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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Whenever The Verge interviews people from companies that have something to do with photography or image processing, they ask “what is a photograph?”. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus.

    As a photographer, I’ve thought a fair amount about it. Many of the most famous pre-digital photographers did a lot of adjustment in the darkroom, and all digital photographs involve decisions about how photoreceptor data gets transformed into a viewable image, even if the photographer didn’t make them intentionally. Most of the time, most people still consider it photography and “real” with significant editing.

    Where it becomes something else in my mind, or “fake” is if the image doesn’t reasonably represent light that reached the lens in the moment being depicted. There’s a whole lot of wiggle room there of course - photography is art, not math. Adding fire to something that wasn’t burning using editing software, however clearly crosses the line into “fake” for me if presented as a photograph, or digital art if it’s not.






  • It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).

    It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.

    An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.

    I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.


  • It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.

    This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.





  • A couple of them.

    One, I met when we were both five years old, and I knew then he would end up in prison. He helped beat someone to death when he was 19 and went to prison.

    Another I met when I was a child and he was an adult. I knew he wasn’t quite right, but I had no idea how bad it was. As a teenager, I had an encounter with him that almost turned violent. He later raped both his daughters and went to prison.






  • It was stressful. I was pretty young and pretty broke.

    A gas station attendant didn’t return it when I made a purchase, and I was distracted so I didn’t notice. He then put gas in his own car at his own gas station using it. I came back the next day with a cop, and he confessed. The cop called his boss and he got fired. I got a report to give to the bank.

    At the time, I was a little annoyed the cop didn’t arrest him, but he was probably as broke as I was and significantly dumber to commit such a stupid crime.