Out of stock

Point and shoot and mirrorless camera are trending again. People realized that it is not about the technical quality of the image, but the experience of actually taking a picture. Cameras don’t have algorithmically tailored infinite content scrolling, and that alone is a plus for a lot of people.

At the same time, dedicated cameras still blow phones out of the water the moment you try to see the pictures in anything larger than a 6" screen. People are also starting to explore the fact that taking 5 thousand pictures that you are never going to see, share or enjoy again is dumb. Instead creating dedicated spaces and ocassions where fewer, higher quality, more sentimental value pictures can be appreciated. Phone’s are woefully inadequate for that purpose, the shadows are always a mess, values are compressed -even when they are shooting fake RAW- and now a lot of fine detail is AI generated. Which looks awful when shown even on the most modest TV screen.

EDIT: Not to mention that phone taken photos look awful when printed. With physical media making a come back, people want better quality images to print and share.

DRM has existed since the DVD era. I think there were even several attempts with VHS before that.

Yeah, let’s forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom’s day, twice.

But it’s OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.

I skim them all. The options I wrote are soft parodies of what each said. There’s a ton of problems with this model of governance, but I’m no voting member, so my opinion has no impact.

That said, it makes it so a single posture has to be voted on in its entirety, which is dumb (as some legislative bodies of the world have proven). As a result, nuance is erased alongside with any sense of ideological vision or compromise, and instead it promotes vagueness in every action and glacial institutions that break slowly break apart.

The very person who wrote the proposal that won reacted to winning with:

I regret the loss of contributors (which would have happened with either option winnign [sic]). It is just too early to take a final decision on the mater [sic]. Let’s revisit this in two years or so, and let this mess of a GR be a warning for our future selves.

The proposal was designed to win time without having to take any real stance while taking the smallest loss of contributors in the process. And thus it was written as the most milketoast nothing burger. When an infinite set of possibilities exists that actually do address real concerns like climate impact, social impacts, copyright and legal problems related to generated code, etc. in relation to the principles and overall values of the project. Instead, they are deferring the practicalities to pull request’s bickering.

But again, I’m not a voting member or contributor. So my opinion is null. I still think the way the process is designed and conducted is stupid and prone to cause the eventual failure of debian via governance collapse.

Do you guys remember PhysX? You needed a whole ass dedicated card for it. NVIDIA has been looking for these outs for a looooooong time.

The Debian vote was so stupid:

Option A: Psychotic breakdown
Option B: Ethical impracticality
Option C: Political extremism
Option D: Two contradictory things at once
Option E: Something that doesn't prevent the other options but packaged with something nasty and unpalatable
Option F: Sensible but ultimately vague and action-less common place neutrality.
Option G: Nuclear option
Option H: Do nothing

It was such a brain dead exercise in futility. It was designed for the winner from the start.

Nussbaun’s comment on the result is hilariously dull:

On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web.

The GR results give us raw numbers about our opinion, and a direction, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to act as a community and understand how we can continue to accommodate the very large minority that would have preferred to ban or discourage AI.

Lucas

¹ obligatory disclosure: the script used is AI-generated

Yeah, the option that doesn’t say anything won. Who knew?…wait yes, mathematicians, they knew. The most important part of a survey is choosing the options carefully.

So, if he dies of poisoning from eating the incorrect plant, Gemini goes to prison? Jim Google is on trial? What is the actual angle here?

When you see that still the most used screen resolution is 1080 and even the very few people who are upgrading, do so only up to 1440. It is easy to see that graphics stopped being impressive a while ago. It seems that a long time ago people were still arguing FPS vs Resolution. FPS wins every single time. 24fps is fine for movies, it might add to the cinematic look. But in an interactive medium, FPS is king. Give me low latency and fast response times over anything else. People don’t notice when games look like shit, but they do notice when the gameplay is laggy or buggy. Most friendslop (compliment) games are very simple and basic in their looks, but still capture the gaming and streaming culture for months at a time. While AAAA games are now struggling to stay relevant beyond the launch week. It is the same trend as with movies. Blockbusters break records and then nobody ever remembers they even watched it. I guess that the algorithmic fragmentation of culture is finally catching up with us all.

