I am also a Samuel and I frequently use the word motherfucker in business communication. The Samuel L. Jackson voice was kind of fun and something I thought was pretty fun. I hope the dude got a chunk of the whole $1 I spent on getting his voice to come out of my Dots.

For what it's worth, all my smart home stuff is shoved off on its own VLAN with no access to the rest of my network. I get a lot out of using Echo devices as speaker groups and they were my starting point as an IoT controller.

I've taken over 900 photos and ~15 minutes of video on a Canon R6 (mirrorless and using a smaller LPE6) and over 1100 photos on my R5 (LPE6NH, the "big" Canon battery), both on a single charge and during a single shooting day. If we're at the point where we're complaining about battery life at around 1000 shots, I think we're just picking nits.

Professionals, regardless of what camera they're using, probably have two or three spare batteries on hand. Pros probably also have a camera bag with at least a couple lenses on hand, and if they're pro-grade lenses, those extra batteries are just a tiny fraction of whatever else is in their bag. Someone with a serious investment in camera gear has probably been resigned to lugging it around for years. Nothing with a 77 or 82mm filter thread is what you'd call lightweight.

Photographer Jamie Windsor has a pretty remarkable set of LUTs and Lightroom Presets (that can be converted to LUTs if you're not an Adboe person) that that replicate or recreate film grain and color processing. He has Youtube videos that explain his technique. If you have a favorite film stock, there's a decent good chance that he's duplicated it. I get a lot of mileage out of his Ilford HP5 preset for portrait photos.

https://jamiewindsor.sellfy.st...

On my mirrorless cameras, I can if I so choose just leave everything in subject eye detection and as long as my lens is even roughly pointed at what I wanted to shoot, I'll get an acceptable photo. Mirrorless also means brain-dead easy subject tracking for video. Both my camera body and almost all my lenses can have image stabilization; I can shoot .5 second exposures handheld without any visible shake in the output. I have to work or accidentally be in the wrong mode if I'm really trying to screw up my shots with my R5 or R6.

As far as software: I want to review everything I shoot anyway. If I shot a lot of photos, I even feed everything through an AI tool called Optyx to cull my photos down to a manageable number, then look at them on a high res 32" color calibrated screen so that I can adjust color, handle lens correction and denoise. Arguably, I don't HAVE to do a lot of that, but it's actually worthwhile when I want the best possible result.

I almost never take a photo with my phone's camera aside from receipts or on premises equipment rack, but my phone is set to shoot everything in RAW regardless. I don't necessarily trust that my phone's camera will process an image correctly for the rare case that I've taken a photo I actually want; every flagship phone has a tendency to overprocess with AI and I'd rather have as much recoverable data as possible.

In practice, across the R5 and R6 that I own, and the R7 my domestic partner has, we generally find that our mirrorless cameras are usually good for between 200 and 250% of Canon's rated capacity. I might take 900 photos on my R6 (i.e. the one with the smaller battery) on a single charge. I'm not sure how estimated shots/charge is calculated but it seems extremely pessimistic to me.

None of my cameras have a perceptible blackout during a shot.

The EVF always shows my current exposure and Canon R, unlike Nikon Z, doesn't do silly things like focus on raindrops when you're using the subject/object AF setting. :)

I had a Canon 5DS but I doubt I'll ever use it again given the quality of the cameras I have now.

Not to be crude, but Lana Del Rey has a song with a refrain that says her lady bits taste like Pepsi cola, and compared to a statement by Meta about how good it might be at Meta-ing, I find the possibility that Ms. Del Rey's statement is likely closer to truth than anything Meta has ever commented on any topic.

So you'd happily deny actual centuries of culture and heritage because its origin offends you to some degree?

Can't speak to the former, but at least in the case of church music, there is rather a lot of historical significance in the history of Western media for both art and music with overtly Christian themes. There's even a bit of a joke to it, that many composers would write some music and then just slap a random passage from the Christian bible or some rote bit of liturgy on it. The church has been a good patron for the arts and let centuries of composers and performers get by without tending to fields or digging ditches.

