... Honestly? A lot. Your symptoms could get worse. You could turn a condition that's got treatable (if not currently curable) symptoms, into one with ones that aren't, or ones that are more severe, with worse treatment options.
And then the burden isn't just on you, it's on your family and friends who have to either take care of you, or watch you suffer more.
Long covid isn't nothing, clearly — but this kind of mindset is irresponsible. The "what have you got to lose" track is typically reserved only for people who have a terminal diagnosis, and even then, it's always a good idea to talk with your doctor about the pros and cons of the different experimental options you have access to.
That's quite an exaggeration. Why do you think the therapies should incur such a risk? Of course, it's on you to make sensible choices, but there are very large communities around long COVID out there, and the crowd makes a good enough job of sorting out what's legitimate and safe and what's not.
Again, I'm assuming we are talking about people in a state of abandonment by the medical establishment, some unable to function at all. I can't understand the risk calculation here.
Statistically speaking, you aren't well-equipped to make sensible medical choices. That's why we have medical professions — pharmacology, virology, internal medicine, and hundreds of others — each with people working in them with years of training and understanding.
The question is less, "will X formulation work as a remedy for long covid," and more, "what effects will X formulation have on someone with Y and Z conditions, in their late 60s, having undergone this, that, and the other medical procedures on so-and-so timelines, and still on a course of this other formulation to abate chronic symptoms as a result of complications during one of the medical procedures they underwent?"
This isn't really even a contrived example. Many people undergo medical procedures. Complications aren't common, but they're not rare, either, and they vary greatly in magnitude and long-term effects. A staggering proportion of people are on a course of some kind of medication (antivirals, pain relievers, more specialized stuff) at any given time. Figuring out how medications interact is aggressively nontrivial, and while there exist databases that can correlate medications and tell you if any are known to conflict with eachother (either always or under certain circumstances — information which, in most cases, was documented through case studies), this information still has to be reviewed by a trained medical professional — an MD familiar with the patient's medical history, ideally — who can say with a good degree of confidence whether a treatment is likely or not to cause the patient harm.
Asking honestly since I've seen Nix and NixOS show up on the front page here a bunch over the years, but never used it: my impression of it is that it fills the same kind of niche as the Zig or Nim languages: conceptually pretty cool, but not widely adopted outside of a dedicated core user group.
Is this really the case for Nix, or is it actually widely adopted, and this adoption is underreported?
If it's not actually widely adopted, what do you think are the biggest obstacles in Nix's way?
I recommend Olympus for that. They're reasonably priced, generally more technologically progressive than bigger brands like Nikon, Canon, or Sony, have a small form factor owing to their Micro Four Thirds sensor, have GPS, and still have a decent set of modern and legacy lenses (which are also commensurately lighter and smaller than similar lenses on APS-C or full-frame systems).
You must not have checked very thoroughly, because these cameras absolutely exist, they're just not popular because of the limited utility of GPS in a camera compared to the battery drain and time it can take to resync an outdated almanac if your camera's been turned off for a few days.
I'll note that that's a limitation not of how powerful cameras are or aren't, but one of most GNSS systems architecturally; the almanac in these situations communicates to client devices information about any updates the satellite constellation, broadly speaking, and because this is a low-bitrate system in GEO, there isn't much client devices can do to speed this up.
Of the top 10 most recent entries on that list, only one (the Hasselblad) weighs in at over USD$7k, though others like the D6, Z9, and EOS-1D are high-end cameras that clock in around $5-6k new on B&H.
Olympus's offerings all fall under about $2500 with most of those options available under $1000.
> And ultra-professional $6k cameras from Zeiss miss the mark entirely, you need to target a prosumer market (i.e. me).
Zeiss is generally not a camera maker, at least not these days; the ZX1 is more of a halo product than anything. They're much better-known for their optics, which are often niche, but usually worth the money if it's your niche.
In any case, a better example of a professional camera would be something like Nikon's Z8 and Z9, Sony's A7/9/1 models, or Canon's newer EOSes. They're also a good amount cheaper than USD$6k, in most cases.
> But why do you need a large protrusion on the right? You don't have a film canister anymore. I already wrote about a myriad of physical controls. Just make it large enough to hold the camera.
