> Thanks, I saw that, but I never can make heads or tails of just MP. Feel like some phones have much lower MP but the quality of the photo is much higher.
It does not merely feel that way; it often is. That is because megapixels measure the dimensions of the files the camera generates (this is not the same as resolution) and as such are almost the worst measure of camera quality.
Boring tech websites like comparing megapixels, because that is a number, and that allows people who do not know how cameras work to review products and have opinions without actually using them. Truth is that pixels, a measure of resolution, have been irrelevant for years when one is not printing them huge or looking at them full-size on gigantic computer monitors. More or less nobody is doing that these days; they're looking at them a few inches wide on their phones or tablets, usually via [insert social app] that downsizes and compresses the shit out of them to save on bandwidth & storage.
Things like
* colour rendition
* contrast rendition
* low-light ability
* speed of operation (allows you to get a photo in the first place)
* and more things I could name
...are all far more important to what makes a good camera on a phone. If more people were like you and actually LOOKED AT THE PHOTOS we might have ended up with much better cameras than we have now.
My old man has been running Linux for nearly 20 years now. I PROMISE not only that he has never once opened a console, but would spontaneously combust if you suggested it. (I have used a command line on his computer a few times in those two-ish decades, when doing my very rare tech support, but that's just because that's the fastest way for me to get anything done.)
Maybe Windows back in e.g. Windows 2000 days would have some sort of claim to user interface discoverability and predictability which no Linux distribution would have. That ship has sailed; Windows today is a shitshow.
I am going to get good at TIG welding. This is mostly because there's a lot of subprojects of my car that would really benefit from me doing TIG - stainless, aluminium, etc (I already got pretty good at MIG for mild steel).
But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.
LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.
There is nothing wrong with this article. Please continue to write as you; it's what people came for.
LLMs have their place. I find it useful to prompt an LLM to fix typos and outright errors and also prompt them to NOT alter the character or tone of the text; they are extraordinarily good at that.
That's a fun trick, but please consider adding ARIA roles (e.g. role="presentation" to <table>, role="heading" aria-level="[number]" to the <font> elements used for headings) to make your site understandable by screen readers.
From the UK too, and your experience is matched by mine. The last time I was in one (I mean "the last time" in both senses of the words) I waited over 20 minutes for my food; I do not know how long it would have actually taken because at that point I got bored, wrote it off as a loss and walked out. No sense in complaining to anyone because that would have consumed even more of my time.
McDonalds is not food and it is not even fast anymore.
I cannot blame their staff for any of this anyway; if I was being paid that little to be treated like garbage I wouldn't give a shit either.
It is not apparent that we are ambivalent because of compensation.
I would argue an inverse corollary. I would argue that the most qualified people for the job are applying.
What I am noticing in my own work is fatigue from processing volume.
It's not personal. You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal. Only then we can actually solve your issue because we have a person to relate to.
I am curious about this notion that fast food workers don't care. I see it a lot. We absolutely care.
I think that merits an apology from me, then: what I said was wrong and I'm sorry. If I'd thought about that sentence for more than ten seconds, it'd be clear that it's all better explained not by indifference from the staff doing the actual work, but because (as you said) they are asked to work under impossible conditions, and as long as some line on a chart representing "money" goes in the right direction it's the people that set the conditions of the job who don't give a shit.
Some part of me understood this already, because...
> You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal.
Aside from the fact that the "front counter" is apparently deprecated these days...given what I know about my personality flaws, I am sure I'd not want to do this. It's not like they could make the food appear 20 minutes ago, and they're not responsible for the conditions that made it take 20 minutes in the first place, so what would it accomplish other than making their day worse? Maybe some warm feeling of "well I fuckin showed 'em" followed by "oh damnit, I was an arsehole" 15 seconds later which would hang over me for a LOT longer than 15 seconds. Walking out was a better outcome for everyone, including me.
That's already happening. Roadsides aren't being cleaned up because the local DOTs aren't being paid enough. That leaves fallen rocks, mud buildup from floods, tree branches, and overgrown bushes very close to the roadway. Grocery stores have empty shelves because they don't get enough stockers. If you go to the meats aisle it's a good chance you'll either find some pork that's started to turn yellow or some beef that's started to turn brown because nobody wants to dig through the freezer. They get told the meat's old, they find the visible one, and the put a price reduced sticker on it. Walk into a hospital and the grating at the entryway will be filled with mud, the baseboards along the walls in the hallways will be scuffed to hell, and the walls will have scrapes taken out of them because the maintenance staff aren't being paid enough to care. Go into a bank and you'll have one teller working both the drive through and the front desk, and they'll take their time getting to you because the drive-through counts towards their statistics since the interaction with the drop off point is tracked. They aren't paid enough to work back and forth in the down time when either is doing something the teller doesn't need to be involved in.
Apathy's just setting in across the board, and it's entirely warranted. One hour of work can't even afford you one hour of reward anymore when it comes to most non-specialized and non-salaried jobs.
As someone building a particularly stupid car in a genre almost but not entirely unlike the OP (a turbo LS1-swapped Rover P5), I am not totally making stuff up when I say that this:
> You have to be prepared to spend potentially years on it and huge amount of money, even on relatively simple projects.
is not at all mutually exclusive to this:
> Honestly, just learn it like anything else.
I didn't really know what I was doing when I started my project. I had an idea and the desire to make it happen. I barely knew how to use a MIG to do the fab work, so I got good (enough) at it. I knew nothing about LS engines, so I learned enough about them at each point I needed to know something about them. I only have a vague idea of how I'm going to do the next phase of it; I know that I can figure it out with enough thinking and by making all the mistakes I need to make. I don't know how to TIG, and it'll be really useful if I do, so I am learning how to TIG.
