A.I. Explosion

The “artificial intelligences” we have so far, like Amazon’s Alexa, are not very impressive at all. If you ask them anything beyond what they are strictly programmed to answer, they are stumped. In other words they can’t think at all.

But I wouldn’t bet too much that they can’t get to do so. And something just struck me: it is unlikely that we will see a long, slow growth in intelligence of A.I.’s. I think that when it happens, it’s gonna go really flippin’ fast. One year they will still seem dull as bricks, and the next year they will be smarter than us, and the next they will have taken over the world, for better or worse.

Leica story, small to large

Article and video in Luminous Landscape’s nice series about the Leica camera/company.

I find it ironic that about a century years ago when Leica was founded, it was about a good camera with what was then a *tiny* negative, 35mm. Today with digital sensors, 35mm (24x36mm) is a *big* format! Unusually big; today you get better image quality than 35mm film with some cameras which have a tiny fraction of that sensor area. In other words, the basics of Leica today has nothing in common in the basics with the Leica originally.
Sure, you can say it has high quality in common, but high quality in mechanics is simply inherent in German engineering.

This is not really important, I just find it funny, because many would say that if any company has stuck to being about what it was always about, it’s Leica, but simply because of outter changes that is not true. Leica used to be a tiny-format alternative to the mainstream large-film cameras, and now it is a *large-format* alternative to the mainstream small-sensor cameras...