

How I Refresh my memory - cyunker
http://www.cringely.com/2013/09/27/refresh-memory/

======
btown
Seems like an intriguing product, though certainly with the potential to be
"creepy" if executed in the wrong way. I was struck by an implementation
paragraph though:

> Every major component of Refresh is a fuzzy system. When it sees “Lunch with
> Tom” – without exaggeration 100 bots go out and vote who Tom is. One says
> “You have a Facebook friend named Tom”. One says “You met with a Tom person
> 3 months ago at the same location.” One says “It’s not your cousin Tom — you
> hate him.” Some are heuristic and some are statistical.

Putting my grad-student hat on, from a Bayesian perspective, they seem to be
effectively "marginalizing" the distribution on "facts" over the hidden
identity-of-Tom variable given the event and your current network:

$ p(facts | network, event) = \int p(facts | identity) p(identity | network,
event) d identity $

The app's output seems to be, effectively, samples from that "facts"
distribution, which can be generated by taking samples from the identity
distribution and accepting/rejecting based on likelihood. It's a more formal
way to look at fuzzy logic systems like this one. The cool thing is that you
can eventually plug other things into the system, such as taking into account
the distribution over types of facts that the current user likes to look at,
in a mathematically sound way. But it's rare (imho) to come across systems
like this outside of academia.

------
shiftb
I love Refresh.

It pings me about 5-10 minutes before I meet someone with a dossier on them.
It includes highlights from social media, things we have in common, and our
last interactions. Very helpful in catching back up where you left off.

One feature I like is that once the meeting is over, the app asks if you want
to remember anything about them and gives you notes field to edit. This shows
up the next time you meet them.

It's gotten REALLY good at highlighting interesting things about over the last
few months.

All in all it's very impressive technology and I look forward to the push
messages. It's hard to say that about many apps.

------
ams6110
Every once in a while you meet someone who's really good at remembering not
just your name but the little details of your life, your interests, what you
last talked about, etc. It's either a gift or the person is disciplined enough
to keep notes and review them before you next meet. Either way it's
impressive.

Now, with an app like this, it will cease to be anything remarkable. Yeah,
someone you met two months ago seems to remember everything like it was
yesterday, eh big deal, he's just using Refresh.

I don't really know how I feel about it, but it seems like it's cheating
somehow.

~~~
AmVess
I am one of those people. It's neither a gift, nor a product of discipline; I
just remember trivial shit about lots of people that I have ever met (but
certainly not everyone I have ever met), all the way back to the 4th grade.

This app will help the forgetful types, but it won't win over people who have
an innate ability to remember some utterly trivial facts. IIRC, the majority
of successful CEO's share this trait...try to pull Refresh on them, and you'll
find out how much closer you got to dog house than if you just kept your trap
shut.

------
PhantomGremlin
Way too creepy for me. I'm (approximately) Cringely's age, and it doesn't seem
to bother him, so maybe it's not an age related thing, maybe an introvert vs
extrovert thing.

What do the 20-something hipsters on HN think of this? Are you OK with
computers becoming more and more adept at mining your personal information and
relationships? Of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. already do this.
But they (pretty much) keep the results to themselves. They don't shove the
mining back in my face.

~~~
ZirconCode
>> 20-something hipsters on HN think of this

Seems very wrong. For some reason, especially the mention of "meeting" the
girl at the bar, and of course, "befriending" people on this basis seems wrong
overall. I don't think these are really friendships. Seems to be a business
world thing.

I find it so creepy, I might go out of my way to post hilarious fake
information about myself. Like how I baked gummy-bear pie for my niece, and
how my stocks in BLAH something were faring. This way I would know who was
doing this to me. I would disdain them... If i were "important" that is =)

~~~
aw3c2
Hey Matt, it was great to meet you at rubyconf last year. Did you get that
lawnmower back from Sal? All the best, Kevin

------
read
How is this different from Ark.com?

~~~
shiftb
Ark is people search and works on a pull model right? I have to look up the
person I want to know about.

Refresh figures out who I'm meeting from my calendar events and then pushes
the interesting information to me.

