>Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.
I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague sense of knowing) the character looked like.
However:
>Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine.
I do find that, once I've seen a movie or show adaptation, that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's glass in the first Harry Potter book/movie.
These passages about reading were interesting to me as well, particularly the preceding one:
> Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.
I do not have aphantasia, but I'm not seeing mental images when I'm reading unless I'm not "in the zone" and consciously choose to do so. Good fiction especially is more direct-to-memory.
YMMV, but for me, the image on en.Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia> made it easy for me to understand. That and having a frank conversation with someone close to me: "Wait, you just think of something and see it, like a picture or real life?" "Wait, you actually see anything?"
Of these I've only read The Worm Ouroboros, and I cannot recommend it enough. The structure is a bit weird at first—you gotta get past the first chapter—but after that it settles and is astounding. If you have any passing interest in Lord of the Rings, you'll likely love it.
The excellent Avery Trufelman (formerly of 99% Invisible) has been running Articles of Interest (<https://www.articlesofinterest.co> and <https://articlesofinterest.substack.com>), a surprisingly interesting podcast about clothing and and culture and so much more. The Ivy League episodes are a great example of what they're about.
>they'd throw USB sticks in the parking lot of the company they were pentesting and somebody would always put the thing into a workstation to see what as on it and get p0wned.
One of my favorite quotes is from an unnamed architect of the plan in a 2012 article about Stuxnet/the cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear program:
"It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."
I don't think we should be calling the users idiots when we failed to make our systems secure by design. If a simple act like plugging in a thumb drive by a well-meaning user undermines the security of an entire operation, then why do we allow such a thing to happen?
Are we still at the "Bill Gates got a BSoD during the demo of USB" level?
I know that at least on Linux mounting filesystems can lead to nasty things, so there's FUSE, but ... I have no idea what distros and desktop environments do by default. And then there's all the preview/thumbnail generators and metadata parsers, ...
One big problem with USB is that something might look like a storage device to the human eyes and hands, but it's actually a keyboard as far as the computer is concerned.
The U stands for Universal, and it's awfully convenient, but it contributes to the security nightmare.
A CD we can just passively read the bytes off, but if we want our keyboards to just work when we plug them in, then it's going to be harder to secure a supposedly dumb storage device.
Sure, and it can be any kinds of device, and ... it can trick the OS to loading strange drivers (with juicy vulnerabilities), but that's the point. How the fuck is this still the norm? (Despite user mode driver frameworks!?)
>If you want a single piece of advice to reduce your bug count, it’s this: Re-read your code frequently. After writing a few lines of code (3 to 6 lines, a short block within a function), re-read them. That habit will save you more time than any other simple change you can make.
So, more focused on a ground-up, de novo thing as opposed to inheriting or joining a large project. Different models of "code" and different strokes for different folks, I guess, but the big takeaway I like from that initial piece is:
>I spent the next two years keeping a log of my bugs, both compile-time errors and run-time errors, and modified my coding to avoid the common ones.
It was a different era, but I feel like the act of manually recording specific bugs probably helps ingrain them better and help you avoid them in the future. Tooling has come a long way, so maybe it's less relevant, but it's not a bad thing to think about.
In the end, a lot of learning isn't learning per se, but rather learning where the issues are going to be, so you know when to be careful or check something out.
I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague sense of knowing) the character looked like.
However:
>Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine.
I do find that, once I've seen a movie or show adaptation, that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's glass in the first Harry Potter book/movie.
reply