I'd argue that it's more akin to ingredient labeling for food so you can at least have some confidence that you're not reading mindless generated slop. It's not perfect, and the writing can still be bad, but at least it's you're trying to avoid subjecting yourself to LLM generated garbage.
Assuming that you're correct and it is a monoculture plantation, they did not remove trees to make space for planting other species, they removed trees to make space for a data center.
If the translation is correct, Finland converted about 14,000 hectares of forest in the 2010s per year (without replacement), and cut about 173,000 hectares per year in general (with replacement).
I suspect how much people think this was an honest mistake with their 330 hectares (apparently following the forestry rules but missing EIA) will depend on people's priors.
What an odd thing to have a LLM make. There are already plenty of options for existing software for film scanning. I use negPy (https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy) to scan photos with a digital camera setup, but it interfaces with quite a few film scanners (anything supported by SANE) and handles inversion and editing quite nicely. You can then export to any other software to do image based tagging, though adding dates and location is still going to be somewhat tedious (negPy does have a bulk edit functionality that helps with this).
Also the mouse take-over is no bueno on the site. And some of the fonts are really grainy.
I don't understand either, not only are there open source tools available for scanning, but there are also colour-calibration slides which can be purchased. They are a known exposure/colour profile, allowing you to correct for your particular type of film and scanner properties, essentially calibrating conversion of raw negative to a correctly balanced positive image.
Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film. By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors. Plus it costs a fortune and costs more to develop. Digital? I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took on a tablet and if there aren’t any where everybody has their eyes open I can take another.
Like all analog workflows the attraction is the process itself. The decision path is one way, path dependency is permanent. You can think of it as a roguelike (the game genre) approach to creative expression. Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops. Analog workflows, pen and ink, paint, wet plate photography, audio recording on tape, film photography, etc. all hem in the artist in different ways. It is the play inside the constraints and honing the craft that make them enjoyable to do.
There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.
One example of benefiting creatively from working with constraints. Back in the 1980s, I read a comment from a newspaper sports editor that went something like this -- "Back when sports photographers used the big 4x5 Graflex camera, a guy would go out to a game with 5 plates and come back with 5 usable shots. Now guys use motorized 35 mm cameras, shoot several rolls, and often come back without a single good shot."
> Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
Speaking for myself, I like film for a few reasons.
The wide variety of form factors keeps things interesting. Yesterday I went to shoot a sunrise, and I took a panoramic 6x17, a pinhole 6x12, and my TLR (which I didn’t shoot) at 6x6.
Everything about shooting film is more deliberate. Simply loading a medium format is typically time-consuming, developing the negatives, and if you’re lucky enough to have access to an enlarger, creating your own prints is very satisfying.
Slow but rewarding.
And I spend all day in front of a computer; it’s nice to have a very analog hobby.
Which is only important if all you care about is a straight line towards perfection. But imperfections can make a work interesting and spark creativity.
> I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took
That’s a feature for you, but for many it’s a bug. Friction matters. You can remove friction or add friction to change your behaviour and thus your outcome.
You seem to derive satisfaction from getting as good a photo as you can get straight away. Perhaps you even delete ones which look “wrong”. But other people prefer to carry on with the moment instead of pausing it to review what they just did. Whatever the photo will be, it will be, they don’t even think about it anymore until it’s time to get the film developed and relive the memories at that point. And because they had to make choices (film is expensive) they pay much more attention to each photo and appreciate it on a different level even if someone had their eyes closed.
There’s no right or wrong here, to each their own.
For me it's largely to avoid the temptation of things like being able to immediately review the photos and "I can take another".
I'm very much someone who wants a quick uncritical snap of a moment and very little interest in how well it's framed or how the people are looking though.
Also a bit sick of having thousands of photos that I'll never get around to curating into anything worth my time looking back on. They all just get dumped on an external hard drive and never looked back on.
RE: the cost it can be cheap enough. B&W is very easy to develop at home for not much and if you get a half frame camera you can get 72 shots from a single roll which can take an incredibly long amount of time to get through.
