[criddell]

I kind of love the idea of feeding the text of entire books to an AI. More often than I’d like to admit, I’ll be reading a novel and find myself not remembering who some character is. I’d love to be able to highlight a name in my ereader and it would see that I’m 85 pages into Neuromancer and give me an answer based on that (ie no spoilers).

Or have a textbook that I can get some help and hints while working through problems and get stuck like you might get with a good study partner.

[mbil]

Kindle X-Ray kind of does this https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/what-is-x-ray-for-the-am...

[ornornor]

Yeah but then you have to contribute making Bezos even richer.

[bko]

He made a product you find useful. Even if he doesn’t need to be rewarded more, he’s proven himself an effective allocator of capital. Give him a dollar and he’ll likely use it to develop some product you’ll enjoy in the future as well.

[ornornor]

That’s presumptuous. He didn’t make a product I find useful, and a dollar more he makes will be used to squeeze a tiny bit more out of those he employs and/or out of society for his own benefit. I’m not enabling that as much as I can.

[bamboozled]

Bezos getting richer? Get used to it.

[ornornor]

I don’t have to contribute to it, as much as I can help it.

[pyinstallwoes]

What do you use instead of Amazon?

[ornornor]

Anything else. I live in Switzerland and prefer to use galaxus, Migros, inter discount, mueller, foletti, or buy second hand. Absolutely anything I can to not buy from Amazon even if the alternative is 10–15% more expensive.

[rakoo]

Contrasted to making Sam Altman even richer ? Or Sergei and Larry even richer ? I don't see the difference. Not meaning it's ok to go the Amazon way, but that it's not ok to use any of those

[ornornor]

And I personally don't use gmail, block all ads on YT, etc. I avoid all these when practical and possible, rather than throwing my arms up in the air. Doesn't mean I never use their services, but I do my best not to.

[Zetobal]

The only thing you achieve by doing that is making your own life harder but principles right?

[dayjaby]

How on earth does 1 minute of your time to install an adblocker make your life harder?

[ornornor]

Not that much harder for me really. You do you though.

[rakoo]

Oh I do agree and I wish more people did like you do, which is my point: instead of discussing what billionaire ego island gets richer, let's just not use their tools and discuss together what we want as a society. If the cost of AI is higher than its benefits, then let's not use it. From any company.

[TrueGeek]

I'm the opposite. In movies (and real life to an extent) I have trouble telling people apart. I'd love a closed caption like service that just put name tags over everyone.

[ryandrake]

That's one of the perpetually-SciFi use cases of Augmented Reality: You're walking around with AR glasses and whenever someone comes into your field of view, your display hovers over them their name, their job, when you last talked to them, what their hobbies are, and so on. A huge privacy nightmare, but useful for people who can't recall names and details about people they've met.

[egeozcan]

I don't think it'd be a privacy nightmare if it used private databases created by the user. Like a personal CRM, something like Monica, but with a real-time touch.

[avarun]

Wouldn't be from a legal sense, but the societal implications of technology like that becoming commonplace are still immense. The limitations of human memory provide safety in a way today that would quickly erode if everybody could remember exactly everything that's ever been said or seen around them.

[Breza]

I agree with you. I had a bit of a falling out with a friend and wanted to check in on her a few years later. The immediately preceding messages in Messenger were the largely-forgotten unpleasantness. Quite awkward. It really drove home how much of a blessing forgetting every little slight is.

[Cyph0n]

For an interesting exploration of this, I suggest watching the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You” (S1E3).

[nindalf]

Honestly one of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen, simply because it challenged one of my core beliefs. I’ve always struggled with a poor memory and I’ve tried all kinds of systems to improve retention and recall. This episode challenged the benefits of remembering everything pretty well and made me reconsider.

[chambored]

Safety from what exactly?

[avarun]

"You said X 3 years ago, but now you said, which is the opposite of X. How dare you?" is one class of problems. Another is that you can learn quite a bit more about a person than they wished to actually divulge to you if you're able to capture and study their exact behaviors over a long enough stretch of time.

[groggo]

Still privacy nightmare and creepy. There's plenty of public info on people, that once collected and assembled into one place is basically stalking. Not saying it's not a cool idea though :)

[Aeolun]

This is no different from my photo’s app automatically labelling faces right?

I’m fairly certain the vision pro could do it right now.

[rasz]

Install our virtual keyboard/virtual screen saver/dancing baby/flashlight app

/small print: requires read all, send all permissions

[HKH2]

And instead of just shrugging it off, you could tag strangers that annoy you and end up with a giant list of grudges against a whole host of people. The false positives (e.g. twins and doppelgangers) should make it interesting.