Because that's where your right hand goes. Most people are right-handed, and having a comfortable grip is nice. Your left hand will usually go under the lens (or at the base of the lens for short or light lenses).
> Why? You're looking at the screen to track the target anyway
Not necessarily. You might be looking through the viewfinder, which will almost always have better contrast in bright sunlight than even a sunlight-readable screen; and even so, if you're using the display, fumbling through a touchscreen interface will always be slower than doing the same with a haptic interface you're used to.
> And with the computational photography, you can just take multiple pictures and synthesize various "exposure times" later. And it'll likely be better than what you set blindly, hoping to get the right combination.
I think this shows some disconnect over what many photographers are trying to do with their cameras. The goal often isn't to maximize the use of technology to get the best possible photo _technically speaking,_ but to use your own familiarity with techniques and tools to make something great _yourself._ Computational photography is an anti-feature for many photographers.
Beyond that; you usually aren't shooting blind unless you choose to. Cameras come with metering (and have done so for many decades now), and it's gotten pretty damn good at telling you when your photo's properly exposed. Newer (<15 years old) cameras will often also have a histogram which gives you even more data than an EV meter.
> Not necessarily. You might be looking through the viewfinder, which will almost always have better contrast
Most mirrorless cameras have electronic viewfinders. They are _worse_ than a phone screen. And they still show you only an approximation of the final image, filtered through an underexposed sensor and whatever processing steps the camera has.
And if the viewfinder is purely optical (in a mirrorless camera) then it won't show the autofocus feedback.
> if you're using the display, fumbling through a touchscreen interface will always be slower than doing the same with a haptic interface you're used to.
Except that you bumped the control wheel on top some time earlier during the day, and it's now at +3 exposure instead of "0". You don't see that in the viewfinder, and find out only when the pictures are downloaded to your computer 2 months later.
Ask me how I know about this scenario.
Oh, or another one I learned at school while taking pictures for the class: if you don't have a perfect vision, and you focus the optical viewfinder until the image is in focus, the actual film image will demonstrate to everyone else exactly how you see the world with your imperfect vision.
> The goal often isn't to maximize the use of technology to get the best possible photo _technically speaking,_ but to use your own familiarity with techniques and tools to make something great _yourself._
And for me, the goal is to take good pictures for my memories, utilizing as much technology and automation as possible. I don't want to spend time learning every function of that 15 knobs on my camera. I want optical zoom and a full-frame sensor, but the same UI experience as on my phone.
> Most mirrorless cameras have electronic viewfinders. They are _worse_ than a phone screen. And they still show you only an approximation of the final image, filtered through an underexposed sensor and whatever processing steps the camera has.
Not in newer designs. Modern cameras have similar or higher perceived pixel density, with very little or no perceptible screen dooring. Latency on later-gen cameras is also very low to the point of being imperceptible.
> And if the viewfinder is purely optical (in a mirrorless camera) then it won't show the autofocus feedback.
I think what you're describing is a rangefinder, as seen on some Leicas for example. This is correct, but rangefinder cameras are a niche within a niche. Frankly I don't know how rangefinder users make use of that in the first place.
> Except that you bumped the control wheel on top some time earlier during the day, and it's now at +3 exposure instead of "0". You don't see that in the viewfinder, and find out only when the pictures are downloaded to your computer 2 months later.
I mean, I can't help you here, this kind of misinput is just as likely if not more on a touchscreen in my experience. The fact is that:
- Normally, on any camera I've used between Sony and Nikon, one click of the control wheel is +/- 1/3 EV. Hitting it nine times and failing to pay attention to the live preview or EV metering scale sounds like user error to me.
- If it takes you 2 months to unload your photos, you probably aren't the target audience for these cameras to begin with, to be blunt.
- Assuming it was _less_ than 3EV, most modern cameras shooting in RAW will, for most scenes, be able to give you the dynamic range to still work with the photo in post.
> Not in newer designs. Modern cameras have similar or higher perceived pixel density, with very little or no perceptible screen dooring. Latency on later-gen cameras is also very low to the point of being imperceptible.
Wow, so just like my phone! My point is, the viewfinder is _still_ electronic. It doesn't really provide much advantage compared to just showing an image on the screen. That's why some of the mirrorless cameras don't even have a viewfinder anymore (e.g. EOS M6 Mark II).
