UIs that accidentally preserve memories | Hacker News Reader

UIs that accidentally preserve memories

metafilter.com

163 pointsmistersquid30 comments

It's interesting how you can almost completely forget about something that or someone who used to be such an important part of your life, and yet it doesn't take much for you to suddenly remember all about it/them.

Here's an excerpt from a letter written by Marcel Proust in 1913 that I came across not that long ago.

"So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears."

Wow. That is so well written. In a few words he's completely captured the sensation of nostalgia that I often chase after.

Yeah, Proust definitely had a few things to say about the remembrance of things past :-D

Good news! There are 4200 more pages where that came from.

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

Between TFA, and this thread I remembered I needed to check up on my gaming buddy, I hadn't heard from him in a few months. He hadn't been answering his Steam chat, texts, nothing. After not getting any response, I did a little digging and came across his obituary and reached out to some common friends and confirmed the news.

I also found out, the reason he still shows as online is his coworkers found his Steam profile on a company desktop. They left it plugged in and online so he'd stay with us.

Rest in Peace, Dave.

There was once this copy-pasta thread or may be it was a capture on 4chan a few years ago where a user remembers a player from an fps (don't remember which). He was a player from Egypt and being 4chan they thought his broken english and odd words regarding the fps fighting in game was entertaining so the author befriended him and added him to his Steam contact list. Around the time of the Arab spring, the friend told the author about the unrest, and that he might not come back in real life. I think he might have made an allusion to the "fight" in game matches as similar to this real fight. The conclusion of the article was the "last online: 3 months ago" tag line at the bottom of the chat box, or some other time period like that.

EDIT: found it[0]. Got the bit about the allusion to the fight in game wrong.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/6EB2lPJ.jpg

Related to gaming and preserving memories, I recall a Reddit thread a couple of years ago about a young lad who loved playing a first person car racing game with his dad.

After his dad unexpectedly passed, he went back to the game one day and noticed his dad's "ghost" car racing against him on the track. As his dad's ghost car would always be the one to race against as long as it held the lap record, I believe he said that if he ever got close to beating his dad's time, he would back off and lose the head to head so that he could always continue to race his dad.

The reason that we need a right to be forgotten is encoded in this 'UI-forced' remembering. Forgetting the awkward moments is one thing, but it is natural to be born, grow, and change. In those earlier centuries, it was only the remembrances encoded in our cultural practices and personal intent that governed what remained. Even the organic, compostable material of everyday life (like wood and leather) would decay to nothing. Liberation by time and forgetting can be a lonely thing, especially considering the ultimate ends of all our endeavors. By comparison, the memoria we maintain today is akin to plastic floating in the ocean, we don't need it, it will outlive us, and periodically it collides perfectly to bear the fruit of a poignant nostalgia.

In the previous ages, we buried our ancestors and in turn were buried.

I think this is especially true as more apps depend on machine learning (or 'AI') to provide a useful experience. Opening a weather app and seeing an old home (and triggering the memory) is one thing but there is absolutely nothing malicious about an app that saves a preference so you don't have to search for it every time.

More insidious is with those more clever services because they seem to become weighted to your earlier choices and your present self has little influence over what the machine has decided to learn. So you have Spotify where the first few hundred songs and artists you listen to have pretty much defined your taste in music and due to the amount of data collected to identify who you are across the internet, you're unlikely to get a fresh start by creating a new account.

The fundamental problem with this kind of memory in tech is that it doesn't appreciate that people change. It won't forget, it won't let go and move on, it won't adapt the same way a person will, it'll probably discount much of that change for being anomalous after some time. Or at least, that's what my fear is.

9 years after he passed, I still cannot bring myself to delete my dad's name and contact details from my phone.

My wife went one better. Her mum passed within months of my dad (she was ill with cancer), and my wife spontaneously recorded the last few conversation they ever had on Voice Memos on her phone, and I know she still listens to them every now and then. I've backed those up off her phone as well, and kept them safely archived.

In my younger days I wished for more of this so that cell phones would automatically save the initial date/time/location that a number was added.

Would have made it easier to remember the context of meeting some lady friends.

Some of the user comments share poignant memories of relationships and people past and passed.

You might find it worth your while to scan past some of the earlier more casual and naive posts to find the more poignant ones.

I joined Metafilter in 2002, and although I no longer use it as my main source of content discovery, I do love to go back now and again. It's always been a top notch community, and if you haven't ever spent some time on the site, I highly recommend it.

I still read it and scan through maybe five comment threads a week for insightful perspectives, but I no longer participate because the community is toxic and mind-killing these days. To me, at any rate.

Edit: IB4, "Metafilter: Toxic and mind-killing, these days."

Do you mind explaining why you think so? That's a pretty surprising perspective; the community often has intelligent discussions about a range of topics.

Yes it does, as long as the discussion doesn't veer into political questions, which can happen in surprising and dismaying ways at times.

But I find that to be true of every online forum I can think of, HN is no different.

No, explicit personal attacks are generally frowned on, here.

I haven't found that to be generally acceptable on Metafilter, but again, I haven't really frequented since the mathowie days.

That was a long time ago.

There came a point around 2010 where too many posts and threads were being dominated by militant nitpicking feminists, with an occupying force of transgendered cat ladies.

I have no dog in the feminism fight but metafilter quickly devolved from a community garden into a special interest forum concerning matters of the vagina.

I just peeked at the top few articles on main page for nostalgia's sake. Already I see an article concerning toxic masculinity, and another of a game exploring rape trauma. Not much has changed.

I strongly believe that over time, all information would be modeled with an expiration timestamp. The fact that I use to visit a coffee shop 5 years back is neither useful for me or the advertisers.

That’s an interesting meta-idea. Have any more thoughts on its implementation that you’d care to share? I started going off on a mental tangent about how an algorithm would extend a WiFi hotspot’s expiration on your frequency / number of connections to it.

> Have any more thoughts on its implementation that you’d care to share?

In its most rudimentary form think of it as another "last used time" column in the database. A periodic job can delete all entries which are older than a certain last used time.

Right, but nostalgia is a powerful thing. I'm sure if advertisers knew you watched some movie 20+ years ago they would target you even harder to make you watch the unwarranted reboot/sequel.

That seems like a case of something I would want to be advertised though.

This reminds me of the expiration dates on supermarket salt.

Data which reflects its time of creation is nearly always better than that which does not.

Numbers do not expire.

I’ve written about it before, but AIM until the very end showed my friend who died six years ago as logged in on his dumb phone because his phone never sent an explicit logout signal.

I never had the heart to remove him. The day AIM shutdown was very emotional for me. It felt almost like he died again.

Oh man. I wasn't expecting that thread to make me cry. It's worth reading, but get a Kleenex.

[Disclaimer, drunk and using a small phone]

A few years back one of my old irc buddies reached out to me with a simple 'hey man what's up' on gChat. Because my schedules were all over the place and whatnot I just looked off and left it. Checked on a old podcast I used to listen to (HPR) and the boys had put together a memorial episode after he lost his battle with cancer. Cancer, I didn't even know. For a year he was the one unread chat off in my Gmail inbox (because who the fuck uses gChat?) and I didn't give it a look, or notice the growing away time. You ever try talking to the dead over XMPP and wish there was a time machine setting?

Wherever you're at LordDrachenblut, give em hell, I'm sorry I didn't reach out. I still go over your old episodes and feeds every now and again bud. That's the weird part, the leftover breadcrumbs from life.

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