trop

Darktable has a "neural restore" algorithm [0] in the development version (intended for midsummer release). Note:

- It appears to be an out-of-band pre-processing stage (run the image through denoise to produce an intermediary TIFF), unlike most other parts of the program.

- All AI features are gated behind compile-time flags which default to off.

[0] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523

> but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws

darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.

I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.

Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, describes a 1930s trip to present-day Afghanistan. But I believe he started the automobile portion in Tehran.

From 3/17/25:

> Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty. The potential for deep cuts in federal research funding, as well as tax legislation affecting our endowment income, has now been added to existing concerns related to rapid growth and cost escalations. It is imperative that we navigate this challenging financial landscape with a shared understanding and common purpose, to continue to advance our mission, strengthen our academic community, and deepen our impact. [0]

[0] https://hr.cornell.edu/2025-hiring-pause

FWIW, here is the recent merged pull requests from darktable:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

At the moment, this is about a week's work by eight authors. Others cycle/in out, of course -- this is a spot sample. They range from bugfixes to performance improvements to documentation to translation work. All what one would hope for in a software project headed to its bi-annual release next month.

There are many ways to develop, and it may be a bit cruel to compare a one-man show to a long-term international collaboration. But here are the recently merged pull requests from the software which is posted about in the blog post:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

On the first page, I see about five authors offering PR's over the course of all of 2023 -- a much slower pace of community development.

It appears that Ansel is being developed more by direct commits from its main author. So let's compare the recent commits:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master

Page 1 of Ansel commits is by its mono-author from the last week. Page 2 takes us back to August. Page 3 back to June. I totally understand that good developers need to work carefully and sit on things, then release them in due time.

Here goes for darktable commits:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/master

If we take a moment to page back to page 3, one can note that we're back to two weeks ago (rather than June). Steady work by a committed community matters. The log of work done is may be quite worth looking at, rather than incendiary blog posts.

What we're seeing here is one embittered ex-developer spending time/effort saying toxic things about their former collaborators in a public forum. At the same time the former developer is making a claim to such radical competence that they can somehow keep an open source project of considerable scope together -- one which until now was coded by generally at least half a dozen committed authors at any given time. The darktable project was originated by some quite bright folks. Others have cycled in/out over the years. Generally without too much drama. It's too bad to be giving so much attention to divisive claims.

> So which is more useful, one that doesn't even know there is a new album coming out, or one that knows what was its release date as of just a couple of months ago?

To semi-misquote Lewis Carroll: Which is better, a stopped clock or a clock which loses a minute a day? Carroll posits the former, as it is precisely correct twice a day. The trick, of course, is knowing for sure when those two times per day will be.

Of course one could argue that the hardcore Linux (er, GNU/Linux) document creator will use Emacs with AUCTeX (or canny uses of org-mode), with rendering via XeTeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX... Or markdown piped through pandoc, for those who want to take it easy.

LibreOffice, it's a slippery slope... Next thing we'll be using the mouse and ditching the tiled window manager.

The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is

> We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users.

This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing.

[0]: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

Steve Roberts had a gig (maybe during the Winnebiko period) writing a column about his travels for CompuServe Magazine. In case you don't remember it, CompuServe was a walled-garden pre-AOL dialup internet site which included forums, games, and news. In this early-in-the-virtual era, subscribers to CompuServe also received each month, via snail mail, a glossy real-world periodical.

I sent Steve a fan email, and to my wonder, received a reply back. He struck me as a lovely guy, happy to correspond about the music and his general state of mind.

My memory is that an attraction of his column was that each was written from a different place, and described the adventures getting there, and being there. But then he got to the Florida Keys. And hung out at the Florida Keys for another column. And then hung out there for another column or so -- it was a pretty great place. And eventually, CompuServe dropped the column.

So nice to read the article on Steve Roberts, and fill out a bit these memories. Perhaps somewhere out there, someone has also written a memoir about CompuServe in its pre-Internet 1980s glory?

> I think the general trend is that actual useful applications are emerging from enormous models trained and owned by billion dollar companies only.

One way to think about it: Today's LLMs require incredible outlays of capital and processor power (and crews of folks with doctorates), such as billion dollar companies can provide. But how is that different from what Intel brought to commodity CPUs in the '90s/'00s, or what Nvidia brought to GPUs in the '00s/'10s? Or even what Cisco and folks brought to networks?

Though we may never design an artisanal CPU/GPU/router, we get to work with them every day to make things, and to communicate. These LLMs can be that for us at this moment. Let's go out and enjoy them, and see what we can make within their (vast) domain-specific capabilities.

