Now that I look at it again, there definitely is a wall in the back left. MCS succeeded where I failed because I guess I have an implicit "walls aren't interesting" filter that threw out the only positively identifiable object.
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand! … Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
I disagree that it's a 'perfect analogy'. Jabberwocky is a poem created by a human that, while it contains made-up nonsense words, still makes sense. (The hero seeks out a fearsome monster, fights it, is victorious and is lauded for his victory on his return). The poem is aesthetically pleasing and intentionally playful in containing an element of nonsense but not too much.
This picture, on the other hand, is nothing like a 'visual nonsense poem' for me. It's artificially generated and not aesthetically pleasing. It's mildly disconcerting and beyond that, uninteresting.
The way you phrase this suggests an unawareness of the fact that one comes to aesthetic judgement through interpretive frames, which are formed through personal experience and knowledge, and therefore express your aesthetic interpretations as more factual than they are.
I recommend
Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis by Michael Parsons, can be found online easily.
The song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well.
Peter Watts' science fiction novels Blindsight and Echopraxia include "vampires" that co-evolved with humans. The vampires' aversion to crosses is described as their brains "crashing" when visually processing right angles.
His is an interesting take on vampire lore in sci-fi. I remember they also have drugs to mitigate this condition, and allow them to live in cities: the anti-euclidean, or auntie-e.
Thanks for posting this. I'd been trying to remember this short story's name for a while now, and seeing this image immediately put me in mind of the "basilisk"!
It appears to be made with GANbreeder but I haven't seen any hard evidence of that. Nevertheless highly likely.
We should try not to physically mount a meatspace DDOS ... but the creator of GANbreeder is hosting a GANparty in Berkeley May 3rd.... https://ganbreeder.app/party
A while ago, I had a migraine with stroke-like symptoms in the other direction: I could form thoughts in my head, but could only get a garbled mess out of my mouth. As a knowledge worker whose most important asset is his brain, this was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life.
I've (probably) had a ministroke (TIA). What surprised me is that typing was affected in the same way for me. In my mind I made a coherent sentence with words, but when I read back what I wrote, I understood that it was a garbled mess. I tried again, failed, and became frustrated.
The crazy part to me was that I realized something was wrong, but it never occurred to me to ask for help. I tried to stubbornly keep working. I was trying to set up IIS at the time. I knew what I was roughly doing, but I kept forgetting what I was specifically doing. Reading those chat logs reminds me that even my own brain can fail me.
You should really get that checked out if you haven’t already. A TIA can be a precursor to a full on stroke or otherwise have lasting consequences. An MRI can confirm all is good in your brain.
That was years ago and I haven't had health insurance in a long time now. Nothing has happened, so far though. Funnily enough, life did actually go downhill after that. I never thought that it was related, but in the half a year to a year that followed it, I dropped out of school and left work. I haven't really been able to put the pieces together since. It's as though I have no motivation to do anything long term. I kind of doubt it's related though. One day I'll get it check out though.
Happened to my mom once and it lasted a couple of days. Very scary. She didn't even know she was speaking nonsense and would get upset that no one could understand her.
Are you suggesting "dumbass idiot 𓅩" with a bio of "shut the fuck hi" is a completely serious account? It's fairly obvious that it's a tongue-in-cheek joke, the linked url doesn't even work.
It surprises me sometimes how innocently naive people are. How people miss obvious jokes, parody and sarcasm online. I figured as more people use the internet, the less naive they'd be, but it seems like the opposite is happening. And the more obvious the joke, the more people seem to take it seriously.
On the mainstream Internet, you can't ever be sure. What you consider an obvious joke can actually be intended as 100% serious by the poster. Or it could be some small agency's "brilliant" plan at social media marketing targeting unsophisticated normies.
However the joke is spot on, since that image is not far removed from the general mess at a typical CVS. You walk in for your meds and are bombarded with a special deal on soda, makeup, want a beach toy? how about some junk food? oh wait here's some more cheap cosmetics to go with your passport photo… By the time you get to the OTC drug section that has the tiny selection of the same meds in 5 different brandings/packagings, you're already overwhelmed. The whole store is a UX fail.
As a side note, I'm fit and not diabetic but making people who struggle with glucose control walk past all these snacks is just evil—or ar the very least highly insensitive. Profit first, damn the sick! :(
The weird thing is that the url they use (for the sake of future readers, cvspharmacy.com ) is a broken site that just gives an error message, and has done so for a long time if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Yet it at one point linked to the real CVS site.
I get a lot of spam email from something @cvspharmacy, maybe the real CVS (which I didn't know about until now) forgot to renew the domain and it was hijacked by spammers. Just speculating of course.
I'm not quite sure what they're trying to do there, but the link isn't real. It goes to cvspharmacy dot com, but the actual site is cvs dot com.
Incidentally, CVS Pharmacy isn't a shady internet thing, they're a longstanding US brick'n'mortar chain. I think this is supposed to be a joke, just a rather obtuse one.
hi, i'm melipone (OP). the cvspharmacy link was an obvious joke meant to parody people who plug links after something goes viral. i got it from my friend karl's page (@hammerfist3); it's in his bio, too. also, it's a dead link; how stupid are people lol.
How can one tell parody and real without knowing your background? It's just a random tweet to 99% of people who clicked here. Known as Poe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Yes, same here. Mild amusement but no discomfort. Had a discussion about it in a Facebook comment thread, and asked on or two of my friends. From my _very_ small sample size the number of neutral vs uncomfortable people seems about equal.
I suspect the people who feel most uncomfortable are the most vocal. Would be interesting to do a poll.
