The people who buy these cameras would probably be better served by upgrading their phones. Phones are good enough cameras for this use and they are infinitely better at processing.
As a long time hobbyist photographer I can understand buying cameras because they have a certain appeal. But I have to say that I honestly do not understand why someone would spend lots of money and then not want to take advantage of the technology offered.
I think shooting to JPEG and using film profiles is kind of pointless. If you want to shoot film, shoot film. Imagine you have taken a really good picture, but it’ll always look worse than it could because you threw away most of the data and applied some look to it that will date it.
I do understand that a lot of people think these cameras are worth buying. And that they are selling well. But I can’t understand why.
> The people who buy these cameras would probably be better served by upgrading their phones.
I'm sorry if this too far off topic but I routinely go to use my phone's camera and the ambient light level is so high I can barely see what I'm intending to photograph, and I certainly can't see the on-screen controls.
I've seen hoods intended to over your head and into which the phone fits and this would, I assume, resolve the issue but by comparison a point and click with a 'proper' viewfinder (perhaps with the rubber surround some used to have) would be a very good solution by comparison.
There are many motivations for shooting jpeg with film sims, from just not wanting to expend the effort editing photos to my motivation as a colour-blind person who simply cannot see colour well enough to manually adjust photos. For me, it’s incredible being able to choose a film simulation and be happy with the result even if I know that the colours I’m seeing aren’t quite the same that others will see. It’s the entire reason I bought into the FujiFilm system.
If you want to shoot to JPEG, and not post process, you aren't really going to need a camera that was designed to capture far more data than the target format is capable of representing. And yet, people pay for really expensive cameras with the kind of dynamic range that is only useful for post-processing. It is like paying for a sports car with a big engine -- and then have someone else drive it no faster than 20mph while you sit in the passenger seat. It is a waste of money. And camera companies are taking advantage of consumers who think they need these expensive cameras to get the kinds of shots they want.
They don't.
Of course I understand that it is more complicated than that. How the camera looks and handles is a huge part of the equation. (I am, after all, the kind of moron who has a Leica in their collection of cameras -- which is a nice camera, but it isn't technically as good as my Nikons :-)). But I still feel that the industry is taking advantage of consumers by selling them capabilities they aren't ever going to use.
Some camera manufacturers do something that is somewhat sensible: they make their film emulation profiles available in post-processing. So you can shoot raw, take advantage of the leeway this provides to get the exposure and tonality right, and then apply the film simulations in post.
As for post-processing, I think the biggest problem is that people think it requires a lot of work and that it is complicated. It is easy to get that impression when you see all of the _atrocious_ editing videos on youtube of people over-editing pictures.
If you do have to spend a lot of time post-processing, the problem is usually that you have no idea how to capture a photo in the first place -- or you have no idea what you want. It pays off to learn how to shoot. And if people aren't interested in learning: mobile phone cameras will usually make more satisfying images with a lot less work. They are _far_ more capable of instant gratification than expensive compact cameras from just 10 years ago.
And I say that as someone who spends a lot of time learning. Even after 30 years. Either you want to up your game, or you don't. If you don't, then there is very little a film preset can do for you.
As for color blindness: you will be no more capable of creating a decent color photo by having the camera slap some color grading on your picture than if you actually edit it in lightroom. Though you can probably learn how to correct images that have obvious color defects without actually being able to see them in post. You can't do that in the camera.
That being said, I do most of my (very rapid) post processing in black and white. The first thing I do is to turn off the colors to adjust exposure, contrast, tonality etc. Once that is in place I turn the colors back on and do any color grading/corrections I want. This is where you'd apply film simulations etc. And as I said in the paragraph above: if you are color blind, it makes no difference if you let the camera do it or some film preset.
I spend perhaps 10-30 seconds per image in post. (Usually I spend more time on the first picture in a series and then apply those edits to all photos of the same scene or with the same settings and lighting with minor variations).
The the big advantage of doing this in post is that you have an entire universe of film simulations to choose from. You are not limited to what comes with your camera. The difference is that you will have a lot more wiggle room to get the exposure and tonality right.
A lot of photographers (myself included) don't actually shoot so the image looks like what I want to end up with, but with specific processing in mind. Usually because you know what the camera sensor is capable of doing, so you optimize for capture of usable raw data so you can get the result you want in post. And with practice, post processing shouldn't be time consuming.
About 15-20 years ago I attended a lot of car events (races, shows) where I took lots of photos. Mostly of moving cars, but also a lot of closeups of race car drivers using a long lens. For about a year more than half the photos published in a very niche car publication were by me. The magazine had a few thousand subscribers. And to this day I still see some drivers use my shots of them as profile pictures etc. Nobody minded being photographed. In fact, they were really happy about it.
Then social media happened. There’s a different «public» now. Any picture taken and published now has the potential to go viral. To get a global audience. And not least: to be put in unpleasant contexts.
I can understand that people’s attitudes have changed.
I haven’t actually given up taking photos in public. In part because I think it is important that people do. I still take pictures of strangers. Then again, I very rarely publish them online out of respect for their privacy.
I understand how photos represent something else today. And that people view the act of taking a picture differently. But if we stop taking pictures, stop exercising our rights to take pictures, we will lose them. Through a process of erosion.
Maybe this comes to mind? : "Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and chief people officer Kristin Cabot, who were caught on a Coldplay concert jumbotron hugging each other and then quickly recoiling when they realized they were on camera."
They obviously didn't ask for that, and it was focused on them without their permission, and yet, here we are....
> They obviously didn't ask for that, and it was focused on them without their permission, and yet, here we are....
The rule is: if you're in public you have no expectation of privacy.
I think a debate on that rule would be interesting. My thought is that if I can't take a picture unless there's absolutely nobody else in the FOV, then that basically prohibits the vast majority of photographs.
I also am a fan of the "expectation of privacy" rule.
That's primarily because it makes it absolutely clear the public always has the right to record officials doing their job. So if you see a policeman murdering George Floyd in the street, or fellow shopper pushing an old woman out of the way, or a parent screaming abuse at an umpire, or even just someone littering in a national park there is no doubt you are allowed to record it.
