I used to be really (really really) into photography. I respect anyone working hard on a physical product, but this misses the mark on every front I can think of.
The real issue that photographers grapple with, emotionally and financially, is that pictures have become so thoroughly commodified that nobody assigns them cultural value anymore. They are the thumbnail you see before the short video clip starts playing.
Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash. This is especially funny to me because I used to struggle with the fact that people looking at your work don't know or care what kind of camera or process was involved. They don't know if I spent two hours zoomed in removing microscopic dust particles from the scanning process after a long hike to get a single shot at 5:30am, or if it was just the 32nd of 122 shots taken in a burst by someone holding up an iPad Pro Max at a U2 concert.
This all made me sad for a long time, but I ultimately came to terms with the fact that my own incentives were perverse; I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else. If you can get back to a place where you're taking photographs or making music or doing 5 minute daily synth drills for your own happiness with no expectation of external validity, you will be far happier taking that $399 and buying a Mamiya C330.
> Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”
It just created a situation in which a bunch of people with guns were told that some teen had a gun. That's a very unsafe situation that the system created, out of nothing.
And some teen may be traumatized. Again, unsafe.
Incidentally, the article's quotes make this teen sound more adult than anyone who sold or purchased this technology product.
I'm going to file this under "examples of Yamaha doing the right thing" (Steinberg is owned by Yamaha)
previous examples:
* Yamaha saved Korg by buying it when it was in financial trouble and giving it a cash injection, only to then sell it back to its previous owners once they had enough cash[1].
* Yamaha in the 80's had acquired Sequential (for those not familiar: Sequential Circuits is one of the most admired synthesizer makers). Many years later, Sequential's founder Dave Smith established a new company under a different name and in 2015 Yamaha decided to return the rights to use the Sequential brand to Smith, as a gesture of goodwill, on Sequential's 40th anniversary (this was also thanks to Roland's founder Ikutaro Kakehashi who convinced Yamaha that it would be the right thing to do) [1][2][3]
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.
I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time.
Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what I want, I adjust the prompt and try again.
I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything
The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .)
Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess.
But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.
We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.
At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.
I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.
I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
We really need an internet Bill of Rights. Google has too much power to delete your company from existence with no due process or recourse.
If any company controls some (high) percentage of a particular market, say web browsers, search, or e-commerce, or social media, the public's equal access should start to look more like a right and less like an at-will contract.
30 years ago, if a shop had a falling out with the landlord, it could move to the next building over and resume business. Now if you annoy eBay, Amazon or Walmart, you're locked out nationwide. If you're an Uber, Lyft, or Doordash (etc) gig worker and their bots decide they don't like you anymore, then sayonara sucker! Your account has been disabled, have a nice day and don't reapply.
Our regulatory structure and economies of scale encourage consolidation and scale and grant access to this market to these businesses, but we aren't protecting the now powerless individuals and small businesses who are randomly and needlessly tossed out with nobody to answer their pleas of desperation, no explanation of rules broken, and no opportunity to appeal with transparency.
Happened to me last week. One morning we wake up and the whole company website does not work.
Not advice with some time to fix any possible problem, just blocked.
We gave very bad image to our clients and users, and had to give explanations of a false positive from google detection.
The culprit, according to google search console, was a double redirect on our web email domain (/ -> inbox -> login).
After just moving the webmail to another domain, removing one of the redirections just in case, and asking politely 4 times to be unblocked.. took about 12 hours. And no real recourse, feedback or anything about when its gonna be solved. And no responsibility.
The worse is the feeling of not in control of your own business, and depending on a third party which is not related at all with us, which made a huge mistake, to let out clients use our platform.
As long as Apple requires they make use of those services for me to install software on the computer I bought, and they prevent others from producing equivalent competing devices via patents (i.e. government granted monopolies), zero.
It's not that it's not worth something, it's that they're abusing their patents and monopoly to extract further compensation after I already bought the device.
This is less useful than most people expected. Redwood has been struggling because the expected battery turnover is not occurring. EV batteries are lasting a long time, so they stay in the car are and not being recycled or reused in any quantity yet.
If EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to recycle or reuse.
Another false positive by one of these leading content filters schools use - the kid said something stupid in a group chat and an AI reported it to the school, and the school contacted the police. The kid was arrested, stripped searched, and held for 24 hours without access to their parents or counsel. They ultimately had to spend time in probation, a full mental health evaluation, and go to an alternative school for a period of time. They are suing Gaggle, who claims they never intended their system to be used that way.
These kinds of false positives are incredibly common. I interviewed at one of their competitors (Lightspeed), and they actually provide a paid service where they have humans review all the alerts before being forwarded to the school or authorities. This is a paid addon, though.
Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler?
What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the history of philosophy.
I hear that the online editor is quite good, but personally I've only ever used the CLI.
I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for PowerPoint (replacing my use of Marp), but have since used it for a poster and some minor text documents. And I've been very happy the results. I know that a lot of people love using LaTeX for that kind of thing, and with good reasons, but I always forgot most of the details between my (occasional) use of LaTeX, while I've found Typst to be very easy to return to
The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
The title is underselling the nuance—there's the entire Myanmar civil war hiding behind the word "allegedly". The group in power claims a group trying to overthrow them is operating scam centers (they deny it); this SpaceX intervention cuts off communications on a large scale, presumably aiding one side or the other in some unclear way.
> "“Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park,” the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is “part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar’s civil war” and “deny any involvement in the scams.”"
I'm a tedious broken record about this (among many other things) but if you haven't read this Richard Cook piece, I strongly recommend you stop reading this postmortem and go read Cook's piece first. It won't take you long. It's the single best piece of writing about this topic I have ever read and I think the piece of technical writing that has done the most to change my thinking:
You can literally check off the things from Cook's piece that apply directly here. Also: when I wrote this comment, most of the thread was about root-causing the DNS thing that happened, which I don't think is the big story behind this outage. (Cook rejects the whole idea of a "root cause", and I'm pretty sure he's dead on right about why.)
On another note, it's very telling that companies that protect their "hey! we do this interesting thing, gonna buy?" character survives for much longer compared to companies which say "we can earn a ton of money if we do this".
The companies in the second lot does a lot of harm to their ecosystems to be able to continue existing.
I find headlines like this much more appropriate when placed in terms of days of revenue: "Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near 2 days of revenue!"
For somebody that makes the median income, of about $50k, this is a fine of $273 for years of largescale systematic abusive behavior, done for profit.
The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance.
The real issue that photographers grapple with, emotionally and financially, is that pictures have become so thoroughly commodified that nobody assigns them cultural value anymore. They are the thumbnail you see before the short video clip starts playing.
Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash. This is especially funny to me because I used to struggle with the fact that people looking at your work don't know or care what kind of camera or process was involved. They don't know if I spent two hours zoomed in removing microscopic dust particles from the scanning process after a long hike to get a single shot at 5:30am, or if it was just the 32nd of 122 shots taken in a burst by someone holding up an iPad Pro Max at a U2 concert.
This all made me sad for a long time, but I ultimately came to terms with the fact that my own incentives were perverse; I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else. If you can get back to a place where you're taking photographs or making music or doing 5 minute daily synth drills for your own happiness with no expectation of external validity, you will be far happier taking that $399 and buying a Mamiya C330.
This video is about music, but it's also about everything worth doing for the right reasons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQF4YIvxwE