Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
The place we're heading to is a deeply rural area, about an hour to the south-west of Lyon, if memory serves correctly.
I was there for another event this time last year and basically no one we met spoke English. It was quite the experience. And as a northern Englishman with a predilection for deep, guttural vowels and strong plosive sounds, I'm almost completely incompatible with the laissez-faire way the French treat syllables.
Incidentally, a Romanian friend of mine I've known for a long, long time met me there last year. He was even more angry at the lack of English proficiency amongst the French than I was! "I put in all this effort so that people could understand me internationally, why didn't these bastards?" I couldn't stop laughing.
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Montreal is beautiful. After the Pequiste uproar in the 70's things have quieted. Your bride no doubt knew Ben's Smoked Meats and Le Roi des Frites out on "The Main." Le Roi is long gone now as is Ben's. I got my Masters at McGill. They treated me like a rented mule, like work, hard work was the norm. OTOH they were unfailing kind, generous and forgiving. When they handed out money for the Masters candidates they had none for me. I figured, OK, a US'er it is just how it is. Then they asked if they could speak to me after the meeting. They apologized for having no money for me and awarded me a half assistant-ship with no duties. So I got a paycheck and free tuition. I am not sure I deserved it but did not argue that point with McGill. Studying US History at a Canadian institution was enlightening, and I got a healthy dose of Canadian History. I have forgotten much of what I have learned but I did not forget how to do research, a very valuable skill. Your bride will no doubt agree that time spent out there on Sherbrooke was time well spent.
As for speaking English, I remember it was OK for US'ers but not too welcome for Canadians to do so. I may drive up this summer. Place Ville Marie, bumper to bumper traffic at midnight seven nights a week. They stay up late in Montreal. Really late. LOL
McGill is a great school. The Canadians are very nice people, until they get a hockey stick in their hands. Old joke.
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Non, non, non, mon ami. French is rigorously controlled and its rules of grammar and pronunciation written in stone. L"Academie Francaise controls this. However, regional dialects can still be perplexing. As for English, when I was working for my uncle there in the mid 60's no one really spoke English. My last visit revealed lots of English speakers. But the argot is amusing. One old guy was smoking one of those hand-rolled in corn paper cigarettes and coughing. He choked, laughed and said, "Mal pour les sponges" Yeah, bad for the sponges, lungs. You will have a great time.
ChrisPlatt
Thread Killer
Independent radio station WFMU-FM has an alternate Web music stream WFMU Rock 'N' Soul Radio.
They use an AI deejay when not presenting a show with a live host.
I like the AI deejay's choice of music better than many of the live hosts.
Chris
They use an AI deejay when not presenting a show with a live host.
I like the AI deejay's choice of music better than many of the live hosts.
Chris
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
I remember them well. I grew up not far from there.
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boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
I was at the photography club meeting tonight. AI came up. I talked about a fellow had entered an AI photo and won a contest with it. Cries of anger and outrage, "It's not a photograph!" was the cry. I said I was not interested in the semantics but the possibility that AI was teaching photographers humility. Again, "It is not a photograph." So, when some one can create a digital image, run it through Ps and add, remove, color, shade, tone and otherwise manipulate a photo what results is a photograph. But if a person says, "Make me a photograph with three ducks, a horse and a spaceship." and gets a great image through the AI doing the same thing it is not a photograph. Yeah, right. Some folks still deny digital is photography and follow it far enough down this line of reasoning and you are at a camera obscura. AI is here, it will be folded into more and more of what we do. AI? How about your car? How about your washing machine? How about your TV? It is here, it is being used all over the place. We just might be part of a dying pastime. Photograph means drawing with light. Human involvement is not part of the definition. Things change.
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dct
perpetual amateur
True, regarding the end product, the image. Still call it "photography"? It doesn't matter for me.
What I like (and why I'm here in this forum) is exactly the human handling involvement. As long as my "light gathering device" let me compose and fiddle around with some basic controls, I'm happy. Why would I bother taking the zillionst image of a well known landscape? Not for the final image, there are thousand of better composed, with the right weather and well performed retouch (AI? Photoshop?) images around.
It might include relatives of mine. It might show a no more existing tree. It triggers my memories. And I like the way I captured it unexpectedly well with the wrong camera, the wrong lens, the wrong sun positioning...
I don't fear the AI topic: It is just irrelevant for the images (err... photographs?) I do myself for my pleasure.
