As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.

This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.

As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.

(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)

Honestly i felt the giddiness that DF did in that first video. It was exciting not just because it did look like a huge upgrade to realism – but because this is another pandoras box moment for genAI. Exciting in a holy shit way, not a “I can’t wait” way. Also, I believed it when they said it was just changing the lighting. Looking at the Grace model more, along with peoples comments, there has to be more than lighting going on here. and with Jensens comments, I think that seems clearer.

He really is pushing the slop angle, and, well – me too I agree with you. I’ve soured on the whole idea. I think there’s been too much backlash toward DF though.

I’m just so tired of seeing 1984 and Brazil and Idiocracy and every other political warning and satire played out in the real world every goddamn day of my life

If I were you, I’d get an compact digital camera like an olympus xz-1. its a little 10mp camera with manual control options. the lens is a built in zoom lens, but it is a wide f1.8 which will allow you to experiment with lower light scenarios and thin depth of field for portraits. It wont get you insane sharpness or croppability (so, get your composition right when you take the shot) but it has nice out-of-camera colors, so you won’t have to delve into the editing world. I shoot film and I got one for my partner so she could have a camera to walk around with with me that looks comparable to film due to its softness.

it wont be as satisfyingly tactile to learn about the exposure triangle (ie, as you change the values of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO in order to capture the right amount of light) as a manual film camera or a digital mirrorless body with interchangeable lenses, but itll definitely be fun to walk around with.

it shouldnt be as overwhelming re: features as modern day mirrorless cameras, which can get confusing with the amount of systems that are within them (like pixel shift, bracketing, internal image stabilization systems, etc. – you don’t need these to learn the basics of photography, and they can be a barrier if you get too caught up with them or finding theyre introducing another variable thats screwing with your shots).

And, if you want to be lazy, put it in auto mode and its a decent little point n shoot. it wont get you near wildlife photography, though, if thats something you’d want to dabble in (that gets expensive). it also wont be great if you want to try manual focusing.

I’d say if you just want a camera for a nice walkaround hobby, a mirrorless or dslr camera is a little bit overkill and the xz-1 is a good inexpensive buy if you can get one for like $300. a good modern starting camera with a lens is probably going to put you around $1k, and thats quite a bit of an investment.

If you want a real satisfying way to learn the utter basics of how a camera works, dont mind some unpredictability, have a camera lab near you, and have a couple hundred to spend, you could pick up a Pentax K1000 with a 50mm f2 lens for like $150 and shoot a few rolls of Kodak Gold 200 and send em off to a lab. But that will be a longer learning process (how to load film, advance it, what shutter speeds to remain under in order to compensate for your body’s movement, how to focus, how to respool the film into the canister once youve taken all your shots, etc). There’s nothing really more satisfying than a no-batteries, all mechanical experience, IMO. but its a lot of learning and can get expensive.

Edit: though, maybe since you’ve already got experience with your Dad’s Nikon, you’d rather something of your own more akin to that…in that case …hmmm well I’m running an Olympus OM-1 mkii as my mirrorless … you could get the mark 1 (essentially the same except for a couple niche features for wildlife) and the 12-40 f2.8 lens for ~1000 and that’d be pretty baller starting kit, imo. the 12-40 is a really really good lens, esp for ~$500. The nice thing about that is it’d be totally weather sealed (like, just let the rain hit it directly and dont even worry) and you have access to try out more modern computational photo tech. It would also allow you to expand into other areas like nature for a bit cheaper than if you went for a Full frame alternative like canon or sony or nikon. You could get a decent birding setup with a Om-1 and a 300mm f/4 pro for ~$5000, where something akin in full-frame land would be more like 7k-10k. Though, there are still tradeoffs going with a smaller micro-four-thirds sensor of the OM-1 – but honestly I don’t think you super need to worry about them.

good luck, I also have a strange affection for that movie

Which body do you have? The 17mm 1.2 is comfortable on the larger-bodied om1, but people say it’s a bit big on the the smaller Olympus bodies. The 17mm 1.8 is tiny though and fits nice on the om-3 style bodies

Thanks. I got a different copy from KEH rather than eBay – lo and behold! this shit sharp lol

I took a look at the interior of the lens by shining my phone light through the back of the lens toward the front, and I saw quite a bit of …erhm… smearing? on the front element of the lens. I’m thinking it may just be a bad copy. Initiated a return

It’s an olympus OM-1 mk ii

(thanks for taking a look btw)

Yeah, no settings changes camera-side. Just swapped the lenses and kept em wide open. Both are straight out of camera.