[dylan604]

Take it to the next step towards Black Mirror where the AR shadows out people you've blocked and then mutes their voice so you can't hear them

[earthnail]

That would make for fantastic comedic situations when you then physically bump into them after you erased them from your AR vision xD.

[EwanG]

Which feeds into Saint Motel's song "You're Nobody Til Somebody Wants You Dead" which has a bit about how the list just grows and grows until it's everyone you've ever known...

[pmarreck]

I had a product idea for an AR app that would do this for everyone who's opted into it. So for real-world networking events, you might choose to disclose some things about yourself but only for that venue and only for some window of time for example.

I never built it, but it's perfectly possible to do.

The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee, and it would then show you others who were in that "market" (of ideas, drugs, sex, whatever). (It might only ask you to pay it if it found someone nearby who matched. And then it would automatically notify the other person unless you paid an ADDITIONAL fee... Not sure about the latter idea, but it was an idea.)

The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.

[piva00]

> The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee

> The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.

No, the genius idea is its major issue, just by paying you gain access to private data (people's preferences) without any kind of chain of trust to make sure that someone is actually part of the group ("market" in your terms) for which they want access to.

By paying you could know that someone around you is looking for cocaine, or is willing to sell sexual services, or is looking to match other people from the same gender, or holds a certain political view against an authoritarian government, etc.

[pmarreck]

I answered this in a sibling comment. You could acquire credibility in a particular preference from the network over time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39482786

[bluefirebrand]

Sounds great, I'm going to make a "credibility as a service" startup and we'll find ways to farm whatever score in whatever fields you want.

And you can be sure government agencies will do the same.

[HKH2]

How would you stop spies or undercover cops trying to infiltrate the "market"?

[pmarreck]

Or people who want to "out" gay people. I know.

That would be a good argument over not permitting a unilateral notification of a match (which, at the very least, I wanted to make very expensive and thus profitable, if it's allowed at all). If it notified both people 100% of the time, and one of you was a possible impostor, you could report them. And from a legal standpoint, showing interest in a market doesn't make you guilty. And, you could possibly also build "cred" in one of these tagged "markets" by getting cred from others who say you're legit, and that information would be revealed at the same time (possibly at your discretion).

[HKH2]

Makes sense. You still might get honeypots though; could you make cred work more generally with trust between friends, friends of friends etc. without compromising the markets?

[chowells]

So your genius idea is to get people to pay to put themselves on a future blackmail list when your data is leaked/stolen/sold? I have to say, it is a kind of evil genius.

[visarga]

Basically the Slack experience. You don't need to remember people, you can see your past interactions right there.

[BurningFrog]

I've seen scenes in movies where assistants of heads of state will discreetly whisper to them who the people in the room are.

With a service like this we could all live like Kings!

[eesmith]

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

> A Farley file is a set of records kept by politicians on people whom they have met.

> The term is named for James Farley, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager. Farley, who went on to become Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, kept a file on everyone he or Roosevelt met.

> Whenever people were scheduled to meet again with Roosevelt, Farley would review their files. That allowed Roosevelt to meet them again while knowing their spouse, their children's names and ages, and anything else that had come out of earlier meetings or any other intelligence that Farley had added to the file. The effect was powerful and intimate.

> Farley files are now commonly kept by other politicians and businesspeople.

[Viliam1234]

The business version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...

[avarun]

This features distinctively in the show Veep, where one of the main characters provides exactly this for the Vice President.

[dboreham]

The sad truth is that technology isn't much used to help people. Instead it's used to make money. E.g. there's all this amazing AI, buy my phone keyboard autocorrect has the intelligence of a slug.

[crooked-v]

> my phone keyboard autocorrect has the intelligence of a slug

iOS 17 already uses a local LLM under the hood for autocorrect and text suggestions. Responses to the change (at least for people who actually noticed it) have been pretty universally positive.

[Turing_Machine]

> Instead it's used to make money.

Most people find having more money to be helpful.

[golergka]

When I first watched Departed, I didn't realise that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters are different people until the third act. It was very confusing.

[neltnerb]

Hah, I thought I was the only one. I'm not particularly face blind either... something about the era I guess.

