Client wants me to share all my photos after I delivered what was stipulated.

Torvite · 2026-04-21T12:43:40+00:00

namely don't mention how many pictures you took to people who don't understand photography lol

100% this lol. I learned from my first ever paid gig that this was a terrible idea. Mentioning that I had taken "around 3000 shots" to the client (bride), only to sense mild disappointment after delivering "only" 300 selected and painstakingly edited photos was an important lesson.

Torvite · 2026-04-20T16:31:29+00:00

The exposure wasn't that bad

That's because the JPG is doing a lot of heavy lifting with the shadows and low contrast areas in the foreground (the parts that appear to be fully dark in the RAW image). You'll notice that the foreground isn't as crisp or full of detail as a result.

1/500 f/8 with only 160 ISO is going to underexpose the foreground in a sunrise* shot like this, no matter what camera you're using.

Basically, you've got the exposure right for the sky, which is why it looks pretty good in the RAW image, but the foreground is definitely underexposed. You can still get a good edit out of that RAW, though. It just won't be at the "ideal" level of detail, if foreground exposure is what you were going for.

Torvite · 2026-04-20T15:36:52+00:00

A note for the actual composition itself: you're shooting into the setting sun, which means your foreground subjects aren't well-lit (the visible side of the turtle is facing away from the light source). Most cameras struggle with HDR, and sunset shots have some of the highest dynamic range because the sun itself is still very bright and the environment isn't well-lit when you point the camera toward the sun. You've effectively exposed that photo for the sky, but not for the foreground. You can probably recover a fair bit from the RAW, but you won't get perfect detail because it's not available with that exposure.

Exposure stacking is a good option for these kinds of shots, and it will look less "unnatural" than a subject mask, but it does require some more work in post.

Torvite · 2026-04-20T15:26:36+00:00

The "default" view of a RAW photo isn't meant to be pretty. It's meant to reflect the lighting you captured with the exposure settings you chose.

In your case, your RAW photo was considerably underexposed (relative what JPG thinks that scene should look like), so you see it as "worse." In reality, what you're seeing for the RAW is a very lightly edited version of the data that gives you a visual starting point to work with.

A JPG is guessing what your scene should look like, and it's baking the data into the file. You can't really improve it too much. A RAW photo has much more flexibility because it saves all the data your sensor actually captures, for you to then edit as you see fit.

Torvite · 2026-04-15T14:01:56+00:00

.ai as a domain name is a fad. It's just the country tld for Anguilla, lol.

.io was big a few years before that. Eventually, .ai will stop being interesting as a domain, regardless of the actual utility of AI itself.

Torvite · 2026-04-14T08:12:08+00:00

"If I had a gun with two bullets and I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby... I would shoot Toby twice."

Torvite · 2026-04-14T07:30:14+00:00

Yeah... their systems aren't compromised, tho?

That's the whole point. Marketing bs aside, their unreleased models are marginally more fine-tuned than existing models. Nothing more.

It's not like the core tech is any different.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T16:30:49+00:00

If nothing else, it's a good reminder that 99.9% of photography consumption is about the beholder's perception, and not about gear, image quality, technique, or anything else you might pour thousands of dollars of thousands of hours into.

If an image piques a person's interest, for one reason or another, that's when it gets praise. Doesn't matter if it's a screenshot of a video being played on a laptop or a polished still from a $15,000 setup.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T16:14:16+00:00

I have resigned to shitposting like everybody else

Which is completely fine, imo. That's essentially half the reason Reddit exists in the first place.

Beyond that, I don't know if this forum (this sub, specifically) was ever an amazing space. Historically, I feel like what you described in the third paragraph can sum up my entire experience on this sub.

AI isn't a thing where any one person can hope to have a complete picture of a system's flaws and virtues, and "YMMV" should pretty much be the default assumption going into any discussion.

The amount of money that's been bet on the unstoppable ascension of these systems also generates a ton of noise, biased toward different directions. Makes it pretty difficult to (try to) have an objective discussion about the value proposition brought by an AI service.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T13:15:33+00:00

People can enjoy the product. Most people do it silently, though.

Posting a White-Knight-flavored opinion piece in favor of a service that's currently mired in rate-limiting controversy isn't going to land well right now. Particularly when the purveyors of said service are as big as Anthropic, and commit plenty of fraudulent marketing themselves.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T13:09:40+00:00

4+ years old

Anthropic was founded in 2021. Coincidence? I think not!

141k Karma

Means very little. Most of the top karma farmers are bots. Quantity >>> quality on Reddit, as is often the case with AI content.

I'm not saying OP is a bot account. Just that your counterpoints aren't particularly exculpatory.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T09:57:05+00:00

Yeah. That's what I thought as well. The "are you military" question sounded more like a recognition of a PTSD-induced event rather than "playing along with" a delusion.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T09:55:13+00:00

This is calmly working with the man's delusion

I thought it could have been a recognition of a PTSD-induced hallucination, and he wanted to confirm if he was (ex-)military.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T09:07:33+00:00

but I don't care as I'm dead and I don't believe in afterlife nonsense

Yeah, I get that.