I suspect there's more neurodiversity in our image processing stacks than we realize, and we've never before been able to observe it because all of our prior input was actually from a relatively small part of the possible image sample space that the real world can generate.
I find this mildly amusing, but I do the surreal and bizarre for entertainment routinely anyhow. But for the same reasons that I seek out those sensations, I find myself having sympathy for those who rather than seeking them out for occasional changes of pace, can't get away from them as they are haunted every moment of the day and night. That would be much less fun, to put it exceedingly mildly.
Compared to most DeepDream images this one isn't unsettling at all to me. I guess if you have seen a lot generated images, they become more familiar and less unsettling.
What scares me about the responses is that this appears to be the first GAN-output that many people have seen. This does not bode well for people being able to recognize this sort of thing, should that become important (spotting 'this person does not exist' profile pictures for bots, etc.)
There's an arms race between we humans learning to spot the signs of GAN-generated images and the GANs getting more accurate. I'm not sure who's destined to win, but my money's on the GANs. I thought we had more time.
I think it's fair to say "no". We have a trained neural net, like the thing that generated this, and this image confounds it with pathological input, so we experience a difference between this image and normal reality. A baby doesn't have very many such trained networks (we do actually come with a few, such as a network that detects faces, but not many), so this wouldn't particularly register to a young baby as strange at all.
Or, to put it another way, we normally have experience A and this picture is giving us experience B, but the baby doesn't have the neural nets set up to support either such experience, and so has experience Zero, which we can't match by having B.
I saw this used in a meme yesterday, and I was torn between it being something GAN generated and a blurry picture of a hoarders room filled with bags of rubbish
When I was kid I had seizure and lost control of my body, I could see and hear people but couldn't respond or move my body. I told my wife to pull the plug if I ever loose consciousness and doctor's are iffy about my recovery. I rather terminate myself than ever go through the same experience.
Wow! If I pay too much attention to the background junk in dreams sometimes it looks like this. Plausible from a distance, but utter nonsense on closer inspection.
I have the same experience if I try to pick up a book and read it in a dream. I recognize pages and text in front of my eyes, and can even derive some ideas from it, but I'm unable to decode the actual letters and words.
I've got several "plastic bags". Some of them I can even identify as the crinkly colored type often used for wrapping present-type things. I can also give you something that is clearly a display board. I can't tell you what it's displaying beyond a generic "smudge", but it's clearly a display board, like for spoons or coins.
Still, I don't argue the core point. Words are flexible and I can probably jam some word onto pretty much image, but I won't deny this image is quite resistant to that.
It's funny reading the comments in here; when this first got retweeted onto my twitter timeline I thought it was just a picture of someone's dressing table and the tweet was a joke about (lots of) men not being able to recognise makeup products ...
Does anyone know how this image was produced? Is it a filter of some kind applied over a real world image? Maybe could be done on a video?
This would be great for a Lovecraftian horror movie like Birdbox, when you want to give a glimpse of what indecipherable monster the characters are looking at just before they go crazy and kill themselves.
I suspect it's been generated from the generator part of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network); you get two ML algorithms - one to pick real from fake pictures (a classifier) and one to generate fake pictures (the generator) - and then pit them against each other. I wonder if this image is possibly a high quality generative example that the classifier failed to identify as 'fake'.
I would guess something similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream or any other system that tries to invert a convolutional neural network by 'maximizing' the match.
I guess it depends what you mean by "thing",. I see a roundish thing, a squareish thing, a gridish thing, a softish thing. But they are all "ish" because not real things.
Showed this photo for my 4.5 year old son. I thought he might identify some objects since kids can be creative. However he looked at it for 1 second and just said that he sees nothing.
is this the same as me randomizing a sentence, such as "satboma.ereegeiafudsuuedlVoiieelelglaesldnu nuorascrluc eip ttelalf rpoima s smudb.loo .r.c ue eu. mtgde mmea i leno undcisuattlicuoM ete Dimr isaaci nriirslraeunbpo abf mavuoD elneaact psg eunn mrlA m taiinccltnd oisnnnniltnt" and then asking you to find the words?
> This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything
I don't think that reddit thread is the original source. Someone in the thread links to a larger-sized image which appears to be from https://funnyjunk.com/Cognitohazard/pxMTMck/.
EDIT: here's an even earlier source, from over a week ago (note: thread contains other strange but mostly safe for work images) http://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/22512161/cursed-image-th.... 512x512 seems like a more likely size for the image to have been generated at, at least.
EDIT 2: here's yet an earlier source, from March 10: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2IkGylneb/. Someone in the Twitter thread mentioned this as being the original source.
With a front page that has daily "Omg facebook is sharing your data", "you'll never guess what uber did now", "<random shit tech company> S-1", "let's all play armchair detectives and speculate why the 737 crashed", "shitcoin is good/bad for <whatever>", etc posts, I wouldn't exactly put HN that much above crappy content aggregator..
There are ads. The "<who cares> is hiring" ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if some content here that goes straight to the top isn't paid for somehow.. There's a large audience here, and no transparency in how the site operates, so the incentive is high.
I've experienced this, not as a result of having a stroke, but as a result of severe dehydration and depleted potassium making parts of my brain shut down, or at least malfunction horribly. It is terrifying, and even looking at this picture makes me begin to feel the panic I felt during that episode. I could not identify anything, or figure out the connection between what I was touching and what I was seeing. Bath taps became cats, my hands were strange alien objects that kept intruding into my field of view, the ambulance was some kind of great bloody animal that I was about to be fed to. I screamed blue murder and wept while clinging to a towel rail, apparently, until the paramedics sedated me.
