not in my mind per se, at least not initially.
Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.
This same behaviour does actually persist in other areas. I'm colourblind, even as an adult I have other people argue that perhaps I just don't know which colours are which rather than have a problem with the mechanism within the eye for detecting them.
> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
Some/many people who can’t smell actually don’t know that, nor do the people around them. The same can be true for color blindness and actual blindness!
> Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia
Citation needed.
People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.
Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.
That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.
"People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere."
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.
It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:
- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia
- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)
- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)
- Memory vividness
Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?
It is amazing that humans can communicate at all given the variance. Visualization is also tightly tied to the emotional centers of the brain and serve as an emotional amplifier. Visualize a scenario and you’ll get an emotional reaction on how you’d likely feel in that situation. Some people have normal visualization but don’t get emotional reactions.
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
For me, inner monologue isn’t audio wildly different from imagining / reliving audio. Both exist, it’s the difference between listening to music and having a conversation.
Interesting. Do people not have some sort of sound or inner monologue running at all times? Apparently a quarter of people have no inner monologue at all which is wild. As for music, I can listen to whatever music I want in my mind whenever and even make compositions purely in my head that I can then write down into notes verbatim.
My inner monologue isn’t audio… it’s more like reading.
But yes, with you on composing songs. One reason I can’t fall asleep on airplanes or in other noisy environments: the closer to sleep I am, the less control I have over the tendency to weave audio patterns, and as soon as it gets interesting… I’m awake and thinking about the music. Repeat, for however long the flight is.
Funny you should ask. In high school I was regarded as highly intelligent, I was near the top of all of my classes and widely read, with an excellent memory for facts and figures. (Though no visual memory whatsoever).
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
In my experience with IQ tests involving complete the sequence many of the solutions when I looked up the intent behind them made very little sense to me.
Hmm I'm pretty sure I have some degree of aphantasia, because I read a lot but I never visualize what's going on (or not consciously, at least).
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national math competitions once.
Maybe though, it's because i was drawing helper figures on paper instead of imagining them.
I have no problem with figure matching IQ style tests, as opposed to one of the sibling posters.
Edit: oh interesting, lower in the article. I have absolutely no problem with spatial navigation, on the contrary, I'm better than many people. But for example if we're retracing our steps on a mountain path I can't tell you in advance what were the landmarks to look for. I will recognize them as soon as we see them or notice we're missing any landmarks though.
Visualizing for me has always been like touching something with my eyes closed. I can't "see" the object, but I have a feeling for all the shapes and contours. You can feel which way a key is in your hand and where each ridge is without having to see it. I solve geometry problems the same way. I can't see the whole thing at once, but I can move my sense of feeling across arbitrary scenes.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
I was good at mechanical drawing in college, meaning I could visualize the view of something from different sides. But, generally there was a perspective to work off of.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
I can "visualize" geometry and technical drawings by focusing on parts of them. It was enough for all my school work.
But then I learned about analytic geometry in the 8-th grade. I annoyed every math teacher by just using it to solve all the school geometry problems. And quite a few geometry problems in math competitions.
Yes. Different people answer this differently: I'm 100% aphantasia while awake, but dream vividly as if it were real life. However, once I'm awake, I can recall the dream but can't visualize it, the same way I can't visualize a previous experience in real life.
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it?
If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
It is definitely different from seeing something. I'd guess it activates a subset of the semantic level neurons that activate when you see a thing. There are no actual pixels. I also guess that something similar happens in dreaming.
When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
I'm aphantasic, but I can relate to almost going blind with inattention. Not like I now have a black visual field, but just losing awareness of what is actually in it, like it is some sort of matte painting put up during intermission. But there remains some lower-level processing, because I may reflexively kick back into full seeing due to some unexpected change.
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
At best, what you're describing seems like a skill issue with the people describing it. Using multiple different metaphors that imply the thing you're saying is unrelated (mind'seye, visualization, image, etc) is just bad communication.
I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing.
Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.
We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
It's not the question of if objective physical green pigment is objective physical green pigment, but rather if what I see when I look at it is what you see (and not in the color blind sense, assuming neither of us are).
> At the end of the day, it's the "Is your green my green?" question and is unknowable.
It sounds like you're equating the comment I responded to with a question about colorblindness is a skill issue. I'm guessing that's not what you're actually arguing, but it's not clear to me what the actually analogy you're trying to make is.
A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.
No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).
This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
When I took psychedelics they were still in effect when I went to sleep and I experienced unusually vivid and strange mental imagery. They call it closed-eye hallucinations, as opposed to mis-seeing the world around you while your eyes are open, which I also experienced.
It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
I have another question I've always wanted to ask. How do you spell words if you can't picture them in your mind?
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
For spelling, I memorize pseudo-Latin letter pronunciation.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
I just know it. And I also think it speeds up certain thinking not having to go through the cycle of visualizing and assessing the visualization. But definitely impairs other things like thinking about geometric relationships.
I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
It wasn't until this site did I know there are people with aphantasia but also have the ability to dream with at least some imagery details.
