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.

Have you heard of F1? Do you know what it costs to just watch the F1 legally on streaming? have you ever wondered who goes to watch an F1 race when they completely shutdown a city for everyday people (like Las Vegas or Montecarlo), and how much the tickets cost?

It’s called value-based premium pricing, and companies couldn’t care any less about how much any of us think it costs to make the thing they are selling. They are simply charging the lowest price that their highest income target demographic is willing to pay. If you are not going to buy it, it doesn’t matter. You weren’t the target anyway. The people with tons of disposable income and a very high nostalgia induced perceived value for the cartridges are. You and I, we are rounding errors, we don’t matter. A single buyer is worth 20 people like you or me., they make up the difference by a long way.

Same way the F1 doesn’t care that Average Joe, or the other 100 thousand people like him, can’t afford a ticket for Las Vegas Grand Prix. The few one or two thousand high wealth targets can cover the difference. And they are not limited by living in Las Vegas or in Nevada. Wealthy people from all over the world will fly their lush private planes or first class seats to get there.

Same way free-to-play games don’t care about the complaints from the credit grinders. They only care to keep the whales happy. So on and so for. Value based pricing is the wet dream of CFOs and CEOs. It is the number one strategy that businesses turn to as soon as they have a captive market, it is the one they turn to when they are trying to maximize profits in a declining market, it is the one strategy that spears head enshittification. Why sell one million $1 copies when you can sell 20k $300 ones?

This is why “vote with your wallet” is a dumb thought terminating cliche. Your wallet-vote is worthless for companies, if on the other corner there’s a smaller, less vocal, but more willing to pay group. That’s why companies charge $100 for a download of a video game that might or might not work and don’t even blink when people complain.

There’s also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren’t the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many “good ol’ immortal appliances” neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn’t be functional otherwise.

We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.

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

Anything is cheap if you just steal it.

One thing to keep in mind is that, when it comes to LLMs, the models have not significantly changed in architecture.

There’s been new experiments and advancements in architecture on neural networks, and machine learning for specific applications. But LLM, as they are being commercialized by AI corporations to the general public, have stayed relatively the same. Except for one thing. Increasing in size. Larger datasets, or more specialized datasets like with coding, and larger number of tokens in memory. This is why it takes such large data centers. It’s all been just brute forcing greater capabilities by enlarging the models.

One of the things with LLM is that all the dataset influences the weighs and probabilities of the results. Even if the dataset includes a single event of a chain of words (think of the pizza with superglue incident), it can show up in the results eventually.

Your comment is so fit for purpose, displaying such a massive willful ignorance about the world in general. Because the biggest problem with asbestos wasn’t using it for home insulation. It killed millions of workers in manufacturing plants and mines. Its biggest industrial use case was for electrical insulation of high voltage transmission lines. Where it also killed hundreds of thousands of technicians in the us alone. Before that it was used for lamp wicks. Where it killed at least a couple of millions more over a century. Today, asbestos kills 250 thousand people a year, 12 to 15 thousand in the us every year.

I supposed any tool can be considered useful if you’re ignorant enough about it or if you’re willing to lie without remorse.

Another Battlefield clone.

EDIT: sighs OK, Fine. It is another “hey, look at me! I’m better than Battlefield!” milsim. There’s like a dozen of them and they all drain all your time and soul eventually. Their average lifespans is counted in decades but their peak players are always in the few hundreds except for a random period of a few months when the entire scene obsess with one single game. Then they die again.

Gotta admit, “not a battle royale and not a extraction shooter” are actual sale points though.

Don’t worry. When AI does all the TV shows for you, then there will not be a need for crediting human labor. You’ll get to all 78 seasons of Ow, my balls! One after the other. Don’t worry about 80% of the screen being covered in ads, it won’t cause seizures to most people.

Implication or not. GNOME is hit or miss with accessibility features. They’ve done some stuff, but they could still do more at no particular greater cost to them other than a shift in attitude. Which…you know… GNOME.

I pay for someone else to hold an encrypted backup of some data. The living data is in my server, they’re just one of the backups in case there’s a fire at my house or something. I pay because I expect legal liability from them to hold my data safely, no freemium shenanigans. And I encrypt because no one can be trusted not to mine my info for AI or sell my shit to a shady third party for profit.