[takes off rose-tinted glasses]

Also worth checking out Alvy Ray Smith's 2021 book, "A Biography of the Pixel". It is (from what I've read so far), much more in the history/theory of technology field, examining the math/technology behind resolving continuous to the discrete (waves to pixels, vectors to rasters, etc.), and the associated cultural/business/entertainment shifts.

Not to be petty, but I see that to all appearances Smith is not, having given "Catmull, Edwin" about half a page of index entries. (The cover identifies Smith as "Cofounder of Pixar. And that there are index entries for "Pixar, origin and cofounding of, cofounded by Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith" as well as for "Pixar, origin and cofounding of, not cofounded by Steve Jobs".)

An anecdote from someone in IT at a major university: The registrar has two employees whose sole job is to write SQL queries. These are to answer basic questions such as, "How many undergraduates are currently enrolled." And it turns out that this is a nearly impossible question to which to give a definitive answer.

I'm curious about this as well, but wouldn't be pointing fingers at the Wayland developers. See, for example, one of the most recent comments in the discussion linked to in the parent post, by Nilvus, one of the (wise and knowledgeable) darktable developers:

> The only thing is that color management for Wayland is progressing and far from being completely done. Even if work is quite slow, things seems to go in good direction. For correct and complete Wayland color management, we just have to wait again.

Blender itself seems to be color-profile aware: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/color_manag....

Here is an issue tracking work on Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m....

There's a nice site which is parallel to this work which summarizes issues/goals: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr

Here is parallel work on this in Sway: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1486 And parallel work in KDE: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439135

I can't find any reference to color management in the Blender meta-issue at https://developer.blender.org/T76428. For X11, I believe applications would have to manually determine the color profile of the display holding the current window, then query colord or and X atom to determine the profile. The application would then manually do the colorspace conversion. Does querying colord and making an in-application conversion works for Wayland until Wayland becomes colorspace-aware? Or if there are more wrinkles?

Note to mention "In the Land of Oz: The Search for the Wizard":

https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/movie/in-the-land-of-oz-th...

Which reads like a bad translation of a bad translation. Like the the old joke about the AI program which was supposed to translate "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" from English to Russian to English, and after the roundtrip came up with "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

Quite true. Best case, we're seeing DJ Spooky style culture jamming/remixing. But more likely it is as you write.

On the other hand, the market for stock photography was already decimated by the internet. Where previously skilled photographers would create libraries of images to exemplify various terms and sell these as stock, in the last decade or so, an art director with the aid of a search engine could rapidly produce similar results.

Indeed. And the artist/creative who can guide DALL-E or GPT-3 will be as exciting as the composer who can make a room dance with music from a synthesizer...or the artist who can make compelling images with a camera.

Indeed, there's an argument that the culture around anything (including software) is the main thing. And if the culture thrives, then that becomes the stable backup (or rather stable living vessel). Isn't there a Linus Torvalds quote that he has the world's largest distributed backup system for his code? But the point isn't that he bamboozled people into keeping copies of the Linux source everywhere -- it's that he started and oversees a living and helpful project.

I had a teacher who was known as a master printer. Students would ask, "How can I make a truly archival print?" His answer: "Show me something you make worth keeping, and I'll tell you."

My high school had a computer lab with a networked LaserWriter (this might have been 1987). It outclassed any screen in the room, so far as display resolution. And with its 68000 processor and PostScript interpreter, it was the fastest and most capable graphics machine I'd ever seen. Indeed, a 300dpi laser printer driven by PostScript was a wonder.

I ordered the Addison Wesley documentation. I figured out that sending a text file to the printer which started with "%!PS" would make the rest be processed as PostScript. Suddenly I could code vector graphics programs and send them to the LaserWriter and get beautiful prints. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and my memory is that there were some great ideas for graphics in that.

The good news: I got a chance to program in a well thought-out interpreted language (a wonder, coming from the world of BASIC, Fortran, C or even Pascal). I got to produce wonderful and intricate graphics output. Reading the IEEE article makes me grateful that the Adobe designers "put functionality over speed".

The bad news: The most interesting output could still take minutes (or more) to run. Of course, this was confusing (or annoying) if someone else in the lab wanted, say, to print their term paper then run off to class. I'd like to think that I learned to run my print jobs at odd hours, and in the worst case, to power cycle the printer and lose my print, to make the device available to the room.

Exciting! One typo, I think:

> Org Mode can be used for anything from managing apartments, writing manuals, literate programs or executing code like a programming notebook.

Is that "apartments" or "appointments"? I suppose some people manage their apartments with org-mode, maybe via TODO lists and calc spreadsheets.

> you'll still be in an uncanny valley of recycled information and in the worst case be in some bizarre feedback loop of old content that is permanently recycled and reconfigured

Does DALL-E 2 create, or does it simply making a pastiche of extant images/concepts? And if the latter, are we simply back to appropriation of content? That is, whatever vast set of images it was fed (stock photography?) is becoming uncredited fodder for this "recycling"?

