For small-to-medium size data sets, you can use Power Query/BI to essentially run a relational database and metrics/dashboards on it inside an Excel spreadsheet plus a web page, minus all the features that a real DB has in terms of version control and backups.
I can't leave Excel for that. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end, and maintain it myself. The amount of work and knowledge it takes to get the same thing spun up in a proper language with a proper server is 1-3 orders of magnitude more.
"If you're going to pretend to be someone, why not pretend to be someone who doesn't hit on the cocktail waitress when he's away from his family?"
Edit: found the exact quote:
> "I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."
> Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
> "But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
> The narcissist demands absolutism in all things-- relative to himself.
> We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent.
The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available for cheap) and LEDs are nearing the middle (medium quality available for cheap), and that I should buy more expensive LED bulbs, but I still think that there are valid "complaints" against the state of widespread LED lighting. I hope these complaints become invalid within a decade, but for now I still miss the experience of buildings lit by incandescent light.
The other thing with AI--the LED revolution was led on this idea that we all need to work as hard as we can to save energy, but now apparently with AI that's no longer the case, and while I understand that this is just due to which political cabals have control of the regulatory machinery at any given time, it's still frustrating.
> The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
LED lamps work just fine, you just need to pay more attention when you’re buying them. Philips makes decent LED lamps.
Make sure you’re buying lamps with 90+ CRI, that will help with the quality of light. 2700K is a good color temp for indoor living room/dining room/bedroom lighting, 3500-4000K for kitchen/garage/task lighting.
You also need to buy special lamps if you put them in an enclosed fixture, look for ‘enclosed fixture’ rated lamps. Regular LED lamps will overheat in an enclosed fixture.
The light color they call "daytime" is around 5000K, so I expected it to look like being outside in the sun; but instead I got a cold blueish vibe. The problem? Not enough power! I got the equivalent of a moonlit room.
So I got this 180W LED lamp (that's actual 180W, not 180W equivalent) [1]. It's so bright I couldn't see for 5 minutes. I put two in my office on desk lamps. The room now looks like being outside, without the "ugly blue" tint, even though the product says it's 6000K. The days of my SAD suffering are over!
Maybe buy your bulbs somewhere else? I'm yet to replace any of the LED bulbs I've bought over the past 15 years and honestly can't even remember the last time a bulb failed.
Actually, since posting this I've vaguely remembered a previous discussion on here about differences between LED bulbs sold in the US and those sold in UK/EU so maybe that explains it.
In many cases you can break one of the resistors off the LED bulb's printed-circuit board and run them at two-thirds of the power so they last forever. In other cases the surgery required is a little more involved than just snapping a surface-mount resistor off with pliers.
[CITATION NEEDED] They do not. If you take the mean, median, and mode of the failure lifetime for LED bulbs sold at these stores and compare them to the failure times of incandescent bulbs, I also guarantee you are empirically wrong here.
I believe this is true for the LED technology compared to the incandescent technology as a whole, but I'm simply turning over bulbs at a far higher rate than I did in the incandescent days. Often the LED bulbs are failing within a year under normal usage patterns. It's possible that using modern LEDs in old fixtures is causing some kind of issue.
Are your LED lamps failing in enclosed fixtures? You need to buy special lamps for enclosed fixtures, regular LED lamps will heat up too much for enclosed fixtures.
Look for ‘enclosed fixture rated’ LED lamps for enclosed fixtures.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Boeing was also pressured to outsource world wide, to spread around the grease to countries with large aircraft orders. They they didn't outsource because it made sense. They outsourced to get the sales guy his sale, and management their numbers to unlock compensation.
My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
Airbus is currently less of a problem because they more recently had huge issues/lost their minds, so they’re more on top of it right now.
But it wasn’t that long ago they were literally faking black box data to cover their ass when their one of their new line of aircraft crashed at an airshow.. I don’t think Boeing ever went to that extent, but I guess we’d never know unless they did it particularly badly.
