We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.

I think I have two general responses.

I think you’re right in that photography and the style of photographs has evolved with technology. Each of those technological steps has been partially shaped by art (what makes it to market) and taste (what succeeds in the market). Additionally, darkrooms gave a lot of leeway for the look of the final image. This also ties into what makes for a compelling image - you’re often looking for a dramatic scene, a subject that’s a bit out of the norm, and/or unique lighting. Yeah, there are street photographs of everyday people doing everyday things in normal lighting, but they often aren’t that compelling.

In other words, photography is often stylized. I personally think that’s OK, especially when you consider how flat lightly processed photos are.

The good news in today’s world: if you shoot digital you can shoot raw + jpeg and change the look of the image pretty drastically with non-destructive edits. I’ve re-edited photos I’ve taken over a decade ago and changed their look significantly. I can do the same again in another 10 years if it strikes my fancy.

Nice! Cross post to [email protected]

I was wondering why our clear skies the past few days looked like they had a layer of lake effect cloud cover. This also explains that.

You’re right that phillips screws are prone to cam out if theres a size mismatch, but it doesn’t stop there. Apply too much torque or have a misshapen screw head or bit and you’re out of luck.

Android is built in the Linux kernel. That’s actually some of what causes this - Android’s permissions model takes the Linux model and amplifies it. Apps are treated like users to prevent them from messing with each other’s files. If an app uses Android’s downloads manager it can write to the downloads directory, but it can only see the files that it put there.

There are some Linux users with iPhones, perhaps that’s what they meant?

Apple is almost the tale of two companies.

From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.

Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.

What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.

Clearly you’ve never used a Mac. It wasn’t until 2024 that you could snap windows, they have a built in dark mode but the word processor that ships with their computer requires you to use a dark page template if you want black background/white text, and lord forgive you if you want to take a screenshot.

What were you intending to focus on? To me, this is focused fine but without an obvious out of focus subject it’s hard to tell.

You probably know this, but just in case: if you want more in focus, close your aperture some more.

I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”

It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”

Ah, corporate politics.

I’m sorry - what strategy finally got us gay marriage?

Gay marriage is presently legal in the US at a federal level due to a Supreme Court ruling, not a law. It seems inevitable that this will change given the present makeup of the court, similar to abortion.

I am all for LGBTQ rights, but until something is passed by Congress the current situation seems precarious.

The old “privacy focused” setting made speech processing local. The new “privacy focused setting” means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won’t store the audio after it’s been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

This all seems like it’s missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you’re giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can’t always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn’t seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it’s associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don’t need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.

more than in any other industry that I have seen

I dunno, I work in auto and let me tell you some things. Granted, I’ve never worked in aviation.

I am a Darktable user and really like it. That said, my workflow is:

• get photos off camera
• cull. I’m using photo mechanic right now, but if I can find an option that lets you sort my the largest in focus face I’m tempted to switch to something else. I shoot some kids sports and want to make sure I get a few good photos of each kid
• move the creme de la creme to their own folder
• add that folder to Darktable as it’s own thing
• edit as necessary in Darktable

I’ve never tried culling with Darktable. Photo mechanic lets you fly through photos using 1-8 to grade photos. At this point my first pass is to find the “this is a decent photo” shots and my second pass is usually just to pare that down. I’ve given after shoot a go, and while I can see why a pro would use it (volume), I prefer manually culling with the exception of the kids sports scenario I hit on earlier.

That’s fair.

It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web.

I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.

Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.

I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?

Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.

Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that’s trying to position itself as user first isn’t necessarily bad.

Processing raw is a lot easier if you use something like Lightroom (Adobe), Capture One, or Darktable (free open source software that’s even pretty easy to use).

I’ll use straight out of the camera JPEGs most of the time, but for scenes with high dynamic range and/or dimly lit scenes I find RAW better thanks to it’s much deeper bit depth. It really helps when you’re pushing/pulling shadows and highlights.