There is no innate reason why a Google search on a subject should return high quality results. This is predicated on there being someone willing to write thoughtful, informative, well-researched content and post it on the open internet such that a search engine can monetize that content via user profiling and advertising.

There may have been a moment when enough people were willing to put up their writing/images/videos for free such that Google's search engine appeared helpful in "organizing the world's information". But that mission statement was is a smoke screen. Google didn't organize. The company, as a gatekeeper, profiteered off of the writing/images/videos of others.

The problem isn't that Google search algorithms are low-quality, nor that Google has been gamed by SEO. The problem is that Google has engaged in a scorched-earth policy of capitalizing on the work of others. Google created a secondary market in information, without funding the primary market -- which then withered. And now there is a tertiary market of SEO spammers capitalizing on the propensity people still have to think that a Google search will return the truth to them, gratis.

peterburkmisher: I wish I knew! I've been wondering about all this myself, and where even this knowledge lies these days. Materials scientists? Chemists? It sees a question too specialized for the former, and not specialized enough for the latter? Please anyone who knows...?

More generally:

Josef Maria Eder's "History of Photography" [1] is a semi-technical survey of 19th and early 20th century processes. Part of what it makes it wonderful is the narratives of so many chemist/photographers trying to get their discoveries supported by scientific societies and/or the market, with vastly varying success. As Eder was actually there doing the work[2], he has much to recount.

Much more recent, Richard Benson's "The Printed Picture"[3] takes on how images have made their way to paper. Benson probably knew as much about this as anyone still alive.[4] If in Philadelphia, it's possible still to catch an exhibition of his work.[5]

[1] https://archive.org/details/EderHistoryPhotography

[2] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/296322 is a beautiful example

[3] http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/495363201

[4] https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/color-photography

[5] https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/richard-benson-w...

There's some history of "organic" or at least "natural" ingredients in photography. See, for example, the early "autochrome" color process. It uses dyed potato starch as color filters. Lampblack (granted a petro-byproduct) separated the potato bits. The plate is coated with shellac (secreted by the female lac bug).[1][2]

Other big photo ingredients, past and present, include egg whites (for albumen prints)[3], gum arabic (sap of acacia tree, for emulsions), and cow/pig hooves (gelatin, for the emulsion)[4]. And, of course, the alchemist's favorites: gold, silver, platinum, palladium...

What I'd take from this is that we're used to technologies involving highly refined/synthesized substances with fancy names. But so many 19th century processes were done with more day-to-day substances, and we're still partaking of those technologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re

[2] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/05/how-potatoes-and-ge...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albumen_print

[4] https://petapixel.com/2011/11/15/did-you-know-film-and-photo...

So strange that the vision of an astronaut (or astronauts) high in orbit, operating cameras at the behest of NRO, seems so lonely and futile. Yet to be an astronaut on ISS and its predecessors seems more like worthy communal work. Why the shift is perception?

Another way to think about it: The night scenes in old movies could embrace the stylization and limitations that the combination of relatively insensitive film and studio lighting afforded. See for example, the night scenes in The Night of the Hunter, for example the riverboat scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFzTBPy7nl8. (The youtube video is stunningly low-bandwidth, another level of remove, but, yet again, the movie still holds up.)

> 13.6% of Faceberg's $94.4b is almost $13b. A good start, but we'll need more.

Presumably a slip on the part of the author, rather than facetious. Regardless extremely unfortunate.

> I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.

Not sure if the stipulation is a war movie about Vietnam, or just plain a war movie. But certainly here's a list of some non-U.S. 20th century war movies, very vivid, biased towards France:

The Battle of Algiers (French, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

Come and See (Russian, Elem Klimov, 1985)

Ivan's Childhood (Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)

Beau Travail (French, Claire Denis, 1999) -- OK, soldiers but not war

Army of Shadows (French, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

A Man Escaped (French, Robert Bresson, 1956) -- POW, not front lines

Little Dieter Needs To Fly (British/French/German?, Werner Herzog, 1997) -- actually relates to the war in Vietnam

Another query about IRB and human subjects: In the case of software which is not only written/maintained by a community of humans, but used by a (vast) community of humans, do the latter also become "human subjects" as well in such an experiment?

If only it worked on Linux. It's Windows-only: http://bitboost.com/pawsense/.

This software is the only winner so far of an Ig Noble prize in the category of Computer Science: https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/winners/#ig2000. See https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-ca... for a write-up.

Apparently this is still maintained, as it is described as compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (excepting "Metro/Modern" mode). Written by this charming coder: http://chrisniswander.com/.

[edited for grammar -- and should note that, of course Linux and ilk OS do offer a "cat" command]