Brinens and Things &#8211; Tumblr Mirror

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.

And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.

It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.

Adverse mutations can stick around for a long time if they’re bundled with genes that otherwise do well. This happens a lot with populations that go through bottlenecks – whatever’s left afterwards is going to stick around for a while.

e.g. the whole vitamin c thing seems like a loss for no good reason and we’re all stuck with it.

As a sidenote, given the population boom in the last few hundred years there’s gotta be a whole bunch of weird mutations that exist in greater numbers than you ever would have expected.

Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.

As a further side note, I wonder what the trade off for lactase persistence is. It must be something, if lactase stopped persisting at some point.

>>It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.<<

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, but I think she misunderstood and I didn’t bother trying to clarify.

Come to think of it, why *do* specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that. Yeah, it’ll take a few years to start getting the hang of it, but those’ll be childhood years in which you aren’t expected to be very competent at stuff anyway.

A lot of the life problems caused by prosopagnosia are not so much from “being bad at faces” as from “being *worse at faces than others expect you to be*”, and if people’s expectations were lower it would be much less of a problem. There’s a possible universe in which the default reaction to walking past a friend at the mall and they act like they’ve never met you is not “how rude, what did I ever do to them” but “yeah, the human brain’s not built to deal with crowds, makes sense that they didn’t recognise me. TBH, I only knew for sure it was them because they had that backpack with the hole patched with denim”.

—

>>Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.<<

Link?

Come to think of it, why do specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that.

So if the example you give later (walking past a friend at the mall and not recognizing them) is the sort of thing that actually happens, then I’d guess general recognition without the extra facial recognition just isn’t good enough.

Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.

If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.

And for babies, recognizing your mother does seem pretty important.

Not sure about the link. I’d have to dig it out. If you want to siikr for it maybe try neanderthal or eusocial or something.

>>Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.<<

Well, whenever I hear people draw a distinction between “friend” and “friendly acquaintance”, they almost always define “friend” so strictly that I have had maybe one or two friends in the past decade, and no friends whose faces I saw frequently. (honestly, where do the friend-vs-acquaintance people *find* so many people who don’t respond to interpersonal problems by contemptuously brushing them off)

I can reliably recognise housemates at the mall, and have nobody else whose faces I have as much experience with as one would have with one’s band members. I can *suspect* that a person at the mall is my boss, but not with confidence; however, I’ve only been around him ~[3 gradually increasing to 8]† hours/week for 1.5 years, so it’s to be expected that I’m only in the middle stages of learning his face.

(He is not faceblind–or at least, he’s significantly better at keeping track of which customers are regulars than I am–but he still didn’t spot me. I asked about how his Boxing Day went a couple days later and confirmed that he was at the mall that day, so it probably *was* him I saw.)

—

>>If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.<<

While this isn’t all that different from what I said, it does make it more clear why, if someone *did* mutate an unusually good facial-recognition ability, it would get selected for and eventually become the norm. If you don’t know whether someone’s an enemy *and neither do they*, that’s far less dangerous than if they know you’re enemies and you don’t.

Also, not knowing by the face whether someone’s in your tribe is something even mezzoprosopons or whatever the hell we’re calling them have to deal with these days, and they deal with it by simply making tribe members wear distinctive clothing when there’s a chance they might encounter an enemy [link].

(and I feel like a lot of the reasons that *I* refrain from murdering people would still apply to the stalking-a-rival-in-the-forest thing, but perhaps my threshold for “I am willing to accept X risk of Y-severity punishment†† in order to get the benefits of committing this crime” is unusually strict; probably an anxiety thing)

—

†I work more hours than this, but these are specifically the hours that overlap with the hours he’s there.

††note: if you assault someone and they fight back and hurt *you*, that also counts as a punishment for this purpose

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #prosopagnosia #evolution #murder mention

Can you tell who this is?

January 8, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{Title link: https://brinbellway.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/can-you-tell-who-this-is/ }}

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.

And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.

It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.

Adverse mutations can stick around for a long time if they’re bundled with genes that otherwise do well. This happens a lot with populations that go through bottlenecks – whatever’s left afterwards is going to stick around for a while.

e.g. the whole vitamin c thing seems like a loss for no good reason and we’re all stuck with it.

