Good morning. Hello. How are you? #800
Apple please let me turn off all your dumb AI photo processing. Walmart. Freedom. Kevin McCarthy shadenfreude. Lloyd Cole is having Filemaker trouble.
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. Happy Friday! It is issue number 800! Man, that is completely insane. Who could have thought that that little, early-pandemic mix-tape-ripping project would turn into this ongoing correspendence between myself and a bunch of my friends and even some strangers? That is just lovely. I am very thankful for all of you.
And I am out of quarantine! Well, at this exact moment, I am sitting in the exact same place I’ve been sitting every day for, you know… let’s see… (checks calendar) 21 days minus about 48 hours between original case of Covid and the Paxlovid rebound. Wow. That’s been a while. But I have been out and about, I’ve hugged my daughter, I’ve gone on a walk through the neighborhood. It looks different. Older. I walked up the big hill verrry slowly and it was fine. I did about 30 minutes on the treadmill, walking, at a verrry slow pace and a verrrry slight incline and it was fine. I went to the recycling center, where I said hello to the attendent who probably voted for Trump and he was very friendly. I went to McDonald’s and it was way more crowded at 7:20 than it usually is at 6:50. Man. Lotta traffic out there. People love going places, they really do.
I went to Walmart and wow, their movie section has been decimated. Other than that, though, Walmart was lovely. All the holiday shit is gone, all the extra island displays clogging up the aisles, all the extra end caps. They weren’t out of stock of anything. It was a good time. No Walmart radio playing, that was sad. For about two months, the Walpay functionality from the Walmart app (which is really quite good, btw) has been partially broken. You can pay, and it registers the payment on the check-out kiosk, but it does not confirm it on your phone, so you don’t have your reciept handy, so if the “greeter” (fun fact: my father was a Walmart greeter after his retirement) asks to see your receipt, you don’t have it handy, and you have to exit out of the app, go back in, and then dig it out of your account. It’s only been an issue once. I just hold my phone, very confidently and hope for the best. It worked this time.
I took a shower and it was amazing. I washed that Covid right out of my hair. Showers have been a bit of a logistical challenge as my quarantine basement only has a half bath. But we managed. And now I am clean. VERY EXCITING.
I am proud to say that I have watched every single one of the eleven votes in which the honorable Hakim Jeffries has won a plurality of votes for speaker of the house, though not, alas, a majority. Eleven votes where poor old Kevin McCarthy has lost every one of them. It has been hugely satisfying. Also, and I know I’ve said this already, so, so soothing to listen to the clerk of the court call each name. It only grates, really, when Boebert or Goetz votes. Even MTG doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe she’s grandstanded yet during a roll call vote. But Boebert with her endless speeches and ridiculous word salad. It really is something.
I’m tempted to view the whole thing as a larger metaphor for modern America and its contempt for compromise and reasonableness. On both sides, in this case. He should give up, they should compromise. Both mistakenly think they’re being noble in refusing to do these things. I love compromising personally, meeting people halfway, forward motion even if it’s incremental, I am all about that shit, and I have friends that despise it in various walks of life. Some despise it in art, milquetoast art, bland art, etc. Some despise it in politics, deride people who compromise as appeasers and centrists. Some despise it in business, where I really don’t care that much about individual redlines and I am happy to meet opposing counsel halfway on a contract. I sent a contract out two days ago and said “hey my lawyer had a couple redlines on this. Accept ‘em if you want, don’t accept ‘em if you don’t want, I really don’t care either way, send it back and I’ll sign it.” People think this is terrible business. They are wrong.
Important news if you live in Western MA: Legendary English sophisti-pop star Lloyd Cole is having Filemaker trouble, in 2023. I am so psyched Lloyd Cole is still using Filemaker that is some profound committment. If you live nearby and are a Filemaker expert, maybe help him out.
