61–70 of 176 posts
I visualize the tent my family will live in if I get layed off.
Nothing, I have aphantasia.
Imagine not having a voice in your head. How are you gonna do rubber duck debugging within your head? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY
I see semi-amorphous/semi-geometrical/semi-colored stuff that represent different aspects and components of system. I think it's similar to people I've talked to about what they see when they think of the year+months+seasons, many friends described similar-ish types of representations that seemed visual (e.g. a circular view of months, or a long ribbon, etc.)
If months are circular for you, in which direction do they progress? A few years ago I realized my mental model of calendar months goes counter-clockwise. No idea why. I'm also aphantasic, so it's a sense of space and movement but I'm not actually seeing a circle. NYE is at 12 o'clock, but January is oddly at 11. edit: here's the article that prompted me to reflect on this https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-t…
I think the title by itself suggests a different question than the article raises. The idea of the article is that certain visualizations can help think through certain problems. Maybe you can hold these visualizations in your head, or maybe you can't (because your aphantasic, they're too complex, you're tired, whatever), but they're just as available to you on paper or in diagramming tools if you need them. It's try…
Nothing. For complex algorithms, I prefer to think in invariants: "this condition should hold here, so this variable must be that". I guess, for me the only exception is the dynamic programming algorithms. I re-discovered the wave algorithm (aka Dijkstra's algorithm) for solving mazes while writing in BASIC at school, and since then, I tend to reformulate any dynamic programming task as a path search in a maze.
When working on a hard problem, I often had to visualize how the algorithm works, data moving there, changing this, replacing that. When I debug a tricky problem and I still have not figured it out yet, I have two options: either systematically note down what the code is going through, or keep the problem in the back of my head and sleep over it. More often than not, the solution will present itself after a while if…
That really resonates with me! I’ve found that when I’m up against a tricky problem, the solution often pops into my head when I’m not actively thinking about it—whether I’m sleeping, going for a walk, or just doing something completely different. It’s like the answer appears out of nowhere after I’ve stepped away. I’ve always wondered why this happens. Is it just how our brains work in problem-solving mode? Does any…
There's the need for some noisy creativity to be able to try to match a lot of combinations including the non obvious ones, where the solution space is.
Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Usually, I don't visualize anything in particular. I use tools for visualization, but I prefer to think algebraically. If I work on a complicated system, programming to me feels like like moving through a landscape, with points of interest that I memorize or lay out spatially in a tool, and going through the motions like patching things together, flicking switches, plugging things in and out etc.