[antifa]

Loudest thing online is people complaining about minorities existing in TV shows. A much bigger, real problem, is when they regularly cast 3 characters with almost exactly the same skin tone, skin texture, hair color, hair length, hair style, eye color, clothing style, face shape, voice, body type. Then the character's name is given once (if given) and you see several scenes without the character. Several scenes with the clones. Sudden scene with 2 clones in the same scene. You really couldn't give these three white people a different hair style? Make one wear glasses?

[gniv]

Amazon already does some of this (they identify actors in a scene iirc), so they could "easily" extend it to what you're suggesting.

[esafak]

Xray, they call it. It's a great feature! https://www.amazon.com/salp/xray

[hn_user82179]

I adore X-Ray. It's great for finding songs I like that are played in a video, or figuring out some actor who looks familiar but I can't tell. And of course for remembering character names. I'm honestly so surprised no other streaming services offer a similar feature.

[mncharity]

Many years ago there was an MIT startup based on the idea, IIRC, that subliminally flashed names increased recall among cognitively impaired elderly when the flashed names were correct, but didn't negatively impact recall when the flashed names were incorrect. So even quite poor face recognition could be worthwhile.

[aidenn0]

Japanese novels are particularly hard for me to keep characters straight due to sometimes very different forms of address depending on who (including the narrator) is mentioning the character.

[andromeduck]

Had a similar experience reading Jane Austen, it never really made sense to me until I watched the movies

[keiferski]

FYI someone did do this for Neuromancer. Not sure if they used AI or not.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1ovTscY-bEuMNAEgNXTCX...

[crazygringo]

That's a truly fantastic idea actually. I'd love to see that built into e-readers.

As well as when I pick back up reading after two weeks -- remind me everything that's happened so far? Where it gives a five-paragraph summary where the first paragraph is top-level covering the entire story so far, and the last paragraph is just about the previous few pages.

Not to mention with non-fiction -- highlight an acronym that was defined somewhere 28 pages ago and tell me what the heck it is again?!

[glhaynes]

I love these ideas. One more: "He said xyz but we know he's lying. What would motivate him to do that?"

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> I’d love to be able to highlight a name in my ereader

I do this on my Kindle. Highlight the name, search, and the first occurrence is usually their introduction. No AI needed.

[Breza]

Eh, it is hit or miss. Same with definitions of words. I'm a native speaker of American English, so I know the most common definitions of words. When I'm touching a word for a definition, it's usually because it's being used in an unusual way. Consider this passage from Around the World in 80 Days...

"He passed ten hours out of the twenty-four in Saville Row, either in sleeping or making his toilet."

Huh? Does the character need to eat more fiber? Try selecting "toilet" in that sentence for a definition. You'll get the most common one, which only makes me more confused. AI should have an easy time knowing that the appropriate meaning is the OED's definition 5a: "Frequently in form toilette. The action or process of washing, dressing, or arranging the hair. Frequently in to make one's toilet."

[world2vec]

Great idea, especially with huge books with hundreds of characters (looking at you "Gravity's Rainbow" and your ~400 characters with wacky names).

[ChildOfChaos]

I'd love to feed it all the advice books on certain topics that I am struggling with and then chat with it like a group of advisors.

[shard]

Whatsapp now has an AI chat feature which includes chatbots such as relationship coach, travel expert, career coach

[jamie_ca]

I can't recall which reader app I used, but I've seen this done before in ages past.

No AI, so no big concept of inferred identities, but if someone's referenced by name you could long-tap the name, and get a list of all previous references in the text. Super useful for referencing secondary characters in super-long epics like The Wheel of Time.

[pests]

I'm really bad with names. I almost wish for unique color highlighting for every name. I would remember previous scenes or conversations way better than keeping track of tons of character names.

[Slow_Hand]

It would be amusing if the AI inferred the identity of a mystery character before they were revealed.

[skydhash]

Some printed books has that. It’s called the dramatis personae. Everyone not listed in it is not important. So not even tech is needed for that.

[mschulkind]

Some kindle books have the X-ray feature that does exactly this.

[cryptonector]

Soon we'll have AI writing books, then reading them for us so we don't have to.

There is value to that, if we mostly only use this capability to digest books we otherwise wouldn't read but also if we don't stop reading books. Most likely we'll just stop reading books, and that strikes me as scary.

[antifa]

Some people have different preferences when reading books. This could be genre, prose style, word count, descriptions, verbosity, types of characters, themes. Perhaps there could be an outline, wiki, and full text, author's notes for the AI to use, then each reader can have a version presented that goes into extra details in accordance to known user preferences then cliffnotes mode for the parts less interesting to that person.

[wouldbecouldbe]

For most classic novels I expect GPT to already have in it's memory.