It's hard to quantify just how scary losing that connection to reality is.
I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.
I've had this experience before enough times that it's no longer frightening but means I urgently need some Gatorade or I may start shaking and pouring sweat.
For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it. Do you have some detail on what you think it's the brain shutting down rather than an effect on the eyes themselves?
Maybe it's the electrolytes. An electrolyte imbalance can lead to a situation that mimics the symptoms of a stroke.[0]
>For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it.
Are you aware of the shade or does it behave like your blind spot? Because I've had a few instances in my life where it felt like my blind spot took up a much larger portion of my vision. I've also had the shaking then suddenly starting to profusely sweat that goes away when I eat something.
I've had this about three times in my life. The first time I thought I was having a stroke and went to bed, in the hopes it would go away. The next morning I was alright.
The second time happened at work and a co-worker brought me to the hospital. Turned out I was having a migraine attack with aura.
The third time happened at work again. I took an aspirin and took it easy for about an hour. My project manager asked me to go home, but that felt more troublesome to me than just sitting it out.
starts as a small spot right in the "centre of vision". then it grows until I can't see anything at all.
Then vision comes back and is replaced by a headache so bad, even the tiniest movement hurts like a knife cut.
Then I sleep between 4 and 12 hours. The day after I'm something like hung over and the day after that it's like nothing happened.
Luckily, I don't get it often any more :-) But it's hard to explain to other people when it happens.
the good thing about the aura is I get a warning what's about to come, usually it means I can get home before it breaks out.
I can only remember once when the headache broke out before I got home and I started sobbing like a baby on the bus. An old lady worriedly asked me if I needed help and I don't really remember how I got home.
I assume we're talking about scintillating scotoma here - you have about a minute to find a safe place to stop until the "blind" zone grows enough. But yeah, this precludes the bearer from piloting mechanisms that can't come to a stop within a minute.
The blind spot portion is what I've experienced, but none of the rest. No flickering or even noticeable expansion. I was a kid at the time and was playing an FPS. At one point I realized that I could see all 4 corners of the screen, but a certain sizeable area inside it was not visible without me moving my eyes. It provided for an interesting gaming session, but did go away rather quickly.
In my case, it was about day seven or eight of no water, no food, just profound vomiting until there was nothing left to vomit - anything I did drink came straight back out.
As to it being brain rather than eyes - I had a seizure once I was in hospital (I’m not epileptic or anything of the sort), and I was unable to assemble any thoughts much beyond unbelievable thirst - although my eyes were also affected - blurred and double vision.
My K levels were about 1.5 - imminent death zone. Heart kept stopping and starting. Thank Cthulhu for Hartmann’s solution.
Because this had become a semi-regular occurrence, and apart from three occasions out of some forty episodes, I managed myself back to a functional state. Hospitalisation is an absolute pain in the ass, means no sleep, no rest, and even more time lost.
I also greatly lost faith in the medical establishment - they failed to diagnose me, and carried out an unnecessary surgery which made matters worse.
I spent years excluding things from my lifestyle and diet to figure out what was making me ill to no avail.
I finally left my business, as I was getting to the point that I was in a perpetual cycle of being ill and frantically catching up, which was immensely stressful over the last five years or so of my tenure there, and about six months later, the vomiting stopped. It’s now been years.
I never took chronic stress seriously - now I do. It nearly killed me.
Dude. You need to explain how you got into this situation of not drinking or eating for 7+ days. Right now we're all imagining you crossed the Saraha on foot or something equally reckless.
Are you constantly incredibly thirsty? Coffee isn't actually a net loss in water - as Zerofries suggested, something else is wrong, or you're drinking a lot of beer all the time(which I'd argue is probably also "something wrong").
One can dehydrated not in a sense of having not enough water, but in the sense of not having enough salts to hold the water in body. In this case, the water you drink just becomes urine very fast and doesn't quench thirst at all. Just taking a bit of bare salt is not a solution either, you have to get some kind of an oral rehydration solution (either a specialized one, an isotonic drink, or maybe eat some soup if your apetite is not impaired). More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Yeah, they make special salt packets you can use called Oral Rehydration Salts that have an osmolal ratio of electrolytes plus just enough glucose to cause your upper intestine to rapidly take the fluids in. If you are severely dehydrated drinking a liter of the stuff is enough to restore you to sanity within about half an hour. I usually carry one or two packets in my hiking/climbing first aid kit. Trioral is a really common brand.
Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.
For me it turned out to be sudden blood pressure drops.
I'd see my vision fade to yellow from the outside in. At 12 I had every damned test done by an ophthalmologist, only to come up empty. Much later, I had blood drawn for a test and when I stood after the same thing happened, but worse, and from everyone else's pov I fainted (I could hear and think, but not see or move). That's when I realized the issue was sudden blood pressure drops.
Sometimes this was accompanied by sugar lows, sometimes not.
Mind you, I never saw anything like the picture we're discussing here.
Admittedly I find this reaction very interesting in comparison to my own. I find not recognizing things very normal (due to the way my brain functions) and so upon viewing the photo my brain took the equivalent of a step back, squinting a little, and then moving on with its day. It identified black portions as cat fur, then there was an animal head, piles of garbage, some jewelery, mostly due to texture and internal pattern matching of what portions of things generally look like and projecting them onto the page.
This is really interesting (and horrifying - I'm sorry you had to go through that).
I find it very curious how much these neural-net-driven visualizations map onto human neurological experiences - for example, deep dream resembling an acid trip. That makes me feel like, at least on a cursory level, that neural nets are a step in the right direction to meeting "human intelligence".
> The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers.
