vr46

I don't think manual focus SLRs (If that's what you mean) are going anywhere now, there's widespread popularity for film photography and the "better" cameras (mechanical or reliable) are fetching silly money. And plenty of unreliable, hard-to-repair cameras are also fetching silly money.

BUT - the value prop has totally changed. Running costs are very high, for processing and scanning or printing, and where digital had high upfront costs initially for computers, everyone already has those now anyway. Plus the variety and diversity of film photography has narrowed considerably. I have a Kodak reference manual/catalogue here from the mid-1990s and the variety and versatility of film is something to behold. And that was just Kodak.

Infrared film? Colour or Black and White? Lith film, Ortho film? Here you go. Kodachrome? Yes, what speed would you like?

So there were things that digital can't easily do now that film could do, but without the film, that value prop has gone, and film cameras versatility has gone with it. If you, we, I, want film photography to thrive and be more than a dead language, we will really need it to do things that digital can't, apart from being slow, expensive and crap in the eyes of many.

My 600SE has been largely out for action for years, with only a trickle of film available. Results were predictable when Polaroid and Fuji peel-apart film were available. The modern Polaroid film is anything but predictable or even vaguely good, especially for the astronomical prices. Zink gives about the same qualities.

Fuji Instax in all its forms won this battle and there’s a cottage industry of Instax-holding backs being 3D-printed to retro-fit older cameras like the 600SE or anything with a Graflok connection.

That said, if the outcome of modern Polaroids is exactly what you’re after and an SX70 is not your cup of tea, here’s your new toy.

We always called weirs drowning machines too. Even my son knows them as this from an early age, my head instinctly regards them as scary now. There's a lot of them around in the UK.

This is just about priorities and theirs are different to yours - firstly, we don't know that they don't have a system that catches and warns of possible errors, we only know that articles may be published without addressing them. Secondly, the fact that it was corrected post-publish suggests that errors are picked up, but timely publication is more important.

The core business is delivering news, and typos halting publication is not a trade-off they want to take, they'd rather have the subs or copy editors batch process or review all the corrections required - maybe they use Pull Requests? :D

It was correct when I just looked at it, and you still read it, though. Eventual correction works and is less important than getting the news out.

Any-way - the fact that they have a system that seeks to improve the copy and direct it towards their style guide is something to be celebrated when most of the news about, erm, the news, is how AI is replacing actual writers.

The Grauniad finally building electronic counter-measures. Great newspaper regardless.

That last comment is a tad disingenuous - a photographer cloned extra smoke from attacks in a fairly obvious way that was quickly picked up, and another was a crop, fairly standard practice. Hardly a “history” of “doctoring” pictures.

My pal is OBSESSED over making a book of 8 x 10 Polaroids. Has been talking about it for years.

He is planning on getting:

Intrepid 8 x 10 view camera 8 x 10 film holders Changing bags Polaroid film next time it's in production Two lenses of unknown focal length Light meters Polaroid Film Processor

Going to be a massive bill

Film used be about a steady-stream of operational costs, amortizing film, processing and printing over many years.

Digital has always been about huge up-front costs of cameras and computer processing.

Film purchase and processing now have scanned added on, and all are getting painfully expensive, not to mention the surge in camera prices as TikTok decides which camera is flavour of the month. I can no longer decide to buy a Contax G2 backup body cheaply, so lucky I did it a long time ago.

Photography has always been an expensive hobby, plus ça change

Amazing article. I made a specific point to go and see Shellac when I was at Primavera in 2018, a bucket list gig.

Complicated guy. I was hoping he'd also renounced his hatred of jazz when I opened the article, but no such luck it seems.

Ditto. Power gives up nothing without a fight.

The UK Land Registry, where all property searches are made, offers a free service to notify parties if any kind of search is made on a property to protect against fraud. Strongly recommended.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/property-alert

They’re avaricious bastards, it’s what they are. Huge, vast amounts of money flows through businesses and straight to landlords in London, strangling investment in small businesses, their employees and the wider economy. Businesses with high margins, low inventory and low unskilled staffing costs win.

In Germany, I note that thousands of small businesses flourish that vanished from London’s streets - I have a choice of places to have a kitchen knife sharpened, for example - and while London holds vast opportunity, I fear that its breadth is severely constricted and whole areas of industry, skills and expertise are effectively extinct as the startup Capex is too high, and the Opex is vampiric.

About three or four years ago, I asked the owners of a closed-down department store if we could turn a big chunk of the 4-5 storey section into a climbing wall and was told to F-off as they had bigger plans for a new commercial centre with mixed-work and retail.

Anyway, it’s still shuttered, so good luck with that plan.

