excite1997

> The principles involved haven't changed much in the intervening decades.

My problem with many old-time tutors is that they refuse to recognize that photography has gotten a lot easier. We don't need to learn the craft the way they did.

For example, you don't need stuff like the "sunny 16" rule of exposure if you have real-time previews in the camera. You use visual feedback, usually with better accuracy.

In the same vein, you probably don't need to learn about flash guide numbers when modern continuous LED illumination covers 99% of use cases without any guesswork.

Or, you don't need to learn about optical filters (perhaps except for the polarizer) when almost all their functions can be accomplished in software without loss in fidelity.

I think you're debating a strawman, though. Sure, there are delusional / ignorant goldbugs who make stupid arguments, but you can find that in pretty much any domain. There are also reasonable people, including heterodox economists, who understand the history of currencies and monetary systems, and still advocate for a return to pegged currencies or for precious metals as a part of a diversified portfolio. You don't have to agree with them, but ad hominems are probably unnecessary.

I mean, it's not even that fringe is you consider that Central Banks sure hoard a lot of gold specifically because they see it as useful in certain (bad) economic scenarios.

I don't think that's the entire story. Google actively pushed WebP, for example recommending it to webmasters in their page speed evaluation tools (and site performance, as judged by Google, is a factor in your search ranking).

If they invested the same resources into improving and promoting JPEG XL, we'd be using JPEG XL. I'm not saying the outcome is objectively worse, but ultimately, they did pick the winner here.

I think that's a fair argument, except they almost certainly did not apply the same yardstick to WebP.

Sure, it's easier than ever to break the law, but not sure that's a fair argument.

In many parts of Europe - e.g., in Germany and in the UK - the purchase of many common "dangerous" reagents is regulated and illegal without a license that isn't available to hobbyists. The government takes the view that it's simply not a legitimate hobby.

In the US, the situation is better, but some essential chemicals are unobtainable due to DEA legislation (iodine, phosphorous). Many others are subject to DHS and DEA monitoring (including KYC mandates) and a patchwork of state laws that prompted most reagent manufacturers to stop shipping to non-commercial customers altogether - and in recent years, also caused them to also crack down on resellers (requiring every reseller to attest that they will not re-ship to civilians). In the past five years or so, eBay also had major crackdowns, banning everything from sulfuric acid to potassium iodide. So did Amazon.

And that's before we get into raids on YouTube chemists, etc. Heck, Texas prohibited people from buying or owning laboratory glassware until recently. Wikipedia has a good summary.

The internet made chemistry easier for a while by facilitating trade, but that era is coming to a halt.

He frames this as a behavior problem, not content problem. The claim is that your objective as a moderator should to get rid of users or behaviors that are bad for your platform, in the sense that they may drive users away or make them less happy. And that if you do that, you supposedly end up with a fundamentally robust and apolitical approach to moderation. He then proceeds to blame others for misunderstanding this model when the outcomes appear politicized.

I think there is a gaping flaw in this reasoning. Sometimes, what drives your users away or makes them less happy is challenging the cultural dogma of a particular community, and at that point, the utilitarian argument breaks down. If you're on Reddit, go to /r/communism and post a good-faith critique of communism... or go to /r/gunsarecool and ask a pro-gun-tinged question about self-defense. You will get banned without any warning. But that ban passes the test outlined by the OP: the community does not want to talk about it precisely because it would anger and frustrate people, and they have no way of telling you apart from dozens of concern trolls who show up every week. So they proactively suppress dissent because they can predict the ultimate outcome. They're not wrong.

And that happens everywhere; Twitter has scientifically-sounding and seemingly objective moderation criteria, but they don't lead to uniform political outcomes.

Once you move past the basics - getting rid of patently malicious / inauthentic engagement - moderation becomes politics. There's no point in pretending otherwise. And if you run a platform like Twitter, you will be asked to do that kind of moderation - by your advertisers, by your users, by your employees.

Strategic disinformation that can be attributed to foreign operations? Maybe, although it would probably be better to expose, not suppress it.

Taking down parody accounts and flagging people for COVID conspiracy theories, as documented in the article? Probably less so.

What do you mean? The current crop of high-end cameras is absolutely amazing in that respect. Take Canon R5, where usable ISO settings extend at least to 32,000 (and the upper limit is 102,400).

> questionable to a pure utilitarian.

So is most of human existence. "Efficient allocation of all resources" isn't a common life goal...