I watched this pretty interesting video from Marques Brownlee, aka MKHD, aka the most influential tech Youtuber out there yesterday. Sorry I keep using Youtube videos as topics for GMHHAY this week but, you know, haven’t been out much. Anyway, it was a deep dive into the iPhone camera and what’s wrong with it. Every year, for, like, five years, MKHD does a tournament of all the mobile phone cameras, letting his viewers vote for image quality in a round robin tournament. And every year, the iPhone camera is knocked out in the first round. And I believe it! Every year, my wife’s Android camera always seems to take better pictures than my iPhone. And he told some very fascinating background about all this. Part of it I knew: that almost all “photo quality” from phones these days is done in software, that they very rarely actually change the sensor hardware. And that Google perfectly dialed in the sensor/software combination back on the Pixel 3 and didn’t change anything from the Pixel 3 to the Pixel 6. Like five years! I did not know that part. Every year I get a new phone and a supposedly “better” camera and every year my wife’s five year-old camera beats it.
Both Google and Apple recently upgraded their sensors to much larger ones. And when you change the sensor, you really gotta change all of your software to adapt for the hugely increased amount of light and data. And Google thusly took a bit of a dip in the rankings, but they have been dialing it in through software upgrades.
The same can be said for Apple, but they are slower. Furthermore — and this I had never thought about — Brownlee says that Apple has a bias to flat lighting on faces. And now that he’s said this, I can’t unsee it. It is totally true. If you have the slightest amount of chiarascuro on a face in a photo, Apple will invent a fake side fill light and flatten the lighthing and make the whole thing unnatural.
I hate this and I want to turn it off. I want to turn it all off. I don’t want any stupid-ass AI messing with my photos it is tedious and I wish it would go away. I feel this way about most AI but especially in my photo editing. Not because I have any bias towards “assistants” — if they can do their job, great (an example that works well: Auto-complete in MacOS Spotlight search). But 90% of the time they suck, we are guinea pigs, and our personal work suffers for it. This is very much true for photos.
Painfully, Apple does let you access the un-altered image, but only in uncompressed form. And these AppleRaw uncompressed photos are huge. And I am very close to my Dropbox storage limit, and they don’t offer a larger amount of storage unless I pretend I am a company. I don’t have the infrastructure to handle a massive amount of uncompressed images. Also, I am fine with compression — Apple .heic is actually very good. I just don’t want alteration. And I don’t want to develop some new workflow where I do all the compressing on every image between phone download and Dropbox upload that is not in the cards for me. I could do it but I ain’t got time for that nonsense.
So, Apple, please: Let me have compressed but otherwise unaltered images as an option. Please please please.
Also, Marques Brownlee is black and he only touched upon this a little bit, but did acknowledge that phone makers were historically slower to get accurate skin tones on black people than white people. And, you know, he’s the judge of these cameras, he’s the tech reviewer, and like anyone, he’s gonna care if his camera takes a good picture of his own face. And this impacts his ratings (he does a separate ratings and awards program in addition to the community-voted tournament). And it makes me think that very soon it is inevitable that phone manufacturers, with their abundant AI and image recognition and shit, are going to start including a “MKHD” color profile in their software. Kinda like when VW cars sensed they were being tested for emissions and adjusted the emissions accordingly.
Got an Ambient playlist for you today. All new stuf I think? Two by this artist 36, whom I know nothing about, but my god are they prolific I swear every week there is something new by them. OH. Right. And the Bones and All soundtrack. So good. Trent and Atticus bang out another one. Real difference between them and the other insanely prolific soundtrack duo with roots in the old Goth scene. Feels like every Nick/Warren soundtrack is kinda samey, but there’s a lot more variety to the Trent/Atticus ones. Okay maybe this is unfair. Also this sells short other successful ex-gothy soundtrack composers like Graeme Revell and Clint Mansell. Were PWEI goth? Eh. Topic for another day. (No. They weren’t).
Have a lovely weekend. Be free. Take a walk. Hug your loved ones. Talk Monday.
Glad you are feeling better and out of quarantine. I may be the only goofball, but I didn’t get a playlist link and also can’t find it in your public list on Spotify.