Tag: images

Photo Measurement

VisualSize will be launching shortly with a service that will give accurate 3D measurements of things inside of 2D photos. To measure things accurately they need 2 photos of the same thing, but from different angles. The VisualSize algorithm automatically detects feature points in the 2 pictures and finds the matching pairs. It then uses the matching pairs to calculate coordinates of the 2 camera positions (x, y, z axes and origin in a 3D coordinate frame), and uses triangulation from the image to plane to the 3D coordinate frame to reconstruct the 3D scene. VisualSize can then measure length, angle, area and volume with a high degree of accuracy.

cool that this is becoming more mainstream. it is, of course, a mainstay for topographic maps.

Dam architecture

Why not build your house like a gigantic gravity dam? It wouldn’t have to hold back water – so there’d be no flooding to worry about – and you’d have big windows on either side. You’d span canyons and have an incredible roof deck.

wow. check out the “apartments in dams” picture. this blog is pure crack

Total history

Where total history comes to the layperson.

We’ve had agriculture for ~12 ka, towns for 10 ka, and writing for ~5 ka. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioral habits – because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

2012-05-06: The transcribed Life. It may already be possible to have your smartphone record every sound it can pick up, and transcribe it continuously. What are the implications when you can search your words and those you interact with?
2013-11-23: Before and after. Meanwhile, someone taped 35 years of TV

Total history is something we haven’t experienced yet. I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first 40 or 50 years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before. Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever.

2017-04-11: Truth

2023-02-24: Others are thinking about the implications, now with a LLM lens

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?