I mean, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and the like were making sample-fests in the early 90s. The word is, Shadow's sampler of choise MPC60 can hold only something like 12 or 16 samples at a time, so the magic was him making ‘Endtroducing’ out of that.
Keep in mind though that strokes (and ministrokes) come in many forms. They can affect most brain functions and sometimes you won't even be aware of them.
I wouldn't trust that title from reddit one bit unless there is a better resource making that claim.
The picture has an ear in it, so I guess someone merged two wildly different pictures in GANbreeder and the redditor just took it for some internet upvotes.
> [...] simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) [...]
That sounds pretty scientific. Does anybody have a (citable) reference or scientific publication where this was published? Would like to read more about it.
This is what Microsoft Cognitive Services saw:
Objects [ { "rectangle": { "x": 346, "y": 321, "w": 333, "h": 417 }, "object": "mammal", "parent": { "object": "animal", "confidence": 0.719 }, "confidence": 0.716 } ]
Tags [ { "name": "wall", "confidence": 0.9889654 }, { "name": "indoor", "confidence": 0.9775573 }, { "name": "doll", "confidence": 0.9775573 }, { "name": "person", "confidence": 0.966689169 }, { "name": "toy", "confidence": 0.5887871 }, { "name": "collection", "confidence": 0.535430968 }, { "name": "bear", "confidence": 0.432904869 }, { "name": "christmas", "confidence": 0.351226926 }, { "name": "animal", "confidence": 0.350886434 }, { "name": "family", "confidence": 0.3459218 } ]
Description { "tags": [ "indoor", "table", "sitting", "food", "dog", "woman", "black", "bear", "holding", "standing", "man", "room", "people", "bed", "group", "stuffed", "red", "kitchen" ], "captions": [ { "text": "a group of stuffed animals sitting on top of a table", "confidence": 0.764803648 } ] }
Now that I look at it again, there definitely is a wall in the back left. MCS succeeded where I failed because I guess I have an implicit "walls aren't interesting" filter that threw out the only positively identifiable object.
Here's the top ten things Amazon Rekognition saw:
Furniture - 94.8 %, Apparel - 93.8 %, Clothing - 93.8 %, Home Decor - 93.6 %, Table - 85.3 %, Pet - 77.9 %, Mammal - 77.9 %, Cat - 77.9 %, Animal - 77.9 %, Toy - 67.9 %
It's surprisingly confident.
GobbledyGook: confidence = 99.9937%
better than I could do. I can't make hide nor hair of it.
Is it really "better" if the image is simulated nonsense? Better would be conceding that nothing is truly decipherable.
Visual Jabberwocky? (Possibly made by a GAN?)
Here is Alice on Jabberwocky ...
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand! … Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
Perfect analogy. This image is a visual nonsense poem... or would be if it were more poetic.
It's fascinating to me. Both feel like they take my brain to the threshold of understanding and then it just gets stuck.
I disagree that it's a 'perfect analogy'. Jabberwocky is a poem created by a human that, while it contains made-up nonsense words, still makes sense. (The hero seeks out a fearsome monster, fights it, is victorious and is lauded for his victory on his return). The poem is aesthetically pleasing and intentionally playful in containing an element of nonsense but not too much.
This picture, on the other hand, is nothing like a 'visual nonsense poem' for me. It's artificially generated and not aesthetically pleasing. It's mildly disconcerting and beyond that, uninteresting.
The way you phrase this suggests an unawareness of the fact that one comes to aesthetic judgement through interpretive frames, which are formed through personal experience and knowledge, and therefore express your aesthetic interpretations as more factual than they are.
I recommend Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis by Michael Parsons, can be found online easily.
A fipple, two gonzies, a stib, borquet and tinch, and I think I also see a couple of goffels
Unfortunately, but understandably, there are no worches and zits, they have already been destroyed earlier: https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the...
Lots of this has been done in language, like the Rockwell Retro Encabulator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w) and Plumbus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJk4y9NGvE)
The song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
Sounds like the industrial piping mumbo-jumbo in The Patriot[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(TV_series)
All mostly made of plastic.
Reminds me of this short story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
Peter Watts' science fiction novels Blindsight and Echopraxia include "vampires" that co-evolved with humans. The vampires' aversion to crosses is described as their brains "crashing" when visually processing right angles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echopraxia_(novel)
His is an interesting take on vampire lore in sci-fi. I remember they also have drugs to mitigate this condition, and allow them to live in cities: the anti-euclidean, or auntie-e.
I still don't understand what vamps drew to crash humans.
Homo sapiens whedonum
https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
Levar Burton Reads has an episode with another David Langford short story featuring BLITs: https://art19.com/shows/levar-burton-reads/episodes/2a76c395...
I'm positive I've recognised some items from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky poem.
And Snow Crash!
Thanks for posting this. I'd been trying to remember this short story's name for a while now, and seeing this image immediately put me in mind of the "basilisk"!
It appears to be made with GANbreeder but I haven't seen any hard evidence of that. Nevertheless highly likely.
We should try not to physically mount a meatspace DDOS ... but the creator of GANbreeder is hosting a GANparty in Berkeley May 3rd.... https://ganbreeder.app/party
GANbreeder in turn uses BigGAN.
A while ago, I had a migraine with stroke-like symptoms in the other direction: I could form thoughts in my head, but could only get a garbled mess out of my mouth. As a knowledge worker whose most important asset is his brain, this was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life.
I've (probably) had a ministroke (TIA). What surprised me is that typing was affected in the same way for me. In my mind I made a coherent sentence with words, but when I read back what I wrote, I understood that it was a garbled mess. I tried again, failed, and became frustrated.
