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Code Like a Surgeon - An interesting way to look at where AI fits into the workflows of developers/engineers.
The goal isn’t to delegate your core work, it’s to identify and delegate the secondary grunt work tasks, so you can focus on the main thing that matters.
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Who needs graphviz when you can build it yourself - Spidermonkey’s (Mozilla’s JavaScript and WebAssembly Engine) path into building their own graph visualizer which is cleaner and faster than graphviz. This post is what led me to collect these links. Interesting find from this discussion - http://d2lang.com
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Why we tend to avoid public conversations - I personally believe that we should default to public channels and use DMs only if its essential (security or privacy). This post delves into the mindset of why our minds tend to avoid public conversations.
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uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade - we’ve been using uv for some time and i agree that it is an awesome thing to happen in the python ecosystem. This post was interesting to go deeper into some tips and tricks of the uv ecosystem.
Awesome idea, Avinash dai!
Here is my contribution for the week:
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Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound : One of the most comprehensive writeups about aphantasia that I’ve read. Goes into how some people are not able to visualize anything, some people visualize too much, and how that has effects on their memory of their life too.
(are you thinking “wait what does he mean that other people can visualize?”, ooo welcome to the club, fellow aphantasiac, please talk to me about this!) -
If you find number 1 a bit too long, highly recommend reading this quick and fun article by Blake Ross (a cofounder of Mozilla): Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind
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Build to Last: Jeremy Howard’s conversation with Chris Lattner on software craftsmanship and AI (of LLVM, Cland, Swift fame)
The distinction between object imagery and spatial imagery makes so much sense. Ever since I learned of aphantasia, I was not sure if I was always aphantasiac or lost the ability along the way. While most evidence pointed toward aphantasia - one thing that seemed contrary was a memory class as a preteen where we had to do memory palace and I could remember much better than my peers in the correct order without fluffing. Since memory palace is mostly talked about in terms of visualization, I wondered if I could visualize at that point. But since learning about being aphantasiac I seemed to have psyoped myself into not even trying, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But since learning about being aphantasiac I seemed to have psyoped myself into not even trying, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
haha I’ve been trying to visualize a bit the past few months, colors seem to work (it almost seems like my brain is able to use some of the light “noise” when I close my eyelids and repurpose it to “see“ some colors)
In general, mental imagery seems like quite a bit of a spectrum, and most people in the middle are left unknown if they can/can’t “actually visualize”
My best description of how my mind works is that I do not see visuals, but when someone says something, the fact gets stored as a fact about the thing. A friend had me and a (hyperphantasiac) friend go through a visualization exercise (visualize a ball, play with it in your hands, then put it on a table), then the other friend answered questions like “what was the ball like“, “what texture was the table“, and others, while for me, those questions were almost farsical (“You haven’t told me what color the ball was. How am I supposed to have that fact in my facts table?”)
one thing that seemed contrary was a memory class as a preteen where we had to do memory palace and I could remember much better than my peers in the correct order without fluffing
Your experience has an extreme contrast with an experience an aphantasiac friend had - he had gone to a similar memory class, and he said he couldn’t visualize it, and the instructor almost gaslit him saying “No you can visualize, you’re just making trouble“
I have not had much success with the method of loci though, it seems to work ok-ish but the things fade away too fast
The distinction between object imagery and spatial imagery makes so much sense
agree with this. Closing my eyes, I can trace a path through my house to other rooms for example, but it does not have a visual component. At the most, I think I can draw faint outlines at the “bounds” of the “walking area“, but they require active effort to “draw” and sustain
Also, at the risk of turning this into an entirely aphantasia thread, here are some other cool articles:
- Sasha Chapin claims to have cured his aphantasia: https://sashachapin.substack.com/i-cured-my-aphantasia-with-a-low
- If you’ve not been down the SDAM route: I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine - Aether Mug
The first article seems to have been deleted. The second article was really interesting - I hadn’t heard of SDAM before.
The author not being able to form sound in mind is interesting. I just learned there’s an auditory equivalent spectrum. While the notion of some people being able to generate any sound at will was surprising, not hearing your own monologue is even wilder. Other than this the article felt like checking boxes on stuff I struggle with too. Felt kind of uncomfortable that stuff I thought was my “idiosyncrasies” is downstream of this one thing.
It also touched briefly on one of my biggest irrational fears: having to be an eyewitness and describe a person. The metrics of percentage of fidelity are a far distant concern - I fear I wouldn’t be able to retrieve anything at all.
