Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by randallsquared 4855 days ago
Actually, what I want is everything logged that I could have seen or heard, had I been paying attention.

I want to be trying to remember what someone said to me while I was distracted by a road sign, and be able to pull up audio or video of that moment by reference to the distracting sign ("triangular blue sign") by doing a video search via voice input.

I want to have every moment of every day in my life available via search or just for browsing, so that I don't have the experience, day after day, of thinking, "Wow, I wish I'd captured that moment by taking a pic or a video that I could send to my loved ones".

I want to have my systems constantly tag my ongoing conversations with wikipedia lookups so that I can stop pointless debates and move on. And I want other people to have this, too, so that I don't have to convince them.

I want to have systems that deliver on the promise that smartphones had, but which are thwarted by slow wake-up times, bad connections, difficulty of use while driving, low battery lives, etc.

The fact is that we're currently losing almost our whole lives because our current recording technology, human memory, sucks so much. I don't want to forget things. Ever. Again.

2 comments

* Most of your life is not fun

* The good times are real easy to remember

* Your loved ones don't want every piece of your daily minutiae, really, they don't

* Pointless debates are some of the most hilarious conversations you can have

* Technology will get better

* You never forget the best times, the rest is unimportant

> Most of your life is not fun

> Your loved ones don't want every piece of your daily minutiae, really, they don't

I'm not sure what to say to this. Try to have more fun? :)

> Technology will get better

I'm counting on it! But Glass is not the final attempt to do this -- it's one of the first attempts. Within ten years, absent political dystopia, there will be no way to tell if the person you're having a conversation with is lifelogging.

> You never forget the best times, the rest is unimportant

Empirically untrue, sadly. From reminiscing with friends, it's clear that both they and I have forgotten some of the best times, since I remember some of the best times and have forgotten others, and vice versa. I can remember that I had quite a bit of fun during the late eighties, but the vast majority of the detail is gone. When I've written down decade-old memories and looked at them a decade after that, it really, really often happens that I'm disturbed at how differently I remembered that event when I was halfway closer to it than now. Human memory is so sketchy and malleable that it's just barely useful at all. :(

Unfortunately some of us have terrible memories, and are really important events, such first memories with our children are fading only a few years later.

Having technology that captures this automatically for me is huge! I'd love to have it recording all the time, and to spend a little time each day highlighting the fun bits.

Time with my kids is precious to me, its fun, its good, and I'm sure that both me and them will want to remember them. Having a crap memory sucks, having a piece of technology to do it for me is worth every penny.

> I don't want to forget things. Ever. Again.

Not strictly technology-related, but certainly human related, you might want to read Albert Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". You might develop a new perspective on "remembering things" and memory after reading the book, a perspective not limited to technology or fancy gadgets but instead one that touches on our very essence as human beings.