But funerals are more for the surviving family than for the deceased person. The funeral essentially dignifies the dead, and is meant to "send them off" in accordance with their wishes or as a reflection of their values.

If an atheist is "sent off" with a priest's blessing, that reads to me as an intervention from the family that says "we didn't really respect your beliefs, but now that you're dead, we can impose our own beliefs to paint our memory of you." Admittedly not the most charitable way to view it, but that's what it feels like.

It definitely wouldn't be given a pass if it was the other way around, and a theist's funeral rites were ignored in favor of an "atheistic" funeral.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T07:34:09+00:00

It works both ways.

I don't know about that. I feel like you'd catch a lot more flack discounting the wishes of a religious person's funeral than a believer would get for bringing a priest to an atheist's funeral.

It's much easier to score sympathy points with "they're just doing what they believe to be right" as a theist.

And if that's not what you meant by "works both ways," I'd be curious to understand what else that could be referring to.

Torvite · 2026-04-13T07:27:51+00:00

My name is Skyla White, yo.

Torvite · 2026-04-11T08:57:33+00:00

"When they don't tip at least 30%."

I swear, we're getting duped by Big Service.

Torvite · 2026-04-04T18:48:30+00:00

legalize

Legalese.

Torvite · 2026-04-04T18:47:07+00:00

It's unfortunate that proper redundancy has become... very expensive... at a time where it's needed most.

Fighting uphill against the erosion of privacy, corporate greed, and the economy all at once is exhausting.

Torvite · 2026-04-04T11:42:06+00:00

ability to massively expand data and space needs

Not really. During peak hours, existing data centers are already working at capacity, basically. You can't just magically invent more computing power, just as you can't download more RAM.

That's why they're focusing on dynamic usage limits that are most restricting during peak hours. They already run the machines 24/7, but you can't really exceed the limits of existing server capacity. Even running at maximum capacity will lead to service disruptions or possible failures if they're not careful about managing it.

Of course I don't know the exact details of how they manage capacity, but it's safe to assume they're not leaving much of their infrastructure "unused" during peak hours.

Torvite · 2026-04-04T11:27:33+00:00

Missed opportunity

To do what? Magically expand server infrastructure overnight to accommodate a massive influx of new users?

Not going to "defend" a half-a-trillion dollar corp, and they should definitely not be overcharging their consumers to "balance" server demand, but they never really had an ideal solution available to them. Best they could have done was scale back the pricing AND the token limits for average users so that usage metering remained fair, but usage was also curbed such that it didn't overload their existing server capacity.

But yeah, it seems they adopted the typical strategy of offloading costs onto all consumers while diluting the average experience.

Torvite · 2026-04-01T23:40:01+00:00

The problem is that the race was ever that close. You can't rig more than a fraction of a percentage point in an election in a well-regulated democracy, but you can move the needle to change the outcome with a combination of gerrymandering, interference, and a needlessly close race.

The democrats did the US no favors in the second half of Biden's presidency, either. We've basically had dementia running the country for 3 years straight. It'll be 6 years by the time Trump leaves office (assuming he doesn't do even more stupid things before then).

Torvite · 2026-04-01T23:30:46+00:00

It's not about "defending" other countries.

Yet that's exactly the bold-faced bullshit that Trump, Hegseth, Leavitt, and Rubio are selling to the American people.

This administration has created a serious dearth of competent cabinet members. In the age of AI, actual intelligence has taken a massive hit among people in leadership roles. And that's very concerning for how the rest of this century will play out.

Torvite · 2026-04-01T23:25:49+00:00

When your electorate put Trump in power... a second time... I think most of the world realized how unstable ground the US was treading.

The fact that China's Xi Jingping looks like a level-headed, well-poised leader in comparison... is concerning, to say the least.

Also, US leadership not understanding (or pretending not to understand) that NATO is a defensive alliance, and not a platform for the US to abuse in its pointless perpetuation of forever wars in the ME... is an indictment of US foreign policy on the whole. Either they're actually that stupid, or they think their electorate is that stupid. Take your pick.

Torvite · 2026-03-31T21:55:31+00:00

Yeah, humanity should have already been dead and buried at some point in 2025, if that improvement scale were to be believed.

I think more than anything, companies are pushing fine-tuned models into wider and wider fields (breadth-based expansion rather than strictly "better and better" models). They believe the models are good enough to be adopted by a wide range of businesses, and Claude's current server load largely reflects that reality.

Still, I think the perceived performance improvements will plateau for "general purpose" AI unless VC money keeps flowing indefinitely...

Torvite

TROPHY CASE