> The qualifications, the "what have you been up to?"s -- such mind-numbingly boring conventions. Who wants to go through a "catchup" interview before talking about what's interesting
If I think about someone, that's exactly what's on my mind and most interesting. What else would you talk about?
Since we're talking about people you used to be closer with — presumably the same kind of stuff you would have talked to them about "back in the day", when you were already continuously aware of what they've been up to because you were up to it alongside them / constantly making plans with them / hearing what they were doing from shared other friends / etc.
I'm thinking how it would work. What should I talk about - programming frameworks and techniques I don't care about anymore? Rock bands I don't listen to? Shared friends I don't know now? Current school/uni things? Magic the gathering cards? Anime? Rock climbing? I don't know about anything I have in common with my old friends. But maybe, just maybe, it we catch up we can talk about kids or best back pain medicine. Or rock climbing, because that's one of the few things I still do.
It's so easy to overthink the content when it's about the contact. What if it's just "saw this and thought of you"? Could be anything. The connection isn't in having the perfect topic, it's in remembering the connection exists.
I don’t know about y'all but most of the fun of catching up with someone you haven’t seen in a while is to catch up on the stuff that’s new, not the same old things we used to talk about in high school. We’re (hopefully) all progressing in life, wouldn’t you want to hear about that?
A shared memory, a common friend, perhaps one who's died, their opinion on a movie, a book you're sure they've read, some current event, a funny story they, specifically, might appreciate, etc, etc.
I shoot on digital and film. Film photography has been "niche" for nearly 2 decades at this point. Comparing it to digital photography is like pointing out "smart watches can do so much more than mechanical watches" - that's not the point.
There's an overlap between the mystique of analog technologies, the ritual and limitations of physical processes, and status. Status in affording the time to learn about this niche, the money for hardware and film, the space for development (sometimes), signalling a different mentality towards content (in theory). Plus, for me, the end-to-end analogue feels like a retort to this phase of digital disinformation/AI-everything.
Any Joe can buy an expensive mirrorless with a good travel lens, shoot 3000 photos at a game, and come away with some good ones. Monkey on a typewriter and all that.
This primate spends plenty of time in the digital darkroom, more than I spend at the actual events whether I am looking at the best 10% or 1%. I color grade everything and almost always make local adjustments -- I find color graded flower photos are hugely crowd pleasing and for sports a lot of student athletes have the beauty of youth but also really bad acne not just on their face but on their legs and for every event I develop a LUT which handles issues like that not too mention everything from neon-colored sports gear and green foliage that can be too saturated if not entirely out-of-gamut while still keeping the jersey colors recognizable.
My last 3 years of photography really started when I got a "free" inkjet printer and realized it would dry out if I didn't use it regularly and challenged myself to make a print every day and realized it couldn't just be anime girls from danbooru so that program was hungry for images and dragged me kicking and screaming into photography
and as much as people like to bitch about the ink mafia, the performance of digital inkjet printing for the price is off the chart, my materials cost for 13x19 prints is well under $2 a page.
I shoot more film today than digital. I like the process more. The shots cost real $, so I'm more thoughtful about what I capture. The cameras[1] are mechanical art and feel good to use. I look forward to the delayed satisfaction due to off-site processing. The results might not be "pixel perfect" but photography rarely is... I prefer the slightly less perfect aesthetic - the grain, the slight miss on color, etc.
But, I also shoot Polaroid, so I might just be a hipster who lacks self-awareness. ;)
1 - Olympus 35DC, Olympus 35RD, and Canon Demi EE-17 for film. Olympus E-M5 and Pen E-P5 for mirrorless. Polaroid Go for instant.
I don't spend anytime post-processing or editing apart from occasional cropping. Film gives me a better baseline for that than digital does, at least for what I want and I just prefer the process. Digital encourages a workflow thats a lot more attached to post and being back at my computer rather than just out taking photos.
To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter." Even with those that are actually technically adept, the skill/luck balance is far less venerable than with actual artists like painters and sculptors and CG wranglers.
> To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter."
As a GenXer who lived through the transition, and worked a photo-processing job for a couple of years, I disagree. There were plenty of people taking meaningful—though perhaps not artistic—photos with point and shoot and even disposable cameras.
Regular people taking photos of birthdays, weddings, funerals, baptisms, vacations, retirements, etc. I processed and colour corrected tens of thousands of photos and the majority of them had people smiling, laughing, crying, etc, and were put in photobooks: some to never to be seen again, or perhaps looked when someone died when memories for a photo slideshow were desired.
> Despite being trained on more compute than GPT-3, AlphaGo Zero could only play Go, while GPT-3 could write essays, code, translate languages, and assist with countless other tasks. The main difference was training data.
This is kind of weird and reductive, comparing specialist to generalist models? How good is GPT3’s game of Go?
The post reads as kind of… obvious, old news padding a recruiting post? We know OpenAI started hiring the kind of specialist workers this post mentions, years ago at this point.
Also, the main showcase of the 'zero' models was that they learnt with zero training data: the only input was interacting with the rules of the game (as opposed to learning to mimic human games), which seems to be the kind of approach the article is asking for.
> However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.
Labor "shortages" for those jobs exist because they are not financially attractive. Why is it a "good thing" to eliminate more attractive roles? How does this materially reduce the cost of living, or increase for the roles you point to?
Let's say answering a phone is 11/hour and laying bricks is 11.20/hour. No big shock that people will take the phone job, but if you remove that option more people will flow into the laying bricks job.
Also, let's not forget an underlying pillar of society; real-estate must never decrease in value. That doesn't really fit with the theory that we're going to build a lot of real-estate.
I lived under all of this, plus two immigrant parents with no community / role modeling, isolated in suburbia as a kid with a chronically online 20s.
Yeah that nurturing left its mark. Yet I learned to see it, and learn new patterns. In my 30s I have deep friendships. Younger, older, men, women, nb. Most are still shallow, my energy is limited, but even there sometimes we touch into depth when it comes to relationship or existential stuff.
For me things like “loneliness epidemic” is fatalistic. End is nigh if some specific stat is not maintained. Giant foot will squish us all.
It’s pop-sci, gate-keeping, always be hustling zeitgeist obfuscated by high minded toxic positivity.
Media post says there’s an epidemic. Academics come up with a theory of social science in a world where the Executive branch is blatantly manipulating the market. Fed and Congress manipulate employment options, COL through rates and tax code.
Predictions of 10-12 billion people by 2100 do not line up with real birth trends.
So much of our social truisms are made up cable TV hype that zapped the elders brains into anxious compliance. Narratives propagated in service to a random researchers rent and food money search.
Fatalistic towards a social concept is not the same as “launch the nukes, humans suck.” Non-Christians can not believe without going about shooting Christians. Not accepting someone’s dissertation is the same thing.
2 vs 1 doesn’t significantly impact space or cleaning labor, unless you’re staying in a super minimalist itty bitty unit (which I rarely find exists anymore)
If I think about someone, that's exactly what's on my mind and most interesting. What else would you talk about?
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