The crazy part to me was that I realized something was wrong, but it never occurred to me to ask for help. I tried to stubbornly keep working. I was trying to set up IIS at the time. I knew what I was roughly doing, but I kept forgetting what I was specifically doing. Reading those chat logs reminds me that even my own brain can fail me.
Relevant: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...
You should really get that checked out if you haven’t already. A TIA can be a precursor to a full on stroke or otherwise have lasting consequences. An MRI can confirm all is good in your brain.
That was years ago and I haven't had health insurance in a long time now. Nothing has happened, so far though. Funnily enough, life did actually go downhill after that. I never thought that it was related, but in the half a year to a year that followed it, I dropped out of school and left work. I haven't really been able to put the pieces together since. It's as though I have no motivation to do anything long term. I kind of doubt it's related though. One day I'll get it check out though.
It sounds terrifying whatever your job happens to be to be honest.
Aphasia. It's happened to me a few times and it is awful
https://migraineagain.com/migraine-babble-words-get-jumbled/
Happened to my mom once and it lasted a couple of days. Very scary. She didn't even know she was speaking nonsense and would get upset that no one could understand her.
Somebody replied it with a clear picture: https://mobile.twitter.com/reneabythe/status/112080586922516...
Most likely generated from https://ganbreeder.app.
Follow up tweet by same person: "Wow this blew up check out <online pharmacy>"
Please don't support this type of virality and profiteering. It's disgusting.
Are you suggesting "dumbass idiot 𓅩" with a bio of "shut the fuck hi" is a completely serious account? It's fairly obvious that it's a tongue-in-cheek joke, the linked url doesn't even work.
It surprises me sometimes how innocently naive people are. How people miss obvious jokes, parody and sarcasm online. I figured as more people use the internet, the less naive they'd be, but it seems like the opposite is happening. And the more obvious the joke, the more people seem to take it seriously.
On the mainstream Internet, you can't ever be sure. What you consider an obvious joke can actually be intended as 100% serious by the poster. Or it could be some small agency's "brilliant" plan at social media marketing targeting unsophisticated normies.
Eternal September has some how gotten worse over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Also CVS is a big corporate pharmacy chain where people buy their toothpaste, etc. I doubt this is how CVS does their marketing
However the joke is spot on, since that image is not far removed from the general mess at a typical CVS. You walk in for your meds and are bombarded with a special deal on soda, makeup, want a beach toy? how about some junk food? oh wait here's some more cheap cosmetics to go with your passport photo… By the time you get to the OTC drug section that has the tiny selection of the same meds in 5 different brandings/packagings, you're already overwhelmed. The whole store is a UX fail.
As a side note, I'm fit and not diabetic but making people who struggle with glucose control walk past all these snacks is just evil—or ar the very least highly insensitive. Profit first, damn the sick! :(
I think it's a joke, the link isn't even functional.
its a parody of people saying 'check out <my website>' when something goes viral.
The weird thing is that the url they use (for the sake of future readers, cvspharmacy.com ) is a broken site that just gives an error message, and has done so for a long time if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Yet it at one point linked to the real CVS site.
Presumably I've just been whooshed.
I get a lot of spam email from something @cvspharmacy, maybe the real CVS (which I didn't know about until now) forgot to renew the domain and it was hijacked by spammers. Just speculating of course.
You realize that CVS is a big company like Walmart or McDonalds, right? This person is parodying people who you're disgusted at.
I'm not quite sure what they're trying to do there, but the link isn't real. It goes to cvspharmacy dot com, but the actual site is cvs dot com.
Incidentally, CVS Pharmacy isn't a shady internet thing, they're a longstanding US brick'n'mortar chain. I think this is supposed to be a joke, just a rather obtuse one.
hi, i'm melipone (OP). the cvspharmacy link was an obvious joke meant to parody people who plug links after something goes viral. i got it from my friend karl's page (@hammerfist3); it's in his bio, too. also, it's a dead link; how stupid are people lol.
How can one tell parody and real without knowing your background? It's just a random tweet to 99% of people who clicked here. Known as Poe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
> how stupid are people lol.
My thoughts exactly.
Damn, is this meta trolling?
Lol welcome to weird Twitter I hope you enjoy
It's a joke. CVS is a massive brand and OT has no affiliation.
I'm only reading about people getting really uncomfortable looking at this (on reddit).
To me it did nothing, although I also couldn't recognise any of the items in the picture.
Does anyone else have the same experience?
Part of the reason people on reddit are reacting like that is because the OP on Reddit framed it with the bullshit title about it simulating a stroke.
Frame it differently and people would be more likely to go “huh, that’s weird”
I found it unsettling.
At first glance it's "oh easy I can easily spot something in there, like that... Oh... Uh?"
I guess its been crafted to tickle the pattern matching part of the brain, so it looks familiar, but not? Like the uncanny valley?
There’s at least a jewelry stand in that image you see at a flea market.
Yes, same here. Mild amusement but no discomfort. Had a discussion about it in a Facebook comment thread, and asked on or two of my friends. From my _very_ small sample size the number of neutral vs uncomfortable people seems about equal.
I suspect the people who feel most uncomfortable are the most vocal. Would be interesting to do a poll.
I can't say why, but these kind of images are really disturbing to me. They give me a mixture of disgust and anxiety...
I suspect there's more neurodiversity in our image processing stacks than we realize, and we've never before been able to observe it because all of our prior input was actually from a relatively small part of the possible image sample space that the real world can generate.
