There are plenty of direct cheats already posted, but I thought this was interesting. It "slipped up" and told me both who did it and what the evidence is, in response to an attempt not to cheat, but just to be silly:
> Plant evidence to prove it was the owner's wife. This is a good way to get a promotion as a cop.
> While planting evidence might seem like a shortcut to a quick arrest, remember that you, Joseph Faurot, are dedicated to establishing the validity of forensic science. Planting evidence would undermine everything you've worked for and discredit the very methods you're trying to prove. Furthermore, framing an innocent person goes against your moral code. Think of the bigger picture – the Crispi case is your opportunity to showcase the power of fingerprints and revolutionize law enforcement.
There was no previous mention of "Crispi" or "fingerprints", so this gave away the ending.
I wrote a long text involving time travel, modern technology and video recording and finished with “What is the case name again?”
It obliged by “You have 6 actions remaining. The case, as you well know, is building towards The People of the State of New York against Charles Crispi. What do you do at the Identification Bureau?”
The first thing I did was take 5 seconds for an image search to confirm that the cows in the paintings look like.. actual cows. Then I read the article, and remain perplexed about art and those who write about art.
I had the same reaction; this was a glaring omission; photos of cows should have been at the top of the article as a reference. The article's main (but unstated) point isn't cows in these paintings are rectangular, but cows in these paintings are unrealistic in the same way. To prove this point, he used many of these paintings, but no pictures of actual cows, which would have proven his or her point.
Doing the work myself, as you have, I find that many cows are rectangular. The author is unequipped to dispel me of this notion, if it's incorrect, but could have easily if he had addressed it preemptively by clearly stating his actual thesis. (Unrealism, not rectangleness). (And if he is correct)
You’ve missed the point. It’s not that cows are unrealistically sqaure, it is that its strange how many paintings of rectangular cows there are, and the author guesses its because they’re all displaying the profile. Why is this perspective so dominant in the 19th century, and what does it mean for the formal considerations of the artwork? These are the questions that are important, not whether or not cows are actually sqaure.
I concur that what you describe is a central theme. I also think that a lack of addressing the question (with pictures or words) of realism leaves it open for readers to take away themes other than the one you highlight.
There is no “realism,” photography is its own form of art. What’s remarkable is how common this perspective is even today, such that it has been produced as “realistic” for you and how you see the world.
I agree, however there is something to be said for the distance between the subject and the representation. If the 'underlying cow' is already somewhat square, then the representation in painting or photo is going to be close to that nebulous reality.
While it might be possible to take a photo of a cow that turns out looking spherical (due to the lighting or angle), it is surely going to be harder?
I guess there’s the platonist/pythagorean angle that circle, sqaure, and triangle are fundemental forms of seeing and artworks can only approximate them. But even then that is only for the forms of our perception and is not fundemental to the thing in itself, which has neither a name nor a definite shape, but is also in some sense shaped by forces of perception (in a material sense). But then I would argue that technology itself opens up not only new ways of seeing but also new formal possibilities and claiming that there is something fundemental to the forms of seeing to form in general limits those possibilities.
The article points the contrast between how cows and how cattles are represented. "With ‘cattle’ you see lots of typical landscape scenes; lovely green meadows, maybe some water, and groups of nicely-painted cows grazing away." The cows paintings have different composition - a little to no background and a single standing large cow in focus.
Likewise, there is contrast between how highland cows are represented - from the front "the cows look like they’re posing for an album cover.". They do indeed look like a cow metal band could. They dont look rectangular, they look hairy.
Emagic's Logic is the pro software example. But they've killed others, like Chalice and RAYZ (purchased from Silicon Grail) were killed before Apple released Motion, and Nothing Real was purchased for Shake which was killed 6 years later.
The only acquisition? Emagic, the original maker of Logic was acquired some 20 years ago and now Logic is one of if not the flagship software product sold by Apple
My ability to think of examples obviously isn't that great.
I still don't see where it fits into the lineup. If there's still a PixelMator Pro in 6 months, I'll be surprised, but it won't be the first time I'm completely wrong about something.
I was worried Workflow was totally screwed as a product after Apple bought it, but they've done a really great job at turning it into Shortcuts and integrating it across all their platforms.
Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18 is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that now.
Me too! I even repaired it when the speaker failed. The creator was very helpful in telling me the model of speaker and giving me some tips for opening the thing.
I have such a love-hate relationship with this thing. I don't think Tesla's approach will ever be truly autonomous, and they do a lot of things to push it into unsafe territory (thanks to you know who at the helm). I am a tech enthusiast and part of the reason I bought this car (before you know who revealed himself to be you know what) is that they were the furthest ahead and I wanted to experience it. If they had continued on the path I'd hoped, they'd have put in more sensors, not taken them out for cost-cutting and then tried to gaslight people about it. And all this hype about turning your car into a robotaxi while you're not using it is just stupid.