Any sufficiently large/important organization tends to do stuff like this unless it is actively stopped. A generation or so is usually enough for people to forget important lessons.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
That last part is key: the MCAS system was designed to fake handling like the older planes but they skimped on safety to save the cost of a second sensor and didn’t train pilots on it or have an override mechanism. If the whole thing had been aboveboard they’d have saved so many lives…
There was an override system, MCAS drove the stabiliser trim motors and so flipping the stabiliser trim motor cutout switches would disable MCAS. This relied on the pilots diagnosing an MCAS runaway as a stabiliser trim runaway and enacting the same checklist.
However, to add insult to injury, the MAX also had another change. In the 737 NG, there were two switches, one would disable automated movement of stabiliser trim, the other would cutout the electric trim motors entirely. This allowed the pilots to disable automation without losing the ability to trim the aircraft using the switches on the yoke.
The MAX changed this arrangement, now either switch would cut power to electric trim. Tragically the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 recognised the runaway, enacted the correct checklist, but the aircraft was now so far out of trim that aerodynamic loads made correcting the situation using the hand trim crank impossible. In desperation the pilots restored electrical power to the trim motors, MCAS re-engaged and drove the aircraft into the ground.
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
> Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster)
You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)
Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.
737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.
Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
You're just clinging to definition while missing the actual issue.
For the 737 to compete with the A320neo, it required much larger engines.
For those engines to fit, they'd either have to raise the landing gear and redesign the airframe to accommodate the changes (which would be a very different airframe), or they'd have to offset the engines (which massively increases the stall risk and lead to the MAX disaster).
This is not an integration issue. There is no possible way for the 737 to fulfill the needs of the 21st century without becoming an entirely different plane.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
This is an interesting detail I had not heard. Can you link to a backstory on this? Why would such a contract ever be signed (especially for a technological product)?
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.
Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.
At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.
I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation.
I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy predates the Internet and has something to do with copyright law, mega-corporate capture of the supply chain (and it's subsequent off shoring), excessive focus on cultural and behavioral neutrality in education, lawsuit culture, and endless video evidence of everything, but I can't spin that into a coherent narrative.
I'm not entirely sure what this implies, but I definitely don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to move the needle back toward widespread elitism and highly motivated creative industries. I wish I had a better answer to your question, which I appreciate you asking.
I can't help but feel the shift to apathy is in part due to a cultural shift from a sense of building society together to a more exploitative view where people have to get what they can while they still can get it. The lack of motivation to produce Great Works feels related to the disconnect from a greater purpose/community.
It all feels related in some way to the dearth of great statesmen. At least the Rockefellers of the past contributed back in the form of great works dedicated to public use.
I think adjacent to this is an element of reduced risk taking from younger people because the stakes are much higher (or at least feel much higher). I've worked with so many smart and talented grads who have seemingly planned their lives/career to the nth degree, in a way that was certainly not that common in my broad circles when I was a similar age.
From conversations with them, it all stems from the view of you can't afford any mistakes/missteps if you want a relatively benign type of comfortable middle class life, in terms of things like housing in particular. If that'd your starting point, you're looking to ge a guaranteedish success at anything you're trying to do and that inherently puts a lid on how much you want to deviate or be creative from the norm. More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
> More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
This infiltration of monetization is insidious. Even in my own idle thoughts I find myself wondering how I might profit off of something I threw together for fun. Or make a great cake and people say you should open a bakery. It's hard for people to imagine doing something for its own sake, let alone for no financial gain.
This video [1] touches on the same theme. Its opening comparison of historic and modern lampposts is illustrative of the greater shift in culture.
In the modern day, when the public has the opportunity to create something dedicated to the public, the opportunity is squandered and used for trolling (like boaty mcboatface or the stick figure euro coin).
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
Ironically, I think a large part of the sense of scale comes from it being a vertical video. Really helps with stacking all these layers of environment on top of each other. Anyway, Rückenfigur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCckenfigur) style concept art where there's a tiny figure in front of a huge layered environment has been common in games for decades, the difference is that with ai we can create """concepts""" that look nearly like a playable demo.
This game looks cool, but also the trailer just showing 3 static scenes from the same angle for a minute is a sure sign that this is very very early.