I find this mildly amusing, but I do the surreal and bizarre for entertainment routinely anyhow. But for the same reasons that I seek out those sensations, I find myself having sympathy for those who rather than seeking them out for occasional changes of pace, can't get away from them as they are haunted every moment of the day and night. That would be much less fun, to put it exceedingly mildly.
Compared to most DeepDream images this one isn't unsettling at all to me. I guess if you have seen a lot generated images, they become more familiar and less unsettling.
The first time I was the same. I looked at it a second time and the longer I looked it felt increasingly uncomfortable, almost to the point of panic.
i felt nothing until i read the comments saying it was unsettling, THEN i got a bit unsettled viewing it. i must be easily led!
Yes.
What scares me about the responses is that this appears to be the first GAN-output that many people have seen. This does not bode well for people being able to recognize this sort of thing, should that become important (spotting 'this person does not exist' profile pictures for bots, etc.)
Do you believe this kind of thing should be/is detectable if you're looking for it hard enough? This is pretty realistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA&feature=youtu.be
There's an arms race between we humans learning to spot the signs of GAN-generated images and the GANs getting more accurate. I'm not sure who's destined to win, but my money's on the GANs. I thought we had more time.
I wonder if that's how new born babies see the world, before they're able to recognize objects and their environment.
I think it's fair to say "no". We have a trained neural net, like the thing that generated this, and this image confounds it with pathological input, so we experience a difference between this image and normal reality. A baby doesn't have very many such trained networks (we do actually come with a few, such as a network that detects faces, but not many), so this wouldn't particularly register to a young baby as strange at all.
Or, to put it another way, we normally have experience A and this picture is giving us experience B, but the baby doesn't have the neural nets set up to support either such experience, and so has experience Zero, which we can't match by having B.
I saw this used in a meme yesterday, and I was torn between it being something GAN generated and a blurry picture of a hoarders room filled with bags of rubbish
This looks like a photo that was created using a Neural Network.
It looks like the output of a GAN that needs some more training.
When I was kid I had seizure and lost control of my body, I could see and hear people but couldn't respond or move my body. I told my wife to pull the plug if I ever loose consciousness and doctor's are iffy about my recovery. I rather terminate myself than ever go through the same experience.
Wow! If I pay too much attention to the background junk in dreams sometimes it looks like this. Plausible from a distance, but utter nonsense on closer inspection.
I have the same experience if I try to pick up a book and read it in a dream. I recognize pages and text in front of my eyes, and can even derive some ideas from it, but I'm unable to decode the actual letters and words.
I think "wall" is the only clear answer here :)
Even a person with dementia knows a big, beautiful wall when they see it.
Wall. Floorboards. Done.
To me this just looks like garbage. It's not disturbing, or all that weird.
Yeah but have you tried singling out an item and naming it?
I've got several "plastic bags". Some of them I can even identify as the crinkly colored type often used for wrapping present-type things. I can also give you something that is clearly a display board. I can't tell you what it's displaying beyond a generic "smudge", but it's clearly a display board, like for spoons or coins.
Still, I don't argue the core point. Words are flexible and I can probably jam some word onto pretty much image, but I won't deny this image is quite resistant to that.
Cellophane is what I see for the plastic.
And there's a cheese grater on the left
Yeah but garbage often gets broken. Containers that get broken, a dog-like pillow that is messed up,..
It's funny reading the comments in here; when this first got retweeted onto my twitter timeline I thought it was just a picture of someone's dressing table and the tweet was a joke about (lots of) men not being able to recognise makeup products ...
Möbius ferret
Does anyone know how this image was produced? Is it a filter of some kind applied over a real world image? Maybe could be done on a video?
This would be great for a Lovecraftian horror movie like Birdbox, when you want to give a glimpse of what indecipherable monster the characters are looking at just before they go crazy and kill themselves.
I suspect it's been generated from the generator part of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network); you get two ML algorithms - one to pick real from fake pictures (a classifier) and one to generate fake pictures (the generator) - and then pit them against each other. I wonder if this image is possibly a high quality generative example that the classifier failed to identify as 'fake'.
Also - the generator probably uses an autoencoder to generate the images, which might explain the 'how' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoencoder.
I hope that explanation wasn't too dull!
Is this one of those deep learning images? I saw some musical notes in there. So framed music?
How was this made?
I would guess something similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream or any other system that tries to invert a convolutional neural network by 'maximizing' the match.
http://ganbreeder.app
This visualizes how too much¹ ketamine feels².
----------
¹ Any is too much
² https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=k%20hole
I guess it depends what you mean by "thing",. I see a roundish thing, a squareish thing, a gridish thing, a softish thing. But they are all "ish" because not real things.
Showed this photo for my 4.5 year old son. I thought he might identify some objects since kids can be creative. However he looked at it for 1 second and just said that he sees nothing.
Deep Dream
is this the same as me randomizing a sentence, such as "satboma.ereegeiafudsuuedlVoiieelelglaesldnu nuorascrluc eip ttelalf rpoima s smudb.loo .r.c ue eu. mtgde mmea i leno undcisuattlicuoM ete Dimr isaaci nriirslraeunbpo abf mavuoD elneaact psg eunn mrlA m taiinccltnd oisnnnniltnt" and then asking you to find the words?
Looks like an assemblage of raffle prizes on a table, first prize is the weird wig in the foreground.
Coincidentally that’s what I saw as well except the wig was a children’s stuffed gorilla.
I was thinking wedding gifts on a table, but same sort of thing.
Easy, it's Cousin It's beauty salon. Cousin It is balding a bit.
Trash
"That doesn't look like anything to me."
Toy Monkey, Plastic bag, wire grill thing
I name the thing with the nose Bruno.