> By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors
Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?
>Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film. By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors.
1. The nostalgia comes from a few things, one of which is the nostalgia for the time and place where film was common, rather than for the film itself, the film becomes a hallmark or totem.
2. Kind of, but also not really. Besides the fact that there are many formats of film, it's possible to get >800 lp/mm of resolution in some films, and the best color films were in excess of 150 lp/mm. Even thinking about lp/mm obscures what film does, because with any analog format (this isn't just limited to photography), falloff outside of the resolving power of the medium is done on gradual curves, as film doesn't have "pixels". To a close approximation, it's only within the last 3-4 years that digital cameras have achieved equivalent resolution to color films, and they /still/ don't achieve equivalent resolution to fine art black and white films at full frame (35mm) size. Additionally, film and digital are fundamentally different not just in capture, but in expression. Digital images are emissive, while printed images are reflective, that is when you look at an image on your screen that image has uniform brightness defined by the backlight of the display and limited in color reproduction by its CRI and gamut, when you look at a printed image the brightness and color reproduction is limited by the print process and the room lighting, looking at a printed image under studio lighting, gallery lighting, or in sunlight has a higher perceptual quality than any digital image on any screen. Does that mean film is better than digital? No, not at all. You can print digital images too, and they will look better printed at high quality than they do on your screen when under good lighting conditions.
I primarily shoot digital these days, although I do occasionally use a 4x5 or medium format film camera. Having tried digital backs for medium format, I can strongly say that once you get outside of full frame, digital still has a long way to go to match the quality of film.
I liked to shoot slide film back when film was all there was.
From a utilitarian, “f/8 and be there” perspective, my iPhone today is way way better. I always have it with me and it handles pretty much any light condition I encounter, including near darkness.
And I took a 4/3 mirrorless digital body with a zoom lens to Africa recently, and got tons of sharp, well-exposed photos of wildlife.
But a slide is a picture, in a literal physical way. There’s no format or device needed. I hand it to anyone, and they can hold it up to a light and see the picture. It is a piece of art the way a sculpture is a piece of art; it embodies itself. I can keep it like a book, hand it over, pass it on. That is very cool, and looking through my old slides is satisfying to me in a way that opening up my laptop and scrolling through pixels is not.
This is why I love keeping an Olympus PEN-F w/ the Olympus BCL-15 f/8, which is a "body cap lens". It literally slides into my pocket even in tight jeans and gives me all you can expect out of a solid m4/3 camera with fixed aperture. It's not super-sharp, but so what, it's there and it captures interesting images. I really make an effort to only use my phone camera for taking pictures of receipts to submit to Concur, but I totally get the temptation, for those momentary snapshots a phone camera is so good these days, but since you like m4/3, thought you should know that things like the BCL exist.
Lots of reasons, but ones that matter to me: the batteries last for months, there’s no boot up time, and there’s no screen, which encourages you to keep your own eyes open.
> Also I cannot understand the nostalgia for film.
Why even put it in terms of ‘nostalgia’?
When someone takes up watercolor painting, do you also dismiss this as ‘nostalgia’? Why is film photography as a hobby any less interesting or legitimate on its own merits than making pottery the way it was made 10.000 years ago?
I often find it’s an older (even elderly) crowd that dismisses film-photography in this way. They maybe shot film when they were younger, discovered digital (which they always describe as being “objectively superior” - as though two totally different media can be compared this way), and then dismiss film users as somehow deluded ‘hipsters’ or as people merely indulging in nostalgia.
In my case, as someone who took up film photography 15 years ago, and shoot it alongside digital, I find film not only a more satisfying and thoughtful process, but also a superior artistic artifact: I prefer film’s color, the subtle ways that film handles highlight falloff, and even the ‘accidents’ that happen when chemical and light fuse to create an image.
Incidentally there are more and more ways to enjoy the entire process without a darkroom nowadays: a changing bag and a unit like the AGO film processor from Vintage Visual [0] make it simple to just take out and pack away all that’s needed to go from photograph to scan and print without a lot of space or mass of hassle.