Edit: You gave me the idea to just take a quick look at the RAW files, just in case it is something with the camera post-processing. The 25mm RAW is definitely sharper than the 17mm, so its definitely a lens thing

check out this book

https://interesi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/technopoly.pdf

Tech is a tool, you don’t need to connect with it in any transcendental way. According to this guy ^ Neil Postman, you may feel this way because we live in a TECHNOPOLY

I’m an admin and using an SSH key is the most common way we log into servers.

Also the most common way I log in to self-hosted servers.

So I’ve been seeing some discussion online about how Apollo has solved some user’s problems with virtual display

Do you mind me asking what you’re running? I’m on Ubuntu 25.10 w/ Plasma 6.4 running wayland, and I’ve had issues forever setting up a virtual display. I’ve just accepted that I have to go with whatever modes the edid my monitor/dummy hdmi plug offers, which means I havent been able to stream 1260x800 or 2560x1600 to my steamdeck (so it is black-barred)

I guess Plasma 6.6 is going to add the ability to add custom modes via kscreen-doctor, but thats at least a few months out I think. I’d much rather use a native virtual display if apollo is magically able to do that.

If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.

Thank you so much! you pointed me in exactly the right direction and now I have a couple edited photos I think I’m happy with it. The trick was watching Boris Hajdukovic’s Diffuse and Sharpen video – seeing him go do his initial edits with Color Balance RGB module gave me some confidence and the idea to just not worry about sharpness – get the colors right – then fine tune the sharpening on the church.

So I did that, then I masked the church and did some manual Diffuse and sharpening there (rather than using the presets - I think one of my issues was i would experiment with a preset and it would reset my mask and screw me all up!) and – well looking back now, maybe its a little oversharpened compared to the OOC jpg, but its not too bad to me!

I did remove some of the atmospheric haze too as you suggested and I think that helped quite a bit.

If you do find time to take a pass at these please let me know! I’ve added my “final” edits to the album in case anyone is interested. “Final” because I think I need to take a break from this image lol.

Will be watching more of Boris’ videos! Thank you again

Thanks! Yeah, me too Re: the endless rabbit hole of editing. For one thing, I very much hate the editing process! I too want things to look natural, but I’ve been watching the “Darktable Landscapes” Youtube channel and I’m amazed at what he’s able to do with some of his rawfiles, especially his use of masks.

Usually I just stick with the OOC jpegs because I find them good enough, but in this particular shot I’m using a long lens and teleconverter, and since the subject is so far away there’s a bit of haze and not a ton ton of detail. So i figureed it’d be a good candidate to practice editing and see if I can make a better image than the OOC jpeg… but I’ve been feeling like I just can’t! When I zoom in to bricks of the church in the OOC images, they seem a lot cleaner and sharper than my edited raw files, and I’m having trouble sharpening in darktable without making the image look twice baked.

I haven’t tried rawtherapee yet but I’ve heard its a bit less cumbersome than Darktable – I think I’ll try that and see how it does. Thanks again!

docker ps

I use navidrome to stream music from my desktop. Symphonium is my android client. It costs like 2 bucks but it’s real good. Lots of different UI options.

I haven’t done it myself since Im the only one using it…but I think in order to have somewhere your family can login and download music … That is a separate application from navidrome. Lidarr, Jackett, and somehow connect to qbittorent…I haven’t done it yet but I think that’s probably the route id go

I figured “frame” refers to glasses, but looks like people are thinking it’s a box of some sort.

Edit: oop I see you already mentioned that in the post body

There are a lot of language learning resources on the site i use. I did a whole Michel Thomas advanced audio course for portuguese that helped me learn the basics. What’s the title of the french book your friend is looking for?