As a sidenote, given the population boom in the last few hundred years there’s gotta be a whole bunch of weird mutations that exist in greater numbers than you ever would have expected.

Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.

As a further side note, I wonder what the trade off for lactase persistence is. It must be something, if lactase stopped persisting at some point.

>>It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.<<

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, but I think she misunderstood and I didn’t bother trying to clarify.

Come to think of it, why *do* specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that. Yeah, it’ll take a few years to start getting the hang of it, but those’ll be childhood years in which you aren’t expected to be very competent at stuff anyway.

A lot of the life problems caused by prosopagnosia are not so much from “being bad at faces” as from “being *worse at faces than others expect you to be*”, and if people’s expectations were lower it would be much less of a problem. There’s a possible universe in which the default reaction to walking past a friend at the mall and they act like they’ve never met you is not “how rude, what did I ever do to them” but “yeah, the human brain’s not built to deal with crowds, makes sense that they didn’t recognise me. TBH, I only knew for sure it was them because they had that backpack with the hole patched with denim”.

—

>>Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.<<

Link?

Tags:

#reply via reblog #prosopagnosia #evolution

Windows 7 is going away, please get used to Windows 10

January 4, 2019June 20, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

The sale of non-Professional OEM licences was stopped on October 31, 2014. Mainstream support for 7 ended on January 13, 2015. Extended support will end on January 14, 2020. On September 7, 2018, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will get three more years of support after January 14, 2020 if users pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) service, however this only applies to users of the Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.

NO.

NO I CANNOT.

I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.

Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).

Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.

Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.

Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.

PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.

Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.

But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.

we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional

collapsedsquid:

How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses? They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money. What the hell is going on with them?

IT’S FUCKING AWFUL.

And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks.

They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility”

And here’s the deal: I GET IT.

But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!

But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.

A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP.

And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop.

Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer.

The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years.

#nah i cant use windows 10 #im just going to switch entirely to linux #at least that doesnt have inherent migraine features

If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.

God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is.

god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices

so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck

Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so

brin-bellway:

>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<

…

*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*

?!

(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)

—

>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<

Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)

(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)

Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.

A 7 year old consumer system will cost you approximately $0, so on that count the comparison still stands.

But I feel like the important thing to note is that it’s not like good hardware has gotten expensive, it’s just that consumers can now get by with cheap hardware, which is a big win imo.

Your audacity problem sounds quite strange – do you know if it’s leaving behind an x window or a spare process, or is it an issue with the window manager or something?

Come to think of it, I really have no idea what the built-for-consumer laptop markets are like, and have only the vaguest awareness of their existence. Almost every laptop I’ve ever had, and certainly every laptop I’ve had in the last decade, was a refurbished or straight hand-me-down business laptop. Businesspeople are the larval hosts of the laptop lifecycle.

(FTR, my previous laptop was *also* a 2011 model, but a lower tier: I knew what specs I wanted my next one to have and what my budget was, and it so happened that the laptop that best fit those needs was not ~technically~ any newer. Switching to this one was still a very noticeable upgrade, though.)

I don’t know what’s going on with Audacity, but IIRC it did *used* to work. I just tried re-installing it, and at some point when having to reboot wouldn’t be too inconvenient I’ll give it another shot.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post

Windows 7 is going away, please get used to Windows 10

January 3, 2019June 20, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

The sale of non-Professional OEM licences was stopped on October 31, 2014. Mainstream support for 7 ended on January 13, 2015. Extended support will end on January 14, 2020. On September 7, 2018, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will get three more years of support after January 14, 2020 if users pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) service, however this only applies to users of the Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.

NO.

NO I CANNOT.

I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.

Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).

Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.

Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.

Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.

PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.

Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.

But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.

we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional

collapsedsquid:

How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses? They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money. What the hell is going on with them?

IT’S FUCKING AWFUL.

And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks.

They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility”

And here’s the deal: I GET IT.

But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!

But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.

A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP.

And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop.

Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer.

The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years.

#nah i cant use windows 10 #im just going to switch entirely to linux #at least that doesnt have inherent migraine features

If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.

God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is.

god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices

so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck