Excellent use of post flair!

Well, it can federate with lemmy instances and there are way, way more lemmy users/communities than there are piefed user/communities. If you want to see the local communities on a piefed instances, it would be at /communities/local. This is the page for piefed.social.

This is exactly why. Some numbers:

• Polycarbonate thermal expansion coefficient - 65 * 10^-6 per degree C (source)
• Glass thermal expansion coefficient - 9 * 10^-6 per degree C (source)

Most amateur telescopes are used shortly after dusk when the temperature is changing more rapidly than deep in the night when the temperature might be more stable. Also, the coatings are not as resistant to more dramatic expansion cycles (remember that you need those mirrors to stay very smooth). Given the high price and low volume of the goods, it doesn’t make sense to cheap out on a critical component like this and give yourself a bad reputation among a very small but dedicated community.

I kind of feel like this was a missed opportunity to have Ponko replace Yachiyo in the OP.

I am traveling right now, so I am going to keep it short. I wasn’t really feeling this episode for a while. Yachiyo going through a rebellious phase (no matter how hilarious or well animated it was) felt a bit out of character to me. However, they brought me back around with the emotional exchange between the two. I am going to miss this show when it is over.

This show is taking its time with the later parts of this story despite going a bit faster early on and I think it is paying off. Honestly, despite the obvious lack of budget/production available for this show, they have done a fantastic job with the adaptation. They have changed up the order and pacing to better suit the medium, leading to some great moments.

I’m traveling, so I am going to keep this short. This episode was probably the best produced episode all season. I have absolutely loved this show. Even having read the manga, this show has elevated the source to such a high level it has been a joy. I will miss this when it ends.

This episode was certifiably nuts. The production on this show has been phenomenal when it has no need to be. It’s been something special all season.

Umm, no? 1-bit means 2^1 values. In this case the two colors but more commonly just 0 and 1.

2-bit would mean 2^2 values.

That’s some great dithering.

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Yeah, this is the way. After somebody gave me this tip years ago, every other way felt so imprecise.

Playing around with things, going too far, and dialing it back is all part of the creative process. The happy place is different for everyone, so just keep at it and don’t be afraid to just go nuts sometimes just to see what happens.

I do think that this looks better than last time, especially the backdrop. Also, it’s clear that you cleaned up the dust/fuzz a bit to make the instruments pop a bit more.

If you want to go for a darker black background, you are going to have to either get comfortable with post-processing your raws or shooting with manual settings (probably some combination of both). You have the advantage while shooting still-life that your subject is not moving and you can take as many shots as you want to really dial in settings.

The reason that your black sheet ended up looking gray is that the auto setting is usually trying to normalize the average brightness to somewhere in the middle of the sensor’s range. This works in reverse too. If you had a bright white background, the auto settings would adjust to make that end up looking duller and grayer. If you are serious about getting black backgrounds still, then your best bet would be a sweep made of matte black paper. When I want to have a very white background, this kind of paper is the best there is.

Moving away from auto settings means that you are going to be playing with three settings for the most part (sometimes referred to as the “exposure triangle”). It’s really not that scary, and all the settings are basically different ways to control how much light you have in the image. I have written super basic summaries below, but I recommend finding some other reading or videos where they can show images/examples of how these things influence your photographs.

Shutter speed/exposure - the amount of time that the sensor is exposed, usually expressed in some fraction of a second. For example, a shutter speed of 1/100 means that the sensor is only collecting light for 1/100th of a second. Some important shutter speeds to know are that 1/100 is about as long an exposure as I can set and get reliable shots without stabilizing my camera in some way (tripod or similar). Also, 1/200 is the fastest shutter speed you can set and still get reliable results while using a flash. Otherwise only part of the picture will see the subject illuminated (unless you have HSS which kinda sucks but is a whole can of worms). In summary, a longer exposure/slower shutter speed means a brighter image because you are collecting light for a longer period of time.

Aperture/f-stop - this is telling you how wide open the aperture is to let more or less light through the lens and onto the sensor. This number is confusing for a while until you get used to it in that it is expressed as a fraction like f/2.8 or f/4. The larger the denominator, the less light that you let in. So, f/1.4 lets in more light than f/4. This lets you influence how much light you collect independently of the shutter speed. So, if you are shooting something like a sports game with quick moving subjects, you might want a fast shutter speed, but to collect enough light for a good image, you can open your aperture way up.

Aperture also controls one other important part of your image, the depth of field. The more open your aperture is (smaller the f-stop number), the narrower your depth of field becomes. So, lots of photographers that do things like portraits like to shoot with lenses that can have very wide apertures. This makes the subject (person) be in focus while the background melts away as a big blurry blob of bokeh. It helps separate the subject of the photo from potentially distracting things in the background. Alternatively, shooting something like a landscape often means that you want both the bushes near you and the mountains in the distance to be in focus at the same time. So, that means you need to shoot with a stopped down aperture. For the product photography that I do, I tend to shoot with a very narrow aperture so that the foreground and background parts of the product are in focus.

