Agree with most of this, it's well articulated and captures how we react to change.

However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.

It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.

Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.

Good point. The rate of cognitive improvements would be slow, imperceptible even over many generations, and virtually non-existent over the less than 100 years of digital automation.

It would be interesting to know how much we changed cognitively since our species bifurcated, and also since civilization scaled up social density.

Relative to the discussion, AI tech is progressing in time frames that are a fraction of a human generation. So we are at a complete standstill in that context.

It's not driverless unless it doesn't have a driver. Some poor guy in hydrobad 'monitoring' (read frequently taking over from) ten cars at a time, while being paid a statistically insignificant portion of a western taxi drivers salary does not count as 'self driving'.

Irish person here... Ireland is a real country, with a wide diversity of human temperaments. Culture doesn't override greed, nor does it impart 'morality'. Moreover, Ireland is perhaps the most Americanised EU nation. Decades of neoliberal government, endemic corporate corruption and poor regulation of anything that threatens the corporate tax avoidance status quo.

For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 - 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely useful tool for organising your social life. You could literally make a facebook post about an event or even stating where you were on a given night, and know that people were likely to see it.

Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that social networks in general became forces for disconnection and polarisation around this time.

Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic filtering whatsoever.

This is a recipe for perhaps the most unhappy society imaginable. Without such outmoded ideas as 'commitment', and 'through thick and thin' relationships become subject to the immediate barometer of personal happiness. In practice this is anything but equitable, freeing and fulfilling. It results in people with perceived high 'value' flitting from relationship to relationship, often several at once. Invariably leaving relationships and abandoning partners when the ordinary vicissitudes of life arise - job loss, ill health, aging, deaths of parents etc.

Real intimacy requires investment. Relationship anarchy, any time I've seen it attested or practiced, faciliates the opposite. It's a fetishisation of alienation. What you're describing as 'pressure of expectations' can be understood very differently, as the expectation of reciprocity. In other words, being able to rely on people - whether as friends or lovers, when things get difficult. Without that, all we have is limerence and capriciousness.

I say all this as someone who's been in non-monogamous relationships of various kinds - from weeks to years. Without the possibility of commitment and the acknowledgement that all relationships are inherently hierarchical, we atomise individual needs and make real enduring connection and community impossible.

What you say is true in general but why would it all be true for a nonstandard relationship? Why would you be less committed to multiple persons (or why would you not have 1 committed out of all). If anything, a single household of multiple stable personalities creates more involving and colorful context, more possibility of hierarchy, and more reasons to not abandon it (as a bigger community relies on you).

I had much less direct and indirect experience, but I know what you talk about. Even more, it is also my experience that these constellations are unstable. But I see this as them existing in a sea of monogamist society, surrounded by prejudice and contempt. Try to introduce this to friends and family. It's similar of how gay relationships are much more often open, due to (guess:) societal context like a patriarchal society.

Historically disconnected societies were used to be more creative. I hope they would also be in the future.

In practice people are never equally committed to multiple partners, if nothing else the longevity of a relationship changes feelings. As it should! It normal and healthy that feelings and commitments deepen over time. There's an idea prevalent in polyamory right now that relationships should be 'non hierarchical'. I believe it's both unrealistic and I unhealthy. Openness does not equate to equivalence. Being happy for your partners additional sexual experiences or even relationships is not the same as those relationships sitting on an equal footing with your own.

To your second point - sure polyamorous relationships are countercultural, and this inevitably puts more pressure on them from family etc. However they're also innately more complex, and require far more processing than conventional relationships. They'll always be a minority for this reason alone. And that's totally fine. Your relationship style is no less valid for being less popular. This need to proslethise to others is itself unhealthy. Tolerance is important, uniformity is not.

Hard disagree. We only discovered the role that glial cells play in processing around 2014. We're still uncertain how patterns of activation consolidate through long term potentiation, let alone how signaling encodes information. We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories; but we don't understand the structural layout of engram complexes - which were themselves mapped for the first time only in 2022!

Taking effective results in machine learning, and somehow assuming that they apply to cognition - simply because neural nets were inspired by our limited knowledge of neural signaling and structure - is like trying to apply aircraft engineering to studying ornithology. For a better articulation of this point (from the reverse direction) check out the paper 'Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?' from 2017 - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

>> We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories...

Hard disagree ;-) You're talking about high level architecture of the brain. I don't think (not my area I may be wrong) we know how memories are encoded in a real brain. Is it weights or something else? If it's weights that's supporting my point (but we don't know what the weights represent in a brain, where in LLMs many weights are just token encodings). If brains store memories in something other than weights I'd really like to know as it's something I haven't read about yet.

Shoot at a higher fstop with a sensor with a high native ISO, like 12,800.

The trade off is so much noise

Boy do you need to look in a mirror.

It's not apparent on first read but I do think he's referring to the US and Israeli governments.

I'm pretty sure that's why the above comment said he needs to look in a mirror.

If he's correctly calling out our government, than he is looking in the mirror no?