Looks like there is an ear in there
Near the teeth right?
Table
A sloth?
yes on the bottom right
Pixels.
I'll name the rabbit - Peko
Guess I'm a robot then.
chaos
Wall
Posted on Twitter from a thread on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/bghyv5/t...
From the thread's title:
> This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything
I don't think that reddit thread is the original source. Someone in the thread links to a larger-sized image which appears to be from https://funnyjunk.com/Cognitohazard/pxMTMck/.
EDIT: here's an even earlier source, from over a week ago (note: thread contains other strange but mostly safe for work images) http://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/22512161/cursed-image-th.... 512x512 seems like a more likely size for the image to have been generated at, at least.
EDIT 2: here's yet an earlier source, from March 10: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2IkGylneb/. Someone in the Twitter thread mentioned this as being the original source.
mods/dang, please update the top link to one of these more-primary sources.
I prefer the current way that content makes its way to the HN frontpage:
instagram->4chan->crappy content aggregator->reddit->HN
I think you meant... crappy content aggregator -> crappy content aggregator -> crappy content aggregator -> crappy content aggregator -> acceptable content aggregator
With a front page that has daily "Omg facebook is sharing your data", "you'll never guess what uber did now", "<random shit tech company> S-1", "let's all play armchair detectives and speculate why the 737 crashed", "shitcoin is good/bad for <whatever>", etc posts, I wouldn't exactly put HN that much above crappy content aggregator..
At least there's no ads
There are ads. The "<who cares> is hiring" ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if some content here that goes straight to the top isn't paid for somehow.. There's a large audience here, and no transparency in how the site operates, so the incentive is high.
Damn, reminds me of rotten.com ;)
This guy[0] is in pretty good shape. Albeit likely drunk and "watch this!" stupid.
0) https://i.4cdn.org/x/1555284615304.webm
Here is a more permanent link to the video with sound
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwAqHTFHpAY
That's ZooMass for you. Times were different then.
There's not much point linking to 4chan images, they disappear fairly quickly.
Oh. Didn't know that https://i.4cdn.org is 4chan.
I've experienced this, not as a result of having a stroke, but as a result of severe dehydration and depleted potassium making parts of my brain shut down, or at least malfunction horribly. It is terrifying, and even looking at this picture makes me begin to feel the panic I felt during that episode. I could not identify anything, or figure out the connection between what I was touching and what I was seeing. Bath taps became cats, my hands were strange alien objects that kept intruding into my field of view, the ambulance was some kind of great bloody animal that I was about to be fed to. I screamed blue murder and wept while clinging to a towel rail, apparently, until the paramedics sedated me.
It's hard to quantify just how scary losing that connection to reality is.
I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.
I've had this experience before enough times that it's no longer frightening but means I urgently need some Gatorade or I may start shaking and pouring sweat.
For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it. Do you have some detail on what you think it's the brain shutting down rather than an effect on the eyes themselves?
Maybe it's the electrolytes. An electrolyte imbalance can lead to a situation that mimics the symptoms of a stroke.[0]
>For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it.
Are you aware of the shade or does it behave like your blind spot? Because I've had a few instances in my life where it felt like my blind spot took up a much larger portion of my vision. I've also had the shaking then suddenly starting to profusely sweat that goes away when I eat something.
[0] https://atlasofscience.org/stroke-mimics-why-we-need-to-cons...
I've had this about three times in my life. The first time I thought I was having a stroke and went to bed, in the hopes it would go away. The next morning I was alright.
The second time happened at work and a co-worker brought me to the hospital. Turned out I was having a migraine attack with aura.
The third time happened at work again. I took an aspirin and took it easy for about an hour. My project manager asked me to go home, but that felt more troublesome to me than just sitting it out.
Man, that's terrible. What happens if this hits while you're driving?
i get something close to this before I get a migraine: https://images.app.goo.gl/XS938pFYT6a2Juuq7
starts as a small spot right in the "centre of vision". then it grows until I can't see anything at all.
Then vision comes back and is replaced by a headache so bad, even the tiniest movement hurts like a knife cut.
Then I sleep between 4 and 12 hours. The day after I'm something like hung over and the day after that it's like nothing happened.
Luckily, I don't get it often any more :-) But it's hard to explain to other people when it happens.
the good thing about the aura is I get a warning what's about to come, usually it means I can get home before it breaks out.
I can only remember once when the headache broke out before I got home and I started sobbing like a baby on the bus. An old lady worriedly asked me if I needed help and I don't really remember how I got home.
I assume we're talking about scintillating scotoma here - you have about a minute to find a safe place to stop until the "blind" zone grows enough. But yeah, this precludes the bearer from piloting mechanisms that can't come to a stop within a minute.
That might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma
The blind spot portion is what I've experienced, but none of the rest. No flickering or even noticeable expansion. I was a kid at the time and was playing an FPS. At one point I realized that I could see all 4 corners of the screen, but a certain sizeable area inside it was not visible without me moving my eyes. It provided for an interesting gaming session, but did go away rather quickly.
In my case, it was about day seven or eight of no water, no food, just profound vomiting until there was nothing left to vomit - anything I did drink came straight back out.
As to it being brain rather than eyes - I had a seizure once I was in hospital (I’m not epileptic or anything of the sort), and I was unable to assemble any thoughts much beyond unbelievable thirst - although my eyes were also affected - blurred and double vision.
My K levels were about 1.5 - imminent death zone. Heart kept stopping and starting. Thank Cthulhu for Hartmann’s solution.
Can I ask why you didn't go to hospital for fluids by day 2 or 3?