To answer your question. Nothing. It is just black. Not even a slight hint of shape of Eiffel Tower or even a tall rectangle or just outline of the structure. It is just nothing.
I sometimes think or wonder people who can dream and close their eyes and actually see things must have so much fun.
I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
That result is right. The Quick Check takes a withdrawal rate, not a dollar amount, and runs with taxes off, so it's scale invariant: $1M at 4% and $3M at 4% are the same simulation times three.
That's what lets it be instant and anonymous, since the whole answer space fits in a small grid I ship to your browser. It stops being true once taxes are on, which is what the full builder does. The page should say so. I'll add a line.
Several commenters point out that while suing the judge is not an option, appealing the judge's ruling remains an option.
So just because a judge completely abdicates their responsibility to use their own judgment, the person now needs to go through a lengthy and expensive appeals process? And even if the judge is sanctioned or removed from the bench, that only prevents future harm; it does not actually make whole the person they have already harmed.
I can tolerate some level of immunity -- maybe even beyond qualified immunity -- to protect judges that make good-faith errors. But when they're engaging in blatant misconduct, it seems like absolute immunity is providing more protection than is necessary or warranted.
Starting a new lawsuit against the judge, potentially with its own appeals, is no less expensive and lengthy of a process than appealing the existing case. Allowing such suits would increase costs to everyone involved, not decrease them.
> And even if the judge is sanctioned or removed from the bench, that only prevents future harm; it does not actually make whole the person they have already harmed.
Yes this is a general problem with misconduct by police, prosecutors, and judges. A lot of times you are fortunate simply to win the case, but usually don't get any compensation for harm caused by the arrest, incarceration before trial, and cost of defense.
I would support dropping immunity and allowing private lawsuits when misconduct is proven through existing processes. But more-so it is very frustrating to me how often the American justice system focuses on punishing the perpetrator while doing little to make the victim whole. The victim should not be required to file a separate private lawsuit to obtain compensation, it should always be part of a criminal prosecution and other disciplinary processes.
Appealing the judge's ruling would be meaningless. Appeals are designed to correct "errors of law." But here, the judge made no "error of law." Rather, the judge committed a grave ethical violation. The judge delegated her decision-making duties to a third party (ChatGPT!). In America, judges are forbidden to delegate their decision-making duties. Such delegation is NOT a "judicial act," and therefore, because there was NO "judicial act" -- judicial immunity does NOT apply. P.S. I'm the guy who sued the judge. :)
If the judge's order was AI slop then presumably it wouldn't withstand an appeal. So one is left wondering why they didn't appeal it in the first place. Why file a whole separate lawsuit? That's going to be even lengthier and more expensive than an appeal.
In fact, a successful appeal might have helped a subsequent lawsuit against the judge since questions like "was AI used?" would have already been litigated. Instead they filed a new lawsuit where those questions won't even be considered until the immunity question is addressed.
It seems like a very strange legal strategy, particularly since from what I can tell the plaintiff is himself an experienced lawyer.
Here in the U.S., the idea of taking even a few weeks off between jobs as a way to refresh oneself is a real luxury because of the way health insurance is tied to employment.
I have wanted to do this each time I've left a job, but a lapse in health insurance would have been too risky for my family, and COBRA is too expensive to be anything other than an option of last resort. So, the most time I've had between jobs over the past 25 years has been a couple of days.
If health care were not so tightly tied to one's employer, I could see people saving up and taking a few months off every 3-5 years as they change jobs. For me, a summer off with my kids would be a tremendous joy. But I don't think I'd be able to afford it until I retire, and by then my kids will be all grown up.
The trick I learned from a kind manager is to make your last day something early in the month and your first day on the new job the last week of the same month. In short if your time off doesn’t actually cross a month boundary your old insurance will still be in effect.
Just make sure when doing so you don’t work at the sort of place that’ll let you go as soon as you put in your notice.
You also have 60 days from when your coverage ends to elect to enroll in COBRA, and for many plans coverage is retroactive to when your original coverage ended (although you have to pay premiums retroactively, too). That gives you close to 3 months between intentional job changes where there is health insurance available if you need it, but you do not have to pay for it if you do not need it.
I have a hard time seeing the ability to change jobs every 3-5 years effectively. Last year I got laid off and it took me >6 months to find a new job. Yes, that time off was amazing (like a vacation) but in IT the market is hard right now at best.
Leaving a job is a “life event” so couldn’t you then go out and get a simple marketplace plan? Last I checked it was only a few hundred dollars per month for a single individual?
They mention having kids, so presumably it's more expensive. And on top of that, if you have nontrivial medical needs, the cheap marketplace plans often don't cover a lot of medications or treatments, or will make you redo things like step therapy before covering them. Or they'll have high deductibles which will leave you on the hook for most/all expenses if you're not on the plan for long enough to fill up the deductible.
While I understand the idea of american private health insurance, I don't get how do you have to pay for kids. Do you have to pay for primary school too?
You pay for private health insurance for everyone covered. Usually this is either just for yourself, for yourself and a spouse, or for yourself and a spouse and children. Each costs more than the last.
Public schools are generally paid for via property taxes at a pretty local level.
