roake

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Hopefully the main focus of Apple's AR glasses will not not be games. The real value of AR glasses is that they can give the user augmented intelligence. Using AI and computational vision, AR glasses could give you a better understanding of the world around you. A simple example would be the ability to zoom in to see distant objects. Computer vision has exceeded the ability of human eyesight for quite a while now. Glasses that let you see in the dark, find objects you are looking for, look around corners or behind solid objects would quickly become essential items. Tagging of objects and locations becomes possible as well. You could select Yelp reviews and see what people are saying about a restaurant you are looking at. You could select a nature channel and see information about each plant or animal you can see. Like all new technology, AR will have its down sides as well. It is not clear how you build AR glasses without some kind of camera built in and walking around with an always on camera is still not socially acceptable.

I’m not sure that means what you think it means.

Your overall points about the technology are valid, and I don’t disagree with them, but let us pay proper respects to human eyesight.
 
Human eyesight is a fantastically incredible mechanism with so much “processing” and “features” that us physicians can only being to fathom it the most basic parts of it.  The eyeball is only a small part of human eyesight.  It lets the light in, and does some simple analog tricks to separate out frequency and different fields of your vision.  It does this by refracting parts of the image onto parts of the retina, with different receptors (many lay people hear about rods and cones, but that’s the tip of the iceberg for “processing” in the eyeball).  The information then gets essential converted to digital.  There are several layers that the image overlays, and different nerve fibers carry this off to different sectors, criss-crossing being the eyes like some complex freeway exchange, and racing through so many ancillary processing systems on their “optic” processing that boggles the mind.  This images can activate thousands of different brain responses before the “seeing” processing in the back part of the brain even takes place, depending on what is coming in through the eye.  While I refer to this as an image, the processing utilizes far more information taken in through the eye than what you may think of as an “image.”   As this information is being processed, it is analyzed for a fantastic amount of information before an image is produced, best we can tell.  These centers can identify basic threats to safety, process your position in 3D space, feeds realtime movement information to your balance centers and separately to your multiple threat systems, depending on what “pre-processing” has so far taking from the input.  All this happens in the more basic centers far before you “see” the images.  There are far too functions here to even brush the surface.  There are many, many thick tomes on the topic that cause sleepless nights to medical students, specialized neurologists, scientists/researchers, and the like.  Those are just basic processing features.  Then, when your brain sends a process image to your higher brain, the spectrum of possibilities of further processing and responses bloom almost into the infinite.  All this happens in the tiniest fraction of time before you even get the chance to consciously register the image.  Eyesight processes longitudinally over time as well, not just “snapshots.”  Eyesight is processing of fluid data streaming in continuously, not just “frames.”  These things are really remarkable, and we barely understand enough to even know that they are there to research.  Human eyesight can process something you have NEVER seen before and stratify a threat level and cross categorize it using so many variables that you can react reasonably to it within a fraction of a second without having a damned clue what it is.

Computerized “vision” is mostly made up of really cool, but really simple tricks that do things like shift wavelengths or simple magnification that allow us to see things that we would not normal register.  This shifted light information is then dumped into the eye for the real processing.  Identification of objects using “machine learning” is another really amazing trick, but isn’t one-millionth as incredible as human eyesight and processing.  The computer’s “sight” is extremely fundamental, and an algorithm essentially pattern-matches something in an image to a known database.  These mechanisms are getting very sophisticated, and they seem like magic to some people.

While I LOVE the things that AR are bringing our way, I would argue that computer vision has not exceeded the ability of human eyesight, and probably never will.  What it will do is augment our vision by dropping some extra data into the eyeball that human eyesight will process.  I think that we will see all the things you discussed coming into play in the very near future, and I’ll be one of the first to get on board, especially if it’s an Apple product that I know will be very well supported.

iOS 15 Safari is cripplingly slow for me.

I like the release in general, but Safari is soooooo slow!  I’m running a iPhone 12 Pro Max with 512gb of memory and had no problems at all on iOS 14.8.  After the update, Safari is almost unusable for me.  I’ve tried resetting the phone.  It didn’t help.

Could this be due to some temporary process, like indexing of files, and will improve?  Or is there a general performance bug crippling speed for some people?

mikethemartian said:

maestro64 said:

Hasn't epic heard they can now set up their own store in Korea and sell at whatever price they like.

Yes that’s why they are asking Apple to reinstate them so they can sell in the South Korean market . So unless Apple is able to make a legal case against the law they either have to reinstate Epic or leave the South Korean market.

As I understand it, Apple is under no obligation whatsoever to restate Epic’s account regardless of the law in South Korea.  The new Korean law doesn’t force Apple to give developer accounts to anyone.  It only has to do with the degree of certain types of control Apple has over apps that are published on iOS in that market.

Epic is making this request only to create noise around it’s case.  Epic knew before they asked that Apple would say no.

genovelle said:

tedz98 said:

The general public has no understanding of what a file hash is. So the techies at Apple have no understanding of how the general public perceives what they are doing. They just think Apple is scanning their phone. I’m not a huge Bill Maher fan, but I agree with him here. It’s a slippery slope that Apple is embarking on.

The general public has no idea except what the media highlights here. He is a part of the problem, likely because he has or has had such materials on his phone. Only a hit dog hollas that loud. 

Or because he doesn’t agree with spyware being factory-installed on billions of devices.  

As a physician myself, I have to wonder if the context of these images was interpreted correctly.

This guy was a medical oncologist.  I have not tried to find the story, but I wonder if he is a pediatric medical oncologist.  Sometimes these doctors take photos of lesions, wounds, other issues on patients and later post them to the chart, etc.  If the affected areas are near breasts or genitals, I could see how these could be mistaken by a lay person for sexually-exploitative images.  These chart photos are may be distasteful to lay people, but they are important to monitor progress of these areas.  He could have left Cloud backup of photos turned on, and that's how they ended up on iCloud.  If THAT is the scenario, then a perfectly good man just had his career destroyed by an overzealous tech industry that didn't stay in their own lane.  Even if this is not the case, it's a possibility that could occur to someone else, destroying the very person that is trying to save those kids' lives.

All that being said, it's possible that these photos had nothing to do with patient treatment and were purely for sexual gratification of some twisted human mind.  If that's the case, then he needs some very serious mental help, and deserves what's coming.

For those that are about to point out that a doctor shouldn't be using a personal phone for those kinds of things, try looking into what it takes to get a formal by-the-bureaucracy authorized photo of these things.  It's damned near impossible, and can take days for approval, which is useless in monitoring fast-moving treatments such as surgery or certain types of radiation therapy where things change daily or sometimes hourly.

And yes, high-end EMR's such as EPIC have applications for your phone that allow you to take photos directly to the chart without storing them on the phone.  But less expensive EMR's don't necessarily have this option.

Update:
After making this post, I spent some time looking for some information that was more informative than "exploitative images" or "pornography," which could be subject to interpretation.  I found a copy of the initial criminal complaint at: https://padailypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/file0.43959436616036.pdf
This complaint makes it very clear that the image he uploaded to Kik was indeed sexually explicit, depicting adult penetration of a prepubescent female.  In other words, this guy has one sick mind, and has destroyed his own career.