Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse, someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise: Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it. And so on.
For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.
That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".
On the other hand, clock time is entirely a social construct whose whole purpose is to coordinate social and business activity, so it should be specifically designed around social customs in order to serve that purpose.
EDIT: Author has pointed out that the interpolation mode can be changed. Very slick!
It looks like this is interpolating in HCL or HSV space— that tends to produce unexpected results, including intermediate colors with unrelated hues (pink between orange and blue?), or sharp discontinuities if one of the endpoints changes slightly (try mixing orange and blue, and then shifting the blue towards teal until suddenly the intermediate pink pops to green).
This document[1] also illustrates pretty well.
Interpolating in RGB space has its own issues (more so if gamma is not handled correctly) due to the human visual system's differing sensitivity to different colors— the result is often that two bright colors will have an intermediate color which is darker than either endpoint.
There's a known solution, thankfully: Mix colors in a perceptual color space like Lab or Oklab[2]. The behavior is very predictable and aesthetically pleasing.
> Humans don’t really use stereopsis beyond the reach of their arms
This is outright false. A person with acute vision can perceive stereopsis out to 1/4 mile. Trivially, 3D movies are projected onto screens which are 10m away.
> Requiring multiple sensors means that all of your sensor systems need to notice a danger
This is the opposite of true. In well-designed sensor fusion algorithms, every new piece of sensor data, however noisy, helps to overconstrain the estimate. Each sensor reading helps to inform the interpretation of the other readings. If your system is designed such that more information worsens your inference, you have designed a terrible system.
> Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive?
That, my friend, is called a "web page", and thanks to the open design of the web, literally nothing stops you from setting one up.
The web is already open and decentralized by its very design, and that openness and decentralization is a major reason for its incredible success.
Web3 people want that stuff not to work. They want you to be unable to right-click save. You can already openly save, modify, and share images. Web3 people want to lock it down and charge you for memes.
It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory. If you are working on this, don't be fooled by all the empty words about "decentralization"; you are working on DRM for giant hedge funds who are trying to take over and own the entire web. Its current openness is their enemy.
For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.
That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".