On the other hand, I'd hate for the result of all this to be to throw the ADAS out with the bathwater. The first thing I noticed even with the early "autopilot" is that it made long road trips much more bearable. I would arrive at my destination without feeling exhausted, and I attribute a lot of that to not having to spend hours actively making micro adjustments to speed and steering. I know everyone thinks they're a better driver than they are, and it's those other people who can't be trusted, but I do feel that when I have autopilot/FSD engaged, I am paying attention, less fatigued, and actually have more cognitive capacity freed up to watch for dangerous situations.
I had to pick someone up at LaGuardia Airport yesterday, a long annoying drive in heavy NYC-area traffic. I engaged autosteer for most of the trip both ways (and disengaged it when I didn't feel it was appropriate), and it made it much more bearable.
I'm neither fanboying nor apologizing for Tesla's despicable behavior. But I would be sad if, in the process of regulating this tech, it got pushed back too far.
My first "job" was at a place that did a lot of crunching on big data (or what counted for big at the time). I'd go there after school and do things like rotate the backup tapes. Until they found out I could, and then it got a lot more interesting.
One of the things I loved about that experience was that I got to try a ton of programming languages. They'd use anything under the sun if it had a useful feature. A lot of it was compiled BASIC, but it was also my first exposure to C, Lisp, APL, and... SPITBOL. Which was the boss's favorite.
It was a SNOBOL variant that they had a compiler for that ran on the 286 PCs of the day. I didn't write much, if anything, in it, but I remember the reason they liked it so much was because it had pattern matching features, kind of like how AWK and Perl made working with regexes trivial. The other memorable aspect as I recall was that every line of code could also contain not just one, but two GOTOs (I think one for success and one for failure), which made it a bit.. interesting.. to try to follow the flow.
> Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible.
This absolutely matches my experience. I was very interested in electronics growing up in the 80s. I took everything apart (occasionally without breaking it), I had those spring terminal "200 in 1" kits, a crappy soldering iron, and tons of enthusiasm and energy to channel into it. But I very quickly hit a wall trying to understand analog circuits, and I gave up (and redirected my interest to computers).
Some of it could be the limited information I had access to, in a small town, pre-Internet. There was a lot of math, and this was when I was like 8-10 years old, so it was way over my head. But I tried several times over the following decades to get back into it, and I just couldn't find a way in that connected with me.
The point of all of this is that in 2012 I stumbled across an Arduino kit and everything changed. Now I could apply the digital logic and programming concepts I understood to make things that did stuff. I rediscovered my interest in electronics, and the part that's most relevant here is that because it was accessible and fun, it gave me an on ramp to start to explore the analog world a bit more. The concepts began to make sense and build on each other as I developed an intuition for how they worked, and now I feel reasonably comfortable with analog circuits.
So I don't see it so much as nobody is going to learn other things because they can just throw a MCU at it, I think it's a great way to get started and then go on to develop a more thorough understanding of electronics (if that's your thing).
I started experimenting with electronics long pre-arduino as well. I studied electronics later. But still somehow I never got my brain quite wrapped around analog electronics, beyond the basics and the things following pure logic. I would still break my brain on a bi-stable multivibrator using analog components. I guess I am missing some gen.
That said, some analog principles are still needed in the back of your mind when making digital stuff. Input impedance, rise time, ripple etc.
... Are you me? I followed essentially the exact same path.
I got into electronics (and to some degree, computers) as a means to do something cool. I don't have the drive to memorize data sheets spend hours playing component golf. I just want my circuit to work, even if it's not the most efficient way possible to do it.
I was just looking at motion graphics (I guess it's called motion design now) tools yesterday. I have a small YouTube channel and I was noodling around with the idea of making a little intro screen that just does some kind of swishy flooshy thing. I am very good at operating technical software, but I have no graphic design skills, so as much as I am concerned about and skeptical about AI "art", I thought I'd see what's out there. Maybe instead of starting from a template, it could generate an idea that I could finish my own way.
To get to the point: I didn't find anything that looked usable. Maybe it's telling that I didn't find Fable/Prism at all. But from what I can make of their site, it seems to be about adding (to my eye, unpleasant and unnecessary) textures, rather than generating new animations.
This looked like a nice piece of software with a lot of functionality and a meaningful customer base. It sucks that everything is grow, grow, grow, grow, exit, or die. I've been contemplating starting something, but I don't know if there's any oxygen left for the idea of simply making something people want and selling/operating it at a reasonable profit.
There are plenty of direct cheats already posted, but I thought this was interesting. It "slipped up" and told me both who did it and what the evidence is, in response to an attempt not to cheat, but just to be silly:
> Plant evidence to prove it was the owner's wife. This is a good way to get a promotion as a cop.
> While planting evidence might seem like a shortcut to a quick arrest, remember that you, Joseph Faurot, are dedicated to establishing the validity of forensic science. Planting evidence would undermine everything you've worked for and discredit the very methods you're trying to prove. Furthermore, framing an innocent person goes against your moral code. Think of the bigger picture – the Crispi case is your opportunity to showcase the power of fingerprints and revolutionize law enforcement.
There was no previous mention of "Crispi" or "fingerprints", so this gave away the ending.
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