I was able to do this a while back in my late 40s. Took 7 months off or so, and insurance was $42/month (bronze). I had enough savings for the gap if I needed it, and it was just me, unlike the OP. Ended up getting a job sooner than expected and had to pay back the subsidy in full at the end of the year. :) So be ready for that. But at least at the time, it was good for cash flow.
It is astronomically higher for a family, as they said they have. The better way would probably be to go on a spouses plan and swap back and forth that way, but that also is a luxury that most underestimate.
For many years I often wondered why wealthy American capitalists (except for the ones in insurance, obviously) didn't actively promote socialized medicine that would free their companies from having to provide health insurance to their employees: it'd be better for their bottom line, wouldn't it? Healthier workforce, lower expenses per headcount, etc. I figured it must just be a generational thing from those who grew up during the Red Scare to distrust anything "socialized."
It's been in recent years, though, that I have come to see that it's still _very_ much in their interest to have employees who already have a job to feel _scared_ to leave it. I don't think this is an organized operation, there's no annual meeting of US company HR departments who scheme about it, I doubt it's something actively thought about by many people very often, but all the same the loss of corporate-provided insurance would do _so much_ to loosen the fears that keep people working for jobs that it would no doubt have a _large_ effect on the economy and every company. The biggest effect would be that it'd be extremely simple to leave a low-paying job to seek a higher wage if you have just enough saved up to cover rent and living expenses for the interim.
As such, it finally makes sense to me why so many of the wealthy choose not to lobby for socialized medicine or even to actively fund lobbying against it even if they're not involved in the insanely-powerful for-profit health industry themselves or to lobby in other countries to weaken/dismantle/destroy their existing systems (yes, I know that with an aging population costs of care are getting higher everywhere, but a lot of the funding issues with UK NHS and Canada Medicare are also political in origin): it weakens labor and wages more than they ever have to spend on insurance.
One of the reasons GasBuddy took off was that it wasn't just based on community reports; there was an incentive for gas stations themselves to accurately report their prices and keep them up to date.
It seems like you're trying to discourage businesses from participating (e.g. by not accepting sponsored placements), and that will have implications for your growth rate. I think you should look for ways to give businesses an active role, without eroding user trust in the recommendations, of course.
Think of the possibilities:
- Business can add coupons to its listing, making cheap food even cheaper
- Business can confirm a reported deal, adding to its credibility
- Business can provide full menu and a link to order takeout
I don't think any of those features would make users feel like the business is "buying" a listing it didn't earn.
Wow, thank you for this suggestion. This might be most sustainable way to update prices, as long as I set boundaries correctly. I will research how GasBuddy set up their data pipeline this week to see if we can benchmark.
I could be wrong but I think you’ll want to consider changing the name. The parent post is on point, but companies won’t be attracted by the “cheap food” moniker. Even “budget food” is more palatable for a restaurant to associate with.
This was our biggest concern as well. I already talked to few owners and negative connotation was making them reluctant to be on the site.. We thought about different name like "under10" "dimedrop" "Fooglemap" but none of them stuck. (We did like the name Fooglemap, but similarity to Google map will create risk of cease and decease letter if it ever becomes major.. so decided not to do it.)
Still torn on name change.. We want cool / memorable name.
Yes, I like this name too. But they will get us if we go major.
I liked Fooglemap (Googlemap + Food) and Slickmeals (like slickdeals) all very dangerous down the road if we ever become major. They will send cease and decease letter through their lawyer
The name is awesome and those businesses who balk at the word are silly. It's an honor to be able to nourish someone who needs a delicious and affordable meal. They should be proud to be able to offer this blessing to the community.
I hope so too, Google goes after any name that remind people of their name with similar service.. so Froogal / Foogle map was off the table.. but I love the name, I wish I can use it T-T
The word "cheap" while by definition means low quality is used in place of "inexpensive" most of the time in casual language, at least in the United States, and understood to mean low cost not low quality. I for one read the URL to mean inexpensive. Not that there aren't more appropriate URLs.
But this is just a map of the lower-priced items, which are available everywhere. You can find a cheap sandwich, bowl of soup, slice of pizza, or taco virtually anywhere. There is no corresponding standard point of comparison (no "gallon").
The unit should be a Meal. Not just an appetizer, a full meal. (Does it include drink? In US, many places give free tap water, but not others. Is it okay if it’s only lunch, or should it be available for dinner too? What about tipping?)
It's a little different, instead of maximizing gas/price they're maximizing community rating subject to 10$ limit. I have often wanted to query google reviews in this way. I think yelp might have let you do this back in the day. If this data is already being scraped continuously what I'd really like is a query interface.
It is explicitly not a foreman, task routing, or an orchestrator agent. It has a bias toward direct action and is instructed to only delegate when necessary.
I've found that this approach yields significantly faster results, without much of a quality trade-off, than an agent whose primary impulse is to delegate.
In contrast, HydraFusion starts with a task routing step, then sequential planning, execution, and review stages. My guess is that this workflow is best for people who are prioritizing cost over speed for the same level of quality.
reply