Author Archives: danijel

Madness

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Trump is pretending to have talks to Iran, while Iran is trying to understand what this guy is even talking about. In reality, he’s deceiving the stock markets to lower the price of oil, while at the same time buying time for his Marine expedition team to assemble and arrive. I don’t even understand what he intends to do; in a 21st century battlefield ridden with suicide drones, they are going to get wiped out within days, and then he’ll have to either run with tail between his legs, with losses too high to justify, or use nukes. Israel will certainly cheer for the latter option.

The insane ideologues of the EU are going to be completely incapable of dealing with the crisis that is going to hit, except by introducing more fascism, which has always been their solution to everything. Lock people down, tell them to eat cake if there’s no bread, introduce 256th round of sanctions to Russia and preach bullshit to China. And by all means, keep virtue signalling something about windmills, solar, democracy and human rights.

Israel is trying to force God to send them the Messiah, instead of accepting the one he actually did send two thousand years ago. They actually seem to be working on enlarging their territory, as if that’s going to solve anything.

Trump’s people in the military seem to be thinking they are fighting the battle of Armageddon, trying to force Jesus to come for the second time and tell everybody that America is his chosen land or something.

All in all, in comparison, North Korea and Iran currently look like the adults in the room. The entire West has gone completely bonkers.

Me, I took a few pictures with my new camera last night. It felt so much like the Olympus Pen, that I actually thought “too bad that there’s no more light so the image is going to fall apart at ISO 1600”, and then I remembered that it’s not. Also, I keep expecting autofocus to suck, and it never does. Interestingly, I don’t think of it as a Sony, because the way I use it and the lens I have on it trigger different associations. For all intents and purposes, it’s A7RV in a different package, but the package matters so much that it feels nothing like A7RV; until I look at the images.

Both little lenses I bought are candy. No flare even with the sun in the frame, no CA, and crazy sharp. Also, composing wide and having everything sharp is interesting after a period of shallow depth of field.

Before sunset

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I made a mistake with timing yesterday, and went to Sveta Nedilja an hour too early, so instead of a sunset I got to see the most contrasty, harsh sunlight. Of course, after we got tired and left, the golden light started. 🙂

This had an advantage, though: instead of the typical sunsety shots I had to look for things that are actually interesting on their own and regardless of the sunset, which is an example of photography in bad light I was talking about before.

Australopitecus hvarensis 🙂

This is exactly the kind of shots that I would normally take with my phone, because the light is so harsh I wouldn’t bother taking the camera, and then I would see interesting motives and end up with iPhone photo quality. This time, I took the A7CR with the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 lens.

There’s one thing I noticed – I got dust on the sensor two days in a row. Either that’s because I was careless when changing lenses, or the collapsible lens “inhales” air into the camera, or it’s just that the A7CR, unlike the A7RV, doesn’t have ultrasonic dust cleaning; it’s hard to tell. The dust speck was prominently featured in all pictures and I had to clone it out, and I need to pay more attention to those things in the future.

 

Look-a-Leica

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The A7CR finaly arrived:

Looks somewhat like a Leica M, but not really; I got the duotone version because it gives me a slightly nostalgic vibe due to similarity with my old Minolta X-300, which also had the silvery plastic on top.

I don’t know why everybody shits on the EVF. It’s perfectly fine; better, in fact, than the one on A7II. It’s smaller than the one on A7RV, but guess what, so is every other viewfinder out there, which is actually why I got the A7RV. They each have their own merit: A7RV is something I would take when I’m trying to get macro shots of bees. A7CR is something I would take when I’m looking for wideangle compositions and I don’t want to carry a huge brick. It’s something like Canon EOS 3 and Minolta X-300 or Leica M – in both cases you have the same film inside, but depending on what you need you can make either a light or a heavy setup.

Fejka

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I’ve been wondering why LLM fake-AI systems manage to be so effective, since they are essentially glorified autocomplete; basically, they are a neural network based probability engine that determines what’s the most likely next word in a sentence.

Maybe because most humans are a neural-network based probability engine that’s also very good at figuring out the next thing that’s expected for them to say. And then this crossed my mind:

“FEJKA artificial potted plants don’t require a green thumb. Perfect when you have better things to do than water plants and pick up dead leaves. You’ll have everyone fooled because they look so lifelike.”

That’s what most people are. They are a fejka. LLM systems merely stumbled upon this fact by accident. A fake artificial intelligence can learn to finish sentences, paragraphs and entire articles in passable ways because that’s what fake human intelligence does – finish sentences in a “correct” way in order to avoid ridicule and punishment. Everybody knows what to say and all their conversations are formulaic and predictable to the point where someone learned how to make a computer system that does the same thing.

It’s not just text. People learn how to take photographs in a formulaic way that gets them acclaim and avoids ridicule. They learn how to have spiritual experiences that will get them acclaim and avoid ridicule, because they are of the exact same kind as everybody else’s, which is what created the idea of religions having the same origin and goal and it’s all the same thing. It’s because everybody has been copying homework from others. They are all fejka plastic potted plants. Looks like the real thing, but even better, because you don’t have to water it.

Now that I think about it more, human brain seems to be very good at doing the human autocomplete thing on autopilot when there’s no soul in the driver’s seat. The corollary is that spiritual awakening is the point where a soul wakes up in the body and actually starts perceiving things, paying attention and controlling actions – “oh fuck, I’m driving a car”. That’s why actual souls can be perceived as weird compared to a fejka NPC – a fejka knows what it has to say next. An actual soul has to figure it out, and is likely to say the “wrong thing”.