4k80 has issues. It’s been harder for them to track down good prints and get the color correction right: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

My pleasure, I’m always down for nerding out on stuff like this.

Another fun example of the early visual processing is feature detection. The parallel processing allows us to instantly find a green square in a sea of red squares, as it jumps out at you.

But when you combine multiple independent features together (find the green square in a sea of red and green squares and circles) now we have to tediously look around the whole image. That integration of multiple features forces the work higher up in the visual system and takes more time, attention, and effort. Thats why Where’s Waldo is hard.

https://i.imgur.com/2UZhT3I.jpeg

Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between stimuli and perception. A lot of it is perceptual thresholds, so how much sound or light is needed for someone to hear or see something (fun fact: people can reliably detect a single photon in a dark room at better than chance). Thus much of the experimental protocols boil down to asking “can you hear this?” after playing a sound which is what the Verizon ads always made me think of.

The other half of the discipline is figuring out the wiring on low level perception. For instance we have massive parallel processing in the early visual system that does things like highlight lines and edges, which is what makes the Mach dot/band illusions work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_bands

It’s what I studied in undergrad as it was a nice overlap in my interests in cognitive science, psychology and computer science. I basically just like knowing how everything works :)

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics

Reminds me of reading the print version of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, where you needed one bookmark for the novel and another for the endnotes, which made up like 20% of the book. Hopefully e-readers make that easier now.

https://youtu.be/X4HQyqc-aVU?si=T1s6HJ6QwacPOOeR

Little Brother wasn’t bad and had some interesting ideas, but I would have to agree with you on the whole. As the saying goes, most authors only have one book in them. That being said, Down and Out is a masterpiece that I think about regularly and recommend often.

If ECT hadn’t worked for me I would try this. It’s actually probably better than ECT on balance because it doesn’t cause amnesia and you don’t have to go in once a month and go under general anesthesia. Once the surgery is done then the maintenance is probably pretty minimal.

Reminds me of the wireheads from the Known Space series by Larry Niven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)

We’d like you to be “agile” by following these very specific and rigid set of rules and procedures.

Hence the saying: The sun never sets on the British Empire

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-does-the-sun-never-sets-on-the-british-empire-mean.html

Is there anything we can do to help? Donations? Tech volunteers? Visit hosting company with a baseball bat?

As the fungus people say, every mushroom is edible once.