Yes, this means towards more surveillance, but it's a counter balance to the surveillance state. The state and large corporations put cameras everywhere. It seems odd to me that people get really upset by taking photos of them when there are likely numerous CCTV cameras already doing that 24 hours a day, in not so public places like offices. The "anyone can take photos in a public place" rule means Joe Citizen gets the same rights as the corporations and governments take for themselves.
I'm in the minority though. The best illustration I've seen of the was a man take a photo of the cheer leaders at a big football game. He leaned over the fence and put his camera on the ground, taking the photo as the girl kicked her leg into the air. His actions where caught on the TV camera that was broadcasting that same girls crouch around the nation. The police prosecuted him because of the huge outcry. I'm can't recall what the outcome in court was, but I couldn't see how he could be breaking the photography rules given my country has the "expectation of privacy" rule.
I find the combination of "pictures of strangers" and "our right to take pictures" rather concerning. I have a different perspective, as I am blind. But I was always uncomfortable with having a picture taken of me by basically a stranger. And that feeling didn't just come with social media. It always was there. I disagree that you have a "right" to take pictures of strangers. IMO, you shouldn't have that right. It is probably different depending on what juristiction you are in. But my personal opinion is, that this attitude is rather selfish. In my perfect world, taking pictures of strangers without their consent should be illegal.
Well, in many parts of the world it is a legal right. You can take pictures of people in public. There are some restrictions, and there’s of course the question of how you go about it, but it is a right.
I can understand people don’t like this. Which is why actually doing it requires a good deal of sensitivity and common sense. But that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea to outlaw it.
However taking a picture is not the same as publishing it. This is the critical point.
The rules for what you can publish tend to be stricter. For instance where I live you can’t generally publish a picture of a person without consent. (It is a bit more complicated than that in practice, with lots of complicated exceptions that are not always spelled out in law. For instance if someone is making a public speech they have no expectation of privacy).
As for making it illegal: that comes with far greater problems than you might think. From losing the right to document abuses of power to robbing people of the freedom to take pictures in public.
In fact, years ago a law was passed here making it illegal to photograph arrests. A well intentioned law meant to protect suspects who have not been convicted of anything. However it has never been enacted because it was deemed dangerous. It would have made it illegal to document police misconduct, for instance. And since the press here is generally very disciplined about not publishing photos of the majority of suspects, it didn’t actually solve a problem. (In Norway identities are usually withheld in the press until someone is convicted. But sometimes identities are already known to the public. For instance in high profile cases. This, of course, varies by country)
> But my personal opinion is, that this attitude is rather selfish.
Public photography is cultural preservation and anthropological ethnography. Asking folks to stop is selfish. You are free to have an opinion that differs, and your jurisdiction may even forbid public photography, but in those places I’m familiar with, street photography is as legitimate an art as music played for free on the sidewalk. I wouldn’t argue against public concerts if I were deaf, as it doesn’t concern me, because it isn’t for me, were I unhearing, and the gathering that such public displays engender benefits one and all, regardless of differences of senses or sensibilities amongst those who choose to freely associate.
> In my perfect world, taking pictures of strangers without their consent should be illegal.
Capturing an image of another without their consent is a bit more nuanced, and I would agree that one is entitled to decide how they are portrayed to a degree, but public spaces aren’t considered private by virtue of them being shared and nonexclusive. All the same, though we may disagree, you have given me some food for thought. I appreciate your unique perspective on this issue, and I thank you sincerely for sharing your point of view.
> public spaces aren’t considered private by virtue of them being shared and nonexclusive.
I live in a country where photographing people in public is highly restricted. The reason is that 99% of people cannot avoid public places in their day-to-day lives, therefore public places cannot be a free-for-all.
> therefore public places cannot be a free-for-all.
They can’t in those places with the restrictions you are familiar with and are subject to, but that is no argument against the norms of other places and the denizens thereof. I can, and do see public spaces as a free-for-all, and that is neither better nor worse, but simply the way we do things here.
If you don’t like it, it doesn’t affect you. Most folks are aware, and make a mental note of such things from a young age. If we don’t like it that way, we have avenues to change the way we relate to each other in public by changing the laws and regulations that govern public photography. That society hasn’t reached a consensus on this and other issues is fine. Variety is the spice of life, and the spice must flow.
I find the comparison with deaf people re concerts is pretty inappropriate. If you take a picture of me without me knowing/my consent, you carry that picture "home" and maybe even upload it to some public site. Heck, you could even upload it to 4chan and make a ton of fun of me. "Look at that stupid disabled guy", or whatever you and your friends end up doing. That is a complete different game. Disabilities are pretty different from eachother, and throwing deaf and blind people into a pot just because both are disabled is a very cheap and mindless act.
I didn’t make fun of you, though. I’m saying it’s not your right to complain about things you don’t know about if you don’t suffer harm, even and especially if you come to know about them. People make fun of other people for reasons or in the absence of them. For you to make a logical leap to imply I’m saying it’s okay to make fun of people, or saying that having a disability is a slight, or blameworthy, or deserving scorn or mockery, is to put words in my mouth.
I’ve known deaf people who love going to concerts. They perceive the thrumming of the bass and the stomp of the crowd. They see the smiles and throw up their hands, and deaf folks are able to carry on a conversation by signing better than most folks who are hearing, especially when the music is turned up to 11.
I’m more concerned with what might happen to assistive technologies meant to be used in public by low-vision and (legally or fully) blind users if public photography bans are passed than I am about any other passing concerns about being photographed in public, to be honest.
The "you" in my writing was refering to any photographer who takes a picture of me without my consent. I should probably mave made that clearer. IOW, I am not suggesting that you in particular are making fun of me or anyone you photograph. But since we were talking about strangers, I have no way of knowing how that photoographer will act. Sure, you in particular probably have a morale compass. However, in the general case, there is no way for me to know if the stranger taking a photo of me is a bad actor or not. And therefore, I oppose the "right" for anyone to do that, simply because I can never know what they will end up doing with that photo.
