Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways

My internal thoughts are verbal and don't see pictures as a normal part of my inner though process.

When someone says "imagine a pink elephant in the room" I don't see a pink elephant, but instead have an inner dialogue to the effect of "ok, so there's a pink elephant in the corner." I may also recall an image of an elephant, but it's not pink and it's not really in the room.

When there is a concrete thing that I have a memory of ("picture a squirrel", specific things from holidays, etc.) I can see flashes of still images from those. I don't see a generic squirrel, but a specific image/memory of a squirrel I have seen.

I have general placement/shape awareness but not so much colours or other specific details. I can infer things like colour from context, or have a thought to the effect of "that building was white" but I don't really see the building as white.

I can only remember a colour if it's a key in the story. Ditto anything spacial - unless it matters, it's gone. Don't ask me what a colour is either, I can only tell if there's something in front of me of that colour, otherwise no idea. I mean I have a map of "colour relationships" in my head which helps me remember the words and how they might correlate to reality.

But according to people who have this giant library of colours in their head, I often get the associations wrong or wrong-ish, because my ability to even care about colours is pretty low.

Yup, I consider it just bad (narrative) memory compounded by aphantasia. Can watch a film or read a book and barely remember what was there the next day. Same for life events, with exception of very strong emotional triggers, or very well-connected systems - ie could describe better some system I was building 15 years ago than what last christmas was like (i assume it happened, there are pictures).

For me, recall is bad, but recognition is OK - things 'come back' easily with hints or photos. But I guess that's how memory tends to work, and motivation to plenty of pictures/videos.

Yes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).

I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that.

Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past.

Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!

I can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng

I'm the same. As a student, I could vividly picture the page of the book containing the details of whatever problem I was working on. I have close to zero artistic and design ability, but am very strong in engineering and spatial reasoning.

I've wondered about this: if you can hold an image clearly in your mind - e.g. the Eifel tower - wouldn't you be able to reproduce it well on paper? I know that's not artistic ability in the creative sense, but still..

People often can't reproduce what is right in front of their open eyes well.

Conversely, I have aphantasia but can draw reasonably well from memory (at one point well above average, but I'm about 30 years out of practice).

There are people who can "trace" what they imagine, but it doesn't appear that being skilled at drawing is that closely linked to ability to visualise.

An interesting thing, though, is that if I draw from memory my lines are more precise, while if I draw from something I can see, I will sketch out and refine. I think the two are quite different skill sets - drawing what you see often requires paying attention to spatial relationships and transferring those to the drawing to get proportions right etc.

I’ve never heard someone claim windows peaked at 8, at least 7.

Everyone hated Vista, 7 was okay, but 8.1 was way better. It was super polished, Windows 10 has been the worst version I have ever used. Windows 8.1 was one of the last versions to run faster on lesser hardware btw.

What’s stopping you from building that yourself instead of having to go through Framework?

Square footage is very much a lie in San Francisco as well

Yes, I initially jumped from Android to iPhone back in 2019 or so because I felt like the experience was much more stable and it just worked, smooth, no issues, kinda boring but in a good adult way. Now every interaction makes me want to throw the phone out the window. If it’s not just blank, the keyboard doesn’t come up, the navbar in Safari sometimes is there, sometimes it’s a blank rectangle, etc. “ask your developer to update the apps to run well in iOS 26” is such a garbage response. We didn’t need to break everything just to have some glass simulations that make everything slower and add no value.

Google Home: holy shit dude. It was a mostly working thing. Absolutely unusable with Gemini. Will get the transcript right 15% of the time. Can’t even ask for the weather.

Roku: Netflix playing in the background but I’m still in the main menu.

I can go on

Well someone has to sue first no? The courts don’t go out telling people what to do. They react to claims.

Maybe if instead we stopped engaging they would wonder why

You’re getting in an ambulance, not calling a cab. You’re probably unconscious, maybe at least disoriented, overwhelmed, concerned about what’s happening more than doing math. Also you’re there on the floor bleeding, what’s your alternative? “Nah don’t worry, I’ll figure out this exposed fracture in the uber, I got points with them so it’s cheaper”?

Parent talked about conscious and aware.

I had fractures several times, and I did think about the costs. In fact, the last one was pretty bad, andy first thought was "good thing I'm in a country with good medical care, even though expensive".

Even with insurance all these companies will fight with each other to find excuses to say it’s not their responsibility and send you letters non stop saying things like “oh you paid for the van, I’m just the nurse, it’s separate” or “oh yeah you paid for the hallway in the hospital but the ct scan person is a contractor, you owe them 3k”. System could not be more broken