Because this had become a semi-regular occurrence, and apart from three occasions out of some forty episodes, I managed myself back to a functional state. Hospitalisation is an absolute pain in the ass, means no sleep, no rest, and even more time lost.
I also greatly lost faith in the medical establishment - they failed to diagnose me, and carried out an unnecessary surgery which made matters worse.
I spent years excluding things from my lifestyle and diet to figure out what was making me ill to no avail.
I finally left my business, as I was getting to the point that I was in a perpetual cycle of being ill and frantically catching up, which was immensely stressful over the last five years or so of my tenure there, and about six months later, the vomiting stopped. It’s now been years.
I never took chronic stress seriously - now I do. It nearly killed me.
No insurance?
Dude. You need to explain how you got into this situation of not drinking or eating for 7+ days. Right now we're all imagining you crossed the Saraha on foot or something equally reckless.
What makes you dehydrate so severely so often? I've never had this happen, and I'm not that on-the-ball about hydration.
I drink an inordinate amount of coffee (and often a few servings of beer the night before) and exercise quite a bit.
I'm bad about drinking water
Are you constantly incredibly thirsty? Coffee isn't actually a net loss in water - as Zerofries suggested, something else is wrong, or you're drinking a lot of beer all the time(which I'd argue is probably also "something wrong").
Caffeine is a diuretic. If he isn't drinking decaf, it's a net loss.
While it is, it doesn't lead to a net loss in hydration.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
https://nationalpost.com/health/nutrition-fact-or-fallacy-do...
http://time.com/5192272/coffee-tea-dehydrating/
https://www.webmd.com/diet/qa/does-caffeine-have-a-dehydrati...
One can dehydrated not in a sense of having not enough water, but in the sense of not having enough salts to hold the water in body. In this case, the water you drink just becomes urine very fast and doesn't quench thirst at all. Just taking a bit of bare salt is not a solution either, you have to get some kind of an oral rehydration solution (either a specialized one, an isotonic drink, or maybe eat some soup if your apetite is not impaired). More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Yeah, they make special salt packets you can use called Oral Rehydration Salts that have an osmolal ratio of electrolytes plus just enough glucose to cause your upper intestine to rapidly take the fluids in. If you are severely dehydrated drinking a liter of the stuff is enough to restore you to sanity within about half an hour. I usually carry one or two packets in my hiking/climbing first aid kit. Trioral is a really common brand.
Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.
Are you sure it's dehydration and not hypoglycemia?
My only real hint is it's instantly fixed with a few glasses of water. I'd expect that I'd need some glycogen change if it were hypoglycemia.
For me it turned out to be sudden blood pressure drops.
I'd see my vision fade to yellow from the outside in. At 12 I had every damned test done by an ophthalmologist, only to come up empty. Much later, I had blood drawn for a test and when I stood after the same thing happened, but worse, and from everyone else's pov I fainted (I could hear and think, but not see or move). That's when I realized the issue was sudden blood pressure drops.
Sometimes this was accompanied by sugar lows, sometimes not.
Mind you, I never saw anything like the picture we're discussing here.
Admittedly I find this reaction very interesting in comparison to my own. I find not recognizing things very normal (due to the way my brain functions) and so upon viewing the photo my brain took the equivalent of a step back, squinting a little, and then moving on with its day. It identified black portions as cat fur, then there was an animal head, piles of garbage, some jewelery, mostly due to texture and internal pattern matching of what portions of things generally look like and projecting them onto the page.
This is really interesting (and horrifying - I'm sorry you had to go through that).
I find it very curious how much these neural-net-driven visualizations map onto human neurological experiences - for example, deep dream resembling an acid trip. That makes me feel like, at least on a cursory level, that neural nets are a step in the right direction to meeting "human intelligence".
> I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.
I have had my episode of panic attack and just looking at that picture made me feel some of those bad feelings again. Really weird.
Well, now I know what's going on if the real world starts looking like that. And I bet it will sound like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
For anyone wondering what that is:
> The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol
After a little therapy, it will sound like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLrnkK2YEcE
That song is brilliant. I think the video detracts a bit. I recommend just listening to it.
My understanding is that it's entirely comprised of sampled clips. A triumph of sound engineering.
I mean, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and the like were making sample-fests in the early 90s. The word is, Shadow's sampler of choise MPC60 can hold only something like 12 or 16 samples at a time, so the magic was him making ‘Endtroducing’ out of that.
This is one of the more delightful things I’ve come across on the internet. I always end up watching it all the way through. It’s remarkably catchy!
A ‘more accurate’ simulation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY
And another: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yU2wkD-gbzI
Keep in mind though that strokes (and ministrokes) come in many forms. They can affect most brain functions and sometimes you won't even be aware of them.
Oh, that's Geordie.
I wouldn't trust that title from reddit one bit unless there is a better resource making that claim.
The picture has an ear in it, so I guess someone merged two wildly different pictures in GANbreeder and the redditor just took it for some internet upvotes.
> [...] simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) [...]
That sounds pretty scientific. Does anybody have a (citable) reference or scientific publication where this was published? Would like to read more about it.
Citation needed.
It looks to me like a random deep dream pic.
Yeah, that was my first guess. Either a photo that'd been fed through Deep Dream, or a style transfer from one photo to another random photo.
People with migraines can have a similar reaction. One of my pre-migraine tells is that I can't "see" text.
baseboard
The thing at the top left looks like one of those mounted white pads that are used to display jewellery. https://www.jewelrysupply.com/assets/images/white-jewelry-ri...
I'm seeing two dogs sitting at a bed.
my soul
hair slug
A plastic bag