> And therefore, I oppose the "right" for anyone to do that, simply because I can never know what they will end up doing with that photo.
Jurisprudence in my country can’t preempt legal activities because they might lead to wrongdoing in the future. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t know what you think folks are likely to do, but there are likely already laws against doing most things you would take umbrage with.
There’s no need to winnow our rights out of concern for your “mights.”
as a non-militant bicyclist I see this every day. People who insist on their right to ride where they are legally allowed to while at the same time being a nuisance. Yes, you can ride on the sidewalk, but it'd be really nice if you didn't. Yes, you can ride in the road, but do you really need to? In all cities where I've rode a bicycle, a tiny bit of planning and attention can usually result in routes that result in minimal opportunities for conflict.
You can certainly photograph street scenes without being a rude cunt.
I was getting enduly riled up over anonymous internet comments and was going to say something much more obnoxious, but not everyone gets Australian humour so I figured I’d tone it down.
If I saw you take an unasked photo of our blind friend here, I’d let them know so they’d have an opportunity to approach you and ask you to deleted it, if they happen to feel motivated to do so, and offer to take care of it myself ;)
I’ve spent some time down under myself, and I would hope if you were to ever find me lacking, to the degree that you needed to take care of me, that you have the foresight to have that moment on camera, because such a photograph ought to go straight to the pool room.[0]
[0] (For those who haven't seen The Castle (1997), you really owe it to the Australians in your life to make an appointment with yourself to do so at your earliest convenience. Here's the scene from the film in question which originated one of my favorite bits of Aussie slang:
> public spaces aren’t considered private by virtue of them being shared and nonexclusive
The problem is that "public" 20 years ago (before cell phone cameras, photo rolls, social media, growth/engagement algorithms, attention economy, virality, etc) vs now just doesn't mean the same thing anymore.
There's a difference between "no expectation of privacy" and "no expectation of having every moment of your life in public be liable to be published".
And at that point, the only thing left is the "well if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't care if your life is published" type of logic, and I don't love that.
I think it's a mistake to cling to a definition of "public" that doesn't account for how much things have changed.
Edit: and I use "published" as a direct reference to the "publish" or "post" buttons on various social media apps.
Well, there is also the fact that in a lot of cities, you will be filmed, often by multiple cameras, most of the time, without you being aware of it. By law enforcement, security cameras (private and otherwise), cars etc. on top of that you carry around a phone that streams intimate information about your location, behavior, preferences to a bunch of data aggregators.
And then there are the signal surveillance networks that are peppered around your environment as your phone shouts traceable signals to your surroundings.
(Heck, you can set up a a RPi with a few ESP32s hooked up to dump wifi probe frames, cross reference the networks phones scan for and create a map of where people come from by cross referencing wardriving data. Lots of ISPs make it easy by giving people wireless routers with unique network names. And from there you can figure out things like «someone living at address X is at location Y. People who live at X work for Z and location Y is the office of a competitor». And that’s just by collecting one kind of wifi frame and correlating a bunch of publicly available information)
Privacy is dead. Someone taking pictures hardly even registers.
I wasn't trying to make a "ship has sailed"-argument, but rather the argument that going after photography is odd given how little we care about surveillance and data collection that is far more invasive, complete and dangerous. If this were an optimization problem (optimizing for privacy and reducing criminal behavior), going after people who take pictures in public wouldn't even be on the radar. It isn't even a rounding error.
Sure, I understand that most people are barely aware of the insane amounts of data various data brokers aggregate, curate and sell of ordinary people's highly sensitive data. But most of us are. Or should be. And many of us are also part of the problem.
I do think this should be addressed. Especially since it is hard to address and it is not going to get any easier. In a well functioning legal system, every single one of the large data brokers that trade in sensitive personal information should be in existential peril. And people associated with them should be at very real risk of ending up in prison.
It seems ... peculiar to argue about taking away rights that private citizens have had for more than a century and at the same time not do anything about, for instance, private parties raiding sensitive government data and essentially nobody caring or showing any willingness to do anything about it.
You are right in that we do have a "the ship has sailed" attitude. But rather than focus on fixing what is most important we'd rather risk infringing on the rights of private citizens further because that is "being seen as doing something".
(I'm not accusing you of thinking this -- I am just finishing that line of reasoning to show what absurd conclusions this might lead us to)
I don't think we have anything close to diametrically opposed views, for the most part.
When it comes to following lines of reasoning to absurd conclusions though, in the other direction, don't we end up in a world where it is everyone's right (private or public for that matter) to surveil everyone at all times the moment they step outside?
Isn't that something you have an issue with? An extension of the existing problem with data brokers, including ones that record data from interactions on their private space (eg our access to their products in their stores, etc)?
You're definitely right that there are worse offenders out there than "randos taking pictures", but it doesn't have to be an either-or thing.
Plus, I'd suspect that almost anyone who thinks it's not great that every other person on the street can now record them and post it on social media for engagement also doesn't like the other bits of tracking and surveillance you bring up, so if anything, they are probably your overzealous allies.
If we'll worm our way back to where I started, the term "public" has changed its substantive meaning over the years. And we have to acknowledge that. If I took pictures of people on the street and published them 50 years ago, even if I were a famous photographer, it isn't very likely that this picture would come to the subject's attention. And for a hobbyist, it just didn't happen.
Even published works didn't have the reach and accessibility they have today. Today even your random mobile phone snaps could make it onto newspaper front pages around the globe in a matter of hours -- even minutes. Or someone might be able to find them after doing a search even if they were published to what the creator thought was a limited audience.
So I think we have to be aware that although we, in most western countries, have had the right to take pictures of people in public spaces for a bit more than 100 years, some fundamental things have indeed changed. It isn't exactly the same thing anymore and we have to acknowledge that.
However, we also have to acknowledge that there are degrees when it comes to infringing on someone's privacy. Someone shooting pictures in the street doesn't immediately qualify as "surveillance". Yes, the picture may land online and yes, it may turn up when you perform searches. But I think calling it surveillance is bordering on arguing in bad faith.