In a youtube demo, the author says he has been working on this idea for a while, and was motivated to deliver after the GIF. So, kinda? Thanks for the reference.
I don’t think it’s ai because it correctly resolves both vertical and horizontal parallax with correct perspective lines applied to the scene - something ai still seems to struggle at greatly
Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."
The smartphone is a perverted implementation of the goal that people use to fantasize about back in the early days of the computer revolution: a personal terminal to the world of audio, text, and video information stored in databases across all of humanity. It's of course worth talking about how they compel us to certain behaviors via push notifications, dark patterns, nasty design, etc. but also--obviously we'd be addicted to personal terminals that let us access all the publicly available digitized information in the history of the world.
It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves.
All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods.
It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the same time.
the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good
> the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing
In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission.
There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility
Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)
I don't know that anyone's really asking for protection from their own impulses. Freedom requires protection from other people's impulses. That's where this is all going. A few truly free people, everyone else in a cage.
Rather than framing it as "protection from my own impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as "protection from teams of professional researchers and engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
Well, yeah, but that type of protection isn't compatible with freedom. Neither the freedom to consume nor the freedom to iterate on a product. I don't blame companies for making their products addictive. I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes I crave a Big Mac. I don't blame them for selling me poison, as long as I recognize it as unhealthy. The best way to protect yourself is by educating yourself to recognize manipulative patterns, and by extension sharing that with other people. We know from drug addiction that simply banning something doesn't work. And an insight from some great druggies like Philip K Dick and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs is that the list of things that can be addictive is endless. If someone made an app that made people chew their nails, or lick an escalator banister, or shock themselves with electricity, people would get addicted to it.
I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience.
We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".
I like your clarity about personal responsibility, but it might also help to remember that human capacity for self-regulation isn’t uniform. We all grow through developmental stages and carry traits that shape how we handle influence, impulse, and awareness.
The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning.
There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
I agree, and I don't want what I wrote to be read as "people just need more self control." I lack self control, that's why I have addictions and bad habits. I know other people who have even less self control, and some who seem to be immaculate. I don't care to be judged or to judge anyone else. I guess that's why I framed it as herd immunity.
Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions.
So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it.
I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
> Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware
to what though? Id argue people prefer going on a website for something to do than dealing with the sad reality that is modern life. Dont blame a UI designer because your lifes empty
How does a child learn this if they are peer pressured to be on these platforms? The parents can say no up to a point. But eventually the environment demands a child to be on these platforms to participate in their social circles.
How do you enforce a rule to a large group of barely related individuals?
Slow, rhythmic speech pattern. Relaxing tones. Asking you to focus on your heart rate or breathing. Counting, or asking you to count mentally. Low lights or candle light. These are the things that come to mind.
There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis".
Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.
> It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves.
I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.
DS9 had frequent if oblique references to it as well, Quark’s Bar had holodecks, I think Major Kira threatened to break his arm if she found out she featured as a character in one episode.
Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...
>Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."
Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation?
I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep.
But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.
I think the access to so much information itself isnt bad. Cuz access to all of wikipedia wouldnt do this. People would get bored because its still work to digest that information
I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked.
Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money.
People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower
Idk I've gotten high and just wasted whole nights going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I think eventually turned to stronger time wasters though. The Wikipedia thing is real though.
We didn’t have internet when I was an early teen and I would read physical encyclopedias before bed.
If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation.
Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways.
If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
Fun facts, and/or actual knowledge you might even use one day. This said, I've definitely never had a use for knowing about CORONA spy satellites dropping film cartridges on the Earth (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)) or about bell-mouth spillways...
Some people wouldn’t, we call it falling into the wiki hole for a reason.
I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier.
But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot).
I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be.
Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad.
I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people?
Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it.
Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people.
East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance.
In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
I agree by and large with the thrust of what you're saying, but
> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?
The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.
You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.
The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.
But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
I agree but it's too entwined with "freedom of speech" and section 230. Many here make too much money addicting children and don't want to turn off the fire hose of money.
