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Comment by mjlangiii | Hacker News Reader

Just my two cents; I'm a father of 4 and I'm okay with not capturing those moments on film. And I mean that in two senses. One, I'm fine using my very imperfect memory to recall special moments and two, because of the logistical problems with grabbing the camera I'm not willing to risk missing out being fully in the moment. The occasionally photograph from an event or time period seems sufficient to conjure up the feelings from that time.

Regarding an always on camera - I'll second other comments in warning there are just so many concerns with abuse, I don't see how to get around those.

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I don't mean to derail this topic, but we don't have too many videos of my mother because for half of her life recording a video meant carrying one of those massive VHS recorders on your shoulder. When she passed and I realized how few videos we had, my first thoughts were: "How can I preserve these moments with my daughter, not just for myself but for her when I'm no longer around?" So I started looking into 360 degree video cameras and that sort of thing and that's when I remembered Google Clips. It's not ideal, but it may be one of the better solutions for preserving moments that doesn't require you to miss anything. I seem to take 90% of the photos of our family, which means I'm not in 90% of the photos.

I hope that doesn't sound strange, but you start thinking about these things during these times.

It's definitely something that deaths and similar events make you think about, but ultimately, I also find myself asking if it would be used at all. And if it was, would it be beneficial?

I have thousands of family slide photos from my grandparents. This is unusual, but they were big photography fans. Nobody looked at them for at least a decade. But about 10 years ago I had access to a nice scanner, so I digitized a few hundred of them, so that we could look at them more easily. Now I have thousands of slide photos nobody has looked at in two decades, hundreds of digitized versions nobody has looked at in one decade, and a handful of ones we printed or such that get looked at more regularly. I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

And I think there's something to be said for the impermanence of memory for helping people move on with their lives. I thought I was going to die a few years ago - I didn't, which is great, obviously, but if I had, I wouldn't have wanted those who loved me to still be dwelling on me today.

Snapchat is basically the app recognition of this idea that not everything is worth saving, that for 99.99% of stuff the value today far, far outweighs any value in the future. Shame it's such a hard concept to monetize, I guess.

(I say this, but I'm not immune to the temptation, either. If you ask the people in my life, they'd definitely tell you they wish I'd follow my own advice around "remember, you're taking pictures for yourself, not for other people, and don't prioritize your pictures of others over other people themselves." :| )

>I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

My mother has a habit of taking a bunch of photos of an event, and posting all of them to fb, disregarding quality. Blurry shots, photos of people mid-scarfing down food, etc, it all goes up.

These kinds of collections are utterly worthless, and to a degree, kind of disgusting to go through. But the events themselves are perfectly worthy of being photographed, posted, and whatever.

The problem is the lack of curation. Its fine that she took many photos, as long as she only shared the two that actually looked good.

In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

And collecting all of your experiences in video would be fine, if you only actually shared the 0.01% of it actually worth sharing. Of course no one wants to do it on your behalf.

> In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

That's kinda the point, isn't it? Hardly anybody actually spends their time curating their possessions for future generations, yet nobody is super sad about this missing inheritance. If we thought we'd value it more, there'd be more of a market for products to manage it - instead, things like Lightroom are a small nice. "On this day..." type reminders from Facebook and the like seem to be enough.

I don't think I have a problem: I have a bunch of pictures I look at, for me. It's just nothing more than that.

I would think you also don't want thousands of random photos in your archives: you'd ideally have filtered through it already, and whatever remains is likely worth looking back on

An archive of 10,000 images, i think, should be an impressive work; a grand feat of labour, through years of collection and curation. Even if you don't care about the content, you'd have to care about the effort spent. For personal use, or for sharing.

>Hardly anybody actually spends their time curating their possessions for future generations, yet nobody is super sad about this missing inheritance

I think ideally, you wouldn't have to curate for the future generations, just the future you, to create a valuable collection. But people often don't even curate for themselves, maintaining a mostly worthless collection. (With maybe a few hidden gems)

And I think curated collections, even those that never leave the basement, are assigned an inherent value. The attic used as a dump can burn and no one will care.