Objectively superior: I can shoot basketball in an indoor arena at 6400 ISO and it looks great with digital noise reduction. With antishake on the Olympus 4/3 camera I can bird with a 600 mm lens that is the length of a 300 lens and can be handheld!. Sharpness is superior. I can take group photos and know I got everybody.
A micro four thirds camera is objectively inferior to film, because it doesn't have the same visual/perceptual resolution. That said, IBIS and high dynamic range sensors are amazing technology that we're all thankful for. Also, you can handhold 600mm lenses on full frame cameras also, Nikon for instance has telephoto primes that use phresnel lens elements and are definitely handholdable. I shoot the 600mm f/6.3, 500mm PF f/5.6, 400mm f/4.5, and 300mm PF f/4 all handheld, and while the 600 is on the tail end of what is handholdable and you give up some light for reducing the size/weight (mostly through a smaller objective), it's entirely doable. So your example would have been better looking at full frame mirrorless. Sure, m4/3 lenses are significantly lighter/smaller, but they're also not remotely comparable to film.
How lately? They have been releasing quite frequently, and have worked a bit to clean up the UI and workflows after adding a ton of new features. I've been using it and it's working quite well for me after version 0.60-ish
About a month ago I think? It didn't have enough options to run the Coolscan 4000 ED I have lying about, at least not reliably, and I don't think it had any batch options (might be wrong about that). I don't really mind going through VueScan first but I'll take a look again soon and see if that area has been improved.
CoolScan support has improved a lot in the last month or so. I don't have one so I cant comment in practice, but its a very active project and I'd definitely encourage you to submit bugs if you have a coolscan.
Ooh great I'll check it out. I have a couple of them actually, although I couldn't seem to get one working through the complex series of adapters I had, so I'm gonna set up a new machine with an actual FireWire card and reassess it then. I do at least have one that works in VueScan so I can at least provide some feedback (it's a modded 4000 ED that does whole rolls).
I feel like if anything LLMs have reduced coding/software to "throw as much as possible at the wall and see what sticks". It feels quite shortsighted and wasteful, especially considering that humanity needs to get better about how it produces and consumes energy. It's sort of bleak.
Which is a bit terrifying and removes the ‘engineering’ component of a critical part of the job, in exchange for slot machine / pray to ai gods…which comes with disconnect from the code, something I assume will adversely compound over time.
In my case, it would be to make sure I have a good mental model of the problem at hand instead of offloading it to a LLM. I'd also rather not put myself in a position where I'm reliable on a LLM to do my job.
Oh and there are also the huge moral and ethical issues with the companies that offer LLMs.
At the very least, AI can review all the code you have written. You can still reject every suggestion, but in the worst it will just slow you down. No citation needed for that. If an AI were to truly confuse you sufficiently to accept a wrong suggestion based on phony logic, then it just shows you didn't grok the logic deeply in the first place. (Which is a helpful finding for the second iteration.)
You didn't say if you did, but just in case if you truly never had a serious look at LLM tools, you really need to step up. Never even trying something like Claude Code borders on negligence nowadays.
AI is still a bubble, but pretty much every software developer having a hard-dependency on these companies nowadays, is was sustains it. It sucks, but currently there is no realistic way around it.
Exceptions apply for data protection reasons, obviously don't upload all your personal data and business-critical intellectual property into some 3rd-party AI tool.
Don't get me started as well on how the iCloud plans jump from 200gb to 2TB with absolutely nothing in between. Apple really knows how to extort their customers!
That's not just an Apple thing though. Google does the same thing. Dropbox only offers 2TB plan. OneDrive is just as expensive but offers 1TB.
They are all counting on you not using all of that space in the 2TB plan. So the avg user is subsidizing the usage of some small fraction of power users. They don't want to offer pay-per-use pricing plans because then they would have to increase the price ($/GB/month) to keep their existing margins.
This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).
Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.
I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.
