That‘s the magic trick you are doing with your analogy. You just assume that human/machine analogy is true.

I always assumed this discussion was about exceedingly crass color shifts, the removal or creation of elements not in the original image, not some dodging and cropping.

Sometimes skies look like that and grass looks like that and (the right) film is more than capable of capturing that with the appropriate saturation. Especially Velvia. Velvia is probably even cranking up the saturation, to levels you would not see like that with the naked eye.

Here is a landscape photographer showing their own favorite Velvia photographs: https://www.macfilos.com/2022/12/02/vivid-velvia-ten-fujifil...

Look at that first Tuscany image. The colors are a near perfect match. With the others the colors - especially the greens – can also be a lot more muted, however that seems to be down to darker greens as a starting point and also the light/weather (less saturation when it’s overcast and there is no direct light).

On close examination of the wallpaper (to a level of detail not visible on early 2000s screens) also shows all the hallmarks of a real photograph with remarkably little retouching.

On the left and especially the right you can see ugly clutter behind the hills which is only not distracting if you don’t examine the photo to closely. Anyone who photographs landscapes knows the issue of hard to hide clutter that nevertheless from my perspective also grounds the photograph in the real world.

Also clearly visible on the hills: tracks/paths through the hills. This is also something hard to avoid in landscape photography, though you try to minimize it with perspective. The same applies as to the clutter: my view is that this grounds the photograph as an actual photo.

Third hallmark of photography: the foreground grass is all out of focus! This is often hard to avoid. Techniques like focus stacking now exist, but as a single photograph that is often a trade off you have to make if your landscape shows both things close by and far away.

So, yeah, looks 100% like a real photograph and shows what a look Velvia is, mostly.

With new ticketing systems and online booking being introduced I think there has been a shift towards assigned seating. I remember the first time I was in a Dresden European Network cinema (Schauburg in 2015, that’s the oldest cinema in Dresden, 1927) and there either being no assigned seating or a seat printed on the ticket that no one cared about. We also weren’t asked where we wanted to sit. That has changed with a new ticketing system and now we are always asked about where we want to sit.

I think these ticketing systems come with assigned seating and that’s also a factor in assigned seating being introduced.

Notably, the one cinema that doesn’t have assigned seating also doesn’t offer online booking or reservations at all.

The four big multiplex cinemas in the city have assigned seating and do price discrimination based on where you sit – so it’s taken somewhat more seriously there.

So, yeah, my guess would be that the role online ticketing and the respective software/service/devices those cinemas use for that do all play a role in what role assigned seating plays and those can also trigger a cultural shift from sit where you want to assigned seating. (I have vivid childhood memories of my hometown long before online booking with price discrimination sections but no assigned seating in cinemas.)

For well more than a century artists like Duchamp (e.g. Fountain from 1917) have been playing around with what turns something into art and makes it valued and where then line between art/not art is and what that has to do with explicit and implicit rules.

To me graffiti in its contemporary form in general but also specifically Banksy is a pretty natural continuation from that discourse that fits right in. That to me has always been the additional layer to any work by Banksy, whatever other (often obvious) statement the artwork might make.

This contradiction at the heart of it does a lot of work and is a very valuable part of the art. This contradiction has led me to think a lot about rules and their role in society and to what extent pure strict rules based societies are a worthwhile goal and on the other hand what it means of we make exceptions.

Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.

That also substantially weakens any leverage the US has.

A mere slight increase in gas prices and slight threat to the economy can already substantially weaken US will to fight …

You can’t just say “but this is doxxing” and expect people to know what you are talking about and also attach the same negative label to it as you do the same way you would when you call out murder or theft.

I personally don’t find “doxxing” that useful as a concept and as a guidepost to what I consider ethical or not. People who use the concept tend to be extremely zealous with at, to a point where anything identifying anyone is doxxing (and doxxing is to those people self-evidently unethical) and that just doesn’t seem useful or practical to me at all.

As to this particular case: if you create something as corrosive, destructive and powerful as Bitcoin society should know you. You don’t get to hide in anonymity at all.

Obviously all actions the US takes have knock on effects elsewhere but those effects tend to become quite unpredictable and also weaker the further you are away from the place where the action happens.

We could talk for days about the knock on effects of the Iran war and sort through them and how all the different actors in the world will react and whether that’s on balance good or bad for the US … but it’s all a bit cute, right?

As always with any kind of film festival you are exposed to the bleeding edge - so yeah, you are going to see some bad films. That’s part of it. Though I noticed that even bad films – especially well made ones that I think are totally misguided in the ideas they express – help me broaden my horizons, understand myself better and maybe also understand the world better.

So yeah, long story short, I don’t think film as an art form is dead and it also won’t be in the next century or so. Maybe certain films won’t be made in the future – I’m currently mostly sad about practically no mid-budget films being made – but I’m totally certain that there will always be great films.

Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.

Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.

I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.

Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.

Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?