AI noise removal is still not that good
I end up with a lot of super-noisy photos because I do social dance photography. The light in the room is dim, and I need a fast shutter speed because people are moving quickly, so I'm letting in even less light. This is terrible for noise.
Unfortunately, it seems that the best AI noise removal tools are still not that good! I am surprised.
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Post for collecting bugs reported on this friendica instance
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network page? on your global community page?
Reminds me of of the "you are bugs" scene in the three body problem.
> And as we go about changing the world to suit our preferences, the rats will remain unconsulted. It seems clear to me that rats will only get what they want, when what they want happens to be nearly-costless to humans.
This seems like it's making progress towards a formalization, though I think it still struggles.
If you imagine that covid virons were agents, then it seems to me that although there's a sense in which we're much more powerful than them, and you know, humanity could, if "it" wanted, defeat them, they can kinda get what they want without enormous costs to humans. And yet humans are still much more powerful than covid virons.
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Hosting providers
Right now superstimul.us is hosted on a Vultr VPS instance. I use Vultr because it's a decently reliable VPS host that offers OpenBSD (though this instance is running in Docker on a Debian system). Much cheaper than AWS; comparable pricing and features with many other VPS providers.
But I just went looking at the prices of competitors, and Hetzner is cheap. How is it so cheap? For roughly the same price I'm paying for this host, I could get ~8x the vCPUs and RAM, and 4x the storage.
It would be a hassle to migrate at this point, but I'm definitely tempted.
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1. It's *even more* cost-competitive if you participate in their dutch-style server-capacity auction (a neat idea):
- hetzner.com/sb/
- docs.hetzner.com/robot/general…
- There is also open-source tooling to automate interaction with the auction.
2. Have no illusions that such infrastructure is physically secure against interference (fun example at: notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.r…), and account for such in your threat model if/as appropriate.
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Notes on the outcome of groups experiment
I think groups are a pretty half-baked feature, and I don't expect people to use them much. A "group" (previously called a "forum", and most of the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this change) is basically an account that auto-reshares things it's tagged in. You can give it a few different settings for how it responds to follow requests, and another setting for the visibility of its reshares. To administer a group, you have to create a second account for it (which friendica does make relatively easy but not trivial), and then switch to being logged-in "as" the group.
So, yeah I guess it might be useful for coordinating things somehow, and the setting with private reshares is maybe promising (though also marked "experimental"). But it seems much less natural to me than the corresponding concept on Facebook.
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Some praise for the behind-the-scenes tech I'm using to run this site
- Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
- Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
- Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.
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The plan for the beta
Thanks to everyone who's joined to help beta test! I'm very grateful y'all are here! ❤️
My basic plan is to use superstimul.us for the next week, posting here instead of Facebook, getting a sense of the platform so that I can help other people later, and trying to iron out basic issues if they crop up.
After that, I'm going to do a push to invite clusters of people who I'm especially excited about being here. I'll probably reach out to y'all for names of people who are cruxy for your active enjoyment/participation here (feel free to preemptively message me about this!).
Anybody can invite their friends, btw, though I would slightly prefer you held off for now, because I want to be strategic about the launch.
I might do some kind of incentive / costly-signaling scheme where I give $20 or so to the first 30 people who share a substantive post here, and not on other social media? Or something; Not sure about that yet.
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I'm considering going to the southern hemisphere for December and January, to miss the shortest days in California.
New Zealand and Chile both seem like good options: Tons of sun that time of year, good climate, safe cities, relatively cheap. Chile is a lot cheaper, and after having a lot of fun visiting Mexico, I kind of want to try living in a country where I don't know the language.
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I just played Duck Detective and I have a complaint
I am confused that it is SO well-rated. Like, it's 10/10 on Steam? The motivation behind the central crime doesn't really make sense and is barely explained. It's cute in a bunch of ways, but writing reasonable character motivations feels like a "bare minimum" thing for me. (At least in this kind of game, where you're supposed to deduce who did what and why.)
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I did a dance shoot on Friday
Check out this edit I did. The more colorful one is the "after." It's more colorful than what it was like to really be there -- but the less colorful one also isn't what it looked like to really be there. It was so dim!
This kind of choice feels salient during photography post-processing. Should I make it look like how it looked to be there? Or how it FELT to be there? Or should I just do something cool?
The ideal probably depends on the purpose of the shoot. (Is it to remember a wonderful event? Is it to create a piece of art? Is it to give people photos to use for dating apps?)
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Yeah that would be nice! Partly because it sounds nice to give people a better idea of what goes into a pretty photo -- a lot of the labor is invisible. (Sometimes people just tell me "wow you have a really good camera" when they see my photos.)
But also because there's a big difference between what is optimal for aesthetics and what is optimal for accurate-information-sharing, and I'm disappointed about how much art distorts people's beliefs
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I'm really excited for this experiment! Friendica exceeds my expectations in some ways (looks nice, has imo an especially good privacy model, seems easy to update and administer) and falls short in others (ease of finding people, occasional UI weirdness).
Please let me know if you run into any issues and I'll try to fix them or at least help resolve them
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in reply to kip • •kip likes this.
Kevin Gibbons
in reply to kip • •I hear good things about Lightroom's denoise - do you have a way you could try that? The random online tools are often pretty far behind state of the art, if that's what you've tried so far.
reddit.com/r/photography/comme…
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kip
in reply to Kevin Gibbons • •Oh cool! I can try Lightroom and this DxO thing (haven't heard of it). I think I may have already tried Photoshop's denoise feature -- maybe that's the same as whatever Lightroom is doing.
Topaz was what I tried in the screenshot. It seemed like it was supposed to be one of the best options, but I'm glad that top comment says it's actually far behind others
kip
in reply to kip • •Further attempts:
According to someone on the thread that Kevin linked, Topaz works better if you're using raw files instead of JPGs. Indeed, it does!
Not sure it's good enough that I'd actually want to use it. I'll think about it.
Looks like I did try de-noising in Lightroom already -- I cancelled my Adobe subscription so I can't redo it, but it's still on there when I open Lightroom. It's kind of impressive, but also still looks pretty unnatural in a lot of ways. (Some things too blurry, some things too crisp.) Looks like some poorly-stylized digital painting rather than a photo. (At least for the photo I tried. I can't share it because it's not a very flattering shot of the person pictured.)
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