Co-founder of Cake. Previous: co-founder and President of SmugMug, co-founder and CEO of Fatbrain.com, Director of Developer Relations at General Magic and NeXT
I haven't made a lot of comments about Apple Photos because I've had so much trouble getting uploads to work from my (Apple) laptop. They just seem to hang when it's a large upload, even though they go like butter to Google and Amazon.
Anyway …
Somehow I stumbled into a Twitter brawl this morning over Barron Trump being mentioned in the impeachment hearings yesterday. It’s hard to imagine the dialogue didn’t leave lasting bitter divisions between all sides.
I don’t think in my lifetime I …
I’m struggling to understand how I’d use it much with Photoshop but I’m buying a CT, so I’ll find out. Maybe I just lack vision. The killer tool with Photoshop, in my opinion, is a Wacom tablet.
I know the world is focused mostly on climate — the air — but in my 10 years in earth science I was focused on water. You can’t imagine... The public is vaguely aware of mercury and plastics but imagine the chemicals — the pesticides, cleaning …
There’s a great story in The New York Times about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html
You’re right, burning the trash does create emissions, but the thinking is they are currently having to burn …
Great review, Vilen. I don’t know how I spend so much time in photography and yet I had never heard of a Loupedeck. I’m still having problems envisioning how cropping works but it sounds like they figured it out.
I’ve been watching reviews of the …
I think you're 100% correct. Can you imagine the training data set for your AI of 1 billion users (they've passed that now) actively identifying the faces they know better than anyone else? And they have real incentive to get it right because they …
This is an interesting take on Taiwan’s apparent success at harnessing social media to uncover common ground as opposed to amplifying divisions:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media
So, what's the conclusion? Google, definitely with one big caveat: their reputation for privacy is fading. Chrome is considered one of the most egregious pieces of spyware on the Internet. I take tons of photos of events with lots of people in them …
I didn't expect the kids to go so crazy over the For You section of goodies Google photos offers. It automatically creates animations from a series of images, collages, albums of events... The kids love to go through my phone and see the latest.
Here's an example. This is me speaking at TEDx. Can't see my face enough on the stage, so Google doesn't provide a way to tag myself. I can choose to put my name in the description or add it to an album, but not to have it come up when you click on …
I did find a few images where Google photos didn't tag the faces. Here's one. If you pick the pencil icon to the right of the image, you can edit who's who, removing any tag and adding any it thinks should be tagged. Easy peasy.
One thing it …
The good news is Amazon has an easy interface for telling it who's who and correcting it when it gets it wrong. I spent hours correcting. For example, it thinks the girl in the upper left, Mackenzie Bean, is Caitlyn Bean in this pic. But it also …
The second thing I notice is Google is really good at face recognition. Amazon and Apple, not so much. It's absolutely eerie how Google can recognize a person from baby to old age, with face paint and glasses. 🤯 They pick up faces in reflections on …
I think the killer feature of photo management is face & scene recognition. It's like turn-by-turn instructions and traffic info is on Maps: try it once and you're hooked.
It's a pretty serious commitment to choose a company to keep your priceless …
As for facts in general, I think everyone believed when the Internet happened, that truth would now prevail more than before. But somehow it seemed to go the other way.
As for Trump, it seems even when the facts prevail (most people do accept that …
I needed this right now. Maybe we all do. I had just finished catching up on the news and jeez, so much personal drama erupting in the headlines. It feels like we’ve all gone back to high school.
Reading the context is interesting. The art this …
That's interesting. I don't think I knew about Google Play Music or if I did it fell off my radar for some reason. I installed it and used it this afternoon. The interface is like butter but I feel like I'm starting over building up a music library.
Am I wrong in thinking that all social media in the Western world was started by young white male programmers in the Silicon Valley who were mostly libertarian? It sounds awful to say it that way and I don't mean to imply they are evil, just that …
Welcome to Cake, jal333. 🎂
As for Metropolis, fantastic! A masterpiece, no?
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/metropolis-bernie-gunther-novel
That’s what I took away too. Annalee Newitz is a respected journalist — she’s written for every pub that matters and she’s involved in good debates like this one. My problem is, like everyone, she can point out how social media is broken, but she’s …
Finally, a review that makes me feel sane. I have deep-ended on Apple and Amazon music lately, trying to find an alternative to YouTube Music, but there’s just nothing like it for discovering music, which is the #1 thing for me.
I was a YTM …
I read The Atlantic story and to be honest my reaction was wait, what? Why have I never paid much attention to this? I had a classmate at Stanford who had a super pronounced stutter. We talked about it some but I guess I never thought much about …