Google Glass

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

Training Photos with a set of my current photos to recognize faces is kind of relaxing.

It still has way fewer images of faces than I can and have viewed in a 5-minute period.

Let’s watch it inevitably end up beating me at face recognition with a smaller training set than I have!

It is interesting that it can catch cartoon faces, annoying that it caught every single face my Effulgence screenshots, and amusing that it can catch “faces” such as my ear, the Raikothi priest’s spiral in slatestarscratchpad’s avatar, and a few other similar images.

Apple default image organizers: beating autistics at face recognition since iPhoto first got the feature (before 2010).

*grumble grumble Google Glass grumble*

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #in which Brin is predictable #it occurs to me that this post qualifies for the tag #transhumanism #for the same reasons as the previous post did

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lennat:

Which one of you was it that came up with the idea of a face recognition app on google glasses?

I don’t think I got the idea from anyone else, but it’s such an obvious idea that I expect plenty of other prosos have come up with it independently.

I was just talking about this earlier today. (That post in turn links to the post before that, which links to the post before that, which I think was the first one.) I’m not sure if this is news to you: for all I know, you wandered by my Tumblr and that’s what prompted you to post this in the first place.

(I was discussing this with my family recently, and my parents think I should start a letter-writing campaign to pressure Google to allow facial recognition. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but I don’t think I’m the one to do it. Even assuming I figure out how to go about such a campaign, it’s a lose-lose situation: either it fails, in which case…you know, it fails, or it succeeds, in which case as its founder I’m the one who gets stuck dealing with the media and whatnot, and I don’t think I could cope with that.)

(I also learned recently of Lambda Labs, which was working on a black-market facial recognition Glass app. (They started working on it pre-ban, but said they would continue with it post-ban.) However, all of the news articles I found about it (such as this one) were slightly over a year old, and it seems that nobody has heard from the developer(s) in an official capacity for six months. I don’t have high hopes for it.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog #overenthusiastic parenthesis use #(although really that last one could apply to nearly every post I make) #(you see what I mean)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

prostheticknowledge:

GLASSHOLE.SH

Code script put together by Julian Oliver which detects Google Glass devices on a WiFi network and blocks them:

This script is a response to a comment by Omer Shapira that the presence of Google Glass worn by audience at an ITP graduate exhibition left him feeling understandably uneasy; it was not possible to know whether they were recording, or even streaming what they were recording to a remote service over WiFi.

The … script will find and detect Google Glass on the local network and kick them off.

More Here

Still bitter about how the obsession with privacy concerns of Google Glass has completely ruined the device’s potential.

There is always the possibility that someone is secretly recording you. That MP3 player I appear to be absent-mindedly holding in my lap? Totally has an audio-recording function, and you have no way of knowing whether I’m using it. Just because people tend to forget the recording possibilities of smartphones unless they come in Glass form, doesn’t mean those possibilities aren’t there. They’re always there.

Using a facial recognition app that scans the faces of everyone you pass by and compares them to a database (a mixture of owner-taken photos and photos copied from Facebook) of people you know to check for matches is perfectly legal and polite and all those other ways of saying “permitted”, but only if you’re running it on a carbon-based computer. People whose carbon-based computers can’t run the app (or can technically run it, but can’t do anything with it due to problems with their on-board cameras) can go fuck themselves.

(It does kind of fascinate me how thoroughly the ban on facial recognition has been spun as “yay privacy” rather than “Google spitting in the faces (so to speak) of disabled people”.)

Tags:

#Google Glass #prosopagnosia #my usual tag for high-tech stuff is #proud citizen of The Future #but in this case it’s more like #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #currently in the stage of citizenship application where #they bog you down in red tape forever

Someone meme this, this shit is fucking priceless

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

lennat:

IF WE’RE NOT ASHAMED OF OUR NEUROLOGICAL DIFFERENCES THEN WE DON’T’ REALLY HAVE THEM, GASP!

WE DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO REACH OUT TO OTHER PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DISABILITIES THAT JUST MEANS WE WANT ATTENTION, OH NO!

WE’RE FAKE IF WE TALK ABOUT IT SO WE CAN’T MENTION IT EVER!

WE SHOULD ALL JUST HIDE AWAY AND WALLOW IN SHAME BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE’RE ACTUALLY REAL

IF YOU DON’T THEN WE WILL GET TALKED DOWN TO YOU USING DEMEANING AND SEXIST LANGUAGE LIKE ‘DARLING’

I shudder to think what would happen if I dared express an opinion on the explicit denial of technologically-assisted facial recognition to the general public (read: us) due to privacy concerns.

(It was bad enough when I thought they were just dancing around the edge, but no, now they’re dancing away from the edge. And where Google goes, the world follows.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #(I’d make an analogy here about hearing aids and eavesdropping) #(but I can never tell which analogies about this sort of thing you’re allowed to make and which will get you yelled at) #(and anyway turns out the people who make those hearing aid commercials that *advertise* the potential for eavesdropping) #(are commonly considered terrible people) #(so that’d probably backfire) #proud citizen of The Future #but only by birth #not by residency #next year in Waterloo

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jtotheizzoe:

What’s better at facial recognition, Facebook or your brain?

Ever wonder how your brain can recognize and remember so many faces? Ever wonder how we train computers to do the same? Vanessa from BrainCraft looks the science of recognizing faces square in the… face?

Bad: It joins in that annoying way that many things about relatively-unusual conditions have of assuming their audience doesn’t contain anyone who experiences it (a falsely-inclusive “we” to refer to “normal” people).

Good: Finally a non-proso who’s noticed that facial recognition technology cries out to be used in assistive tech. (I swear to god, it’s like the people in charge of this sort of thing are deliberately trying to come up with every possible use for artificial facial recognition except the obvious one.)

(Come on, The Future, you’ve been a good home to me. You’ve given me those lovely photographs of Martian desert, full of colour and detail, the next-best thing to being there. You’ve given me multiple pieces of tech that are literally out of Star Trek. Give me a glasses-mounted HUD that flags passing acquaintances with their names. I know you can do it. Google Glass has been dancing around the edge for, what, a year now? I’d prefer an attachment to the glasses I already have, but as long as I can get them in prescription and they cost less than, oh, say twice as much as regular prescription glasses, I’ll settle for buying a new pair. Please, let me have this.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #(cell phones and e-readers) #(and I suspect you could turn a smart-watch into something very like a combadge without much tinkering) #the power of science #with power comes responsibility #and that responsibility takes many forms