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My Favorite Photos of 2024
With 2024 breathing its last, I decided to rewind time and relive my year as a photographer. Going through the photos I took over the past year made me realize that this was a year of “staying in place” more than big leaps in my development. There were no new tricks I learned. There wasn’t a new technique that made its way into my arsenal. Instead, I learned to get better at what I really liked.
Modern society has conditioned us to believe that we must constantly be going somewhere, doing something new, and indulging in the novel. If we’re not, we somehow feel we’re failing and perhaps not living up to our potential.
I, too, fell prey to that line of thinking and started to experiment with multiple cameras and different lenses. I tried four new cameras this year — the Leica SL3, Hasselblad X2D 100, Nikon Zf, and
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The Story of Stent
Today is my 17th re-birthday. If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know why I call it my re-birthday. If you are new around here, well, here is a short recap. Just after I turned 41—17 years ago—a life of poor habits and family genetics caught up with me. I had a heart attack and was in the hospital for a few days. The doctors discovered all sorts of problems, and I ended up on the operating table. I came back home with a few new additions to my heart—the stent.
This morning, over my first cup of tea, I started to think about the past few years – things that have gone right – mostly right – since that heart attack. It was a terrible situation, but it changed the trajectory of my life.
After the surgery, the doctors told me
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As an avid Reddit user, I’ve learned to approach everything I read with skepticism, echoing Jerry Seinfeld’s catchphrase, “Really?” This morning, I encountered an unsourced post about Boox, a tablet and e-reader, which I viewed with a critical eye. According to the post, an upgrade to the Boox tablet’s operating system, which is based on Android, includes an AI assistant developed by ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant that also owns TikTok. ByteDance launched Coze, a competitor to ChatGPT, earlier this year.
The post claimed that this new bot is essentially disseminating Chinese Communist Party propaganda, accompanied by several screenshots. For example, prompts about the Tiananmen Square incident in China, compared to historical injustices in Western nations like France and the United States, reportedly yield strikingly different results. It was amusing to see the responses about North Korea and Russia.
However, it’s important to note that there is no way to verify the authenticity of these images or the post itself. The comparison between responses to prompts about various countries’ historical events raises questions about potential bias in the bot’s programming.
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