Fundamental misunderstanding of the market dynamics here.

There are at least an order of magnitude more people making a professional salary as photographers (ie.: enough to justify a software purchase) than professional videographers.

Outside of film, videographers are generally paid a day rate about half as high as photographers, with enormously higher equipment costs.

Film - hollywood, streaming, TV etc, combined actually employ a relatively small number of people. Sure there's enormously more budget for any given TV show than say a wedding photoshoot, but think about how many people get married, how many corporate photo sessions there are etc etc.

Basically by conflating videography and cinematography you've obscured the issue. Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.

Also on anything bigger than a very low budget short, it's editors and post people who are using the editing software not the videographers / camera operators / DOP. Bare in mind DaVinci does not own the film industry. It's very much still Avid's game, with Nuke for colour, and a small percentage of Adobe Suite.

As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.

I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.

The amazing thing about Resolve is that the free version is almost certainly enough for > 95% of use cases. The features that are locked behind the Studio upgrade are truly pro features - in that you won’t need them at all unless you are delivering for a proper studio or professional project. The amount of firepower you get from the free version is easily at parity with any comparable product from Adobe/Apple - and in many cases blows them out of the water… for free.

(and it supports Linux)

Theoretically..

IIRC, it only officially supports CentOS or some other baroque thing, doesn’t support importing or exporting mp4 when free, and also (unrelated to the product itself) Linux hw accel of video is flakey.

Huh. I got it running on Ubuntu 24 a while back. Didn't know that was an accomplishment.

I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.

THe cinema industry is much smaller than photography, but the dialogue between companies and customers is much much richer in VFX.

Autodesk, foundry and Avid all have site licenses with their big players, and the product owners/managers will be on site talking to users to see what bugs/features are needed.

More over a lot of the big companies that buy this software also have their own R&D departments. So there is much cross pollination.

Also people will come to blackmagic and foundry with problems and ask for help (Ie rolling shutter reduction, anti-noise, optical flow, copy grade, etc etc)

> Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.

Tangential - any helpful advice you could give to budding videographers? I'd love to make those nice B-roll images you see in YouTube videos (Engineering Explained comes to mind).

Most advice is either for folks videoing people, or generally for photography. Funny thing is I'd say I'm already a very solid photographer... but my videos (admittedly shot on my phone) never look as good.

Sure. It's a very broad question but...

Learn to shoot static first. Biggest mistake I see people make when they move from photo to video is moving the camera without intention. Master the basic size of shots - wide, mid, closeup - with a variety of stills lenses on a tripod (or in hand with good in camera stabalisation).

Then learn the basic moves - ped, pan, track etc. If you're moving, think about how you're stabalising your camera - gimbal, shoulder rig etc. Most DSLR's do not have good enough stablisation to allow movement without artifacts.

Make sure you understand your camera. For photos you have much more leeway in post. For video I'd recommend always shooting at the camera's native ISO, at 24/25/30 shutter speed, and keeping shutter angle at double the shutter speed (or 180 degrees).

Don't change settings during a shot (other than focus). Set everything to manual, get your ISO, white balance, shutter speed or angle right, and leave it at that for the duration of the shot. If the lighting changes in the shot, your settings should cover the whole extent of the lighting for that shot.

Think about each shot as an image. i.e.: Don't try to catch everything, but focus on a detail, or framing, just as you would with a photo. If you're filming people, how they sit in the frame in relation to the background and other people (how large they are in frame, how they're blocked, whether they're enclosed by foreground detail etc) determines how we see them.

Just focus on all the basic photography stuff - rule of thirds, colour theory, bokeh etc. People just get overwhelmed when they switch to video, but the same rules apply. It's really just moving photographs after all.

Movement is in time, think about a nice frame of a railway line in a landscape - then a train enters and passes through it. Movement is everywhere - water, reflections, shadows, animals. Find a strong frame in nature or the build environment, that has movement, or will have movement passing through it and shoot that.

Then start thinking about how shots connect together. Even B-Roll tells a story and has a rhythm. Wide to closeup, big object to small object, matching motion between shots, directing the viewers eye as it moves across the frame. You're always telling a story, so when you get 'coverage' try to have the story you'll tell in the edit in mind. If you're capturing a place, whats a wide or ultra wide that gives us an emotional impression of the place. What are some details that colour it in. Whats a change thats occurring that ads movement life and purpose.

Basically it's about intentionality and choice. Whats the feeling you're trying to convey and which shots convey it best. A good exercise is trying to shoot a happy event in a threatening or disturbing style, or vice versa. Here's an example where I shot and edited a St Patrick's day parade in a nightmarish style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj-fK8obPI

Think in terms of the final video or film rather than individual shots. That's the equivalent of the finished photo.

100% agree. Photo is a much muuuch bigger market.

From what I remember colourists are not using Nuke (more compositing)

Steve Yedlin uses Nuke exclusively for grading. AFAIK lots of high end cinematographers and colourists do. I'm a DaVinci man myself, nuke is intimidating.