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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You know what I really look forward to?

AR glasses with facial ID and rolodex features, and fuck the privacy concerns.

I have ADHD, and for the life of me I can't remember names and faces of someone I don't see every day unless I make a concerted effort to memorize it. My brain would rather accrue all sorts of garbage insight porn and random trivia than something like that. This a problem I'm sure many of you face, or at least the insight porn addiction, but it's a pain in the ass for someone with an enormous family who has to familiarize themselves with an ever rotating cast of characters in their hospital.

I am deeply envious of anyone for whom this comes naturally. Just give me something innocuous that reminds me that X is my aunt's cousins nephew's dog's trainer's dog or something, and appends records of our conversation.

I've already forgotten the names of half my classmates in med school, let alone actual school.

Well yeah a persistent database connected to your brain and vision would be tremendously useful for a lot of things including remembering people's names. Lol

I would really like if I never had to pull out my phone from my pocket again or even never look at my watch again. Just fucking overlay the time, gps directions, email and group chat into my natural vision at this rate.

C'mon, someone remake Google Glass again, but good. Don't tell me a literal decade and change of improvements to batteries, chips and laser projection/translucent displays can't make it happen.

My impression (never owned one) was that the problem with Google Glass wasn't the tech, but social acceptance. It was at best seen as dorky, and at worst met with open hostility (e.g. the "glasshole" epithet). I think that's the issue you would need to solve. I hate to say it, but the solution is probably to have Apple make one. There won't be any meaningful improvement, but suddenly people will think it's cool because has a fruit logo.

Things have gotten better. Snapchat's version with recording features (I don't think it has a display) was generally quite popular. It looked like fun glasses rather than something cybernetic.

Apple probably wants to get it down to a similar form factor, but they simply can't, hence why their current MR product is whatever the fuck it is. They simply ask too much of it, whereas all I want is a camera, facial ID, notes, navigation and the like. It can even be relatively dumb and connect to my phone or an external computing device for the smarts and processing power.