Bad news buddy. Ethics are politics. If anything politics is the warfare for the implementation of ethics. You can’t be ethical yet unwilling to enforce your ethics, and the only way to do that is to engage in politics. That’s just the only way to influence the behavior of other human beings.

The worse part is that tech culture has failed to understand that all and any technology is part of the conflict to define politics. Whether you like it or not. Anything that involves a person besides yourself is political, because humans are political animals.

Always remember. No matter what the law says, in our current philosophical embodiment of what a “justice system” is, you might be guilty or not of a crime, but the only real reason you are being punished is because of poverty.

Sleazy lawyers expect the judge to have rocks for brains and buy this argument. They’re relying on the ignorance of digital goods and how they work. I hope they didn’t forget that neat word from the last corpo scam before AI, non-fungible. Every copy is indistinguishable from all the other copies. If you can sell infinite copies at no cost, then people should be able to buy a copy and keep it in a working state forever. Fuck DRM.

Don’t go there, I see a “buy license” button in our future. Right now, nothing but the string of text has to change. They have been changing what really matters, the crazy infrastructure behind that prevents downloading, and allows erasing, the content we have bought.

That’s where my doubt lies. Is it really gonna be better than a pro doing exposure bracketing? Because my point is that you don’t have to buy a brand new $1800 camera from last year. When a camera from a decade ago will excel that performance with only a tiny bit of practice and skill for a third of the price of a new phone. Phone cameras have gone a long way, but they are physically limited in ways that no new sensor can overcome. New material tech is not going to surpass basic light geometry.

Are 8 extra stops of performance going to justify a new AI riddled, surveillance and privacy nightmare device? When you can get 24, 30 or more stops of performance with a decade old tech. I don’t think so. The average hobbyist who wants better technical specs for photography would be misled if they looked at new smartphones and not into the recent past of digital cameras. And stop obsessing over OM, that’s a tangent on my comment and just my personal preference. A Sony, Canon or Fuji would fit just as well into the argument if that’s the buyer’s preference.

Yeah, then do that. My point is that it doesn’t take a lot of money to surpass flagship smartphone cameras anymore. Plus Google is not obsessively looking at your dick pics that way.

MFT is far from dead though. Their glass is top tier even in the plastic bodies. And the point of buying a second hand old cameras is to not have to swallow the price. For most people just trying to replace a smartphone camera, even a fixed lens is a massive improvement. There’s a reason dedicated point and shoot like the PowerShot are coming back en force. I recently kit up with an old EM-1 and a pancake lens, and the thing is not only pro level features with good quality glass. All in all, it cost me less than $500 including postage. And though it won’t fit in my pocket, it weighs almost nothing and is absolutely tiny for the power it packs.

Ricoh, Leica, Olympus. There are pro level compact alternatives. Ricoh’s are almost as small than a smartphone while being more ergonomic to use and better featured. The reason there needs to be such technologies as LOFIC for tiny sensors is precisely to compensate the size and achieve what larger sensors already achieved decades ago by shear force of being larger. But you don’t need to go that much larger, just a micro four thirds camera with mediocre glass from a decade ago already blows away anything that big tech put last year on flagship phone cameras.

Anyone who has paid over $500 for a phone, if they did it for the camera, they wasted money. For the same amount of money one can get an old second hand pro camera and a more basic phone.

The camera will be infinitely better and the smartphone will still smartphone just fine.

Wall Street, where everything is possible…if you just fucking lie confidently.

You accurately described the TV series modus operandi and the reason why JJ Abrams creative philosophy is such a soulless hack that always leads to disappointing dead ends.