(Back to OP: I accept and expect some AI elements in a smartphone. Not in my "serious" photo equipment)
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
Yes, what you say is true and I agree. I like these cute little opto-mechanical toys and what I can do with one. I'm not masochistic enough to do film. I did it for years and am done with it. A good digital camera with a good color engine and lens suits me just fine. And, yes, AI is compulsory in phones. I can see no other way to pull a good image out of that teeny lens.
Pál_K
Cameras. I has it.
I don’t know whether the image processing in a cellphone camera can be called AI - does it learn, adapt, and modify its image processing algorithms based on experience? Or does it just use what’s already been programmed back in the lab (it may very well be a great image processing algorithm, but it is static aside from firmware upgrades).
And what is this “phone” thing of which you and others speak? The handheld internet, texting, photo and mapping device? Why do they call it a phone when “phone” (φωνή) means “voice”?
luuca
Well-known
ok, you made me laugh 😂
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
We both know that "phone" is a shortening of "telephone" which is from the Greek meaning "distant voice." I am not hip enough to define AI so I went to Wikipedia:
"Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by non-human animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs."
It does not require learning in this definition which may be correct.
Pál_K
Cameras. I has it.
By Wiki’s definition (which I think is insufficient), any algorithm which produces decent results could be considered “AI” and any camera with a microprocessor which made exposure decisions could be considered an AI camera. Thus, from 1978:
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boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
If you have a problem with the definition take it up with Wikipedia. ;o) That is where I got the definition, Here is another: What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? which describes it the same way. I think what is happening is that AI has become much more sophisticated and in so doing the meaning has changed in the popular mind. We have come to believe that all AI can carry on conversations, learn and infer. Back in my early days of programming the large shop I was apprenticing in had "Dr. Ottomatic" the on-line psychiatrist which could carry on a dialog and make suggestions, ask questions and so on. This was in '78 or '79. It was not an official in-house product but a lot of fun. This is not new to everybody but it is new to the general population. It has created a Luddite hysteria in addition to some serious thought amongst the folks responsible for the current about how AI should be controlled and regulated. My thinking is that the toothpaste is already out of the tube. But it is interesting to see the drama play out. And I doubt that we have seen all that there is.
ChrisPlatt
Thread Killer
When I was young and inexperienced I bought the hype and "upgraded" from a Canon AE-1 to a then new Canon A-1.
I hated the interface. "Help! My camera has swallowed a pocket calculator!" This drove me to abandon Canon entirely.
Chris
I hated the interface. "Help! My camera has swallowed a pocket calculator!" This drove me to abandon Canon entirely.
Chris
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
That is interesting but other than proving you made a bad choice what does this example illustrate? I have a Sony A7M III which is quite complex. It takes good photos. And I bought an after market manual and have watched some YT videos on setting it up. Problem solved. OTOH the M9 is simple. No image stabilization, no HDR, no autofocus, no movie, a lot of stuff that is in the Sony is not in the M9. If I want to be sure to get the photo I use the Sony. If I have the time I take the M9. There is no perfect camera despite what the marketing departments says. "Comes the revolution, MBA's, cost accountants and marketing types, up against the wall." ;o)
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
In case you hair is not yet on fire about AI, check these Cold Fusion posts:
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dct
perpetual amateur
It might not be the single front end device (in this example a smartphone) but the whole system behind it. After several iterations the in-device and online algorithm is refined from update to update. Is this primitive intuitive trial and error AI learning? To some extent. Add the engineers of the software companies backing this up with new ideas and approaches and there you have the whole "learning network" of such a tiny device.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
At that time, I always had Leica RFs and Nikon SLRs and my friend always had Canon SLRs. He bought the A-1 after having an FTb and then an AE-1 ... and he loved the A-1. I never liked any of those very much, preferring the (to me) simpler and nicer feeling Nikon F, F2, F3, FM2, and FE2 (I'd acquired all of them by 1980-82, and I used those cameras until 2003).
He eventually bought a Canon F1 and then an F1n, and then wondered why he had because he liked using the A-1 more. And then Canon moved to the EOS system and changed the lens mount. He never forgave them for that... But he still has all of the old bodies and their lenses.
People differ.
G
Pál_K
Cameras. I has it.
I remember in the 1970’s there was also the ELIZA program similar to that, created in the 1960’s. People had a lot of fun with it.
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
The mention of DOCTOR in the Wikipedia page makes m think that Dr. Ottomatic could have been a modification. You can imagine what young programmers were saying to it.I remember in the 1970’s there was also the ELIZA program similar to that, created in the 1960’s. People had a lot of fun with it.