Start somewhere, and the more you do, the more you can do.
> As someone building a particularly stupid car in a genre almost but not entirely unlike the OP (a turbo LS1-swapped Rover P5),
I have no idea why people do this stuff to a nice car like a Rover P5. It isn't my car though.
> Start somewhere, and the more you do, the more you can do.
Obviously. But I had to do a lot of stuff that I wasn't prepared to do far quicker because the previous person who doing this took short cuts. I almost had the dash catch fire because someone did a bodge job on electricals instead of paying £15 for the correct part (a plastic plug).
The point I was making is that you are making it sound far simpler than it actually is. There been a good few weekends that have been sunny and I have honestly felt like I was wasting my time and couldn't face working on it.
I had to fit a new turbo and it took me about 3-4 weeks. Not because it was difficult (actually it one of the easier and nicer jobs IMO), it was sourcing parts around the turbo such as gaskets, copper washer kits and other dumb stuff like that.
There was constant trips to tool shops because I was always missing like a tool, trying to find a fitting/gromit in Halfords (they never have it) or a parts supplier 40 miles away in the sticks. It all adds up in both time and cost.
Now I know roughly who the order from, what I should order from etc. But that is going to be different for almost different manufacturer and worse if the stuff is more niche/custom.
The amount of the projects that get given up, suggest it not that easy.
(I don't know why your comment got flagged. I vouched for it; whatever we might argue about here, I don't think you're out of line in any way.)
I actually feel everything you have said apart from this P5 being "nice" (it was fucked). Like turbo delays - I had that on my other project, and going from "I need a new turbo" to "I have a new turbo and things adjacent to the turbo" took damn near a year by itself. I know how this goes!
So I hope I did not appear to say that it's EASY. I've put in enough hours to know that it's not, and if it was everyone would be doing it anyway. It does in fact take a lot of time, and willingness to learn, and plain old determination, and money. I will say it's something that IS possible, and that I still agree with this:
> Honestly, just learn it like anything else.
But...I suppose we'll know that for sure once I have an actual working car, right? :)
Yes, any time someone says "I'm going to make a thing more reliable by adding more things to it" I either want to buy them a copy of Normal Accidents or hit them over the head with mine.
How bad are the effects of an interruption for you? Google has servers running every day, but you with one server can afford to gamble on it, since it probably won't fail for years - no matter the hardware though, keep a backup, because data loss is permanent. Would you lose millions of dollars a minute, or would you just have to send an email to customers saying "oops"?
Risk management is a normal part of business - every business does it. Typically the risk is not brought down all the way to zero, but to an acceptable level. The milk truck may crash and the grocery store will be out of milk that day - they don't send three trucks and use a quorum.
If you want to guarantee above-normal uptime, feel free, but it costs you. Google has servers failing every day just because they have so many, but you are not Google and you most likely won't experience a hardware failure for years. You should have a backup because data loss is permanent, but you might not need redundancy for your online systems. Depending on what your business does.
I was on Mastodon for three years. I deleted my account. When I found out that Charlie Kirk was murdered, my second thought was "well, best create yet another filter on Mastodon so I don't have to watch people celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered" and when I caught myself having that thought I realised that being on Mastodon was a net negative for my wellbeing.
(I didn't like the guy either, by the way, or at least I knew enough about him that I knew I have much better things to do than listen to him. There are more than a few people like that, all of whom I wish find some peace in their hearts, and none of whom I wish to come to any harm.)
Mastodon is packed to the brim with literal psychopaths and people pretending to be psychopaths for imaginary Internet points. It is not an experience I suggest for anyone who is neither of those things.
From early in my Mastodon journey I made it something of rule to not follow anyone who doesn't CW politics, and mute or block many of the accounts that post politics on main unfiltered.
I don't need that many filters if people make good use of Subject lines (I do like to joke that CW is the short Welsh for Cwbject.) It means I don't see a lot of "celebrities" in my feed that cross-post from one of the other sites and doesn't add CWs because their client or cross-poster doesn't support them, but that seems to be so much the better. It also often means I remove Boost privileges in my feeds from people that will boost stuff without CWs.
That sort of curation is a lot of little bits of work over years. I can definitely understand the feeling that the easiest way to catch up on that curation is to just quit. It's why I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter). It's why I don't bother with BlueSky or Threads. Mastodon gives me enough curation tools and I've used them for long enough that I feel happy with Mastodon.
If this is intended to accuse me of being a Charlie Kirk fan I can only conclude that you either did not read what I wrote (in which case, you should refrain from replying to it), or you are being dishonest on purpose.
> They were more or less just rewriting what you wrote.
The literal opposite of what I wrote, actually, because "that" refers to "celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk", an activity not much associated with fans of Charlie Kirk.
It does not merely feel that way; it often is. That is because megapixels measure the dimensions of the files the camera generates (this is not the same as resolution) and as such are almost the worst measure of camera quality.
Boring tech websites like comparing megapixels, because that is a number, and that allows people who do not know how cameras work to review products and have opinions without actually using them. Truth is that pixels, a measure of resolution, have been irrelevant for years when one is not printing them huge or looking at them full-size on gigantic computer monitors. More or less nobody is doing that these days; they're looking at them a few inches wide on their phones or tablets, usually via [insert social app] that downsizes and compresses the shit out of them to save on bandwidth & storage.
Things like
* colour rendition * contrast rendition * low-light ability * speed of operation (allows you to get a photo in the first place) * and more things I could name
...are all far more important to what makes a good camera on a phone. If more people were like you and actually LOOKED AT THE PHOTOS we might have ended up with much better cameras than we have now.