[HN Gopher] Augments Are Speech
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Augments Are Speech
Author : doctorhandshake
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-09-26 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahnorman.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahnorman.substack.com)
| hirundo wrote:
| An AR augment as described is basically a geo-linked URL, and
| should be treated the same way as any other URL. For the most
| part we can link to whatever we want, and "decorate" it with our
| commentary. Adding a reference to a point in space shouldn't
| change that. Presenting the commentary as animated 3D instead of
| text doesn't either.
| spullara wrote:
| I wonder why this same thing isn't working for social media. Why
| is it that people want to limit what people can say when they can
| easily limit what they hear?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They can't 'easily limit what they can hear'. Filtering is
| technically difficult for some people, and constantly updating
| and expanding filters can be time consuming - although this
| problem can be solved with tools like BlockTogether or other
| utilities that leverage shared data.
|
| Covert social signaling is constantly evolving though; trolls
| and other people actively look for ways to circumvent defenses,
| bypassing existing content filters or user filters. You can see
| this on Twitter; there's a busy secondary market in buying
| existing accounts (with various levels of age, quality,
| verification) and then naming and using them for trolling or
| influence campaigns. Dive into a contentious topic and note how
| many of the toxic participants have default usernames, very low
| follower counts, and (if you're really interested) atypical
| activity histories.
|
| This is not a comment on the source article, whose arguments
| seemed largely reasonable.
| spullara wrote:
| I don't know why it would be any easier for an AR app to
| implement than it is for Twitter and other social media
| platforms.
| Natsu wrote:
| There have been more than a few people who want to make an
| extension that lets people leave their own comments on sites. I
| seem to recall them hitting a lot of issues with that, because
| people don't want others to comment on 'their' sites.
| JieJie wrote:
| It's my understanding what people are trying to limit here is
| the spreading of extremism. The theory is that people can be
| drawn in with what people call "dog whistles" that evade
| filters and once trust is established, proceed to deliver more
| extremist messages.
|
| These aren't just theories, these are how extremist ideologies
| get spread around the world, from ISIS to anti-government
| militias in the US.
|
| I think most people are quite agreeable to filters (personal
| blocks and mutes, etc.) to deal with speech we find unpleasant.
| What we don't want is for those filters to provide cover for
| extremist recruiters.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| I agree with this - I think the ability to 'filter from the
| firehose' using a granular, user-controlled filtering is a
| realistic solution to the issues platforms face with differing
| opinions of what constitutes unacceptable speech. I think of
| augments as being a kind of graffiti, in a free-writing-
| anywhere sense, not in a public nuisance sense, and I think
| that even in the instance where we have the good problem of far
| too many high-quality augments sharing 3D and semantic space,
| we'll need high-quality context-and-user-specific filtering
| tools to allow us to find what we need (akin to search on the
| web), and, even further, to continue to navigate the physical
| world without getting hit by a bus.
| twiceaday wrote:
| I have always thought that people who call for censorship do it
| on behalf of some group they feel responsible for: children or
| the otherwise gullible people who lack critical thought.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| "gullible people who lack critical thought" comprise an
| enormous proportion of people, and many have influence one
| way or another, be it voting or violently storming a pizza
| shop with a rifle
|
| obviously we all have a vested interest in ensuring citizens
| are educated and informed
| belkarx wrote:
| This is only an issue if there is some centralized platform (ie
| Meta) that hosts AR and has a monopoly over the space. It's
| actually likely that that will happen (the average user won't be
| using the niche platforms) and that everyone will have a "space"
| with some sort of control over whose you can see (very similar to
| social media like twitter)
| kazinator wrote:
| Augment systems for the web never took off.
|
| Anyone remember Reframe It? (And a few similar projects.)
|
| Users using the browser extension could surf the web and see each
| other's comments attached to pages.
|
| Thus any site could have comments about any of its content,
| without the control of that site.
|
| Reframe It, IIRC, was acquired and turned into something else. Or
| something. Now there is a cryptic ghost website with a FAQ which
| says you can sign up if you click something in the corner of some
| webpage that doesn't exist.
| wpietri wrote:
| I truly appreciate humanity's ability to dream up spaces of
| infinite possibility. And then to turn around and artificially
| limit those spaces such that people can indulge their lizard-
| brain urges to treat absolutely everything as exclusive
| territory/property. Quickly followed by support for primate
| dominance hierarchies, so that people can rank-order themselves
| and be guaranteed to feel superior to somebody.
| superb-owl wrote:
| This makes it sound like there's only a single platform for
| "augments," and we all need to share it.
|
| In reality, I imagine there will be many different platforms,
| some free-for-all and some tightly curated. Users will choose
| which platform's augments they want shown at any given time.
|
| Which doesn't address any of the platform-related free speech
| concerns, but I think that's a much more general discussion, that
| has little to do with AR.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Bummed to hear it came across that way. In the next post I'm
| going to detail exactly how I envision it working, but my
| intent with Augmented Realist is to advocate for something like
| an AR web. The ideal system would allow users to choose their
| own markup/language, payloads, hosting, search, filtering,
| 'browsers', hardware etc., with scene understanding happening
| on-device.
|
| The secret sauce to this design is to allow users choice in the
| 'semantic lookup' labeling step between scene
| understanding/segmentation and the use of language to search
| the world of available augments. In my opinion, the most
| important component of a hypothetical AR web absolutely nobody
| is talking about is how language is used to describe the world,
| and my proposed solution is focused on assuming that there can
| be no consensus in that regard. I believe if we can design with
| that acknowledgement in mind we can unlock a truly modular,
| private, free, decentralized AR web.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the most important component of a hypothetical AR web
| absolutely nobody is talking about is how language is used to
| describe the world, and my proposed solution is focused on
| assuming that there can be no consensus in that regard.
|
| This is the opposite of how the actual web happened, with
| just HTML, CSS and Javascript used to describe it.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| To clarify, I meant language like English or Spanish. This
| is a hard point to compress into a comment but - if there
| is a central authority that labels things definitively
| (think DNS-> IP), we have a problem where the very first
| step in attaching an augment to the world requires you to
| use the language someone else has chosen for you to
| describe it. I framed this up in the 'Manifesto' post on
| the blog: https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/manifesto
| superb-owl wrote:
| Obviously we should standardize on Esperanto!
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Even beyond the language (eg Esperanto) the words are
| expressed in, the words themselves are likely to be
| subject to some serious debate. It is entirely wrong,
| IMO, to believe that you can acquire consensus on what
| things are called even in 'objective' labels, to say
| nothing of the clearly subjective language we use to
| describe things.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Definitely a noble undertaking!
|
| Will be curious to see what you're thinking on a technical
| level, especially to what degree you want to build on top of
| existing web standards, web 3 tech, or invent something new.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| It's quixotic and theoretical for sure. Please watch that
| substack (or subscribe) - next post I'm going into hard
| details after a year of talks on the topic.
| anm89 wrote:
| I'm not really interested in his larger argument here but I think
| there is a specific interesting point:
|
| There is no particular reason why trying to rent seek things like
| land or property should work in a digital world. They aren't
| constrained by physics which is the whole reason any of that
| stuff works in our physical reality. Why should it matter what
| neighborhood your house is in if you don't have to follow
| euclidian geometry.
|
| It seems like most people who are attracted to the space are
| exclusively interested in rent seeking opportunities but it seems
| likely that these people will get burned trying to chase a broken
| metaphor.
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