And in the same fashion, constantly recorded lifespans will also have little value (except maybe to historians), if it stays as a data dump. The value of that feature is lost if left alone, as is the collection of objects dumped in the attic. But the act of collecting gives you the chance to derive value that you otherwise couldn't (say because you didn't expect that particular moment to be noteworthy before it occurred for example), by curating it. A found, used but unprocessed film roll has no value; a gallery of selected photos can be extremely valuable.

I think it's a great conversation to have and one I've seen come up more and more.

I totally understand the inclination to capture as much as possible and have found myself wishing I had more photographs/videos/etc of certain things.

However, I think most of us are already past the point of useful amounts of capture. I definitely noticed it for myself when I realized I don't really ever go back and look at most of the pictures I take. When I do, it is almost always pictures of people that are gone. Even then, as the parent comment said, having one or two pictures from a time period or maybe one from a particular event is more than enough. Your mind fills in the details and that's awesome!

As far as the other side of things, I have definitely found myself spending more time trying to capture as much as possible (or capturing "just the right one") than actually enjoying the event.

I'm not saying don't take pictures. Far from it. I'm saying I don't think we have to try and preserve people via pictures. Because you can't.

I completely agree (father of 3, here). It's just not that important to record these things. Live in the moment!

what if you could record them AND live in the moment ? that's the endgame imo

Wouldn't you then be using the moment to have the potential to live in the past and not actually living in the moment?

No, not when recording is as simple as noting after the moment that you might have liked to capture that, and then telling your smart device to preserve that last 30 to 60 seconds of buffered video.

I have little to no recording of my children by myself because getting the phone out is always a pain and seems to take too long and make me miss the moment. That doesn't mean the few videos I have aren't appreciated.

The best tools enhance our natural abilities, not replace them. Having an enhanced recall function would be appreciated by many, I'm sure.

As a father of 2, I think the best videos I have are the ones of the kids when little doing everyday silly things. Pottering around in the living room, colouring in.

It's nice to capture these occassional snippets, and you can still be in the moment for important things.

As a parent with a terrible episodic memory, having more convenient ways of augmenting my memory would be a huge plus.

Those are fine two cents for you, but I don't know why it should matter that you mention them in this thread. The parent comment clearly shows he/she appreciates the ability to take photos/videos at his/her leisure. If that works for them then why bring your opinion to the conversation?

Conversation - the informal exchange of ideas by spoken words.

Opinions are ideas [0].

> ... but I don't know why it should matter that you mention them in this thread.

Is this not an opinion?

[0] loosely.

I can understand that. I just think it was a case of the parent comment already having a method/process that worked for them. I'd say there are a couple of different schools of thought when it comes to committing things to memory nowadays (more photos or more living in the moments) and if one works for someone then it's a bit unnecessary for someone else to come in and simply say that the other way works better for them.

I hate that I lost it, will have to spend an afternoon on the internet achive, But these are so tired. It's the exact same things people were spouting when phones started to have cameras. That came, and it turned out, having a quality camera you take with you is pretty cool and the end of the world didn't happen. Button cameras have existed for literally decades, if someone wants to take discrete pictures of you the means are there and it's a hell of a lot less awkward than staring at someone while your HUD camera grabs them.

A heads up display with no way of taking in data from the outside world is gimped to the point of uselessness and I think you really need to sit down and logic through the "concerns of abuse". There's no opportunity for privacy violation that isn't easier with another form of tech; at least Ive never heard one that sounds remotely plausible.

> That came, and it turned out, having a quality camera you take with you is pretty cool and the end of the world didn't happen.

