> In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment?
I can't speak for the OP, but I can certainly tell the difference between photos taken with my different camera gear. I have an iPhone, a Fuji T3, and a Nikon D810 to compare against.
The Nikon is 10 years old and still a lot sharper than the other ones, despite them all being years newer than the Nikon. In challenging conditions (wet, low light, etc.) the difference is even more noticeable.
For example, a picture like that one would be difficult to take on a phone because of the snow. First of all wet fingers would make using the phone nearly impossible. Even if it didn't, there's a good chance the focus would be off due to the snow in the foreground. And the sharpness of the Nikon blows the other cameras away. In the linked photo, do a 1:1 zoom of the fire department logo above/leftleft of the front wheel and you can read the text, including the small "EMS", "Colorado", etc. around the border. Phones just won't get that detail. And that's an old camera.
Besides the image quality, the DSLR is just easier and more comfortable to use once I learned the controls. There are no dumb menus and touch screens and I can adjust settings and take pictures with big mittens on even when it's wet/snowy/raining. Meanwhile, my iPhone is completely unusable with wet fingers.
I use my phone to take pictures most of the time, but if I'm going out intentionally to take pictures, I always take a real camera.
Here you are comparing a decent bluetooth speaker to a pretty good wireless active speaker to a hifi setup. I think the original comment about audiophiles is them wasting money on upgrading the hifi setup with all kinds of audio cabling, bi-wiring, etc.
That would be similar to upgrading to that one tiny bit sharper lens which otherwise has the same aperture etc.
Yes that's more accurate. And it's about measurability. Even with that tiny bit sharper lens, you can probably point to an actual measurable difference in the photos. Whether that makes them "better" remains subjective.
Audio is a weird world where everyone lives in their own experience and the externally measurable things often don't really translate to the visceral experience. So everyone kinda comes up with their own tribal knowledge that's often more superstition than science, and a lot of people just tend to assume they need "the best" in lossless files and analog whatever and gold-plated this and that.
> But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised.
I don't know if that matches my experience. I've seen plenty of places where the dev teams complain about tech debt and other kludges costing too much, slowing them down and causing other problems, but management don't want to "waste time re-writing working code".
But now that management read on linkedin they can jump on the AI bandwagon by having the team use AI to fix tech debt, there's suddenly time to work on it.
Eliminating manual toil seems like a huge win for LLMs. There are a ton of straightforward-but-tedious projects that no one wants to fund because they take 2 dev weeks to implement and the result is a hard to quantify quality of codebase improvement. Some of these can now be handled by an LLM in a day and so they suddenly become extremely tractable. You don’t have to embrace vibe coding to benefit from cheap debt pay down.
That's pretty optimistic. First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off - LLMs aren't exactly making their lives better.
And I'm not talking about cases where an AI can do things faster. We have a few tech debt tickets at work right now where using an AI will take the same amount of time, because the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.
It's silly, and I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.
> First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off
I was referring to the sort of work that just never gets funded. Cleanup, refactoring.
If you have business critical toil being done by people who now get laid off, that is obviously a cause for concern.
> the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.
So AI has convinced your management to let you pay down tech debt? Seems like a win.
The company I work for uses a contracted recruiter for hiring, and the other day he was telling me that they're seeing a huge amount of scams, fake candidates, and "hands off" applications where people are trying to use AI to do basically the whole interview process - apprently even video interviews. We've mandated at least one on-site interview just so we can be sure we're getting actual people.
And most of these job candidates aren't even doing it maliciously, just "life hacking" the interview process. It's going to be a shit show if organized criminals start using AI.
It’s already happened tho, I recall a case in 24 ish, where a person got phished into joining a zoom call with their CFO and team. They were told to transfer money and they complied.
Heck, I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin. I had to look at it twice to reassure myself that it really was a scam. This was immediately after the event, and YouTube very helpfully suggested it for me.
Then there was the paper with Bruce Schneier as an author, about how LLMs result in significant targeting improvements and process efficiency gains for criminals. These enhancements mean that entire demographics that were too poor to be worth targetting, are now profitable.
Plus this is all for people in the developed world, who still haven’t seen the worst of it.
In the majority world, shit was already fucked six ways to Sunday. For example, in India, things are so outrageously, that people who deal with fraud are relieved when people lose less than $100k.
Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
> I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin
I think around that time there was a trend of phishing large YT channels and uploading deepfaked crypto ads. The channel's popularity ensured the recommendation algorithm showed it to many people.
> Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
That's probably true, but not totally unexpected. I suspect HN readers are relatively tech savvy, and probably do an above average job avoiding the seedier parts of the internet and generally know to be cautious online.
How they're raised makes a big difference, but natural instinct is natural instinct. It's just like how chihuahuas were bred to be small, but pit bulls were bred to fight other dogs.
Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.
As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated to fix anybody's bug.
It's not like they were nagging him about it - it's been years, and they had major releases in the mean time. Quite possible it was fixed as a side effect of something else.
> It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.
I want to draw out this comment because it's so antithetical to what Apple marketed that it stood for (if you remember, the wonderful 1984 commercial Apple created; which was very much against the big behemoths of the day and the way they operated).
We're at the point where we've normalized crappy behavior and crappy software so long as the bottom line keeps moving up and to the right on the graph.
Not, "Let's build great software that people love.", but "How much profit can we squeeze out? Let's try to squeeze some more."
We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction. That's why it feels like quality in general is getting worse, profit became the end goal, not the by-product of a customer-centric focus. We've numbed ourselves to the pain and discomfort we endure and cause every single day in the name of profit.
> We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction.
It's easy to blame the companies, but if the consumers keep buying the shitty products then there's no reason for the companies to spend money fixing stuff. I stopped using Apple long ago because I thought the software quality was going to crap. A lot of people won't do that, and so they get what Apple gives them.
Still, as a software engineer, I don't see a problem closing out old, abandoned bugs. Even for a company of Apple's size, there's limited time and sometimes it can be literally impossible to fix all of the bugs in a way that satisfies the people opening them. Given that, their approach for deciding which bugs to close seems reasonable and more fair then other ways of doing it.
Sorry, but what this is supposed to be. It's just a spinning WebGL model?
I wish they would rewind back to using Presto and being an independent Norwegian company, but I'm sure everybody who made it a great browser back then is long gone.
Yeah, count me out. I don't even like how the world's played out in the 40 years I've been here. Imagine waking up in 200 years and finding out 90% of the world is still poor, we can't feed everybody, the rich still get to do whatever they want, we're still warring for no good reason, etc.
So... same as the whole of human history? You're upset that your generation isn't going to fix all of the problems of civilization that have existed forever?
I don't know why you think I'm upset. It's not my responsibility to fix the world's problems.
But I don't have much faith in humanity to make things better, so I'm not sure I'd want to see a future with another 200 years of people making things worse.
I guess I would say I'm happy to live my life now and let the future can take care of itself.
What a waste of time.
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