Surveillance is surveillance.
If we allow the argument that all capture of images or video is surveillance to pass without drawing attention to the use of misleading and loaded wording, we might end up eroding practices that are extremely important. Imagine, for instance, how difficult news coverage of important events would be if we were to ban any and all filming or photographing of people in public spaces without their consent. ()
You might argue that this is taking things to an extreme, but it actually isn't. It is a problem we deal with already. Covering the actions of law enforcement has always been difficult, and just in the last few months in the US, it has gotten a lot worse. A good example is coverage of the Pentagon right now, where only those who have signed away their rights to truthfully cover what they see and hear have access.
Which means all of us are now less informed and less able to develop informed opinions and make informed choices.
Some might argue that "journalists" are a different "class of observer" that is to be afforded more freedom, but this gets us into even more trouble. Again, what happened at the Pentagon represents a very concrete example. You do not want there to be a special class of people who are specially licensed to observe and communicate "the truth" -- as that license can be used to dictate what "truth" they report.
() Filming or photographing newsworthy events isn't without its moral dilemmas. I used to photograph demonstrations because they provide opportunities for capturing visually interesting images of people. The more intense the demonstration, the more interesting images you could get. However, the more polarized and angry a society gets, and as the risk of government overreach increases, the more you run the risk of endangering people taking part in protests by taking their picture. The last few protests I've observed first hand (having my camera with me), I've actually not taken any pictures. Because I didn't feel it would be advisable to publish the images (so I might as well not take any). I'm probably not alone in this. Which is bad news both because we have to fear for people's security, but it also makes protests less effective.
Interestingly, the national broadcasting service in Norway chose to broadcast the Charlie Kirk funeral live. However, there was nearly no coverage of the "No Kings" protest that gathered 7 million people in the US. Most people here may have heard of it, many have not, and there exists exactly zero "iconic" defining images of it. Which means that it is almost as if it didn't happen. There are no memorable images of it in the public consciousness over here. Not one. Only bland pictures of crowds that fail to hold anyone's attention. There were at least half a dozen far more compelling pictures and clips of the Charlie Kirk funeral.
So on one hand you could argue that privacy was, in some sense, respected. On the other hand you could also argue that as an instance of political speech, it was far less effective than one would have assumed when 7 million people take to the streets.
> Addressing nothing because everything can't be addressed isn't a great strategy for change.
Presupposing that some strategies for change are less suitable than others is no argument against the status quo, either. Sometimes the way things are is just the way folks in a given time and place do things, and is simply contingent as much as it’s worthwhile.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. If you don’t like the way things are done here, you either care to make a change, including hearts and minds, or you don’t. If you aren’t from here, that might be an uphill battle, perhaps even both ways: coming and going.
It’s a kind of double standard to judge folks for their customs without wanting to do the work to disabuse them of their notions, lest they warn you not to let the door hit you on your way out, especially after it was opened unto you in the first place. Wanting to have it both ways is a sort of special pleading.
There's legally usually quite a big gap between what pictures you can take of people, and how you can publish them.
In places where you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can generally be photographed. But there are significant limits to how such pictures can be published (including social media).
The law doesn't matter much if someone is convicted in the public square by intentionally misrepresented (or even just context-collapsed) images of them going viral to a global audience at Internet speed.
By the time the law, or the terms and conditions of social networks, catches up, the damage is already done.
This is a double edged sword. Two good events that should make us think about this are the Charlie Kirk funeral and the No Kings protest.
The former was a relatively small event broadcast live. The latter was a huge protest involving more people than the populations of some small countries. However, their media footprint was very different.
The No Kings protest produced no iconic visuals and was rapidly forgotten by international media. It had considerably less staying power than, say, the arab spring. Arguably because there existed no compelling visuals. It might as well have been a small protest of 100k people for the footprint it occupies in international consciousness.
The Charlie Kirk funeral, on the other hand, produced half a dozen memorable images that circulated for weeks.
> I think it's a mistake to cling to a definition of "public" that doesn't account for how much things have changed.
I think it’s a mistake for others in different jurisdictions to tell those subject to those norms how they ought to live.
The times may have changed, and we didn’t start the fire. We could put it out if we wanted, or if the lick of the flames brought us undue harm. Perhaps most folks just don’t want to change as much as the times, and that’s okay. The future is not yet written, and justice is a living thing. We can always go a different way if the future we arrive upon necessitates it.
I don’t mind if we have to change, but I do admire the view. The camera can only capture what’s inside the frame, and it would be a shame to stop living, and the greater loss would be to give up on life in pursuit of capturing a fleeting moment. I think for many, like me, who admire the hobby and have a love of photography as an art form, it’s akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. If it were outlawed or constrained, a true loss to society would occur, as that would be a material change in living conditions. Others are free to disagree, and I wouldn’t find fault with them for simply doing so.
When it comes to curtailing my rights to preserve history and my place in it, I don’t think I’m the one who is entitled, but those who would prevent me from freely expressing myself through my chosen medium. If you see something, you ought be free to say something or remain silent. Forestalling my speech is not for you to say. Freedom to photograph is a free speech issue, to my view.
Photography is my favorite art form to consume, so I'm not in favor of any kind of ban of it.
I also agree that freedom to photograph is a free speech issue. I just happen to think the ability to live your life without having it being recorded everywhere is also a freedom issue.
I think it's a challenge for us to solve and I don't pretend to have a solution. I just don't agree with a "change nothing" stance on grounds of "no expectation of privacy" because I think things have changed to a point that it needs to be addressed.
Side note:
> I think it’s a mistake for others in different jurisdictions to tell those subject to those norms how they ought to live.
If that's directed at me, then I think you're reading something in my comment that I haven't expressed.
I don’t mean to direct anything at anyone, other than my viewfinder. I believe in home rule, and not dictates from bureaucrats. As a sort of journalist, I’m going to keep taking pictures, and to keep writing journals. Anything less or different would be to be someone other than myself the best and only way I know how, and that isn’t being true to myself or to others.
