> The principles involved haven't changed much in the intervening decades.
My problem with many old-time tutors is that they refuse to recognize that photography has gotten a lot easier. We don't need to learn the craft the way they did.
For example, you don't need stuff like the "sunny 16" rule of exposure if you have real-time previews in the camera. You use visual feedback, usually with better accuracy.
In the same vein, you probably don't need to learn about flash guide numbers when modern continuous LED illumination covers 99% of use cases without any guesswork.
Or, you don't need to learn about optical filters (perhaps except for the polarizer) when almost all their functions can be accomplished in software without loss in fidelity.
> For example, you don't need stuff like the "sunny 16" rule of exposure if you have real-time previews in the camera. You use visual feedback, usually with better accuracy.
Except that it may not, unless you know what you are doing and press the right button:
> With the monitor or viewfinder, you may see an image with an aperture that differs from the shooting result. Since the blurring of a subject changes if the aperture is changed, the blurriness of the actual picture will differ from the image you were viewing prior to shooting.
> While you press and hold the key to which you assigned the [Aperture Preview] function, the aperture is stepped down to the set aperture value and you can check the blurriness prior to shooting.
> In the same vein, you probably don't need to learn about flash guide numbers when modern continuous LED illumination covers 99% of use cases without any guesswork.
And leaving your camera in "auto" also probably "covers 99% of use cases without any guesswork"… but you give up creative control to the software. Why bother learning what aperture is at all if 99% of the time you won't ever matter to taking a photo?
The whole point of reducing the use of "auto" is to make creative choices yourself.
The point of learning Sunny 16 is that once you’ve internalized thinking in full stops, you don’t need visual feedback, which makes you faster, which can make the difference between getting your shot or not and having a happy or angry client.
> Or, you don't need to learn about optical filters (perhaps except for the polarizer) when almost all their functions can be accomplished in software without loss in fidelity.
I still think it’s a good idea to learn what they do, so you know when to use a (digital) BW red filter because you want brighter skin.
In the mid-2000s, HDR was all about jacking up local contrast, giving you that unique look of gritty skin and halos cropping up all over the place. I'm talking stuff like this:
Less obnoxious tone mapping that compresses shadows and highlights is a more modern trend, I'd say post-2012. It's basically done by every cell phone today when shooting a high-contrast scene.
At the time, I produced some top ranked HDRs out of annoyance, like, oh, use tone map plugin? Automatic upvotes! Called it the "Flickr craze" and polled on comparison between:
I thought those types of shots were "woah, cool!" when I first saw them. But they got old and overused fast. I'm so glad those days are (mostly) behind us. It's interesting to me how that came and went as a photography "fad" in less than a decade.
I think you're debating a strawman, though. Sure, there are delusional / ignorant goldbugs who make stupid arguments, but you can find that in pretty much any domain. There are also reasonable people, including heterodox economists, who understand the history of currencies and monetary systems, and still advocate for a return to pegged currencies or for precious metals as a part of a diversified portfolio. You don't have to agree with them, but ad hominems are probably unnecessary.
I mean, it's not even that fringe is you consider that Central Banks sure hoard a lot of gold specifically because they see it as useful in certain (bad) economic scenarios.
Well in fairness when WebP support was added in Chrome over 10 years ago it was a massive, massive improvement over the existing image formats that were being commonly used on the web.
JPEG XL's problem is that WebP has now existed for 10 years and has widespread support.
I don't think that's the entire story. Google actively pushed WebP, for example recommending it to webmasters in their page speed evaluation tools (and site performance, as judged by Google, is a factor in your search ranking).
If they invested the same resources into improving and promoting JPEG XL, we'd be using JPEG XL. I'm not saying the outcome is objectively worse, but ultimately, they did pick the winner here.
If you look at slide #14, you'll see Opera was an early adopter.
Firefox published a "No" blog-post in 2013, and Safari removed WebP support from Sierra preview in 2016, eventually adding it back in 2020. Stuff happened.
And yes, when WebP was created there was a real, non-incremental, need for a Web-oriented image format. Nowadays, it's just incremental improvement on this idea for browsers.
Mozilla didn't support WebP for years. I'm fairly certain one of the official reasons they gave for not doing it was that it wasn't a massive jump in quality over JPEG, which obviously would have been good for the web if it was true and motivation for them to support it sooner than they did.
