Update: iPhone Camera app did not replace person's head with a leaf

What kind of thing do you mean by "this type of thing"? Why do you think it degrades bayesian priors?

Life is, among other things, a constant quest to better understand the world around us. For every "real discovery" there is a ton of noise. Most of that noise can be easily discarded, some look more convincing. This particular instance looked more convincing.

We know that modern imaging equipment is very complex. You shoot a picture and complicated processes happen which were optimised by thousands of engineers to produce a good looking photo. In the past we have seen that such complex pipelines can introduce plausible looking artefacts in a different context: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

This is why it could be possible that maybe something similar happens with the camera app. People investigated, and it turned out that that is not the case.

For every breakthrough in our understanding there were thousands of perhaps and maybes. For every eureka moment, there is a bin full of superluminal neutrino experiments. This is normal and part of the process of reasoning about the world.

If your thinking processes get damaged by encountering as of yet unexplained phenomenon then your brain is broken and you should ask for a refund.

And frankly looking at the original picture again, focus is no excuse for that. Yes, there is a leaf, no, the AI whizbang still blurred it all to crap.

Those two things are exactly what everyone was assuming happened. So while you're right about what is going on with the camera behavior, I think you're disagreeing about a completely separate conclusion than everyone else arrived at.

> It just so happens that the leaf was really there from the perspective of one lens or photo.

In the original thread the photographer was fairly certain there weren't leaves in front, which is what started all of this.

As a fairly trivial example, years ago now I wrote a little article observing that a Sony ad boasting about how responsive their camera was (at a time when many digital cameras had a distinct delay) was using a rather famous wildlife photo shot on film. I also noticed that it wasn't quite the famous frame though it was still an excellent photo. Odd. Maybe something about rights.

You probably see where this is going. Subsequently I saw other ads in the series which had clearly mistimed versions of other famous photos. At which point the thing I had never considered clicked--to my somewhat embarrassment.

(In my defense, the wildlife photo used was certainly not an obvious example of bad timing unless you were familiar with the original and even then it was subtle.)

The people who made such comments were never replied to, and while I can't see upvotes my suspicion given how far down you have to scroll to read them is that no one cared to give those possibilities much credibility.

Don't blame systems for bad input; garbage in, garbage out.

IMO this is also a good example of engineers looking for complex bugs and solutions which are simply not there.

I thought maybe it was just some processing glitch, maybe it was computational photography messing up, maybe it was just a question of focus, or maybe a mix of things.

In meatspace, his eyes are at a different vantage point focusing on the face, while cellphone cameras try to keep everything visible as sharp as possible.

Post now, think later

I think a lot of the HN crowd are susceptible to that because they know just enough to know it's possible but are not perhaps familiar with a given domain (I certainly know that applies to me).

It's perhaps some spin-off of the dunning-kruger observation... There must be a spot on the curve where a person knows just enough to be freaked out by what they're seeing, but not enough to explain it fully. Whereas here the Halide devs know the domain well enough to quickly diagnose it.

there is that false story that gathered tons of likes and comments, even though a buried comment debunked the whole thing. the worst part is that it's since been shared in many Quora spaces. where it is gathering more likes and comments.

i stopped for a minute and wondered if the situation could have been prevented.

(btw, is the "Karen" reference really necessary? It's a sexist, racist insult that detracts from an otherwise interesting comment)

It's not, "he took one photo and it came out wrong", it's, "humans everywhere took billions upon billions of photos and you only were told about the weirdest ones which fit a Narrative".

They're a trillion dollar company who don't give even the slightest little fuck about you. Stop feeling sorry for them, that is an insanely unhealthy way of thinking.

Well now you’ve just gone and given this thing a catchy name. That’s not exactly going to help matters.

#leafhead