I read that paragraph. It doesn’t undo the fact that you dismissed a hobby by calling all its practitioners hipsters. It’s like insulting someone and then saying “no offence” after the fact. It’s pure cowardice and I let it slide until you drew attention to it.

Oh yes, I’m well aware of darkroom techniques such as push processing, dodging and burning, masking and airbrushing. The hassle is the point. Even if you want to do it, the limitations of the process prevent you from doing most of what you’d imagine possible.

Film has a much narrower dynamic range than digital. Slide film even more so. With digital you can take a test shot, look at a histogram, and dial in a perfect exposure right there on the spot. With film you simply cannot do that, so you are forced to figure it out before hand. You can use bracket exposures, but that gets expensive. Shoot on 4x5 sheet film or plates and it quickly becomes cost-prohibitive for a middle class hobbyist.

Look, I’m glad you’re happy doing digital photography. But seriously fuck off with the “film photographers are hipsters” thing. Do you shit on people who paint with oil paints or water colours instead of Procreate?

The digital still camera has the same issue as digital movie cameras highlighted in that video: it lets you defer too many decisions to post. You can sit there for hours in Lightroom, tweaking everything to “perfection.”

It’s fine if you’re using the camera as a tool to make money (such as a wedding photographer) because it makes your job genuinely easier than shooting film. For amateur photography it takes away a great deal of the serendipity and intentionality of the process of actually taking the photograph.

I would not lump film photography in with the other stuff. Modern phone cameras are heavily post processed and filtered with AI. This is fine if all you’re doing is sending a pic of your latest meal to Instagram. If you actually want to control the process of taking a photograph then film is your best bet.

Film photography forces you to get everything right BEFORE you press the button, rather than letting you fix it later. This is thought to be one of the biggest reasons modern movies look so bad.

Ahhh, but that’s a lesson on writing clearly, not a cooking lesson!

This has always been the style of the Liberal party. Justin Trudeau was an outlier.

This is why they’re called “the Natural Governing Party of Canada.” They benefit from tremendous amounts of vote splitting!

If your goal is to lower a population over time, neuter and release can be very effective. Neutered males will still try to mate but they will not succeed. The females they try to mate with might not mate with another male, so they miss the chance to create a new generation.

The line is drawn by the community themselves. They decide what the rules for the category are.

This is how all speedrunning communities work. They make rules for each category. Mods aren’t the only thing that can skip large chunks of a game. Major glitches are as well. Many, many speedrun categories prohibit major glitches that skip large sections of the game.

That can help, though the office isn’t the only transmission vector. Schools, grocery stores, restaurants, public transit, etc. are all major vectors. Families with early school-age children especially tend to get sick a lot, as young children learn and play in close proximity but don’t tend to follow good hygiene habits.

There’s also just the issue that in any environment with multiple people, it only takes one infected person to infect everyone else. Different people have different tolerances for illness as well as varying severity of symptoms. Someone with mild symptoms may come to work/school anyway and the whole room gets sick.

The issue arises when multiple people all get sick at the same time, which is much more common than random chance would have it due to how contagious cold & flu (and COVID) are. A workplace that can handle half the staff gone for a day without falling behind is gonna struggle to find stuff for people to do when everyone is there.

Yes. It doubles as a spicy bayonet!

I’m keeping an open mind about Mamdani but isn’t this a bit premature? Has there even been a tax season since he made his changes?

Let’s see how things are 5-10 years from now before judging the effects of Mamdani’s policies.

Fucking morons wonder why people don’t have more respect and reverence for the country like the last 50-60 fucking years of history didn’t happen.

I think they would argue that it is the ignorance of the constitution and the lack of respect which has made the decline possible. The lack of accountability especially!

There are loads of bad art tattoos out there by third rate tattoo artists.

I would say fewer than 1/1000 tattoos make me stop and think “oh that’s beautiful.” Most I see are so ugly I feel bad for the person, knowing I would regret it if I had their tattoos.

A lot? Or maybe they care 0.0000000001%. Could still care less, but not much less.

Employers aren’t looking for the best possible candidate for a job. They’re looking for an easy to find candidate who is good enough and doesn’t have major issues working long term.

Nowadays, employers get far more applications than they can reasonably deal with, thanks to AI. They have to find some way to narrow it down.

I remember hearing about a hiring manager who threw out every resume of candidates who mentioned having been a lifeguard. Not for every position, but just for one day of sifting through resumes. There were hundreds of applicants for the one job and almost everyone’s resume was enough to qualify them, and he didn’t have the time to interview everyone, so he just used weird random methods to narrow it down.

For large group behaviour you’re better off looking at cooperative game theory which is a branch of game theory that deals with games of more than 2 players and the formation of cooperating groups known as coalitions.

It’s a much more complex topic than basic 2 player strategic game theory, so I don’t see it discussed nearly as much outside of subject matter experts.

I guess I should explain a bit more then.

The term “player” in game theory doesn’t mean a person, it means a collection of rows or columns in a payoff matrix. Basically just a table of numbers. One player is all the rows, one player is all the columns.

A strategy can be either a pure strategy (select one row or one column of the table) or a mixed strategy (assign percentages to every row or every column of the table, so that all percentages are non-negative and the total equals 100%).

In a 2x2 payoff matrix, each player has 2 possible pure strategies (pick column A or column B, row 1 or row 2) but infinite possible mixed strategies (e.g 33.186794% column A and 66.813206% column B) since an infinite number of pairs of percentages can add up to 100%.

Mixed strategies can be thought of as introducing probability into the situation. If you choose a mixed strategy of 50% column A and 50% column B you could think of it as using a coin toss to make the decision. But game theory itself doesn’t do the coin tossing, it just assumes the expected values of the percentage times the payoffs in those entries of the payoff matrix.

Any mathematical textbook will do it. Try Springer.

It’s quite simple really. Games in game theory are represented with a payoff matrix which shows the utility for each player. Pure strategies are defined as rows or columns in the payoff matrix. The math of game theory doesn’t care about why a player chooses a particular strategy, only its payoff.

I would define a purely rational player at minimum as one chooses a dominant strategy, when one is available. You’re free to expand that to mixed strategies and games where (strong or weakly) dominant strategies do not exist. Irrational players would be anyone who is otherwise not a rational player.

This isn’t very interesting in basic game theory. It becomes a lot more relevant in cooperative game theory, which can have more than 2 players and players forming coalitions.