trop

There's a band called Stoney Spring which has a somewhat caustic 2013 song "Jobs" which touches on this. Excerpts:

  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For what he's done to our bodies and our brains
  I blame you and me for making Steve Jobs feel like what he done was right
  
  ...
  
  And I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For turning rock-and-roll into a store at the mall
  I blame you and me for accepting the seduction
  Of being normal
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For driving a spike through the heart of the public space
  I blame you and me
  For retreating into fantasy, fingering our half-formed thoughts
  In our sleek sexy crumbling civilization
  
  ...
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For making us timid and effete
  I blame you and me
  For paying Steve Jobs to turn those sins into a lifestyle
  
  And a product
  And an industry
  And an identity
  A badge of honor
  
  ...

> 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.

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.

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".)