If you felt that I directed my comments at you, I apologize; I almost certainly wasn’t. If anything, I am directing them at myself, as an affirmation of what I believe and why. Freedom of expression is one of the few issues that I will take a principled stance on, and if you feel that I was directing my comment at you, I don’t mean to, though you are free to express whatever you feel led to if you feel that I have given you short shrift or unalloyed fire, friendly or otherwise.
While I agree with you that publishing a picture of a person without their consent ought to be illegal, I as an individual with very unreliable memory and one who’s always doubting my perception of reality, I heavily rely on modern technology and strongly believe that personal recording of any kind is my right, it being simple augmentation of my senses that allows me to live happier and more fulfilled life.
Making it illegal is a few steps too far. It leads to situations where you can end up doing more harm than good. In reality this is is a very complicated question and any attempt at "solving" it with absolutes will only complicate matters further.
Here's an exercise you can do. Go to a library and look at books by photo journalists who have covered poverty, conflict, disaster etc. There are many, many iconic photographs that helped shape our view of the world, and not least, contributed to making us aware of what was going on. From Dorothea Lange's work in the 1920s covering poverty and suffering in the US, to photographers covering everyday life, and reporters covering anytihing from famine to war.
Now ask yourself how many of the subjects in those photos signed releases or otherwise had an opportunity to give consent.
Should we erase this history? If not, why should the subjects in those photos have fewer rights than people should have today? If so, why?
Before you think that something should be illegal you have to think about what that would actually mean.
There are people who can "take a picture of you" just by looking at you for a second. They have you memorized after that.
I believe the usual approach is that in general, if you're in a public space, you accept pictures may be taken of you. But it depends on the context. If you're a bystander in your city while tourists are fotographing places of interest for example, and you make it into the picture, then that will hardly be a problem in any practical legislation. Most legislations probably allow for pictures taken of you even without you being asked explicitly, as long as certain rights are not violated.
Artists with photographic memory can. And in the modern world of computational photography and gen AI what even is the difference between a photo and drawing?
The difference is time, effort and scalability. There are many things that humans can do that society doesn't strictly regulate, because as human activities they are done in limited volumes. When it becomes possible to automate some of these activities at scale, different sorts of risks and consequences may become a part of the activity.
I find it strange how people consider taking pictures of strangers as some basic right.
Here in Germany, people have a right to their own image. You can't just photograph strangers. You can photograph a crowd at a public event but you can't zoom in on one specific stranger. Also you can photograph people that are of public interest.
Maybe it is me who is biased but I find these rules quite reasonable. It protects both my privacy while allowing photographers to do their job. If you want to photograph a stranger, ask for consent.
Correction: you have to distinguish between taking photos and publishing them. You are generally not probibited from photographing individuals in Germany. The limits generally only apply to publication.
Sure, and so am I. We're all biased toward what we are used to, especially if it's something we grew up with through childhood.
While I think it'd be creepy for someone to sit outside, zooming in on strangers and taking photos of them, I don't think that sort of thing should be illegal. (Aside from when it might break other laws, like if it were to turn into harassment.) I do think it we should require consent before publishing a photo that focuses on individuals, at least for most uses (I'm sure there are exceptions).
I don't think laws should try to spell out or enforce social norms (for the most part; again I'm sure there are exceptions I'd consider), and I think "don't be a creep with a camera" is a social norm, not a legal issue.
> It protects [...] my privacy
I just don't see getting photographed in public as a privacy issue, but I'll admit it depends on the "how". Dragnet surveillance with cameras on every corner is a privacy issue, but a single photographer with a manually-actuated camera is not.
But really, what is it about someone having a photograph of you while you're in public that violates your privacy? It may "feel icky", but I don't see that as being a violation of anyone's rights. (Again, publishing a photo is IMO another matter.)
At the risk of diving into whataboutism, it seems weird to me to object to public photography -- something that has many legitimate artistic and historical uses and benefits -- when many of us are subjected to pervasive surveillance, both of the governmental and capitalist kind.
> Again, publishing a photo is IMO another matter.
With analog photography this might be a useful distinction but with digital it is easy to leak that photo even without explicit intention to do so.
Even if the intention was to never share my photo, it is likely to be automatically uploaded to Google Cloud or similar services. It can be hacked, it will end up as training data for some LLM and so on. It is more practical to stop the taking of the photo in the first place.
> it seems weird to me to object to public photography
No one does. Lots of people practice public photography in Germany. You just have to ask for consent if you want to photograph strangers.
That is the point where I am lost an why this is even such a big deal for you. You can photograph the environment, you can photograph your friends, you can photograph anyone who wants to be photographed. Why would you even want to photograph someone why doesn't want their photo taken? Why not take a photo of the many people that would love to have their picture taken?
> when many of us are subjected to pervasive surveillance, both of the governmental and capitalist kind.
Germany has also much better laws in that regard as well. Sure it could be better enforced but the GDPR is super strong.
As for surveillance, this is also more restricted here as well. There is definitely a push to make widespread surveillance more a thing but we are still far away from US levels.
I’m not sure I agree that consent should be a requirement for photographing people in public. You have a right to observe people in public. You have a right to take notes about these people and publish them. You have a right to hire a person to sit in a public place and record their observations, and to publish these to your heart’s content.
Technologically augmenting these rights does not change them. A pen and paper to record observations is a technological augmentation to memory and recall. A newspaper is an augmentation to a gossip corner. A camera is just the same. A person should be able to record and retransmit any information they come across in public, regardless of technology, since ownership of an observation is fundamentally the observer’s.
> You have a right to observe people in public. You have a right to take notes about these people and publish them.
Not completely. If you keep staring at me, following me around and taking notes I am going to call the police even if you keep to public spaces.
While it is not illegal to stare at people I would strongly advice you to not do so. You will find that some people will react quite badly to it.
> You have a right to hire a person to sit in a public place and record their observations, and to publish these to your heart’s content.
No, you can't. They can write about the people they saw in general terms but once you publish information that directly identifies me and contains personal information about me, I am gonna sue you. Might vary depending on country though.