IIRC Secondary legislation can be challenged in the courts and this is hopefully where the fight will take place between the well-heeled cat 1 service companies and Uk.gov

Else companies will leave or simply ignore the legislation, e.g. Signal, and the law will quietly become impossible to enforce with a series of arbitrary decisions and fines taking place before the digital economy falls off a cliff.

I honestly hate my current government with all my heart.

Let this series of badly-thought-out bills be destroyed in the courts once the courts find that reality bats last.

There’s probably a clause in there that decrees Pi must be four from now on.

Documentation has definitely gotten better, especially as people realize that this drives adoption and sales of the language/library/product.

For more complex problems that are better served by a call-and-response loop, Discord seems to be where conversations are happening.

I very much miss Pete Townshend’s articulate and incisive commentaries on music and society which were more frequent in the press many years ago. I knew this story but not the part where he wrote a message to the family on Scott Halpin’s death, very kindly.

He lives just up from my local, but now closed, record shop, Sleeve Notes, and popped in on the way back from shopping one afternoon to sign copies of the last album and chat with Ken, the owner. Top lad, old Pete. RIP Scott Halpin, immortalised in rock legend.

The presentation of the data doesn't support the conclusions drawn, i.e. women have been actively impeded in songwriting - they might have been, but the data doesn't say that on its own.

Also, some credits were only there due to sampling, the songwriters did not actively sit down and write or co-write that particular song.

Given that music has been almost completely democratised with the lowest barrier to entry there has ever been, it's hard to say women are being prevented from songwriting, but breaking into the highest echelons of the hit industry (a dubious accolade) might be tougher. We don't know how many are trying.

The last Intel Macs were mind-numbingly expensive - my i9 MBP16 in 2020 was around £4.5K I think - and I would be seriously irritated at not being able to sweat this particular asset, or even sell it on. At least it still boots Windows. Still a good machine, the Touch Bar is a Power user’s dream.

Apple might well have reduced their turnover by making the M1 series too good to need replacing on the same timeframes as the Intel machines - either way, what’s the point of making hardware built to last without the software?

As an aside, I once went to the Apple Festival in Cambridge (UK) where several hundred varieties were available and the queue for the, erm, apple store, was around the block. The choice was amazing but it’s unrealistic to offer consumers so many often subtle choices and trade-offs.

I doubt the Cosmic Crisp will be orders of magnitude above any other apple but I’d like to try one, perhaps the next apple festival.

No kidding on the boutique shops, an expensive street in Covent Garden is super cool to pickup a bike from but running a specialised servicing department from there was clearly commercial suicide. For profligacy this was topped only by a datacentre I was asked to help decommission that was in an Art Deco building on Strand. Next to The Savoy. Overlooking Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames.

That said, it is a shame that you can’t have specialised bicycle service shops in the centre of London. VanMoof offered a pretty good bespoke experience and my X2 has had a few issues but it’s going quite well four years in. What goes up quickly comes down quickly, I suppose.

Bike theft is rampant in London, but I never had any worries with the X2, combination of inbuilt-lock and an Almax chain saw to that.

Well the AirTag arrived about two years after the bikes, and Apple won’t go track the thief down for you and retrieve the bike.

In Hamburg and London, bike shops absolutely have six week backlogs.

Yeah, I hear you, the risk of buying something so integrated factored into my original decision. I was in London at the time, and after diagnosis of an error code I had, they simply shipped me a new wheel and motor as I said I could fix it myself.

As an aside, do check the connection between the motor and the battery in the fork, comes loose easily and causes all sorts of errors.

I can’t imagine when I’m next going to be able to afford a bike, probably in six or seven years, but I too will be going for something more generic.

Obviously not, but the point isn't to make a public model, but to make something out of my own - my question was how does ownership work? At some point, somebody is going to be making something out of their own massive archive.

There's around 1M images in there, I was wondering whether the labelling and object detection would be more important than the quantity.

Reading these discussions with interest as I am in the process of making and training my own personal model using my 31+ archive of photography, pictures taken and owned by be, which goes against this idea that models are not trained on data owned by the companies doing the training. While this is all for my own personal interest and use, how would the idea that the weights cannot be copyrighted affect my rights on the model if I were to release the whole thing for use?

I bought an X2 in July 2019 and still use it most days. There have been a few niggles but nothing major and customer service has been good. Would buy again. Given the cost, however, I really need to sweat this asset (while mildly sweating myself). I think the total cost including rack and basket and insurance was around £3.5K. £875 a year. For a bicycle. That needs to be much lower to really get the value for me. No new VanMoof for me - even though I paid to get early bird on the vapourware V.

However, the landscape in four years is TOTALLY different, e-bikes are absolutely everywhere and at every reasonable price point, so it must be super tough to fight it out in this market.