To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either.
But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.
I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.
I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not.
I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.
Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
Ah, an opportunity to call upon Hacker News, tech support of last resort…
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
> "You take multiple pictures, sometimes over 100 and it takes tiny little slivers of focus, and then you put all those into software, and that creates your final image."
Is this a workaround to let us see “what it would look like”, or are there optical reasons why this produces an image that is inherently artificial, and could never really be perceived that way?
It's focus stacking so basically just compensating for the way macro lenses and large apertures work.
There's nothing artificial about it, the software is just layering the sharpest parts into the photo. It's a common technique, heavily used for things like astro photography and landscape photography as well.
https://www.canon.co.uk/get-inspired/tips-and-techniques/foc...
My understanding is that modern mobile phone cameras do heaps of "stacking" across multiple axes focus, exposure, time etc to compose a photo that saves onto your phone. I believe its one of the reasons for the multiple cameras on most flagship phones, and then each of them might take many "photos" or runs of data from their sensors per "photo" you take. id love to see a good writeup of the process, but my gut says exactly what they do under the hood would be pretty "trade secret"ie.
Had a quick play with my iPhone 15. It doesn't give the sort of magnification you would need for insect close-ups. I will stick with my Nikon DSLR + 100mm macro lens!
Yeah it's far from being as good as a DLSR or mirrorless with a dedicated macro lens. Still, most people reading HN have one in their pocket and it can be a good test to see if you like the idea of macro. It does work with larger insects, on a pixel 10 pro my mantis fill most of the frame.
You can, depending on your definition of "useful". You can buy a cheap laser pointer, take out its lens, and put it over your camera lens. Tape it onto the lens for a temporary janky version or make a 3d-printed mount for something much better that you can easily take on/off.
I've personally found this little hack useful, but then again I don't have a DSLR and macro lens!
When you take macro photos with close focus, your depth of field is like a very thin slice of the scene, you can think of it of having a plane of just a millimeter or so deep that you are scanning through the subject, taking a frame each time. So if your subject is something like a monarch butterfly which is generally around 30mm in length of body and close to 55mm considering both wings and body, you might need to take 60-70 frames then focus stack them afterwards to get critical focus on all parts of the subject.
I'm not sure what folks use now, but Zerene Stacker ( https://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker ) was the gold standard when I was doing serious macro photography about ten years ago.
>Is this a workaround to let us see “what it would look like”, or are there optical reasons why this produces an image that is inherently artificial, and could never really be perceived that way?
Both in a way. When you look at a landscape, your eyes and brain are constantly adjusting everything so what you look at "directly" is sharp, and you don't really realize most of what is in your field of view is low resolution, maybe a bit blurry. Same when looking at something really close.
When you look at a picture, if some parts of it are blurry, your eyes/brain can't adjust so that it becomes sharp, because it was captured blurry. Even if you had a camera that exactly reproduces your eye, the pictures would look nothing like what your eyes see, because your eyes and brain are a very different system from a camera.
In photo there is something called "depth of field", which is "the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image captured with a camera" [1]. You can see on the wikipedia page that there's an equation for approximating depth of field, that has in it 2u², where u is the distance to the subject. That means the closer the subject, the smaller the size of depth of field. You can test this with your eye. Take an object 30cm away, put your finger between your eye and the object, and you can change the focus of your eye between your finger and the object. When you focus on your finger the object is a bit blurry, when you focus on the object your finger is a bit blurry [2]. Now take two object that are 15cm away from each other, but 2m or more away from you. Changing the focus from one object to the other won't make the first object as blurry as when you did that close. This is because your depth of field is larger, as the distance increases.
Finally macro. In macro photography, you're often extremely close, so depth of field is extremely thin. When I say extremely thin, I mean "it can take 10 or more pictures to cover a whole fly". A solution in that case, to get all your subject in focus (sharp), is to take lots of different pictures, focusing a tiny bit closer/farther away each time, and then taking all the sharp parts of each picture. That's the technique used here, often called "focus stacking".
[2]: This might be harder if you're older, as we age we slowly lose the ability to adjust focus, hence the need for reading glasses (cameras can also use "reading glasses" when they can't focus close enough, they're called "close-up filters" and work the same).
This links to the section in question, but it's well worth watching all of it to see and example of how your brain tricks you. The computer doing eye tracking and blurring everything else out to the user really points out how much your brain lies to you about reality.
The ACA makes it illegal for insurers to make the “punitive deductible” a function of one’s probability of needing healthcare, hence the financial incentive is for the insurer (who can bring down cost of claims, and hence be able to sell insurance at lower premiums).
Of course, the insured has the quality of life incentive of not having to deal with complications from consuming excess calories.
On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have lost data due to a badly configured 40GB HDD early in my digital life. I was so aggrieved that it inoculated me against data preservation complacency, and in the subsequent 25 years I haven’t lost a single byte.
As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
Many, many moons ago I was finishing a uni. essay on an Amstrad PC that didn't even have a hard drive. The way I worked at the time was, type first, then save to a floppy disk, because the saving operation took something like 5 minutes.
The time was 10 p.m., I was done. I hit save. While the application was writing the file to disk, I decided to move the bulky monitor from one side of my desk to the other. Somehow while doing so I hit the power button (or took the power cord with me, I'm not sure). PC went off while writing operations were still on.
The file could not be recovered, and of course there was no other copy.
I spent the rest of the night recreating the essay from memory, and thinking I had been extremely unlucky.
I had the opposite reaction. Realised the futility of data retention. Stopped backing up and let it flap into the wind if that’s the way the dice rolls. There’s always more data. Losing data now is relieving, like closing a chapter in a good book.
Interesting that World War 3 never happened; instead, we smoothly transitioned to War World, where war is just something that happens all the time, randomly, intermittently, undeclared, and interminably.
I’m not so sure. This War World is very similar to the geopolitical game played by the great European - and increasingly US as well, especially in SA - powers in the 19th century. That Belle Epoque was of course what drove the global politics into the first Great War.
Kissinger maintained his goal was to avoid stumbling into another Great War; we may or may not believe him, but at least he took the trouble to rationalize his actions.
(I have a friend who is a PRC citizen; I don't know her background precisely but her habitus reminds me of nothing so much as the slightly younger women I'd met at a boarding school in Palo Alto, so I think it's safe to say that socialism with chinese characteristics has at least one non-prole class :-)
I have the same requirement and I solved it as follows:
Apply a label to emails dated after the last backup, using an “after:YYYY-MM-DD” search. Takeout then offers the option to export only that label. I do an annual backup so the amount of manual effort here is acceptable.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
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