ISO - This is basically telling the camera how much to amplify the light that hits the sensor. So, turning up the ISO means that you don’t need to collect as much light since your camera amplifies the light that does hit the sensor, but it also means that you see much more noise in your image due to this. Cranking up the ISO is pretty common when shooting subjects at night or in dark settings (concerts, etc.). It is also another dial you can control to adjust the amount of light you need to collect to get a good image. So, if your aperture is all the way open and you can’t increase the exposure any more without a tripod, but it is still too dark? Then you turn up the ISO. This is usually the last thing I turn to when I need more light in my image as I really don’t like digital noise in my images. I try to keep my ISO <800, but this can vary a lot depending on the camera/sensor.

Is this with a flash or with continuous lighting? The reason I ask is that I do product photography for my wife’s business and I found it much easier to do with flash. There are a couple benefits I found:

• There is just a ton more light to play with. This lets you stop down the aperture and increase the depth of field in your shot. Looking closely at your shot, the front of the spyglass and the rear of the cases are out of focus, something that you could fix by stopping down to 8.0 or so (where I do most of my photography these days).
• Related to above, the extra light lets you shoot at a lower ISO. Your shot has lots of noise in it which tells me that the ISO is pretty high. I typically shoot at 200 or so, something that would be impossible without the all the light from a flash. Also note that this could be due to compression that happened when it was uploaded to lemmy, so if you don’t see this in your version, then you can disregard.

I think you have done a great job with what I find to be the hardest part of product photography, the composition. In other words, the products are all laid out in an interesting and appealing way. I find that side of photography really tough and it is the part that is hard or impossible to teach if you don’t really have an eye for it.

If I were to offer some constructive criticism, its that the backdrop is not the most flattering. The uneven texture emphasizes the noise in the image, and the seam cutting through at an angle doesn’t really add anything and can be visually distracting. Similarly, some of the billowyness of the backdrop is creating light/dark areas that don’t add to the composition.

The types of products I shoot are not metallic, so I don’t have to worry about specular reflections, but it is something to keep in mind when photographing subjects like this. For example, the smooth metallic surfaces of these instruments really make things like dust/fuzz stand out. As an example, see the dial around and central bottom surface of the instrument on the left. This can be an aesthetic choice though (it almost look cobwebby), so that is why I just say to keep it in mind.

Great work! Keep it up!

Ah, I’ll have to try that out. I kind of forgot that the Playstation even has a browser.

Most of my plex users stream via Playstation, an area where Jellyfin has essentially been locked out. I let my users know how they can access my Jellyfin for the upcoming loss of remote play, but almost all of them opted to just pay the $2/mo to keep using their Playstation client.

I’m not a biologist, but if I understand your question correctly, you are basically looking for land-based invertebrates that also lack a hardened exoskeleton (like insects). This would basically consist of small, soft animals like snails, slugs, leeches, tardigrades, and tons of different types of worms.

The reason that you don’t see large examples of this in land-dwelling creatures is that skeletons or exoskeletons become way more necessary without a medium like the water in the ocean to help support a body. The rigid structure provides an attachment point for musculature to create the mechanical levers we use to manipulate our limbs.

Not sure where this falls on lemmy’s roadmap or if there is a github issue for it, but you can turn off notifications in piefed per post or comment. You can also enable notifications for posts/comments that aren’t your own if there is a thread you want to keep tabs on.

The theory that the lead maintainer had (he is an actual software developer, I just dabble), is that it might be a type of reinforcement learning:

• Get your LLM to create what it thinks are valid bug reports/issues
• Monitor the outcome of those issues (closed immediately, discussion, eventual pull request)
• Use those outcomes to assign how “good” or “bad” that generated issue was
• Use that scoring as a way to feed back into the model to influence it to create more “good” issues

If this is what’s happening, then it’s essentially offloading your LLM’s reinforcement learning scoring to open source maintainers.

Really great piece. We have recently seen many popular lemmy instances struggle under recent scraping waves, and that is hardly the first time its happened. I have some firsthand experience with the second part of this article that talks about AI-generated bug reports/vulnerabilities for open source projects.

I help maintain a python library and got a bug report a couple weeks back of a user getting a type-checking issue and a bit of additional information. It didn’t strictly follow the bug report template we use, but it was well organized enough, so I spent some time digging into it and came up with no way to reproduce this at all. Thankfully, the lead maintainer was able to spot the report for what it was and just closed it and saved me from further efforts to diagnose the issue (after an hour or two were burned already).