> I mean, I can't help you here, this kind of misinput is just as likely if not more on a touchscreen in my experience.
It can be shown on the screen, and the UI can more faithfully reflect the settings.
> - If it takes you 2 months to unload your photos, you probably aren't the target audience for these cameras to begin with, to be blunt.
Sure. That's why I want GPS, on the photos. But I still want a good optical system, there's just no way around the sensor size and the lens quality.
> Wow, so just like my phone! My point is, the viewfinder is _still_ electronic. It doesn't really provide much advantage compared to just showing an image on the screen. That's why some of the mirrorless cameras don't even have a viewfinder anymore (e.g. EOS M6 Mark II).
I guess? Superficially?
It's normally better than a phone screen since it's hooded, meaning you can get consistently high contrast and good colour representation in a wider range of environments without worrying about glare.
I'd also say that it's not a question of "some mirrorless cameras don't have viewvinders anymore" so much as there exists a segment-within-a-segment which doesn't have viewfinders.
Sigma's fp fits in there (though there's an optional viewfinder attachment); so does Nikon's Z30 and Sony's ZV-E10. It's not a popular design choice to remove the viewfinder since most users of ILCs do get use out of the viewfinder.
> It can be shown on the screen, and the UI can more faithfully reflect the settings.
This doesn't address the issue of having to navigate multiple layers of menus or having to do weird on-screen gestures to get to settings, all without haptic feedback; besides that, it's not like this information's hard to read on a traditional-layout display. 1/40, 5.6, iso400, and an EV scale pointing to 1.3 is pretty intuitive if you have a basic understanding of photography concepts. If you don't care about that stuff and spend most of your time in auto, most cameras offer layout options to hide that information.
> Sure. That's why I want GPS, on the photos. But I still want a good optical system, there's just no way around the sensor size and the lens quality.
The hard truth is that you'll have to compromise on something here.
- GPS used to be a popular option for halo-product cameras. I used to own a Sony SLT-A55 which had it, but it was often unreliable and battery life took a hit whenever I had GPS turned on. It was a decent camera otherwise. Nowadays, most cameras just don't ship with GPS built in. Some will offer a hot-shoe attachment, but these still have reliability and battery drain issues. Others rely on a phone link to encode that into the EXIF. Modern phones are pretty good about using standalone, unassisted GPS, so shooting in remote locations while using your phone as a location source is generally an okay solution. If this is a hard requirement for you, you'll have to resort to a camera design that's a few years old, partly because this feature has kinda fallen out of style, and partly because camera generations move slower than smartphone generations (for good reason; outside of professionals in demanding areas like sports or event photography, the value add has to be clear from generation to generation for the bigger enthusiast market to buy in).
- You seem to be hell-bent on having as few physical controls as possible, and even no viewfinder. This cuts out most high-end, midrange, and even most entry-level ILCs, and leaves a small segment of vlog ILCs, plus point-and-shoots (though there are some very respectable higher-end options in that market these days, like the Sony RX100 series, which has a cult following at this point).
- You still want interchangeable lenses and a bigger sensor than what you can find on phones. The latter's easy, most dedicated cameras have a bigger sensor than phones; the former less so given your other constraints, since most cameras with interchangeable lenses will fail on one of your other constraints. Out of the major manufacturers, this basically leaves you with the Sigma fp, Nikon Z30, EOS M6 Mark II, and the Sony ZV-E10, all of which, regrettably, have that control wheel that you might still accidentally hit nine times and bump your exposure up by +3.0EV.
- If you want _specifically a full-frame_ sensor, and you don't want to pay for niche products like Leicas, Zeiss halo products, or something weird like the Sigma fp, the unfortunately the camera you're looking for doesn't exist. The feature set you want represents a tiny sliver of a niche that's mostly been eaten up by smartphones at this point.
- You also want computational photography built in, which, to be honest, as it's currently implemented in phones, largely negates the limitations of the small sensors and cheaper lenses. As in; for casual photography, you're pretty unlikely to see a clear improvement over your phone with a dedicated camera these days, whether or not it comes with phone-style computational photography built in. I can't underscore this enough. If you take pictures of challenging scenes, or if you're going for a specific style, then yeah, phones are outclassed, at least as difficulty of the shot goes -- but for casual stuff? Phones are the way to go, almost unquestionably.
