In one of the podcasts that I listened to, I heard about this new AI-generated George Carlin special: I'm Glad I'm Dead.
As a fan of George Carlin, I had to listen to it, even though I knew it was fake. The situation is a bit unclear. The Carlin estate sued the producer, and the details are hard to come by. The uploader says that most probably the jokes were written by a human, and probably, just the voice was generated.
Regardless, I think it's a cool achievement, despite not really feeling as good as a Carlin show.
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In the last year and a half, I was looking for an upgrade to my old camera without any success. I own a Canon 6D (first generation) since 2015 or so. Despite the beating it took so far, it still works great. Unfortunately, it lacks in certain areas. The focus system is pretty poor (I miss a lot of shots due to it), and it's video is not that great (only 1080p and contrast based autofocus with not focus peaking option).
Based on what I feel it's missing and what I like about my camera, my criteria for the new camera are:
- full frame sensor
- phase detect auto focus
- 4K recording without cropping
Canon has all these technologies, but they never put it all together in a camera. Mainly because they have so many products lines and they want to protect them (read cinema cameras).
In the current DSLR line-up, the closest I get to meet my criteria is the 1DX Mark II. I say closest because it has 1.3x crop in 4k. Initially was released with a 1.7x crop, but Canon pulled it down to 1.3x with a firmware upgrade.
The new EOS R is also pretty close, with the same caveat. A 1.7x crop in 4k that's a defying common sense. I don't expect them to improve it via software upgrade. In my opinion EOS R it's the state of Canon (in)competency in the mirrorless word. Its ergonomics leave a lot to be desired, and the rest (image quality, eye detect auto-focus, 4k video) is years behind competition (mainly Sony).
The rumours are not giving me any hope either. 1DX Mark III is supposed to launch next year. At this point you need to have a tons of old EF lenses to buy something like this. If you don't own a lot of cool EF lenses you should stay away from this soon-to-be-outdated system. Everything is gonna be mirrorless in 5 years and you will basically throw money out of the window buying lenses that will be worth nothing in a few years.
Since I'm an expat living in a country that has four official languages (all of them are still foreign to me) I feel entitled to rant about the internationalization and localization of software. Let's start:
1. Making it hard for users to change the language
Most of the websites and applications make educated guesses for which language they should display. This guesses are not always right. For example I'm using a company laptop where I cannot change language and Chrome reports my default language wrong, or I'm travelling and my IP address has nothing to do with the languages I know. Some software developers don't take this cases in considerations and once the language was guessed it's very hard for the user to change it. Usually because the configuration is hidden or missing completely.
My suggestion is to try to guess the language, but let the user change it easily and wrong guesses will be less annoying.
This can be done by putting language selectors in places that are visible and easy to reach. You should not have to scroll to find them and god forbid to require navigation through a menu structure in a language you're not familiar with. Some prefer to show a message when the "guess" happen to inform you about the automatic choice and also provide a short-cut to change it in case the guess was wrong. A message like "You were redirects to Language Name. You can change you language here in case you prefer something else". This will let you get away with hidden language controls, but will still presents a problem if the user has no idea about the language used for the message. I will never understand this message in Chinese for example, but if it will be one of the other languages accepted in my country/region I can probably guess pretty easy.