Reminder to everyone that Roam Research is still in business, still great, getting updates, and most importantly worth the subscription cost. While I don't use it anymore, it has served me extremely well.
1,558 karma · joined November 19, 2020
https://smp11.simplex.im/a#ESE7iMv24KbMzxzY7CtwWaN1W80NpKvK3zZKER366Gs
Requires a decent amount of VRAM and runs poorly with pretty bad quality (IMO)
https://github.com/yuval-reshef/StreamVC
Unofficial implementations of StreamVC
Speaking of fun desktop toys, Compiz effects used to be wild.
I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures into your mind and superimpose an apple onto them, like adding a layer in Photoshop, perhaps with 90% opacity or a bit of inconsistent flickering. That's probably the best way I could describe the experience. Those edits I create are on another visual layer, inside my mind, which requires an active effort to have a consistent visual experience, but of course sometimes it can passively activate and you're just daydreaming without any effort. Personally, I have a hard time imagining faces. They change, they melt, sometimes they become inhuman. I only have consistent faces in my dreams.
The places I know well, I can fully navigate inside my mind, just flying around a town, going down streets and such. I, of course, don't believe neither the scaling or the distance is accurate, but it's convincing and consistent enough for me at the level of abstract thought.
I fully get immersed in the books I'm reading or listening to. It's the best part of reading a book.
I can imagine smell, taste, sound, touch, sight and even other senses like balance and whatever else. Sound would be the most vivid part of my imagination. High consistency and fidelity. I also have an inner monologue which I use in second person communication, addressing myself from the perspective of another entity.
I have anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and problems with rumination. I experience memories with a lot of emotion. Whenever I look at art or listen to music, I also tend to have a deep and powerful emotional reaction.
I am intrigued by non-human consciousness. A higher form of life. Seeing more colors, feeling more emotion, perhaps being a part of a hivemind. Do you ever think why the hivemind is vilified? Realistically there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so foreign that we can't ever possibly imagine it. It's a scary thought. We lose our human experience, something unique to us.
I believe there is a case of conjoined twins where they are sharing the same brain part, having two brains, being able to feel each other's stimuli and emotions, although I've only heard of it.
You will continue to exist as long as conscious life is able to propagate. For me, it makes sense that a state of nonexistence can't exist. Your consciousness is not unique, it's only a physical phenomena, thus it can be replicated, and it doesn't even have to be exact, after all, you are the ship of Theseus. When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the original, exactly. Like waking up from a dream, to suddenly being teleported somewhere. When you go to sleep, why don't you wake up as a rabbit? Who says you don't? Consciousness so far can only be examined from the outside but this does not deny our subjective conscious experience. I believe that when you die you will just move on, not as the same person, but as another conscious being. Eternal life. Essentially immortal, but you lose everything, and you're unaware of it. Even if 5 million years have to pass, you will just wake suddenly wake up.
I also believe consciousness is not quantifiable, but shared, and you just have a narrow perspective at a time. When you die I'd say you don't even have to wake up as a newborn, you could just spontaneously be another person, as long as there's no other path of continuity.
I don't take notes on articles I find boring. If I can't find value within the first few minutes of skimming, I don't take notes on it.
You see a lot of productivity gurus take an exorbitant amount of notes on articles that can be summarized in one paragraph at most.
A lot of my notes are for things I find very interesting and exciting. Whenever I am having a conversation about them, the link to those notes is immediately made and I can resurface information in conversation.
I touch on them every once in a while, but it's not something I do frequently.
Most importantly, I make sure that I can find my way back to the notes I've taken. I use lots of tags and backlinks that do not "look" right with the page, but make it easy to find using adjacent concepts and ideas.
You'll have to use an external UI like SillyTavern.