Snark aside; if you're looking at something like family photography, I strongly recommend something like an RX100 or a Z30 or Z5. The RX100 is a point-and-shoot, but it's best-in-class in a lot of ways even if the current rev is from 2019. It's also small enough to fit in your pocket and has a solid lens with a good zoom range. The Z30 and Z5 will probably lock out the control rings for you if you're in auto mode, which should help prevent any accidental overexposure. They also benefit from recent-gen sensors and image processors (though the sensors are APS-C). If you want a full-frame, stacked, or BSI sensor it'd likely break the bank while committing to using more conventional controls since you're looking at an enthusiast camera at that point. No two ways about it.
The GPS thing is the biggest hurdle you'll still have to clear. I don't have a great solution for you. The Z30 and EOS M6 MkII both probably have good smartphone app integration and they'd likely be able to sync location from there, but that can be finnicky, and it tends to be a battery hog.
On the other side of the spectrum I guess you could look at something like Beastgrip. I hear it's what they're using to rig up iPhones for the new 28 Years Later movie.
> The GPS thing is the biggest hurdle you'll still have to clear. I don't have a great solution for you.
Sony also has a great smartphone app which doesn't eat any battery at all. It waits for your camera to connect and activates the GPS when it connects and feeds data to it. I have never seen it eat my battery more than it should on my old iPhone X.
Sony's app also can do remote shooting and image transfer via WiFi and it's not half bad at either.
> As in; for casual photography, you're pretty unlikely to see a clear improvement over your phone with a dedicated camera these days
Phones are great for panorama shots, but they can't zoom. It's a physical limitation, you _need_ larger lenses for that. Another big problem is the low-light shots. Software does wonders, but it's still limited by the amount of light that the sensor can gather.
> Snark aside; if you're looking at something like family photography
I love travels, and most of my photography are either wild nature or landscapes. For the wild life photos you _really_ need optical zoom, you don't generally want to come close and ask a bear (or a lion) for a selfie.
I kinda adapted, and each time I take pictures with my camera, I also take a couple of pictures with my phone, so I can later use it to get the GPS position and correct the timestamps.
And yeah, I really want camera makers to try and go after my market niche. They think that it's small, but I seriously doubt it. There is a lot of people who like to take better-than-a-phone pictures, but can't care less about exposure timings and ISOs.
> And yeah, I really want camera makers to try and go after my market niche. They think that it's small, but I seriously doubt it. There is a lot of people who like to take better-than-a-phone pictures, but can't care less about exposure timings and ISOs.
That may be the case, but many "compact" cameras, like the Sony Rx100 mentioned in this thread wipe the floor with phone cameras. But they're very niche. If there was a market for it, I doubt manufacturers would come up with a random reason not to tap it. I think there are actually very few people who want better than phone pictures and are ready to spend the money and lug around the resulting camera.
As GP says, I doubt you'll find a model that checks all of your boxes (especially the integrated GPS one). But you can probably go to a camera store and try out a few models. My camera with many dials and buttons ignores all of them when in "full auto" mode. It also ignores "picture settings" or whatever they're called (things like custom tone curve, white balance tweaking, etc.). It even has a physical lock on the mode dial, so this should prevent you from unwillingly bumping the mode dial and ending up in some weird under/over-exposed situation because you've also unwittingly bumped 9 times a separate dial. Sure, the camera may have a zillion options for you to configure, but if it ignores them in full-auto mode, it's basically what you're asking for.
My specific camera is an 8+ years old model, so you probably don't want this (olympus pen-f), but there should be newer models with a similar behavior. I'd look at the Panasonic S9, which I wanted to like but dismissed because of the lack of dials. It's a "full-frame" model, so be prepared to carry big and heavy lenses for it, though.
> Give me a large sunlight-readable touchscreen, with multitouch. Also GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G/LTE for connectivity and geotagging. Add automatic uploads to Google Photos, iPhoto, WebDAV, etc. Put in a small editor for on-device photo touchups.
Most newer cameras have _many_ of these, minus integration with Google Photos, iPhoto, or WebDAV, and cellular connectivity since many areas of photography just wouldn't benefit from it enough to justify the extra cost, complexity, and battery life hit.
