234 North

I’ve been on the Internet a long time - several years before “the web” was released to the world. In 1993 it was and it was small and it was fun. There were no corporations. No ads. No tracking. No billionaire tech bros. No “influencers” and social media. No bullshit.

It hasn’t been fun in quite awhile honestly, but that has accelerated rapidly with the release of LLMs and chatbots. It’s a whole new level of bullshit, grift, and graft. It is impossible to read the tech news and stay away from stories about AI. Forget the tech news, it is literally everywhere now and no place is immune. It’s a bizarre mass psychosis.

Before finishing this post I’ll say that I’m not trying to be “old man yelling at clouds”. What bothers me isn’t the technology, it’s people and their usual fashion of fucking up anything good, driven by people who can never seem to have enough. It always comes back to money. Social media? Money. Influencers? Money. “AI”? Even worse because of how much money and resources are being consumed in the pursuit of something not at all proven.

I’m old enough to know this is nothing new, but the level we’re seeing today would make the Robber Barons of the late 19th century blush.

I’m also not sure where that leaves me in all of this.

Update : because I keep seeing references from Kagi to this "review” let me expand on it just a bit.

Key take away

Overrated in my opinion. Don’t waste your money. That said, if you’re looking for something that’s as close to the X100VI as possible and actually available? The X-E5 kit is your best bet right now.

What I didn’t like

1. Buttons are too small for my liking.
2. Far too much menu diving to set up recipes.
3. In the default settings the LCD will shut off while you’re using the film simulation dial because the proximity detector for the EVF is so close it gets triggered any time you use the dial.
4. The film simulations/recipes are just highly overrated in my opinion. I was expecting a lot more based on everything I’ve read.
5. The grip is too small. I now understand why companies make add-ons for this.

What I liked

1. Build quality is really good. Feels super solid in the hand.
2. The picture quality is excellent. It is after all a 40 megapixel sensor tied to an excellent prime lens (I bought the kit with the XF 23mm lens). And while I think the film simulations are overrated, Fujifilm’s JPEG output is excellent.

Overall

I was not going to get out of this camera anything I could get out of my iPhone with VSCO Pro, with far more hassle involved, and it was $2000. That’s a lot of money to not be 100%+ thrilled with the thing. Yes, I realize it’s a dedicated camera but the quality I was going to get out of it does not make up for the convenience of my phone which also has an excellent camera system.

Me, my wife, and my kids took a trip down to the Obama Presidential Center yesterday. Short review: meh. The campus is gorgeous, and the view from the 8th floor is great, but as someone who lived through the 8 years of Obama as an adult the museum portion wasn’t very exciting.

Oh, and if you’re planning on visiting don’t take the “limited parking” warning for the on-campus garage on the website seriously. The parking was ample. There were still plenty of spaces there even on a Sunday afternoon when the tickets were sold out. ¹

1. Yes technically all parking is limited but when I see that phrase I expect they’ve only got a small number of spaces.

Read this today and was disappointed in the author’s definition of being Agnostic as “The position of being unsure or doubtful whether God exists.”

Agnostics are not "unsure or doubtful whether God exists", they simply don't believe that the subject can be known. That is not the same thing as being "unsure or doubtful". Ultimately the term comes from the Greek word "gnosis"..."knowledge".

An Agnostic would say that the Bible is not a reasoned explanation of the existence of God. It's mythology, no different than Norse/Greek/Roman mythology. They're all the writings of man. In the case of Christianity a mythology sprung from a minor sect of Judaism at that. The Bible is not proof of God.

With the X100VI that I’ve been pining over for years still not available due to limited availability I did the next best thing - I bought the X-E5. After years of seeing, and drooling over, pictures made with the various Fuji film simulations (and recipes using them) I’ll finally have a chance to try them out on my own.

One thing I am not liking about this camera from the moment I took it out of the box: the tiny buttons and dials. I don’t have sausage fingers and still think the buttons and dials are too small.

I’ve got 30 days to try it out and a week of vacation upcoming to put it through it’s paces. Given the cost some hard decisions will be at hand soon.

The Right in Europe would have us believe that air conditioning is the answer. Marine Le Pen wants to roll out air conditioning countrywide in France because they don’t have any other answers. Air conditioning is an option for specific issues but when your infrastructure is not built for it, and when your nuclear power plants are shutting down because of high temperatures, AC is like a tiny band aid on a limb that’s just been cut off.

The rest of the world is at risk as well - I don’t want to diminish that point. Europe is the canary in the coal mine though to use a worn-out phrase. The change is more rapid there than anywhere else, their homes and other buildings are not built for hot weather, and frankly they don’t have the infrastructure that countries like the US and Canada have for fire-fighting. Le Pen would be much better off suggesting rational policy on those things vs. “AC for all” but like everywhere else in the world the Right doesn’t have any rational policy to help fix any of this. There is a direct line for the problems the world is experiencing to any policy the Right has put forward.

So I’ll say a prayer for Europe, and the rest of the world, that our leaders will pull their heads out of the sand, pretending the issue doesn’t exist while the world burns. I’ll say another prayer for those responsible for electing these leaders to pull their own heads out of the sand to see that we are all responsible, some (much) more than others, and that current policy, and dumb ideas like “AC for all”, is not going to fix anything.

Wildfire smoke is a weird thing. I’m sitting on my patio, watching the sun set. It’s very obvious the smoke is up there because of the color of the setting sun. Intense pinkish-orange (and blinding, why am I looking at it directly?!?).

And then there is this, the smoke plume map of my general area in the US Midwest:

Not only is the wildfire smoke up there, it’s pretty heavy. There is a milkiness to the rest of the sky. Down here though? On land? Nothing. Green and yellow dots everywhere. Good to great air quality. Green here where I’m sitting. And a beautiful evening to boot! Low 70s (Fahrenheit), low humidity¹. Wonderful weather to be sitting outside.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I had enough of the ground level smoke a couple weeks back when we hit 900 on the air quality reading (for reference it’s 43 as I write this). It’s just odd to me, and another wild thing about nature to think about. But oh those smoke-assisted sunsets!

1. “Humidity” as a percentage is useless. The dew point is a much better indicator of atmospheric water content. Right now it’s in the high-50s here. Very comfortable!