People are making such high level philosophical argument about why they should be allowed to photograph strangers but no one answers why. It is hard for me to come up with any non malicious reason. Sure, maybe you just like photography but then again photograph people that consent to it.
Not to mention even if you legally can, I doubt that running around photographing strangers will gain you any positive reputation. In practice you are well advised to ask for consent anyway.
> You will find that some people will react quite badly to it
It’s a good thing we have laws, courts, and prisons for people who can’t control themselves.
> once you publish information that directly identifies me and contains personal information about me, I am gonna sue you
For what? What right of yours have I violated by retransmitting publicly available information about you? Presumably this right of yours would also be infringed if I gossiped about you? I agree it’s not a polite thing to do, but rights only count when they protect contentious actions.
> It is hard for me to come up with any non malicious reason
Free people don’t need to justify their actions. Your country may infringe on your rights, but that doesn’t invalidate the assertion they exist. Freedom of speech and the consequential freedom of the press are fundamental to a free society. Having to justify yourself when you’re not harming anyone is tyrannical.
> For what? What right of yours have I violated by retransmitting publicly available information about you? Presumably this right of yours would also be infringed if I gossiped about you? I agree it’s not a polite thing to do, but rights only count when they protect contentious actions.
Information that you gained from observing me is not necessarily publicly available information. You can't camp in front of an abortion clinic and write down everyone who went in and publish that on the internet, at least not in Germany.
Generally, if there is not a legitimate public interest, you can not publish information that would direct identify me, like my name, in a newspaper.
> Free people don’t need to justify their actions.
Well if you answered that questions, we could have an actual discussion.
Currently everyone that responded to me here said a variation of "everyone should have the right to photograph strangers without their consent because everyone should have the right to photograph strangers without their consent" with a bit of fancy works.
Like yeah this might be true and self evident because of some axioms that you have but that I don't necessary share and that you don't make explicit so this looks completely pointless to me.
I genuinely don't even understand the passion for photographing strangers without their consent and why it needs to be defended with such a lofty rhetoric.
My best attempt to steelman this is that you think restricting your god given right to photograph strangers without their consent is some slippery slop towards having more rights taken away which is... a very weak point.
> Your country may infringe on your rights, but that doesn’t invalidate the assertion they exist.
This makes no sense to me. There is not right to photograph strangers without their consent in the declaration of human right and never has such right existed in my country so how can that be my right?
What the hell has photographing strangers without their consent to do with free speech?
Observing and publishing a list of who goes into the abortion clinic is a perfect example of the exercise of free speech. You don’t need a public interest to do so. Restricting what I can publish is a violation of that exact idea. Free speech means you can say very nearly anything without criminal penalty (libel is a civil matter).
My point is that the free people can do whatever they want, as long as they are not directly harming someone else. My right to waive my fists around ends where your nose begins. I don’t need to justify why I’m waiving my arms around. I don’t need to justify why I’m camped outside the abortion clinic. Maybe I hate abortions and am engaged in civil protest. These are all protected activities in a free country.
My assertion is that as a consequence of German policy with regards to speech, Germany is a fundamentally less free place. Who gets to decide whether something is in the public interest? Why is shaming abortion seekers not in that category?
Germany has historical experienced how fascists can weaponize free speech to gain power. One of the core tenants of modern Germany is to let this happen again.
Now, we might not be doing well but certainly the US is currently doing much worse. You are already at the building camps stage and it is unclear whether you will have free elections for long.
What is the point of theoretically having free speech for a migrant worker that might deported without any trial by the ICE, for a women that might die during pregnancy because abortion was banned? Those that allow fascists to speak freely will end up with no one but fascists speaking.
People that want to murder me should not be allowed to speak.
> My point is that the free people can do whatever they want, as long as they are not directly harming someone else.
And yes, someone writing that I visited an abortion clinic can do me harm. Same as someone making lists of practicing Jews by camping outside a synagogue can get those people hurt. Your free speech ends where it can hurt me and certain information about me being public can and will hurt me.
Making the lists is not the problem. It’s the rounding people up and sending them to camps that crosses the line. We already have laws about the circumstances required for citizens to be detained. Illegal aliens can be summarily deported, such were the risks they took when the broke the law to get here.
> for a women that might die during pregnancy because abortion was banned
To discuss abortion we would have to agree about things like "what is a person?". Many would reasonably argue that unborn children are humans too and therefore deserve their own freedom.
Allowing fascists to speak freely is the hallmark of a free society. Otherwise who gets to decide who the fascists are or are not? Free societies are free as a matter of principle, not as a matter of consequence.
”I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
When Nazis marched through Skokie, Illinois in the 70s, it was Jewish lawyers who defended them. Being obsessed with liberty is a much better defence against tyranny than hoping the enormous government apparatus that determines who gets to speak and who does not will never be turned against you.
> someone writing that I visited an abortion clinic can do me harm
No they do not. Any person who reads what they wrote and decides to visit violence against you is doing you harm. Don’t shift blame away from violent actors, they make their own decisions. We already have laws about violence. You are not harmed by people simply knowing you had an abortion. It is a true fact about you.
This gave me an idea - what if we made a stable diffusion based AI that would replace unimportant faces (and possibly other identifying details) with different ones - I have seen that AI can do this and make the change unnoticeable.
That way people would be safe from having their personal likeness and whereabouts accidentally plastered over the internet (except when they want their photo to be taken), and the end result wouldn't look so obviously modified as blurring faces or licence plates.
That's a solution that prioritizes privacy over reality, and I'm not sure we collectively want that. Mutilation of truth in the name of protection etc...
I don't think that's better. For something like Street View that's explicitly supposed to be capturing reality, I want to know when that reality has been censored. Realistic face replacement breaks that.
(And yes, I'm sure Street View imagery is edited in other ways before it makes it to production, but I think it's important that our view of reality remains as real as possible.)
No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined. Kill social media, kill gigantic public face tracking dragnets, kill privacy-invading capitalism.