Many newer cameras also have smartphone control, with varying levels of actual usability, but that's a separate issue.
> Put in a small editor for on-device photo touchups
An editor with any amount of value-add for the kind of person who still buys a standalone camera would be pretty big in storage and would likely be painfully slow; for me, on a 2019 Macbook Pro, Lightroom is consistently a pretty heavy app to run (to say nothing of Photoshop proper).
> Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway.
As others have said: a good haptic interface is essential for most shooting styles, and many of the settings do have automatic modes, but a big selling point of standalone cameras is that they allow you to express yourself creatively by exposing these manual controls to you.
Wanna take a picture of a waterfall at dawn? Throw your master mode and ISO into auto and you'll probably get a really nice shot of a waterfall. But what if you want to blur the water so it looks like white streaks? There's not an auto setting that can just infer that for you. With a good haptic interface you'll be able to set that up in the dark, or in the cold while wearing gloves, or in the wind or on rough terrain where it might be tricky to keep your hands steady over a touchscreen.
If you're shooting at an airshow, what balance do you want between shutter speed and ISO to balance crispness with the appearance of motion? With a good haptic interface you'll be able to configure that while following a jet through a long lens.
> A physical button for the shutter and an analog knob for fine tuning are fine, but I don't need a manual switch for AF/MF. Or a "shutter delay" selector that is too easy to accidentally bump.
Fortunately, there's a class of devices where these needs and gripes are served well: smartphones. The default camera apps and even some higher-end camera apps loaded onto modern smartphones are immensely powerful at making good shots with minimal effort.
Having said all that: smartphones are usually excellent cameras, and arguably _much more than enough_ for the average person, but if you want to break out of using the bog-standard auto settings, interfaces get tricky, annoying, and even in the best case can be difficult to work with. Halide, for example, is great in general, but struggles with short focus (much more than the stock iOS camera app) for some reason; it provides a manual focus slider to work around that, but for nearby scenes with a shallow FOV, you'd usually want a hold-to-keep-in-focus or even an AF-C setting.
Dedicated cameras -- and especially ILCs -- target a different audience with different goals. What you get is, relatively speaking, uncompromising flexibility and an ability to support a wide range of artistic visions, though often with a learning curve tied to it.
So, I'll ask you a followup: what do you want out of a camera that a phone can't get you?
Cathedrals were the result of centuries of research into materials science, physics, and geometry -- and that's just considering the buildings themselves, not even the often-intricate religious art within.
Some of the challenges and solutions in cathedral architecture took generations to solve; in many gothic and neogothic cathedrals with particularly tall, internally-unsupported naves, solutions like flying buttresses were thought up to support the walls externally -- sometimes with multiple layers of buttresses-upon-flying-buttresses. Developing the right cement and figuring out which type of stone you could use alone were often a project that took years, especially for landmark churches.
These churches sometimes took decades or centuries to build, depending on how you measure it (basically, if you include significant reconstructions).
They also weren't representative of the average construction project in essentially any region where there are cathedrals; those were more likely to be houses, shops, and other commercial buildings like port structures.
Things like flying buttresses or new, opulent-but-functional arch designs also weren't representative of the average innovation in those times. Depending on where you look, that might be stuff like, a new loom variant that lets you produce new patterns, or a new kind of cheese that ages quickly while having a similar enough flavour to a slower-aging, more expensive type of cheese.
My overarching point is -- at any given point in time, the average invention is small and boring. Specialists are a valuable resource, yes, but the more specialized they are, the smaller and more boring their contributions will seem to the average person outside of that specialization. Landmark innovations are built on thousands of smaller innovations made over years or decades, and those smaller innovations were usually invented by someone who's spent the past 25 years of their lives obsessing over that tiny thing, having published dozens of papers and argued for years about something you've likely never even heard of.
And then the burden isn't just on you, it's on your family and friends who have to either take care of you, or watch you suffer more.
Long covid isn't nothing, clearly — but this kind of mindset is irresponsible. The "what have you got to lose" track is typically reserved only for people who have a terminal diagnosis, and even then, it's always a good idea to talk with your doctor about the pros and cons of the different experimental options you have access to.