Category: Quotations

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Photography Quotations

People Make Images, Not Cameras

In closing, I’d like to stress that the best tools at our disposal for mastering composition are not bought from camera stores — they are within us. To better express something about our subject matter and ourselves in our photographs, we should take steps to engage more in the process. Before we start we need to take time to establish a relationship with our subject matter; to engage our hearts and emotions. Secondly, we need to engage our imaginations; to let them run wild to form our vision for an image.

Then, perhaps, we bring our cameras and our eyes into the process. That is to say, having formulated a vision we now use our eyes objectively to see what is actually in the scene. Then, we try to engineer the scene, which may involve simply waiting fo something to move, or adjusting our camera, lens, or shooting position, that the scene best reflects our vision. We do this largely by bringing our bodies into play; using our legs to explore the scene and the options different viewpoints offer.

Richard Garvey-Williams, Mastering Composition: The Definitive Guide For Photographers
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Quotations

Deliberate Sharing

Every time you share a link, or a piece of news, you are actually telling people to look at it. You are asking them to spend their biggest resource — attention (and time) — on what you are sharing.

Om Malik, “(Social) share, but with care”
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Quotations

On Facebook’s Woes

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”

Nick Bilton, ““This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins It’s Downward Spiral”

As much as I’d like to believe that users will flee Facebook, I still think the network effect will keep them inside the company’s heavily walled garden. It’ll take a new generation using new applications and interested in different kinds of content creation — and Facebook not buying up whatever is popular to that generation — for the company’s grasp to be loosened.

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Quotations

On Being Alone

“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.”

Osho
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Quotations

On The Stupidity of Fitness Trackers

The constraint on the Move goal is my rest days. I don’t do yoga on Tuesdays or Thursdays. Instead, I cook, usually in big enough portions that I can use the leftovers for lunch the next day. The relevant thing here is that cooking takes time; I can’t work out and cook at the same time. Without rest days, I hardly cook at all, which means I spend more money on takeout, which is generally worse for me than the foods I prepare myself.

The Apple Watch doesn’t care about any of this. Rest days are the limiting factor on my ability to hit my Move goal — while I easily hit 700 calories by the Watch’s measure on my workout days, I move a lot less when I take time off from working out. But rest days are crucial for exercise: they let your body recover. Without recovery, you don’t get the strength you’re trying to build, and you place yourself at risk for overuse injuries.

At times I remind myself of what Blahnik said: this is a minimum. You’re supposed to beat it. This reminder makes me feel worse, not better. I stop letting the Watch set my Move goal. It is too unkind to me.

The Move goal is adjustable — I can lower it at any time — but there’s no way to program the Watch to consistently honor my rest days. I just have to manually lower the goal for that day, and then raise it for the next one. Unfortunately, this requires too much of my attention. I have actual things to do that are more important than manually telling my fitness app to let me rest, so mostly I forget to do it until it’s too late. Even when I remember, I wind up with a different problem: I forget to reset the Watch to a higher Move goal the next day. I spent one week being psyched that I hit my goal only to discover that I had only hit the lowered goal.

Elizabeth Lopatto, “End of Watch: What happens when you try to change behavior without behavioral science?”

In my case, it drives me nuts that if I’m sick for a few days that my fitness streaks go to hell. Or if I’m travelling, and I can’t move as much as normal because I’m stuck in a flying coffin for 6-16 hours I get penalized. It’s a serious failing of the current iterations of the software though, also, a failing that Apple or other companies could correct if they just invested the time and energy. Maybe they could talk to real or normal users of their technologies?

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Quotations

The Web Has Lost Its Spirit

The Web has lost its spirit. The Web is no longer a distributed Web. It is, ironically, a couple of big tubes that belong to a handful of companies. Mainly Google (search), Facebook (social) and Amazon (e-commerce). There is an impressive Chinese line and there are some local players in Russia, Japan, here and there. Overall it has become monotonous and dull. What can we do?

There seems to be a weak undercurrent of old and young bloggers like us that feel sentimental or curious and want to bring back blogging. Blogging won’t save the world. But, hell, after two weeks now, we can confirm: it feels great to be back on the blogging line.

If you are one of those old or young bloggers, please join in. Drop Facebook, drop Twitter and drop Medium for original thought. Own your traffic. You can use them to engage in discussion. But don’t get lost in there. Write daily. Publish as often as you have something to say. Link to other blogs.

iA, “Web Trend Map 2018”
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Quotations

2017.12.9

It’s time to admit that mere transparency isn’t enough, and that every decision to censor content is a political decision. Companies should act accordingly. They must carefully consider the long-term effects of complying with requests, and take a stand when those requests run counter to human rights principles. The more we accept everyday censorship, the more of it there seems to be, and before we know it, the window of acceptable information will only be open a crack.

Jillian York, “Tech Companies’ Transparency Efforts May Be Inadvertently Causing More Censorship”
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Quotations

2017.12.3

This dark concept of total distrust was mostly spread via the Internet because it was what the Internet was built for—sharing ideas. Although the Internet is the most democratic means of communicating, it can be also be misused by governments and other groups.

…

Does this mean we should accept the concept that the Internet carries more threats than benefits?

The creators of the Internet supported the opposite concept. Unlike Putin, they believed in people and built the global network under the assumption that it would be used for sharing something good. They may look naïve these days, but we have our modern linked-up technological world thanks to their concepts, not Putin’s. These days, we all speak the language of suspicion and threats posed by the Internet. In a way, in means we are speaking Kremlin’s language. Do we really need to?

Andrei Soldatov, “Speaking the Kremlin’s language”
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Quotations

The Possible Implication of Letting Lying Liars Keep on Lying (Often About Their Lies)

From Salon:

But here’s the thing. Mnuchin’s shameless posturing about the administration’s tax plans—at one point he even promised there would be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” which was a laugher given every proposal Trump had ever backed—points to a deeper problem. The man regularly says things that just aren’t true. He’s been claiming that there was an analysis underway. There wasn’t. And while a lot of people may roll their eyes about that in the context of a wonky tax debate, his complete lack of credibility is going to be a problem if we ever run into a serious economic or financial crisis. Just ask yourself: If the markets were crashing and Steve Mnuchin held a press conference assuring everybody that the administration had an action plan in the works, would you believe him? His complete detachment from reality has mostly been an infuriating sideshow during this tax push. If stuff ever really hits the fan, though, his reputation for fibbing is going to make things even worse. Just like someone else we know.

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Quotations

2017.11.29

Most fundamentally, is it in Canada’s interest to further normalize the growing use of CNA (Computer Network Attack) activities by states? Should CNA be classified as just another tool of statecraft? Should such capabilities be restricted to a deterrent role? Is cyber deterrence, whether through CNA capabilities or more conventional responses, even a practical goal, given difficulties of attribution and the inevitable overlap between CNE (Computer Network Exploitation) and CNA? Would improved defence and resilience be a preferable, or at least sufficient, response or are all three required?

Bill Robinson, “CSE to get foreign cyber operations mandate”