I hadn’t connected aphantasia with memory but in hindsight it was really obvious. My prior mental model of aphantasia was it being a retrieval (voluntary activation) thing - I would be able to recognize (pattern match) a face even if I wouldn’t be able to describe it. I had also thought about this using (Ned Block’s) distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness - same representation, just lacking the phenomenal ‘imagery’ experience of it. But I hadn’t thought about the difference starting during encoding too.
He describes the averaging function in episodic memory - I noticed this even on day vs. week timescales. Earlier this year I went to an ethnographic retreat for a week where we had to write daily. I knew I was the only aphantasiac there as several prompts were to imagine something. When writing about stuff from that same day, my writing had more “fickle details” preserved. But later, when I tried writing about the whole week’s experience, I ran into the same averaging function he describes - all the specific instances blended together.
Felt kind of uncomfortable that stuff I thought was my “idiosyncrasies” is downstream of this one thing.
ouch. I sometimes feel like maybe I am pedestalizing aphantasia (& downstream SDAM) a bit - making it a bit too much of my personality than it should be, but it does feel sometimes to be a fundamental difference in the experience of life
That being said, if I didn’t know about it, there would’ve been no observable difference between my life and someone else’s, so maybe it is not something I should think this much about? XD
It also touched briefly on one of my biggest irrational fears: having to be an eyewitness and describe a person
Hahaha probably a common fear. When I saw those scenes in my childhood, I was always perplexed how they could describe people like that
I hadn’t connected aphantasia with memory but in hindsight it was really obvious. My prior mental model of aphantasia was it being a retrieval (voluntary activation) thing - I would be able to recognize (pattern match) a face even if I wouldn’t be able to describe it.
Since recognition works (it does not work in some people, google “face blindness“), I think there are a set of possible reasons:
- Recognition is different from the kind of retrieval needed for (imaginative) reconstruction. On the face it seems “how could you recognize without ability to reconstruct“ but this feels the same as “how can you spatially navigate without visualizing“, so maybe two different pathways
- It could also be the case that they’re the same pathway in non-aphantasiacs but aphantasiacs have a different pathway they leaned on/honed due to the absence of the visual pathway
One hypothesis I have is that aphantasia is just due to some brain muscles being overtrained while others remain undertrained. According to this hypothesis, there was a decision point when I was a little child where I had two options:
- read a book
- visualize imaginary scenarios/play with an imaginary friend
I chose 1, and biased my brain towards that side of the wordcel vs shape rotator spectrum, and further decisions just pushed me more and more towards the aphantasiac spectrum.
Of course, this could very easily be conflating cause and effect too - maybe I chose 1 because my brain circuitry leans towards less visuals by default - no way to know I guess
For me, SDAM is much more concerning than aphantasia. It means I cannot relive the memories of say, vacations with my family, and I just nod along and like listening to them recall the story. After a few iterations, I do remember the story, but not autobiographically just semantically - it feels distinctly different from what I think other’s vicarious relived experiences are. One thought is that since I am not able to visualize memories, it reduces the incentive for thinking/remembering them later, and this cycle is how aphantasia is linked with SDAM
We totally hijacked this thread to talk about mental imagery XD, but as you said before, it does feel like so many of our characteristics are downstream of this one thing, and so it’s hard to stop thinking/talking about
One interesting general thing to think about is how it took so long for aphantasia to be discovered. And by that I mean “discovered“ in both the scientific sense, and “discovered“ in the personal self - as in, we always thought people were talking in metaphors when people said visualize, we never realized their internal experience was different than ours. And then the mindblowing thing is to realize that our brains might be different in so many thousands of ways, but they seem to be similar because of the limited “communication API”s. Wonder how many things like aphantasia there are
biased my brain towards that side of the wordcel vs shape rotator spectrum
Tbh I never understood aphantasiac → automatically wordcel meme. For anything non-trivial, I feel aphantasia requires me to employ similar external scaffolding (externalize - compress, chunk) for both domains.
Would you say wordcel-adjacent tasks are more innate to you?
Would you say wordcel-adjacent tasks are more innate to you?
well I would definitely say I’m better at them than shape rotation tasks, like say engineering drawing MCQ questions (which ironically I did pretty good at, but it was more due to me using a bunch of heuristics rather than actually visualizing the, say, orthogonal view of the trapezoid in question)
and well, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, so, anything non-trivial obviously requires scaffolding