“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.”
-Homer Simpson

Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades

I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.

I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy “place” so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that “room”. That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.

This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.

When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.

With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.

As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.

As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.

Is that intended as a legal or moral position?

As far as I know, the law doesn’t care much if you make money off of IP violations. There are many cases of individuals getting hefty fines for both the personal use and free distribution of IP. I think if there is commercial use of IP the profits are forfeit to the IP holder. I’m not a lawyer though, so don’t bank on that.

There’s still the initial question too. At present, we let the courts decide if the usage, whether profitable or not, meets the standard of IP violation. Artists routinely take inspiration from one another and sometimes they take it too far. Why should we assume that AI automatically takes it too far and always meets the standard of IP violation?

Yes but there’s a threshold of how much you need to copy before it’s an IP violation.

Copying a single word is usually only enough if it’s a neologism.
Two matching words in a row usually isn’t enough either.
At some point it is enough though and it’s not clear what that point is.

On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.

Until now we’ve basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.

We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to “reasonable”. In theory it’s supposed to be at a level that’s sufficient to, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?

It occurs to me that there are several species of animals that have both claws and anuses, and that like to eat breadcrumbs. They will bring their claws and anuses with them when they partake in a feast and aren’t particularly careful about them.

Permanent markers, grease pens and crayons write on glass. Windshields are made of glass. What a coincidence.

It’s YouTube. I don’t need a little taste. I can just start playing a video and skip around.

I’d be less annoyed at them if I could turn them off.

Since Google keeps trying to shove them down my throat it’s safe to say they exist for Google’s benefit, not mine.

I’m not a lawyer and you should go talk to several. Most states have several ways to find lawyers. If you have any friends who are lawyers, describe this to them and ask if they can refer you to anyone. Every state in the US has a bar association. Their websites have search engines for all the lawyers licensed to practice in their state. Make appointments with a few of them. You don’t have to pay for the initial consultation. You explain the circumstances and they tell you what your legal options are and what it will cost you. Pick which ever one you want to work with (if any).

Talk to them about this but here’s my basic understanding of how it breaks down.

There are basically two avenues; criminal and civil.

In order for there to be a criminal prosecution, they would need to have broken some law and it needs to be bad enough that a government attorney is willing to spend their time going after it. There are a whole bunch of federal laws around phones and telecommunications. You’re probably familiar with a bunch of them from your IT work. Chances are pretty good that they broke some law. If you give the police your evidence they may care enough to go after it.

In order for there to be a civil suit, they need to have done something that harmed you, in a quantifiable way and they need to have done it in an illegal way. This does seem like their methods met the threshold. The harder part might be establishing harm. Feeling violated is hard to quantify, unless there’s some statutory compensation. If you can point at something like lost wages or lost economic opportunities it’s probably stronger.

“Finally” makes it sound like this doesn’t already exist for multiple platforms.

Amazon has been trying to get me to buy https://www.bhaptics.com for a while now.

It’s amazing how much additional immersion you can get just from some vibrations though. I once saw a demo of a device that uses an array of ultrasonic speakers to create a 3-d haptic “display”. You put your hand over the array and you can “feel” a virtual object. The sensation is odd, since there’s no actual resistance, just a sensation. So it ends up feeling like you’re holding some really light and delicate object. Like an ultralight gel.

We’re not quite there yet on VR and I suspect this thing won’t exactly fly off the shelves but it definitely has potential.

Per Wikipedia, “Tankie is a pejorative label for communists and those who align with Marxism–Leninism ideology.” That’s basically what you get when you ask people to define, “tankie.”

But, as with most perjoratives, its usage has expanded. It can still be used in its original meaning but it’s often used much more broadly. If you do a search on how people use the word “tankie” (like in comment threads) you’ll see it’s now commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t sufficiently critical of China and Russia and sometimes as a modern synonym for “un-American”.

Nobody’s making me wear pants. I’ve worn garments similar to dresses and skirts and I’m not a fan at all.

This has been going on for much longer than Starlink.

There were a number of observatories built in or near cities. They became mostly useless once we figured out electric lights but we still use them for education sometimes.

SpaceX has been working with the NSF so they can continue to dim Starlink https://spacenews.com/nsf-and-spacex-reach-agreement-to-reduce-starlink-effects-on-astronomy/

Now we’re putting more and more observation capabilities deep into space. JWT is already getting images better than anything you could get on earth, even if you eliminated Starlink and turned off every light on the planet. Ground based astronomical observation is still relevant but we keep coming up with better alternatives.

Adding some detail. Evaporating water takes way more energy than just heating it up.
When you put energy (heat) into water that’s below 100c it gets hotter. When you add 4,184 to a liter of water the temperature goes up by 1c. If the water is already at 100c it takes 2,260,000 to turn that into 100c steam. The energy that goes into turning water into steam isn’t going into the steak.
So if you put a wet steak on the grill it will create an insulating layer of steam that keeps the steak at around 100c (even if the pan is above 100c).
That’s also why you only salt your steak right before or after heating it. If you let salt sit on the steak it will draw out moisture, reducing the Maillard reaction and drying out the steak.

For a great practical way to grill the steak perfectly, check out videos on “cold searing”.