That just makes it So the big boys who are making all this money can continue to operate while small platforms can no longer afford to comply with the new regulatory environment.
So, do you remember the Wolf of Wall Street? AKA Jordan Belfort. Huge fraudster, did shittons of financial crime. People on Prodigy and Compuserve forums were talking about it, and so Jordan Belfort decided to sue the shit out of the companies in order to take the speech down and censor the users talking about him.
The resulting caselaw we got out of this mess was that Prodigy's moderated servers were treated as publisher and assigned defamation liability; while Compuserve, being unmoderated, had no such liability. CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn the Prodigy verdict. So repealing it would put us in a place where Internet forums are either totally censored and sanitized, or completely unregulated messes of spam and garbage. No middle ground.
>"When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."
But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.
This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.
> When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids
They are not tired enough if they choose to use their smartphone, that's an education issue.
Children are taught the value of a good night of sleep, they are taught by having fulfilling daily lives and exhausting. If you let them be like a plant, yeah they will be just as dumb as a plant.
It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.
I was raised Quaker, and in theory one of the core tenets of Quakerism is that uncomfortable honesty. Trivial example: refusing to swear on the Bible because that would imply that you might not be honest when you hadn't just sworn on a Bible.
I have found that Quakers are just as fallible as anyone else; but the subset of Quakers who really live that tenet have an unnerving and extremely peaceful unflinching willingness to comment or question on problems in a way that removes the smokescreens of social obligations. I've found it far easier to talk about anything involving money, feelings, sex, danger, beliefs, crime, fear, etc. with those individuals who have really committed their lives to only let truth come out of their mouth (even if they don't always succeed).
I was raised in the Friends culture, and find this characterization skewed. "Honesty", yes. "Even if uncomfortable", sure, often, but only literally speaking. But I've never heard a Quaker in my life extol "uncomfortable truth" in those words. Because, realistically speaking, "telling the uncomfortable truth" when declared as a principle is 99% of the time just a wordplay excuse to be an asshole or to be petty (which I assume is why I never heard the Quakers in my life use that phrase, since they tend to be not only honest, but also kind and pragmatic).
Sure, I'll concede that the common wording of "uncomfortable truth" has been hijacked by podcasters and their ilk. I just meant "the truth, even when it's uncomfortable".
This is one of the oldest trick in the book of very very dumb people who confuse "the truth" with "what they think".
I'm sure we all met that person in the family or in a new job, or at school being so proud of themselves for being "honest", and later on you discover that their honesty is not honesty, it's just "saying whatever crosses their mind unfiltered".
I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".
I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.
I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.
I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high comprehension—-but it takes me incredible effort to remember the color of someone’s eyes, for example. I more or less skip descriptions in novels and prefer to read philosophy.
I’ve always found it interesting that in programming communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be very overrepresented.
What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream?
I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count.
If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment
Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It’s ironic because I’ve always had really good (better than 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words.
The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year.
One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc.
[1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.
If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.
It’s odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles.
But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help.
They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.
It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that?
It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.
I dream in images but have only once in my life seen anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking state.
I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.
But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.
How? I've tried writing it down many times over the years, but never recalled anything by the time I've been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.
Focus real hard and make it a practice. You'll need to try every night. Most importantly, have patience.
I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly. @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps. Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that is likely going to be the best time. But you really need to want to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep it.
I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and illegible. It's better to start writing illegible nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come with time. Just write down anything you can remember. A color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself that this is important to remember. Just like taking notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act of note taking helps build that mental pathway.
Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it took me a week to just recall a color. That's not abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing, then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60 minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error might help. You're targeting the last or second to last cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is probably better to start there, try to time it with your normal alarm.
[0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it is harder for you, which might be a thing given your condition.
I don't "maintain a sleepy state". When I wake up, I wake up, and the dream is gone long before I'd be able to get a pen. All of it. It's pretty much like flicking a switch. I'll often make notes first thing after waking up, and they're never unintelligible, but they'll also never be related to dreams, because the dreams are gone by the time I've picked up a pen, even if it's right next to my bed.
I often set multiple alarms really early. It's never made any difference to my dreams just "switching off".
