As siblings have said, his video series are quite good. But if you're just looking at this repo only, you probably want to look at the python reference implementation. (The C is designed to exactly replicate its functionality.)
There is an ex-pro FPS player that has aphantasia (reports no visualizations either intentional or intrusive) and I would really like to see one of these studies talk to him one time. It seems like an interesting extreme case to poke at.
I had idetic memory until sixteen or seventeen, which is quite late. But over time my ability to visualize things in my head has almost entirely shifted from pictures to shapes. I barely picture things anymore, but I know the space they occupy down practically to the millimeter. I am absolutely the guy you want to pack your car for you when you have to move, because I will get three more boxes into your car.
My kid moved recently, and I looked at his backpack, said this will fit behind the driver’s seat. It did, with about the thickness of a magazine to spare.
I have ADHD, which most people will tell you generally comes with a slight reduction in working memory. Up until ten years ago I would have sworn in court that I had an excellent working memory. Early in my career I was known for tackling big architectural shifts and managing to complete them with only one or two regressions. That’s a hell of a lot of plates to keep spinning, even if you can enter flow state practically on demand like I could.
I know now that I have normal ADHD brain, so how the hell was I doing this? It was a watching of Sherlock Holmes that finally cracked the code. I finally realized that I build mind palaces every time I work a difficult problem - but without pictures, which is why I didn’t know I was doing them. I build them the way a person who was blind from birth would do it. The same way I avoid bumping into walls going through my house in the dark. The same way I know there’s a truck in my blind spot. Each “object” occupies space that I can recall or turn around in my head.
And that’s how I used to shred code into pieces and then reassemble them like making the second build in a set of LEGO.
I believe crosshair placement would be harder to memorize/reflect on.
Coaches also often say “see yourself from your opponents POV and be in an unexpected place”. eg royalG valorant guide. That’s just a figure of speech for aphant folks.
I have aphantasia and wasn't seeing how it'd have a particular effect on FPS games, at least the ones I've played.
Crosshair placement for things like leading shots? Or more for building a mental map of where the enemy is likely to poke their head up? I would think these things involve spatial imagery/memory. I do remember putting a tiny piece of post-it note on my monitor to act as a red dot sight in Killing Floor, but my guess is that'd help anyone headshot zombies better, not just us aphantasics.
Crosshair placement as in positioning your aim at head level when peeking corners or holding an angle.
I'm decent at it. Struggle more when there's verticality (im sure everybody does though.)
In Valorant, there's often objects to use as guides. But when there's not, I imagine someone with good visual memory could pull up the post-it note of their last fight and reposition off of it. Whereas I'd have to reason my way through it or use muscle memory through lots of practice.
Those few bits are the difference between a keylogged password holder waltzing in and an automated monitor noticing that someone is failing the token check and locking the account before any damage occurs.
I think your missing parents point, both are just preshared keys, one has some additional fuzz around it so that the user in theory isn't themselves typing the same second key in all the time, but much of that security is in keeping the second secret in a little keychain device that cannot itself leak the secret. Once people put the seeds in their password managers/phones/etc its just more data to steal.
Plus, the server/provider side remains a huge weak point too. And the effort of enrolling/giving the user the initial seed is suspect.
This is why the FIDO/hardware passkeys/etc are so much better because is basically hardware enforced two way public key auth, done correctly there isn't any way to leak the private keys and its hard has hell to MITM. Which is why loss of the hw is so catastrophic. Most every other MFA scheme is just a bit of extra theater.
Exactly, that's it. Two parties have a shared secret of, say 16 bytes total, upon which authentication depends.
They could have a one byte long password but a 15 byte long shared secret used to compute the MFA code. The password is useless but the MFA seed is unguessable. Maybe have no password at all (zero length) and 16 byte seed. Or go the other way and a 16 byte password and zero seed. In terms of an attacker brute forcing the keyspace, it's always the same, 16 bytes.
We're basically saying (and as a generalization, this is true) that the password part is useless since people will just keep using their pets name, so let's put the strenght on the seed side. Fair enough, that's true.
But if you're willing to use a strong unique password then there's no real need.
(As to keyloggers, that's true, but not very interesting. If my machine is already compromised to the level that it has malicious code running logging all my input, it can steal both the passwords and the TOTP seeds and all the website content and filesystem content and so on. Game's over already.)
> This is why the FIDO/hardware passkeys/etc are so much better
Technically that's true. But in practice, we now have a few megacorporations trying to own your authentication flow in a way that introduces denial of service possibilities. I must control my authentication access, not cede control of it to a faceless corporation with no reachable support. I'd rather go back to using password123 everywhere.
> none of them have issues understanding when someone is speaking
This isn't it at all. It's the first part that's the issue. It's not that I can't understand speech, it's I can't focus on having a conversation increasingly as the number of chaotic elements increase.
There's loud(ish) background noise, there's people moving around, there's the uncomfortable feeling of strangers nearer to me than I would optimally like. And so I've realized in my younger attempts to fit in that I couldn't relax and have a good time and talk to people because of some of those things, because they felt to me like immediate urgent things and the conversation while I would like to have it is not getting priority.
A similar thing happens in larger group contexts, more people is more mental overhead, and additionally there's an element of not knowing how to take a turn in group conversation because I either lack an appropriate referent to relate or I don't know when my turn is.
By the time I have both something to say and can pay attention to turn taking the conversation has already moved on and I have to start over.
But neurotype is definitely a strong element in it, both in interests and somehow in things like conversational turn-taking as well. It also helps that a lot of conversations end up happening in text for me, turn-taking isn't an issue when you can both type at the same time.
My conflict management skills are not very good. I take heart in the wisdom that it is possible to reach past hostility and work together. Just as I hope people reach past the ick and read his words on their own merit and not react to them how they are "supposed" to react.
Do I respond to nitpicking with my own nitpicking? The language of the parent post implies a lack of necessity (due to having success through other means).