It's a little early to say that, given that we're talking about things that take 50 years to transpire. You're telling people right now, in the midst of the smartphone explosion, that it's all said and done and over - you won't regret it at any point in your life, you'll always be glad of that smartphone, etc. But you don't know that yet.

And I will say that for some people it has already happened. I have missed countless things in the last 10 years because I was looking for my phone to take a picture. Events that happened and I never witnessed them to even get a memory of, just because I was looking down for my phone.

I already regret having the camera nearby but not quite ready to go for the last 10 years. Your examples are already wrong, and actually quite offensive in your tone, suggesting that you know better than everyone and that you know how everyone will feel in 50 years.

The concerns are real and justified, even if you personally don't share them.

So it's your phone's fault you've "missed experiences". I have to say, I've never heard that one.

Obviously no one can take away anyone's concern; however it's a larger leap to say all concerns are justified. I really don't understand your point, 50 years seems incredibly arbitrary. The smart phone explosion has come and gone; 95% of adults in the US have a cellphone and 77% have a smartphone[0]. Next to none of today's tech even existed 50 years ago can we not comment on any technological progress? I am nearly certain opinions will change over the next quarter century, and not in the way the luddites predict.

[0] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/

> So it's your phone's fault you've "missed experiences".

I did not say that, don't twist my words like that. It is my fault I missed the experiences - I was busy looking for my phone.

> The smart phone explosion has come and gone; 95% of adults in the US have a cellphone and 77% have a smartphone

Sounds like we're at the start of people having smartphones. I don't see how you look at those numbers and think it's gone. The explosion and cultural changes are just starting, as backed up by those numbers.

> Next to none of today's tech even existed 50 years ago can we not comment on any technological progress?

I'm not sure where you got this. Of course we can comment on technological progress. But it's ridiculous to talk about the smartphone explosion and its societal effects like its the distance past. This stuff is happening now, nothing is "settled" or "said and done". It's all starting, really.

There is a subtle but important difference between trusting someone doesn't have a hidden camera pointed at you and recording vs trusting someone to not have the camera that is on their face and pointed at you currently recording.

Ultimately, yes, people have been able to take hidden photographs for a very long time. I think the concern is normalizing the removal of 90% of the steps involved in doing so.

As a thought experiment, what I'd like you to do tomorrow, is the first stranger you see spend 30 seconds staring at them. Not discretely, square on staring at them, keeping your head ideally still to prevent (hypothetical) camera jitter. You'll quickly discover why effectively no one that owns heads mounted devices has ever used them to take video of consenting people (ignoring the fact that why bother anyway, when there's essentially no social stigma for whipping out your phone to take a video/picture and it's considerably more comfortable to try to be discrete since your head doesn't need to be directly facing your subject).

I own a pair of glass, and while the thing has loads of problems (unergonomic , thermal issues, and terrible developer's experience being the main ones) nothing breaks my heart more than people just repeating back click bait about the end of privacy, because as wearables go I think there's a lot more potential in HUDs than smartwatches and the like.

I don't think the camera angle matters here. If I am talking to somebody with a camera on their face, wondering whether they are recording or not becomes a constant concern.

Having shaky or off-centered video of me is still video of me.

It is regrettable that you're being downvoted so hard because I too recall these discussions. I also recall discussions about how toxic digital cameras would be with an "explosion of photography" "diluting the art" and causing an end to privacy. It's weird how prohibitionist people here are about cameras, but how other types of prohibition are axiomatically bad.

Turns out that there is a big difference between capability and intent, but no one really wants to talk about that in those discussions. If a thing COULD be used for a purpose but almost no one does, it seems difficult to really blame the tech for empowering people who breach the social contract.

Nevermind that in fact the proliferation of private cameras actually brings more parity between governments (which have proven the world over that they refuse to be trustworthy with that data) and private citizens (who can hardly do a worse job).

I think people love the idea of bad actors taking their picture because it intrinsically validates them. That guy with google glass is clearly out to take pictures of me. Oh the humanity.

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