mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Aphantasics less likely to be engaged with a short story, but still enjoy it
mrcgnc's comments
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Speculative Calendar Events
The idea here is creating tentative events in one's own calendar, not tentatively accepting someone else's events. This is to prevent overbooking oneself. It's a simple feature and I'd personally use it a lot.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Ente successfully completes a security audit
Context: Ente is a hosted photo storage service with e2e encryption similar to Google Photos.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Hutter Prize for compressing human knowledge
True, but then I would argue (as a layman) that AGI would need to be able to guess what matters in a given context to really be AGI.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Kagi Small Web
I'm a paying customer and this is yet another nice addition. It's something only you can do. Please keep doing this kind of stuff!
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Other things I've had to deal with: in Myanmar people usually don't have a concept of first and last name, just two (females) or three (males) words that form their "name" (as far as I can remember).
Also, often names in Sri Lanka look like this: Rajapaksha Mudiyanselage Siril Ariyaratna. Two family names and one or two given names. Regardless of the number of fields used, displaying long names like that needs some special considerations.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Garden-Path Sentence
That comic is an example of excessive subordination, another common pitfall.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/cmt-40/kantoo/...
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Garden-Path Sentence
Neat, now I have a name for these. A lot of what is considered "bad writing" seems to consist of these "garden-path sentences", written unintentionally. Finding one of these in a text is a good indication that the author either didn't re-read what they wrote, or re-read it and couldn't step out of their own head to notice how confusing it is.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Mosaic Challenge - Draw...
I like the idea. It reminds me of Reddit's Place, but with no way to coordinate. It's a rather frustrating experience, especially when others erase your hard-earned black squares (or when I did it myself in a moment of distraction), but it's also strangely addictive.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA
> I don't want China to get to the south pole first with humans and then say this is ours, stay out
I suspect that the very act of saying this only contributes to increasing the zero-sum space race mindset.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Italy shocks banks with 40 percent windfall tax for 2023
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Italy shocks banks with 40 percent windfall tax for 2023
Discussed here as well:
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: ASK HN: What’s a small thing you’ve purchased which has made your life better?
A whiteboard for my study.
I feared it would be a short-lived whim desire but I'm using it daily and I love it. So much smoother than a note-taking app for ideation, and also better than a notebook, because whatever I've drawn will decorate the room and gently remind me to think about its contents.
mrcgnc | 2 years ago | on: Blaise Pascal: The Infinite Spaces, Alienation, and the Wager
> For in fact what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a meeting between nothing and everything.
The path through this existential angst, I think, is in the realization that the nothing can't exist if there isn't something somewhere. The hole needs a doughnut around it.
Likewise, the infinite has no dimensions, it has no "infinity" in it without something finite to compare it to.
The relative size doesn't matter, the presence itself does.
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Metaphors and analogies are very useful for me, because they provide archetypes of mental models for my understanding of the world (in this case fictional). There's nothing inherently visual in them or difficult for me.
I love to see artwork, and maps certainly help understand the geography of a scene, but I'm not sure that has much to do with aphantasia. If the GM's verbal description is good, I actually prefer not seeing pictures, so that I can fill in what I can with my own imagination.
Maybe the biggest thing that aphantasia does in this context is give me a strong filter against "useless" details. If you describe a monster with knife-like jaws, or a woman with pink bubblegum hair, that's interesting because they are potentially useful "action hooks", i.e. knowing those might influence my decisions, be it tactics or conversation prompts. On the other hand, if you describe all the random colored spots on the monster's back or tell me that the woman's hair is blond with curls "like overcooked macaroni" or whatever, those are not going to mean anything to me, and they're going to bore me.