Notably, when they did add it, Edge did so around the same time, which seems to me suggests some politics in the background, (not in a conspiracy sense, just an agreement based on interperability) which I suspect might apply this time too.
Worth noting that JPEG XL has a pretty good lossless mode too, however, I think in many cases you actually want to just use a lossy AVIF or JPEG XL in places you'd previously have used "lossless".
It was kind of an artificial split, much like text, alpha transparency or line drawing might be done as PNG, not because you wanted them to be "lossless" but because JPEG would mess them up due to a lack of tools for reproducing non-natural photo content.
basically: JPEG XL does things right, WebP lossless is also not bad (14.8 % worse than JPEG XL), PNG is ok for its age (46.3 % worse), AVIF didn't focus on lossless (63.0 % worse)
Sure, it's easier than ever to break the law, but not sure that's a fair argument.
In many parts of Europe - e.g., in Germany and in the UK - the purchase of many common "dangerous" reagents is regulated and illegal without a license that isn't available to hobbyists. The government takes the view that it's simply not a legitimate hobby.
In the US, the situation is better, but some essential chemicals are unobtainable due to DEA legislation (iodine, phosphorous). Many others are subject to DHS and DEA monitoring (including KYC mandates) and a patchwork of state laws that prompted most reagent manufacturers to stop shipping to non-commercial customers altogether - and in recent years, also caused them to also crack down on resellers (requiring every reseller to attest that they will not re-ship to civilians). In the past five years or so, eBay also had major crackdowns, banning everything from sulfuric acid to potassium iodide. So did Amazon.
And that's before we get into raids on YouTube chemists, etc. Heck, Texas prohibited people from buying or owning laboratory glassware until recently. Wikipedia has a good summary.
The internet made chemistry easier for a while by facilitating trade, but that era is coming to a halt.
You don't understand the industry. You are thinking in the context of nice academic labs with thick budgets.
Where do you think the fentanyl people are getting their ingredients from? Asia. You can easily get most industrial/pharmaceutical chemistry pre-cursors and analogues/isomers for the semi-legal/regulated substances. Whether it can clear customs is another story but for kitchen chemistry the internet is more than sufficient.
Go to an aggregator like "Alibaba" and do a search. You will be surprised at what you can find.
He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this model when the outcomes appear politicized.
I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong.
And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes.
Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.
That is a byproduct of Reddit specifically. With 90s style forums, this kind of discussion happens just fine because it ends up being limited to a few threads. On Reddit, all community members must interact in the threads posted in the last day or two. After two days they are gone and all previous discussion is effectively lost. So maybe this can be fixed by having sub-reddits sort topics by continuing engagement rather than just by age and upvotes.
A good feature would be for Reddit moderators to be able to set the desired newness for their subreddit. /r/aww should strive for one or two days of newness (today's status quo). But /r/communism can have one year of newness. That way the concerned people and concern trolls can be relegated to the yearly threads full of good-faith critiques of communism and the good-faith responses and everyone else can read the highly upvoted discussion. Everything else could fall in-between. /r/woodworking, which is now just people posting pictures of their creations, could split: set the newness to four months and be full of useful advice; set the newness for /woodworking_pics to two days to experience the subreddit like it is now. I feel like that would solve a lot of issues.
The whole idea of "containment threads" is a powerful one that works very well in older-style forums, but not nearly as well on Reddit. "containment subs" isn't the same thing at all, and the subs that try to run subsubs dedicated to the containment issues usually find they die out.
What do you mean? The current crop of high-end cameras is absolutely amazing in that respect. Take Canon R5, where usable ISO settings extend at least to 32,000 (and the upper limit is 102,400).
My problem with many old-time tutors is that they refuse to recognize that photography has gotten a lot easier. We don't need to learn the craft the way they did.
For example, you don't need stuff like the "sunny 16" rule of exposure if you have real-time previews in the camera. You use visual feedback, usually with better accuracy.
In the same vein, you probably don't need to learn about flash guide numbers when modern continuous LED illumination covers 99% of use cases without any guesswork.
Or, you don't need to learn about optical filters (perhaps except for the polarizer) when almost all their functions can be accomplished in software without loss in fidelity.