To me this feels incredibly presumptuous in assuming peoples brains work the same, which is something I'm generally extremely sceptical to given how different I've learned we actually are.
How do you know you dream then? If it's like a switch. What are you writing down? How do you know it is unrelated.
Btw, I kept pen and paper under my pillow so I could grab it right away. Even before I opened my eyes. Early on I would keep them closed for as long as I could, fighting to hold onto the memories.
> I often set multiple alarms really early.
The timing is really important. If you do the "normal" thing of seeing them 30 minutes apart then thats not going to work. A sleep cycle is 90-120 minutes and REM is the last stage. There's variance day to day, so you'll really have to iterate on what it right. Luckily the REM stage is a good portion of that time, so it gives you a decent window to hit. Try to aim for 3/4 of the way through. More than half so the intensity of the dream is high but not too close to the end because you'll be naturally winding down.
It can also help to try things that help people lucid dream. Even if you don't get control of the dream I've found that being lucid typically helps with remembering. But I never found that easy, though it was easier when I started dreaming more. My usual trigger is when I read something a second time I'll notice it says something different. My friend has a weird one, their teeth fall out lol.
> To me this feels incredibly presumptuous in assuming peoples brains work the same
I think you're misinterpreting. By the nature of the conversation I know for a fact your brain works differently. *The entire premise of the conversation is based on this fact.*
But the advice I can give you is based on my experience. It's not an instruction set that gives guaranteed results, it is a guide. It is guess work. I have to distill what worked for me and try to target based on the little information you've provided. What are you expecting? That's a typical way to share advice and try to help.
Ultimately it'll have to be up to you to fill in the details and adapt. No perfect instruction set exists unless you make the assumption you accuse me of. I'm not sure why you're suddenly dismissive. I didn't say you're doing anything wrong or accuse you of anything.
> How do you know you dream then? If it's like a switch.
Because the switch doesn't flick until a second or two after I've woken up. Too short that I've ever been able to even grab a pen, long enough for me to be left with a memory of having briefly remembered dreaming, but never the slightest hint of what. Of course, that also means I can't be 100% certain to know whether that memory is true.
> What are you writing down? How do you know it is unrelated.
Notes on what I'm planning to do for the day. I can't of course know 100% for certain it is unrelated, but I have no reason to believe it is related either.
> If you do the "normal" thing of seeing them 30 minutes apart then thats not going to work.
That's never been what I've done. I've at times worked in weird patterns because I've found I work best at night, and so when that's fit in with my family life, I've often gone to sleep for 2-4 hours before then getting up to work, and timing that to REM is critical exactly because I will certainly be extra tired if I wake up at the wrong stage. I experiemented a lot with timing to get that right, and it's never affected my recollection of dreams at all.
> You asked for help, I'm just trying my best.
I didn't ask for help. I asked a mostly rhetorical question based on what to me seems like a flawed assumption about how trainable this is. Your clarification here is much more reasonable. If you interpreted it as a request for help, there's our disconnect, and why I'm being dismissive. Sorry for our miscommunication on that.
> Because the switch doesn't flick until a second or two after I've woken up.
That sounds a lot like the "half-asleep state" being discussed before.
> I didn't ask for help.
> If you interpreted it as a request for help
You did right here[0]. You have to understand that I, cannot, read your mind. Nor can I hear any inflections in your voice. If you ask someone "how" you should expect them to answer. It is a reasonable and standard interpretation of such a question, especially as you continue. Getting upset at them is an extremely unreasonable thing to do.
It is not our miscommunication, it is yours.
You can take responsibility for yourself, no need to include others. I had more to write, but you clarified you didn't want help.
For me, it’s dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming state. Then I’m able to sort of “translate” the dream into language, which I remember—-and sometimes from there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn’t think I remembered. It’s still very rare for me and I’ll go years without remembering a single dream—-in fact, mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of the first areas where I learned my conscious experience was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.
Same—including the time I dabbled in “experience altering” compounds when much younger. I always find it so strange that many people, including in this thread, find the presence of language in their inner experience unsettling or “imperfect”—-I really wouldn’t trade my inner monologue for anything…
Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well.
Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.
I remember them for as long as I read it and then it goes away.
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
I don't.
When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
I’m the same, but it can also be frustrating when I _try_ to retain that info, it constantly shifts.
I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated videos where the details are constantly morphing and shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I simply can’t hold onto a single still visualization for more than a second.
So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)
>When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
Likewise. It even happens even with the people I know in detail such as family. If I try to project the image of my own son in my minds eye it is not clear and is always shifting, it's more of a feeling than a clear picture. Once, when I was a teenager, I was mugged and when at the police precinct they showed me a booklet with the common offenders in the area. After a few pages I could not remember what my mugger looked like. Always wondered how people manage to rebuild sketches of offenders not knowing as an aphantasiac it's nearly impossible.
Yeah I never understood descriptions or who the intended audience of those long winded descriptive words is, but if other people have this magical capability of getting visual imagery out of it, I guess sure. It is hard to believe, but it must be the case. It is so hard to fathom that other people process things so differently, but I guess it can also explain a lot.
Original commenter for this chain here--my mental imagery for books is so strong that I can read books two decades later and call up close to the original visual memories that I had when I first read the books. My favorite books are the Lord of the Rings volumes, and I can remember different imagery I had from each successive generation of reading the book (from before I saw the movies and the Tolkien art to after).
Well... that definitely makes me envious. But also in a way it gives me relief, because during school times I always felt some sort of personal failure or laziness that I found some of the things so boring to read, but it makes sense if there's just a processing difference that doesn't give me that no matter how I try. But it must be wonderful then for you, because there's so many different books to read vs amount of high quality films/shows on any topic you desire.
Without discussing this and understanding how processing can truly differ like that I could go a lifetime wondering how people can read fiction etc, and how is it possible that I don't get what they are getting. I wonder if some drugs might allow me to get the same out of fiction books.
Another discouraging note from school times was that whenever I tried myself to read the mandatory literature fully myself, and formed my own conclusions I got bad grades and no one understood what I was getting at or what my conclusions were about, but when I just read summaries and conclusions on the Internet it was easy to get perfect grades.
Too many of those things during school which made me feel delusional/crazy. Oh well. The rant went off-topic, but I just have I guess "vivid" memories of how school affected me emotionally in terms of self esteem and confidence. I remember just having my own thoughts, conclusions punished, while not understanding others, but still having to learn and memorize those facts even when I didn't understand how they came to be.
Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.
philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a sentence you don’t quite get, and then spend a bunch of time just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all sorts of sense.
it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.
A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.
I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.
I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.
It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.
I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120 wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often partial images from my own memory, and the words come out without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while the words appear.
I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is, there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to describe it. It's much easier to think of other related images.
I first heard about “thinking in pictures” from Dr Temple Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism. Anyway, it’s also how she thinks and appears to be a super power when it comes to designing feed lots. https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html
I imagine you also struggled with algebra? Being a non-visual abstraction.
Actually, I did struggle with algebra, and also calculus and differential equations. As with most on this site, I fell into an "advanced"/"gifted" cohort, but I was always down at the bottom of the class.
I excelled (relative to my peers, not to truly gifted people) at linear algebra, statistics, systems engineering, and combinatorics.
Algebra is very visual. Picture the variables and parentheses and constants just moving around, like a choreographed dance. Same with calculus, picturing the curves and areas and surfaces, until you start hitting more than 3 dimensions.
I'm the same way, and I often feel like I don't know what the words that come out of my mouth will be until they happen.
I'm thinking in abstract feelings and images, and then it feels like some subconscious part of my brain is actually figuring out the words and saying them, if that makes any sense.
It can be spooky sometimes since it doesn't always feel like I'm in control of the specific words I use
Sounds like you think in word blobs that only get unpacked when you talk or write. Otherwise they move through your mind bundled but understandable to you.
I can't leave Excel for that. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end, and maintain it myself. The amount of work and knowledge it takes to get the same thing spun up in a proper language with a proper server is 1-3 orders of magnitude more.