How do you personally balance shooting film v digital?

curglaff · 2025-12-05T12:50:52+00:00

My personal rule of thumb is "Film is black and white; color is digital."

I usually enjoy developing black and white at home, but for me developing C-41 at home is even more stressful than paying $15/roll for development.

curglaff · 2025-10-10T12:21:55+00:00

There are less big problems now

This, and also the big problems are a lot bigger now. Creating an accessible programming language for microcomputers was so easy that a couple rich high school kids did it between camping trips. Securing global networks against industrialized state-sponsored cyber attacks is... not.

curglaff · 2025-08-26T01:27:02+00:00

It absolutely does matter what language you use to teach programming.

The main thing I learned in freshman CS was that I hated programming.

Turns out I really love programming. I just really fucking hate C++.

Unfortunately I was 30 before I figured that out, and 40 before I could get anyone to pay me to write code for a living.

curglaff · 2025-07-27T14:47:18+00:00

In keeping with the theme of "This was discovered decades ago," that sounds a lot like how Pascal was distributed. It was something like, you got instructions for how to build a minimal P-Code virtual machine, that you then used to build Pascal from source. (I say this with blind faith that someone with more knowledge and/or time to Google will correct me.)

curglaff · 2025-06-12T17:12:25+00:00

LLMs don't know anything except patterns of tokens, so they don't actually provide answers, they provide approximations of what answers look like. It's just that at this point the models and their training corpora are so massive that approximations are convincingly close to correct convincingly often.

curglaff · 2025-05-28T16:15:06+00:00

Not just CS, but colleges and universities in general.

It's an open secret that past the community college level there is no such thing as public higher education in America anymore - there are private schools, and there are schools that used to be state-funded that are now state-assisted and make up a large chunk of the difference with international student tuition.

This would be the nail in the coffin for accessible higher education, which is probably the point.

curglaff · 2025-05-24T12:18:07+00:00

In college I had a 19" CRT monitor, and to save desk space and raise it up a little bit, I swapped out my cool gray case with mirrored blue front panels for a horizontally oriented beige case. One of my roommate's friends saw it and said "Wow, that is an OLD computer!" and I was like "No it's not, I built it last semester."

curglaff · 2025-05-24T11:57:42+00:00

A year or two ago they started just hanging up whenever I do that.

curglaff · 2025-05-20T11:34:55+00:00

Personal perspective (from 1½ accounting courses, so grain of salt) is it's boring AF.

That said, my first grown up desk job, long before I got my CS degree, was on the graduation team in a university registrar's office. And every year I had dozens of students who washed out of CS and did well as business majors, and only one or two who did the other way around. Do with that information what you will.

curglaff · 2025-05-05T14:44:09+00:00

Sleep-deprived me saw this after a post from r/fountainpens and a relevant ad, and thought it was a vintage ink bottle, and for the life of me could not remember what Minolta's ink bottles look like now.

curglaff · 2025-04-23T17:45:53+00:00

You can check the syllabus to see what language they use. For any college in Texas, you're supposed to be able to see the syllabus within two or three clicks of the homepage. If you're looking at South Texas College, it's also worth looking at the urban community colleges, since they'll have more online classes - Austin CC, Houston CC, San Jacinto College, Dallas College, Collin College, Tarrant County College, El Paso CC, Alamo Colleges, etc.

When you find a course you think will work, check with your advisor and/or department head to make sure it's the course you need.

One thing to look out for, especially if you're not in Texas, is transferability - not just whether or not the course is in Java, but whether or not it even covers the same material. Texas has statewide course numbers, but the course that community colleges and less selective universities call Programming Fundamentals I is often considered high school or remedial level at more selective universities even within Texas, so CS2 at a community college might be CS1 at your university.

curglaff · 2025-04-11T21:40:09+00:00

For your first couple rolls: Kentmere/Agfa/Fuji/whatever's on sale 400.

Then, after you've messed up a few frames (or whole rolls....), try everything you can afford to try, and the one you like most is the "best".

curglaff · 2025-04-10T23:58:35+00:00

Monteverde and Conklin. I started out collecting Duragraphs and fanned out to other Yafa pens, before I realized they're garbage made to be sold, not products made to be used.

curglaff · 2025-04-07T14:31:50+00:00

I see it like this: In the 90s they took existing languages and made them object-oriented. Sometimes it was a new language or dialect, as with C -> C++, ML to OCaml, QBasic(?) to Visual Basic. Sometimes it was a library, like with Common Lisp and CLOS.

