Photo Friday: Tigers
After the break: A YouTube app that doesn't suck, a moving story of changing identity, and LLMs are bad at brain teasers.
We’ve made it another week! Congratulations to each and every one of us.
Dallas got a nice little coolfront this week, but it’s a short-lived one; next week we’re getting back to the upper 80s. I’m really hoping this heat dome breaks soon, especially now that we’ve had a taste of the 50s in the mornings again. (I don’t know why I always talk about the weather here. I’m taking suggestions for new things to talk about every week in the Friday newsletter.)
My college football team has a bye week, which is great because it means I cannot be emotionally devastated by teenagers playing a game this weekend. At least I got some cool pictures from Baton Rouge. Let’s take a look.
Photos
1.
My dad and I had the most incredible lunch on Sunday at Parrain’s. It was a beautiful day, except for all of the LSU fans surrounding me. There was a longer wait for a table, but in fairness, we had walked in right at the peak of post-church traffic.
While we were waiting, I brought my camera out and started looking around the building. Around the corner, there was a courtyard that featured this composition. If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, you know I love dappled sunlight, so this composition was irresistible.
I didn’t have to do a whole lot of editing on this one. A little cropping, some color temperature changes, and that was about it. The lighting strips up top are a little bold, but I think it gives the image a feeling of being a casual look into a scene, rather than something staged.
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2.
Y’all, I haven’t shot sports since I was in high school. I didn’t plan on it this weekend either, but after lunch, we wandered into the PMAC and found ourselves in the middle of a conference volleyball game.
I had my Canon R5 and my RF 70-200mm f/2.8 lens with me. It can shoot 12 frames per second, has incredible high-speed autofocus, and a 45 megapixel sensor. And most of the time, I shoot one frame at a time focusing on a stationary object. So I figured I’d unleash the beast and see if I could get a single decent shot. We were sitting pretty far up, so I was going to be relying on the camera and lens hardware stabilization to let me get sharp pictures in low light.
Most of the photos I took were terrible! It was not the hardware’s fault. It was all operator error. I would shoot with a shutter speed that was too slow and get unwanted motion blur. I spent way too much time focusing on the action at the net instead of the action in the backfield, which usually had more motion. The angle we were at gave almost every image a super busy background, and it was hard to isolate a single player or a group of players without catching stray arms and heads and legs from others nearby.
I remember shooting better images with far worse cameras back in high school, because I had been building and working those photographic muscles regularly back then. It’s hard to jump back in and get anything worth publishing, but it was an absolute joy to see how cameras these days can bail out even the most fallible photographer sometimes.
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3.
I know I’ve got a lot of college football folks subscribed to this newsletter, but for the rest of you, it might be news that not only is Louisiana State University’s mascot is a tiger, but they actually have a live tiger on campus. His name is Mike. Mike the Tiger.
He lives in a spacious habitat by the football stadium with a big pool, a tree for climbing, and all sorts of other enrichment. He has an indoor area where he can hang out when it gets too hot or when people come in to care for his outdoor habitat area. He is waited on paw and paw. And he is adored by everyone who comes on campus whether they’re LSU Tigers fans or not. Everyone is a fan of Mike.
When my dad and I showed up on campus the day after the game, we initially didn’t see Mike. Eventually, we saw a parent pointing him out to their child. Mike was enjoying a lazy Sunday in this shady area at the back of his habitat. I pulled out my lens and snapped some shots of him, feeling lucky that he was sitting in a really clean, simple framing. Right after I got this picture, Mike stretched out, yawned, and laid down on his side to snooze some more.
I loved the framing of the arch already and wanted to focus just on that, so I cropped down to just that vignette. I masked off the areas that were in shadow and raised the exposure on them so that they weren’t in such high contrast to the areas that were caught by the sun. I shot this in the early afternoon, so the sun was pretty harsh, but I liked keeping everything really light so that Mike’s color stood out as much as possible.
I don’t know why they won’t let me in the habitat to go give Mike a hug and some scritches on his snout, but they won’t, so I guess this picture will have to do.
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Links
1. Unwatched App
I don’t like watching YouTube on YouTube. There are too many distractions and suggestions and tricks that Google uses to try and keep you on the site. They’ve incentivized creators to make clickbaity titles and thumbnails to get you to click, and I really don’t like that either.
Unwatched, an iPhone and iPad app1, aims to treat your YouTube subscriptions like they’re RSS feeds. You sync your subscriptions with the app, and it just pulls all the videos from those channels into a feed for you to mark as watched, add to a queue, or skip.
I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks and have really enjoyed the ability to just watch the videos that people I like have made and nothing more. There’s no getting lost in the algorithm. You just queue the videos up that you want to watch and then press play.
4. A few more thoughts from my trip to Provo by Matt Brown
When I talk about my trip to Utah being an emotional one, that’s part of the reason. Spending a few days out in Provo reminded me of many of the things I deeply love and cherish about the LDS experience, and also some of the things that frustrated me and brought great pain. Figuring out what to keep and what to cast aside is something that will probably take me a very long time, maybe the rest of my life. I don’t think I’m alone there.
I hope somebody out there figures out a better way for athletics and higher education to be even more supportive to folks, be they athletes, staffers or fans, figuring out their way in the world.
Oh boy I’m a big fan of Matt Brown. He writes a newsletter about the business of college sports, and I’m a big ol’ nerd about those sorts of things, so I’ve been a subscriber for a couple of years now.
Matt grew up a Mormon but went to Ohio State for school and is not from Utah. This piece is not just about Mormonism or college sports, but about both and neither at the same time. Pieces like these are what I love about college sports—they are nothing without people and the stories and experiences that people bring to them and build around them. I cannot recommend reading this highly enough.
3. A Man, A Boat, and a Goat — and a Chatbot! by Gary Smith
Human: Solve a puzzle for me.
ChatGPT: Sure, I’d love to help! What kind of puzzle would you like me to solve?
Human: A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they both go across?
ChatGPT: The man takes the goat across the river first, leaving the boat on the original side. Then, the man returns alone with the boat. He leaves the goat on the other side and takes the boat back to the original side. Finally, he takes the cabbage across the river.
I am not usually good at these kinds of puzzles. I get so caught up in knowing that they’re brain teasers that I kind of just freeze and miss the whole point. But this one? I think I can solve it better than the LLMs.
This piece is another piece of evidence that LLMs cannot think, understand, or reason. They aren’t intelligent in the same way that humans are. They cannot come up with new ideas because they cannot escape from the limits of what has already been written. They simply use statistics and a really big body of words in order to guess which word they think should come next based on the prompt they were given.
Have a good weekend content with the knowledge that Skynet is not coming for humanity for quite a while.
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac, you can download the iPad app from the App Store and it will run on your computer as well. I’ve done this and will vouch that it works about 97% correctly.