In that way, it is much like Spotify.

As someone who use to run porn sites, my metrics always showed that the most active users in the USA tended to be from either gulf coast states or Utah. Maybe the majority of people in those places are prudes, but everywhere there are a bunch of prudes, there's a greater than normal demand for gaping buttholes, muscle twinks and teenage MILFs.

Pornhub and its corporate parents are deeply awful companies. They don't do anything right by performers and at the lowest levels of camgirls, it's much closer to sex trafficking than anything else. But on the other hand, it IS well moderated and responsive to legal matters. I understand that the people who are seeking these restrictions want to legislate porn out of existence and that All Porn Is The Enemy, but if these people could actually read without moving their lips, they'd realize that they'll get farther with restrictions by working with major players in adult entertainment than trying to prevent access entirely.

In 15 minute of conversation, it told me I need to look at mental health resources 12 times. Which is probably true for 80% of Snapchat's user base but spectacularly bad advice in my case.

I really don't know why people want or need this.

I prefer to use the Google applications that are available to every user than deal with Samsung-specific versions that might not be present on other devices.
I will also say that Samsung Gallery is absolutely infuriating as a device default, since Google Photos might very well be the best general purpose mobile app that exists.

Samsung already puts a bunch of extra bullshit on their devices, but my last couple phones and nicest tablets are Samsung devices, so I have a nice long list of things I change as soon as I get a new one. I already ditch absolutely all the Samsung branded software that overlaps Google versions (Calendar, Contacts/Dialer et al) , remove Onedrive and all the Microsoft Office stuff and switch the launcher to one I like better. Samsung is in many ways the least Android of any major OEM and it has abandoned the SD card I expect to have on my phone on its high end models, so I may be done with the brand as it is, but changing the default search is trivial and seldom an issue regardless, since I do almost all my search via Firefox regardless.

That's always going to be a moving target, at least until the standard for eye candy shifts to 8k etc.

I'm not a big gamer and in fact my needs as a content creator are best served with Intel Arc cards, but to the extent that I do fire up games, I've found that I get a perfectly gratifying experience gaming in a window on my primary display so that I can continue to see and use the other screens on my workstation.

The truth is that PC gaming isn't allowed to greatly surpass whatever consoles are doing in the way that it used to. Companies with the budgets to make the titles with the greatest technical demands are going to target Playstaton and Xbox before they even think about whatever a top end PC GPU can handle on top of the dedicated game systems. At best, maybe the PC will get a longer draw distance or support to run across multiple displays or something. It's hard to get excited about that IMO.

My guess is that everything that could reasonably be called a "Gaming" GPU from the current Ada lineup will wind up somewhere north of $450.

(The reason I went with Arc? It supports hardware h.265 10-bit 422 color, which is what natively comes out of almost all mirrorless cameras. Even though this has been the case for years, nVidia and AMD only support h.265 4.2.0 in hardware. Editing video is a lot easier when I don't have to transcode my camera output before I ever do anything with it.)

Guess they're finally going to call me on my purported SVP roles at Enron, Flooz, ToysRUs and SVB off my profile.

Not just this, but most video is shot with digital sensors, which have immensely better ability to resolve detail in very low light. In the world of film, you have three ways to make an image brighter: Increase the aperture of the lens, increase the length of time the shutter remains open (kind of a limiting factor for movies) or to change the film to one that is more responsive (and thus more grainy) to light.

Digital sensors still have the idea of responsiveness to light vs grainy output. This is the ISO speed. Film 30 years ago probably topped out at something like ISO 1600, and 15 year old digital cameras might've been able to do ISO 6400. These days, cameras can handle ISO values above 200,000 and take images that need minimal or no noise processing even up to 25,000 ISO. This means that you can shoot in very dark places and still get useful images. That means you don't have to do some of the fakery or extra BS production crews used to do to simulate darkness, like slapping a blue filter or lowering exposure from daylight shooting conditions.