I’m with you. The dichotomy between public and private needs to change. I should still have a degree of privacy even when I’m out in public. What has changed is the ability of others to “see” everyone everywhere at every moment with less and less friction, whether through pictures or videos shared on social media, facial recognition cameras, or location trackers like license plate readers. Historically, no one has had this ability, and now we don’t even know the degree of that ability that some have.
You do not want to depend on infrastructure that might cease to work because the people running the infrastructure behave in an erratic, random and impulsive manner. This is a bigger risk than alignment with the policies of any government.
I would argue that the traditional way to install applications (particularly servers) on UNIX wasn’t very compatible with the needs that arose in the 2000s.
The traditional way tends to assume that there will be only one version of something installed on a system. It also assumes that when installing a package you distribute binaries, config files, data files, libraries and whatnot across lots and lots of system directories. I grew up on traditional UNIX. I’ve spent 35+ years using perhaps 15-20 different flavors of UNIX, including some really, really obscure variants. For what I did up until around 2000, this was good enough. I liked learning about new variants. And more importantly: it was familiar to me.
It was around that time I started writing software for huge collections of servers sitting in data centers on a different continent. Out of necessity I had to make my software more robust and easier to manage. It had to coexist with lots of other stuff I had no control over.
It would have to be statically linked, everything I needed had to be in one place so you could easily install and uninstall. (Eventually in all-in-one JAR files when I started writing software in Java). And I couldn’t make too many assumptions about the environment my software was running in.
UNIX could have done with a re-thinking of how you deal with software, but that never happened. I think an important reason for this is that when you ask people to re-imagine something, it becomes more complex. We just can’t help ourselves.
Look at how we reimagined managing services with systemd. Yes, now that it has matured a bit and people are getting used to it, it isn’t terrible. But it also isn’t good. No part of it is simple. No part of it is elegant. Even the command line tools are awkward. Even the naming of the command line tools fail the most basic litmus test (long prefixes that require too many keystrokes to tab-complete says a lot about how people think about usability - or don’t).
Again, systemd isn’t bad. But it certainly isn’t great.
As for blaming Python, well, blame the people who write software for _distribution_ in Python. Python isn’t a language that lends itself to writing software for distribution and the Python community isn’t the kind of community that will fix it.
Point out that it is problematic and you will be pointed to whatever mitigation that is popular at the time (to quote Queen “I've fallen in love for the first time. And this time I know it's for real”), and people will get upset with you, downvote you and call you names.
I’m too old to spend time on this so for me it is much easier to just ban Python from my projects. I’ve tried many times, I’ve been patient, and it always ends up biting me in the ass. Something more substantial has to happen before I’ll waste another minute on it.
> UNIX could have done with a re-thinking of how you deal with software, but that never happened.
I think it did, but the Unix world has an inherent bad case of "not invented here" syndrome, and a deep cultural reluctance to admit that other systems (OSes, languages, and more) do some things better.
NeXTstep fixed a big swath of issues (in the mid-to-late 1980s). It threw out X and replaced it with Display Postscript. It threw out some of the traditional filesystem layout and replaced it with `.app` bundles: every app in its own directory hierarchy, along with all its dependencies. Isolation and dependency packaging in one.
(NeXT realised this is important but it has to be readable and user-friendly. It replaces the traditional filesystem with something more readable. 15Y later, Nix realised the same lesson, but forgot the 2nd, so it throws out the traditional FHS and replaces it with something less readable, which needs software to manage it. The NeXT way means you can install an app with a single `cp` command or one drag-and-drop operation.)
Some of this filtered back upstream to Ritchie, Thompson and Pike, resulting in Plan 9: bin X, replace it with something simpler and filesystem-based. Virtualise the filesystem, so everything is in a container with a virtual filesystem.
But it wasn't Unixy enough so you couldn't move existing code to it. And it wasn't FOSS, and arrived at the same time as a just-barely-good-enough FOSS Unix for COTS hardware was coming: Linux on x86.
(The BSDs treated x86 as a 2nd class citizen, with grudging limited support and the traditional infighting.)
I can’t remember NeXTStep all that well anymore, but the way applications are handled in Darwin is a partial departure from the traditional unix way. Partial, because although you can mostly make applications live in their own directory, you still have shared, global directory structures where app developers can inflict chaos. Sometimes necessitating third party solutions for cleaning up after applications.
But people don’t use Darwin for servers to any significant degree. I should have been a bit more specific and narrowed it down to Linux and possibly some BSDs that are used for servers today.
I see the role of Docker as mostly a way to contain the “splatter” style of installing applications. Isolating the mess that is my application from the mess that is the system so I can both fire it up and then dispose of it again cleanly and without damaging my system. (As for isolation in the sense of “security”, not so much)
> a way to contain the “splatter” style of installing applications
Darwin is one way of looking at it, true. I just referred to the first publicly released version. NeXTstep became Mac OS X Server became OS X became macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc. Same code, many generations later.
So, yes, you're right, little presence on servers, but still, the problems aren't limited to servers.
On DOS, classic MacOS, on RISC OS, on DR GEM, on AmigaOS, on OS/2, and later on, on 16-bit Windows, the way that you install an app is that you make a directory, put the app and its dependencies in it, and maybe amend the system path to include that directory.
All single-user OSes, of course, so do what you want with %PATH% or its equivalent.
Unix was a multi-user OS for minicomputers, so the assumption is that the app will be shared. So, break it up into bits, and store those component files into the OS's existing filesystem hierarchy (FSH). Binaries in `/bin`, libraries in `/lib`, config in `/etc`, logs and state in `/var`, and so on -- and you can leave $PATH alone.
Make sense in 1970. By 1980 it was on big shared departmental computers. Still made sense. By 1990 it was on single-user workstations, but they cost as much as minicomputers, so why change?
The thing is, the industry evolved underneath. Unix ended up running on a hundred million times more single-user machines (and VMs and containers) than multiuser shared hosts.
The assumptions of the machine being shared turned out to be wrong. That's the exception, not the rule.
NeXT's insight was to only keep the essential bits of the shared FSH layout, and to embed all the dependencies in a folder tree for each app -- and then to provide OS mechanisms to recognise and manipulate those directory trees as individual entities. That was the key insight.
