Author Archives: danijel

AI

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Here’s the lifecycle of the AI experiment in a software development company:

Honeymoon phase: “AI greatly increases productivity, we can reduce the number of programmers, get the product finished more quickly and gain a competitive edge; let’s use as much of it as possible and evaluate coders by token use, because it’s a productivity multiplier so coders who use more AI are more useful to the company”.

Greed phase: “AI greatly reduces or completely negates the differences between programmer skill levels; it just requires precise instructions. This means we can eliminate expensive programmers and replace them with writers of precise instructions for the AI. This is a generic job that requires far less training and qualifications and makes the employees easily replaceable and cheap. Oh goody.”

Mature phase: “We no longer hold any competitive advantage since everybody uses the AI. Also, our code base became a black box since no human in the company can actually inspect it and evaluate AI’s work. We are experiencing unfixable bugs, random outages, and AI intelligence level drops that make it impossible to understand its previous work, let alone fix it. The customers are complaining, but we can’t do anything about it now since our entire code base is AI-produced and AI-maintained and our human employees are all merely human interface for the AI. All our human coders either quit after we offered them pay cuts and/or limited promotion potential, or we fired them. We might have to start looking for programmers to supervise the AI, but since the code complexity is enormous, the cost would be order of magnitude greater than what we started with. Also, since we started experiencing outages and service degradation, the customers started leaving, and we lost 30% of revenue because they refuse to pay for our “AI slop”. We don’t actually have the finances that can handle the cost of employing high-end coders.”

Nightmare phase: “The AI providers understood that they have us hooked and are steadily increasing the token prices for the last year. They are also introducing tiered pricing scheme, where only the top tier is useful for our needs, but it’s astronomically priced and we can no longer afford it. Our token consumption went hyperbolic since the AI constantly generates problems that require enormous numbers of tokens to resolve. Also, there are all kinds of sanctions so American and Chinese providers are limiting access to their most useful models. We lost more than half of our customer base because they say our product became AI slop; the web interface is crashing, the data contains all kinds of nonsense, every now and then things get deleted or show nonsensical results, and they are done with us. We need to start downscaling just to keep the lights on, but if we do so, the product will instantly stop working because nobody will be able to control the AI’s blunders and we might as well close the doors. Why did we even think AI was a good idea in the first place?”

Why not 40?

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The fact that I bought the FE 50mm f/2.5 G is kind of surprising even to me, because I originally contemplated the 40mm; in fact, Sony made the set of 24mm, 40mm and 50mm with almost the same look and dimensions, and out of the three, I chose Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN rather than the 24mm f/2.8 G, and 50mm G rather than the 40mm. So, what’s with that?

Well, it’s not like I’m collecting the Pokemon so that I’d want to have a matching set or something. I watched the reviews and the Sigma 24mm appealed to me more because it has better corner sharpness wide open, in fact it’s great from wide open onwards. Both lenses are great, but for my needs the Sigma felt better, it’s much better uncorrected than the Sony, and I don’t care about aperture at 24mm.

Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN

As for the 40mm, I initially liked the idea but then I figured out I like it mostly because I’ve had my brain flooded with all sorts of reviews that are hyping it to an incredible degree, almost as if Sony was paying them to do it… Oh wait. 🙂 Also, I was narrowing my choice of a light walkaround prime between the Sigma 65mm f/2 DG DN, and the Sony 50mm f/2.5 G, because both were at bargain prices used. The 40mm G, however, was kind of overpriced used, likely because of the hype, and the fact that I was looking at the longer focal length alternative meant that a 40mm would be a step in the wrong direction. After all, if I want a wider walkaround lens, the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 zoom is actually preferable, and when I actually want everything sharp and wide, the Sigma 24mm is much more to my liking.

FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6

The 40mm is hyped as the best of both 35mm and 50mm, but I already see the 35mm as the middle ground between a 24mm and a 50mm, so I kind of don’t see the point. I use the 24mm for things people would use a 35mm for, and 35mm for what people would use a 50mm for, and I’m actually trying to learn 50mm properly since it’s been neglected in my arsenal for… well, since I started doing photography. I would always go either wider or narrower. So, going with the 40mm doesn’t actually fit the nature of the exercise. Likewise for the 65mm Sigma; it tries to be a 85mm while pretending to still be a 50mm. The closeup shots made with it look much smoother than the 40mm and 50mm Sony, but guess what – so do the shots with all the other lenses that I already own, so it would be merely fitting into a focal length gap between the 50mm f/1.2 GM and the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art, and that’s a gap that I don’t actually need to be filled, since the 85mm is already something that fills a gap between the 135mm and 50mm. If I wanted every transitional focal length filled, I would have bought a 70-200mm zoom. What I want are distinct perspectives from “primary” focal lengths – ultrawide, wide, mid-range, light telephoto and telephoto.

Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art

So, I basically wanted a replacement for the 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty” that annoys me with its hazy closeup performance when I want crispness, and with a deluge of CA whenever I point it toward anything contrasty. Also, I wanted something with the aperture ring and AF/MF switch on the lens. Also, I wanted something that is very small and light, so that I can put the camera with it in the beach backpack with the towels and it would fit. I scratched the Sigma 45mm from the list because it had unsharp closeup performance even worse than the lens I was trying to replace, and I scratched the Sony 40mm G off the list because I don’t like riding hype trains. It’s probably a great lens, but the 50mm was optically very similar and I got it used for a pittance, because all the hype followers went for the 40mm.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

What do I think about it, now that I went out with it three times? I like when something does exactly what I expected and bought it for. There are zero surprises; the reviews were accurate. It’s crisp, the colours are clean and great, there are no optical defects worth talking about, and it creates pictures that very much resemble the “Four Thirds” look – you can blur out the background, but not completely, so there’s a structure and texture to it, rather than the sea of toffee that I get with the wide aperture glass.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

Minolta MD 35-70mm f/3.5

It also reminds me of the old Minolta glass, because those lenses had similar bokeh; somewhat textured and gritty, but guess what: sometimes texture is what actually works for a picture, and sometimes smoothness fails. For me, a walkaround lens must be able to blur out the background well enough, and this one does; most shots I see when walking to the beach or similar places where I would take this lens are details that caught the ray of light, or a piece of dry wood in the tall grass, or something of that sort. This is what I tested the lens on, and I’m very happy with the results.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

Does it have any drawbacks? Not really. Ergonomically, it’s tiny so everything is kind of crowded together, so I have to get used to it; the Sigma 24mm has better ergonomics, such as manual focus ring not competing for space with the aperture ring, but the complaint is minor. Also, the de-click switch is a waste of space and I could do without it; sure, the video people would want that. The lens shade is ugly and I took it off, to no ill effect because the lens is very flare resistant as it is.

I like it when things just work.

Harsh light

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I took a few more pictures with FE 50mm f/2.5 G and A7CR;

Betting on poor odds.

Lightsails

As I already said, the background blur is harsh compared to the wide aperture lenses, but is in fact quite similar to what I used to get on the Four Thirds format, or with Minolta MD 35-70mm f/3.5 on film; somewhere between harsh and smooth. It has a particular aesthetics that I like for such shots, where the contrast is high and the shadows are harsh. But when you’re trying to catch the feeling of the long August heat wave, I think it’s just right. It would also be great for depicting the crispness of fresh snow, but I’m kinda out of that at the moment. 🙂

Late summer

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I took A7CR with the new lens to the beach today just to see what I can get, and initially I wasn’t very pleased since the pictures looked like summery postcards. But then I thought: well it’s summer in Dalmatia, what else are they supposed to look like?

Also, it’s quite obvious why we had so many fires.

Everything is dried up like gunpowder from the prolonged heat wave and no rain whatsoever. In fact it’s a miracle we had so few fires. Hopefully we get a rainy period soon because the vegetation is on its last legs. The dried-up ikebana stuff does lend itself well to photography, though. 🙂

Edit: BTW this is a good example of what I was saying about needing small but high quality 50mm lens for shots that don’t require extreme depth of field, or night vision. If I’m going to shoot a detail that needs to be sharp, or separation of the planes needs to be slight and subtle, the small lens will do fine. But what’s the big lens for, then?

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

It’s for making magic out of chaos.

Projections

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I’m not done yet. 🙂

I know it’s a projection. I like the series because I identify with the main character and I project a future for the character that I hope to have personally. It’s fucking obvious, after all. I mean, you have a character who wakes up as a demon larva in a total shithole, and understands that she needs to get stronger if she wants to be more of herself, and I project a future where she gets her old memories and self back, only upgraded by her new experiences. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what I’m doing here. Of course the main character is nothing like me in many ways, but I don’t care as long as I see the main trend of similarity; basically, someone threw you into a pit, you have no memories other than the desire for something you feel you should be but can’t access, and it powers all your efforts to dig yourself out. And, of course, the stronger the soul, the stronger the drive.

Also, I somewhat envy the simplicity and clarity of the system. To Salvos, you just need to kill progressively stronger enemies, and you level. Of course, you need to make choices that determine what kind of a person you end up being, but still, it’s incredibly straightforward. Here, it’s all vague, unclear, indistinct, and the actual method of spiritual evolution is hidden under seven veils and I had to figure it out myself; everything everybody thinks is superficial and more harmful than useful. So, it’s much harder than merely killing monsters 20 levels above you, which is why I envy the system from the books and this envy feeds the appeal.

