TheOctonaut

Programmer turned photographer turned back to programmer.

I was really enjoying the online photography scene the 2000s and early 2010s. I used to do street photography, ask interesting people to take their portrait, blag a press pass and take photos of up and coming bands (“sure why not” is a crazy answer to “can I inexpertly point my flash directly at Florence Welch as she performs her last tiny gig before stardom”).

I started doing work for wannabe models (ModelMayhem mostly) and from that got requests to do paid personal events, eg weddings and engagements. Especially when I moved abroad to places where I was basically self employed, this was a nice little occasional gig. But it was work. Regardless of why they chose me, they wanted their photos to look the current fashionable way, they wanted them by a certain date, they wanted specific moments and they wanted them perfect even if they weren’t perfect in real life. It sucked all the fun and creativity from it.

Coupled with the overloading of the internet with (elitist snob coming) mundane and repetitive photography content and the death of discussion and appreciation of thoughtful photography, it eroded my love for it on both ends.

I’m old and have kids now, I’m trying to get back into it. It’s hard to build back up that courage to take out a camera and snap a photo. Before it marked you as unusual, but at least as potentially an expert or artist. There was a percentage of people willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. It seems these days that like many “democratised” things, putting extra effort into something seems to be heavily discouraged and denigrated as elitist. And I think just in general a 40-something with a camera does not get the benefit of the doubt that a 20-something used to. I’m hoping it swings around again as I hit proper old age, just a harmless old weirdo with a DSLR.

This is a setting in your browser.

I have opening apps automatically disabled for places where I have multiple accounts.

This is an extremely weird take. Iran/Persia and its predecessors have been conquered many times. As far back as Alexander and as recently as WW2 with the Arabs, Turks, Mongols all taking control of it in between. Iran’s culture is as unique as it is because of all the ethnic admixture, not due to some imagined unbroken ancestry from Elam.

Sure, but the effect won’t be that the LLM is worse, just our keyboards.

It just shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how AI works. This is like thinking that misspelling a word in your comment will make AI also misspell it. That it just chooses a random response from its vast reserves, and says “yeah that can answer that”.

LLMs are first and foremost statistics. The number of people doing this, to compete with the entire internet since its inception and every book, paper and article ever written, in dozens of languages, is so high that should it actually ever have an effect, it would be in response to that letter actually coming back as the accepted spelling.

Do you think the Asian slaves on these ships are keeping up to global news on social media?

Holy shit it’s one of those guys, the “I did my research” guys. I never get to see them these days. Amazing. Imagine this energy used for something like painting miniatures instead

This is your brain on ActivityPub

I’m glad you see it working out, what’s next (once the likes of me have been dealt with)?

Do you have a point, or do you just prefer to copy and paste things at me in the hope that I’ll read them? Alright let’s entertain it.

Does that genuinely say we’re importing Israeli military drones? 🤣

Western civilisation includes bad and good like every other civilisation. It includes Ireland as well as Britain, Gaul as well as Rome. People who see it as nothing but imperialism would do well to remember who was “imperialed” first. As you’ve rightly spotted Ireland suffered a greatly. As an Irishman I’ll tell you I would rather you not compound matters by deciding that that erased anything positive about the culture we’re part of.

Commenting on the daydream was not a value statement. Western civilisation is… well, not exactly great for the world right now. For better or worse however, I’m in it and so are my kids. So if it’s alright with you, I’d rather work to improve it than cheer on various other forms of imperialism so that, uh, I get to see the “worse” part of “worse before it gets better”.

I appreciate that you see both as zero, that’s remarkably insightful for this place.

I’m from Ireland and it was a local election.

As it turns out, when you aren’t from somewhere that leftist thought is completely alien, you don’t have to daydream of the collapse of western civilisation to see change.

Ah yogszy! Been a while since I saw your name. How’s the collapse of the west progressing? Imminent, I believe it was. In 2024.

You’ve misunderstood what I meant by “source”. I meant “who is benefiting from making young leftists think like this” not “lol nice substack bro”.

Rest is spot on though 🫡

One billion times more productive than posting about Russia on discussion board

Yeah, no, I’m familiar and as it turns out repeating nonsense from “Telegram sources” isn’t changing my opinions of anything. As someone who has literally voted for communist candidates in elections in the last year, I’m glad to have grown up before this type of American sports-team need for religious unquestioning, black and white adherence to whatever the online bubble is totally organically pushing. If someone wants to in a handful of words categorise Hungary as “crushed” or Ukraine as “Nazi” that’s not a serious line of thought that needs to be interrogated. Its source does.

Until my new PieFed client figures out how to block instances, please don’t expect me to engage with naked fluff talking points on here. I’m interested in speaking to people about how they themselves engage with it.

Of course, I’ll likely just be banned, because engaging with other viewpoints is not exactly as encouraged here as you’ve suggested.

I mean every single sentence has some ugly falsehood. There’s no point in addressing nonsense like claiming that the EU will “crush” Belgium like it’s crushed Hungary (what), that NATO has been defeated in Ukraine (what), that the EU rigs elections in member states (what). That’s not what I’m here for. These people are lost.

The important thing is that this person believes, or consistently acts as if they believe, that all these things are true. They’re not being rhetorical, those are the things that inform their opinions. You need to consider this when assessing what they say. Like, if you want to ask about the EU being fascists now apparently, consider that the evidence is things like crushing the independence of union states, rigging elections, and being defeated in border wars. Can we think of any nation state this actually applies to? Why would a person have such a blind spot?

It’s important that you understand when framing your response, that the other guy actually believes the thing’s hes saying.

Fucking ouch bro