Plan 9 virtualised the whole FSH. Clever but hard to wrap one's head around. It's all containers all the way down. No "real" FSH.
Docker virtualises it using containers. Also clever but in a cunning-engineer's-hacky-kludge kind of way, IMHO.
I think GoboLinux maybe made the smartest call. Do the NeXT thing, junk the existing hierarchy -- but make a new more-readable one, with the filesystem as the isolation mechanism, and apply it to the OS and its components as well. Then you have much less need for containers.
I agree with tou that the issue is packaging. And to have developers trying to package software is the issue IMO. They will come up with the most complicated build system to handle all scenarios, and the end result will be brittle and unwieldy.
There’s also the overly restrictive dependency list, because each deps in turn is happy to break its api every 6 months.
I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do.
(If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before).
And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses.
I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess.
I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.
I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.
As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.
So, what changed?
SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.
Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.
Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.
As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
Most people used to be illiterate a few generations ago and then only had a handful of books in the house, like the Bible and some other staples, and their letters were full of spelling mistakes, and clumsy writing and bad letter shapes. This is also seen in reddit translation requests of postcards and letters.
Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles, aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But up until the early 20th century the vast majority were farmers and then they were factory workers.
Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.
Selection bias means that we don't have the sheer volume of printed material that there once was, as in pulp fiction novels, not to mention the newspapers and magazines that used to be in such abundance.
Where you lived made a difference. A rural Catholic area was not what you wanted. In the city with protestant ethics, things were a little different, more than one book was permitted.
Fortunately there is a lack of aristocracy in my known ancestry, so factory workers over the last century, and reading was the thing for them, including all of the difficult books, even though none of them had much in the way of education, just basic schooling and working for Ford in ye olde factory.
Agreed that before the 1900s there were literacy issues. However, empire has always needed vast armies of clerks and record keepers, so literacy has always been important, just not for everyone.
> (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.
There are various tools to mass unsubscribe. Gmail also recently added the option to surface your subscriptions and unsubscribe. Gmail added the various email categories too.
You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)
Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message.
Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.
I agree, this is context dependent. If the email clearly touches upon multiple topics and is separated into several questions, it can be better to answer point by point. Still, to me, ripping my message apart and inserting the comments feels a bit off, as if you were my prof or teacher grading and commenting and critiquing my paper.
Of course, answering inplace makes it harder to weasel out of answering some of the points. In that sense it's more honest and straightforward to write it inbetween.
> ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended
This is absolutely true. One should not assume too much based on small things like this, assume good intentions until clearly proven otherwise instead of reacting to minor "clues" and "signs". But on the other hand when producing text, it's also good to know how they are culturally interpreted around you. You can say all that is a "you problem" but I don't think that thinking leads to a good life.
The shocking thing isn't that fascism would come back. The shocking thing is that the people I thought were smart would allow it to normalize so fast and give up without a fight. And that even some people I know are apparently fascists at heart - they just needed "permission" to show themselves.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
If almost everyone has disappointed you, then perhaps the issue lies with your expectations. Just like the boiling frog, perhaps our evolution has not prepared us to take courageous action in situations like this.
I'm a simple man who has simple needs. I want a better and faster way to pass Go structs in and out of the runtime that doesn't mean I have to do a sword dance on a parquet floor wearing thick knit wool socks and use some fragile grafted on solution.
If there can be a solution that works for more languages: great. I mostly want this for Go. If it means there will be some _reasonable_ limitations, that's also fine.
You're doing native code, this the solution is the same as in native code: your languages agree on a representation, normally C's, or you serialize and deserialize.
Mixing language runtimes is just not a nice situation to deal with without the languages having first class support for it, and it should be obvious why.
I am not sure what you actually want but it sounds like something where the component model (the backbone of WASI) might help.
It defines a framework to allow modules to communicate with structured data types by allowing each module to decide how to map it to and from its linear memory (and in future the runtime GC heap)
In your case you could be able to define WIT interfaces for your go types and have your compiler of choice use it to generate all the relevant glue code
This is the truth, and it's not really much better in non-GCed languages either. (In reality my impression is the GCed wasm side runtimes are even worse).
Some of the least fun JavaScript I have ever written involved manually cleaning up pointers that in C++ would be caught by destructors triggering when the variable falls out of scope. It was enough that my recollections of JNI were more tolerable. (Including for go, on Android, curiously).
Then once you get through it you discover there is some serious per-call overhead, so those structs start growing and growing to avoid as many calls as possible.
I too want wasm to be decent, but to date it is just annoying.
Was this dealing with DOM nodes and older IE versions by chance? That was probably the single biggest reason to wrap all DOM manipulation with JQuery in that it did a decent job of tracking and cleanup for you. IIRC, a lot of the issues came from the DOM and JS being in separate COM areas and the bridge not really tracking connections for both sides.
I need to pass all the user input events to a game engine, and get back the results into the webgl JS runtime side renderer. (The games at https://www.luduxia.com/ )
Computing lens blur ought to be easier to achieve with more modern camera systems that add a LIDAR to capture a depth map. Does, for instance, Apple use their LIDAR system on the iPhone to do this?
They do, and it has made some noticeable improvements. Compared to when it first came out, "portrait mode" on recent iPhones is a lot less likely to blur individual hairs on a person, or keep the background seen through a lock of hair in focus. But IIRC the iPhone lidar can only distinguish something like 16 depth layers, and at the end of the day the blurring is still computational and "fake", I don't know if it will or can ever reach parity with what a large lens can do.
As a long time hobbyist photographer I can understand buying cameras because they have a certain appeal. But I have to say that I honestly do not understand why someone would spend lots of money and then not want to take advantage of the technology offered.
I think shooting to JPEG and using film profiles is kind of pointless. If you want to shoot film, shoot film. Imagine you have taken a really good picture, but it’ll always look worse than it could because you threw away most of the data and applied some look to it that will date it.
I do understand that a lot of people think these cameras are worth buying. And that they are selling well. But I can’t understand why.