I also like that the author doesn’t sexualise it. In lots of modern stuff I encountered everything seems to be about sex, and everything else looks like merely ways to package sex. It’s boring, and it hides absence of actual ideas. Here, this part was marginalised and this brings everything else to the surface – the way characters think and feel about all sorts of things. Conversations aren’t merely a way to get to the romantic part; they are the actual point. When someone like Orgaf admires Salvos, he does so because of her achievements – she killed the Lich of the Plaguelands. He saw her fight a Hellabomination that was an evolution and over 40 levels above her. He saw her turn back time in order to land a hit on Belzu, he saw her endure and keep fighting after almost getting killed, and after he himself almost gave up. He saw her kill Ira, whom he fought and lost badly, barely surviving the casual encounter. He saw how she spent the last drops of her potion of regeneration to revive him after he was almost killed, and they were in a rough spot at the moment, where he knew her secret and it wasn’t certain to her that he would protect it; it would have been so easy for her to just let him die or finish him herself; instead, she had him nurtured to full strength and left Willy to care for him. The characters are admired for their actions, and when a meritocrat like Orgaf, who spent his entire life killing monsters in various dark dens, searching for treasures to loot, and who is known for speaking about lvl. 100-149 people as “those useless Diamonds” is fangirling over Salvos, you know he has good reasons for it. Also, when Helena Warshade (I internally call her Helena Ravenclaw for obvious reasons), who is Clayton’s equal in magical power and one of the two highest ranked human Mages, and who actually doesn’t like Salvos very much and is very skeptical of her, teams up with Orgaf and Salvos to deal with shit, you know it’s been earned. There’s no stupid artificial sexual tension or jealousy or rivalry interposed in the plot to cloud the important matters. I mean, sure, it exists, in case of Amanda who has a crush on Daniel and is jealous of Salvos and it’s completely obvious, but it’s very localised. It has a function within the plot; the plot isn’t a mere instrument to sell you the sexual content. That’s very realistic, in fact, despite the modern opinion that sex is the main thing people are concerned with, and everything else is merely a way to package it. I am honestly glad to have found a piece of modern literature that contextualises sex and romance properly, instead of drowning everything in it, the way processed food is drowned in sugar. It’s there because somewhere in the margins Edithe is having a romantic relationship with Hadrian, Daniel has a crush on Salvos which she takes nine books to figure out and only with Amanda’s help, and so on, but it’s one thing among twenty, and prioritised below top ten. The important parts aren’t when someone had sex, they are when they figured something out, overcame something important, when something was revealed that changes everything, or when someone saved a friend from mortal danger at great cost and hazard to themselves. The scenes when Salvos is half-dead from pushing a Skill too far and is completely incapacitated and in excruciating pain, and her companions carry her, protect her and deal with shit for her are much more important and telling. For instance, the journey of Edithe from “Demon! Let’s kill it!” when she first met Salvos, through hostility, guarded tolerance, cautious friendship, to profound friendship that developed in the Plaguelands, where Salvos kept saving her life every moment of every day and twice brought her back from the brink of death and mortal danger at extreme cost to herself where she lost her wings, an arm and almost her life fighting an almost unkillable foe because he had Edithe hostage and was going to kill her the way he killed all those other redheads over the centuries. It starts with Edithe being very reluctant to put Salvos on guard duty, because Demon, to Edithe carrying the wounded Salvos in her arms and protecting her with her life. It’s stuff that develops over nine books of material, very gradually. You don’t get cheap stuff here – no easy rewards, no deep emotions that develop overnight for no good reason. You have deep history between the characters who don’t start as friends. Things don’t just happen. Salvos’ roommate in Mavos Academy wants to kill her when she finds out she’s a Demon, and it takes quite a lot of work for Salvos to get past the dangerous point, and after that there’s lots of suspicion before they get to the point where Saffron would throw herself into fire for Salvos. It takes multiple books to get there. They get to know each other and become friends in book two. By book nine, Salvos is the point of inspiration of Saffron’s entire family; they all look up to her and try to live up to her example, after she saved their lives multiple times with acts of outright heroism. It’s not cheaply earned acclaim; it’s someone flying into the heart of the worst battle in the world at that point to save your family from certain death, and then gets you all out and stays to deal with things, and then things like that keep repeating until you all owe your lives to her ten times over. It’s earned, it’s solid “show, not tell” writing style over multiple volumes. Salvos didn’t just accidentally get famous over one event. It’s multiple instances where she fought, lost, fought again, and barely won, saving people who watched and told stories later. For instance, there’s a group of three adventurers she meets in the second book, and whom we follow through the books at the margins of events, who are so inspired by her that they keep looking up to her and doing more daring things to rise up, because next time they meet, they want her to be proud of them; she, in return, saves their lives on multiple occasions because she remembered them.

Also, there’s the sophisticated arc with the Devil, who looks like a crazy person alleviating his eternal boredom by messing with people when we first meet him; dangerous, deranged, nigh-omnipotent mythical being. He first takes notice of Salvos, then gets to like her, then as he mentors her he develops true feelings for her and adopts her as his daughter, and she’s first annoyed by him but respects him, and then as he helps her develop two grand skills and twenty levels, she feels true gratitude and love for him, and that has so much power that it starts to heal his broken soul, eventually succeeding, and she’s the first person in 50000 years that actually reached him. Also, it’s an arc from book two to book eleven. It’s not some cheap trick, not something that just happens because reasons. She begins by being his dupe, and ends up being his true family.

As I said, “Salvos” is not what one would think it is. It’s deep stuff packaged in shallow nonsense, not the other way around, as it unfortunately tends to be the case with much of literature.