I have a collection of Macs from the 2000s, including the iBook G4 and the iMac G4. The iBook G4 still connects to wi-fi, and I've seen this update prompt on my iMac G4 (which is connected to Wi-Fi using a mini wireless access point).
I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.
That's what capitalism does – it isolates individuals and destroys communities. No wonder why so many people are befriending AIs and there's a "loneliness epidemic" going around.
When it comes to physical communities (e.g. neighborhoods), I think about some neighborhoods in São Paulo that are being destroyed by buildings and construction sites everywhere [1]. So many neighborhoods full of stories and friendships and people who took care of each other, now becoming part of this massive verticalization, speculation and isolation. Neighbors have to leave due to construction companies' harassment. The ones that decide to stay have to live without their friends around, in neighborhoods that grow more dangerous, with worse traffic, with less small businesses and without knowing who are their new neighbors (which aren't even long term living). Their houses look exactly like Carl Fredricksen's house from Pixar's Up.
When it comes to digital communities, I can only be reminded of how Orkut and MSN defined lots of adolescences in Latin America. Orkut literally had the concept of communities, where people gathered around similar interests (just as the early web's forums). I made a lot of friends in Orkut and MSN Messenger, some of them are still my friends after more than a decade. Facebook tried to recreate the idea of communities (with their groups), but Facebook is pretty much dead for younger people. And Instagram is just so isolating. It has a whole lot of standardized and algorithmically curated content that alienates you from other human beings.
I believe the reason why Orkut (owned by Google) was killed was that they wanted more users, maybe to compete with Facebook. But Orkut was too localized, it basically talked to Brazil and some other countries in Latin America, and India, where it was created. After killing Orkut, Google invested a lot on Google+ (do you remember that fiasco??).
This is honestly the best and most simple way to learn photography, at least something basic that is still very hard to grasp sometimes. I know photography is not just about the photometer, and about depth of field, but this simple simulator helps to learn about these relationships between aperture size, shutter speed and ISO which always bugged me (sometimes my shots were bad and sometimes great).
If I ever find a good moving prop like a small fan, maybe I'll also re-shoot new previews to demonstrate how shutter speed affects moving objects.
Now, I'm just not sure how would one simulate a running fan with a picture. While for a static image you can have separated foreground and background and then apply effects for simulation (I know iPhone HEIC images have this property), for moving images you have to simulate the blur and the stillness, which is probably more difficult in terms of coding.
Why simulate? Most modern cameras can be controlled through USB. Just actually take each one (except for ISO, which you can easily fake), encode the frames in a reasonable bitrate MP4, then have a lookup for the frame in the video. :D
I don’t know if I follow. You mean to keep a fan moving, take pictures with all the different combinations (aperture and shutter speed). Then merge on an MP4 file that you can lookup somehow the setting combo with the frame?
Sounds… reasonable I guess! I guess it can be simpler than I imagined. The owner of the site just needs a fan :-)
So what. That's a little over an hour [1], and you're done! Some smallish JPG is all that's presented here anyways, so using a reasonable MP capture to JPG should easily fit on its SD card.
Also, there's around 4600 that are pure white, and something near that that are pure black, for the scene above (although more dynamic range would be very cool).
[1] 18000 * 0.5s shutter / 3600 = 2.5 hours for worst case shutter, /2 for average = 1.25 hours of exposure.
If you consider how long lower speed shutters will take and the aperture combinations, it would take a long time to take all the pictures and would stop being feasible.
That's why I love fiddling with analog cameras for a bit, or even experimenting with old lens on newer DSLRs. I have a Canon Rebel from 2011 and sometimes love to use my soviet Zenit Helios 44M lens in it. I do have the Zenit which came with this lens, but I have yet to develop its film.
I've started fiddling with an old Canon 30D again just because it's completely devoid of all the automatic post-processing I've become so used to with my phone camera. It's nice to just see the image as it is.
Well, to be fair, you see the image how the proprietary jpg engine chooses to automatically post process the raw file. Even this age canon cameras there was some controversy in that regard. And even if you view the raw file you are looking at how your raw file viewer chooses to post process a minimal preview for you to view for that raw file.
You want full control you fall into the rabbit hole of dcraw where you can option out how that raw processing engine actually works, what algorithms are used and what parameters for those algorithms. Even lightroom you are just using the algorithm they decided for you already with parameters they decided are fine.
I used to have an old rebel xti, how do you actually confirm focus shooting like this? as far as I remember there were no aids for manual focus like film slr ground glass or modern mirrorless live view focus peaking.
You don’t confirm focus… pictures are always a bit blurry, but I kind of like the aesthetic (not very practical though).
I did a bit of research, for better results you can try:
- focus peaking
- focus magnifier
- aperture priority (so that it would choose the shutter speed for you)
- and you still would need to confirm focus manually with you naked eyes
I like to capture shots with subjects in an ideal distance where I can have some interesting bookeh but still capture the subject. The bookeh on the Helios lens is beautiful!
I've applied for some jobs such as Technical Account Manager and mostly Backend Software Engineer (which is probably way more difficult to ace than infrastructure for me). Project Management is definitely something I don't have any experience with.
Why would someone in their sound minds allow their kids to do some sort of facial age estimation made by a third-party vendor? Sounds like a great privacy-protection idea (/s).
You see, these companies leverage the lack of regulation regarding platforms. I'm not sure how one company would fight predatory users, but shifting the blame to parents or doing some techno-stuff to save the day won't do it.
We can already imagine a lot of problems with this approach – what if the vendor forgets to delete these pictures? It can be maliciously, or by sheer stupidity. What if the pictures leak at some point? Again, not every system is 100% safe from bad actors.
Last but not least – do we know if this age estimation algorithm works 100% of times? Are there studies that prove that predators won't find ways to crack this?
Also, kids in the same age group might also misbehave.
These things are way better to see than stupid AI. It’s not going to “sell”, but it’s a tech person being creative and doing their craft.
I used to study a lot of hobbyist OS development in my late teens. It was awesome, I still try doing small kernels from time to time (last one was a RISCV small kernel that printed a message to my partner).
I did that all my life: no unicorns but if you do enough things, some will sell auto (once any traction happens I sell: I don't like running a company, I like building stuff). Without all this stress and grifting. Granted, I was lucky that my hobby in 2000 turned out to be worth millions, but it still works fine 25 years later.
It's weird to characterize ai categorically as "stupid" when, until it was wrapped with clever UX, it was an entirely academic pursuit (craft), with little to no money in it.
I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.