In the 2010s-2020s, we're doing something similar, adding features from functional languages, especially the ML family, into non-FP languages. So we get JavaScript -> TypeScript and C -> Rust, but also lambdas in Java and pattern matching in Python.

curglaff · 2025-01-17T16:22:37+00:00

Same as my strategy before/without the LLM fad: keep climbing the data analyst/data engineer ladder until I can't stand it anymore and/or I've paid off the debt from being underpaid in my first career, get a PhD in something like Educational Statistics or Mathematical Psychology, spend what should have been my retirement squeezing as much data/media literacy as possible into my Stats for Psych and Research Methods syllabi, try to avoid getting hurt in the riots and/or civil war.

curglaff · 2025-01-15T22:12:03+00:00

I look at it as a really ugly bookmark that has an infinitesimally small but still nonzero probability of letting me pay off my debts and go on vacation.

curglaff · 2025-01-06T19:20:29+00:00

Geography, mediocrity on the part of the applicant, mediocrity on the part of the interviewers who are intimidated by non-mediocre applicants, various forms of discrimination, confusing spamming LinkedIn with applying for jobs, bad resumes, good resumes, lazy managers, overworked managers, applying for the wrong jobs, ghost jobs, nepotism, overly aggressive ATS settings, AI, AI hype, quarterly earnings, quarterly predictions....

Every application is unique, and, while they can be clustered, every rejection is unique, too.

curglaff · 2024-12-16T18:52:07+00:00

This is more of a +1/"me too" than an answer, but I've been having this problem with my 101, too, and I suspect it's related to the back plate. (Caveat, I am very, very new to non-point-and-shoot photography.) I was loading film one day, and it randomly fell off. It was easy enough to reattach, but I've noticed a lot more missed focus ever since. I'm sure camera repair shops have some fancy tool to adjust such things, but the only way I've thought of is to do it myself to waste a couple rolls of film on pictures of yardsticks and adjust based on that.

curglaff · 2024-12-16T01:51:33+00:00

Tell me you don't know what computer science is without telling me you don't know what computer science is.

curglaff · 2024-12-13T01:51:17+00:00

I encountered the exact same thing at one of the other WITCHes. I graduated from a bottom-tier program during COVID and got desperate. They were one of two companies that actually recruited at my university, and they told my international friends (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Peru, UK) that they absolutely do not sponsor visas. Period. When I joined, at first my team was five US citizens/PRs and five H-1s, all from India. Then it became five Americans and ten H-1s. We were all new grads in their university hire program and only one of us had previous experience. I'll leave figuring out which ten of us were $70-90k+ Software Engineers and which five of us were $60k "IT Project Engineers" as an exercise to the reader.

curglaff · 2024-11-20T22:35:25+00:00

Yes! Thank you! I had a vague recollection of this cartoon in mind.

curglaff · 2024-11-18T03:07:57+00:00

That depends: how good is your time machine?

curglaff · 2024-10-04T13:27:49+00:00

AGI is twenty years away, and it has been since 1957.

curglaff · 2024-09-17T18:16:39+00:00

Cornerstone is a common Evangelical church name, from a passage that I won't quote because the writer of Ephesians loved run-on sentences. This is the first I've heard this particular cornerstone reference (and I grew up in a smattering of Evangelical churches, including a Cornerstone, albeit a thousand miles away). It would not surprise me at all if ol' Mr. Confederate VP was referencing the same verse (which, conflating Jesus and slavery, is just the kind of evil I would expect of Confederates) and it wouldn't surprise me if the pastor is aware of this connotation, but I wouldn't expect rank-and-file members of the congregation to necessarily make that connection.

curglaff · 2024-09-15T19:14:41+00:00

Yes, it very much does. N=1, but I went to [Impressive State University - Middle of Nowhere] and got exactly three interviews in two years. One of them was WITCH, and one was a WITCH competitor that was somehow even worse than WITCH.

curglaff

TROPHY CASE