2026-11-09 04:00:00
Good heavens, I haven’t done a Long Links since June. I’ve been opening these with something along the lines of “nobody else could possibly have time to read all these but one or two of them might enrich your day.” Now that I think on it, there are plenty of other people who are less than fully employed and also fast readers with inquisitive minds, so I apologize all of them. And I do hope that whatever you bother to dip into here rewards the dip.
I do make a conscious effort to keep That Stuff in a minority position here in Long Links, which is difficult, because it seems that’s what people want to talk about (and presumably read about?), mostly. Then while drafting this I was rudely shocked by learning that I’m not that great at slop-spotting.
Specifically, on Mastodon I recommended STORIED · COLORS, then Lachlan Cooper replied “I love this concept, but the writing here is absolutely pure, grade A slop, right from the first sentence.” In my defense, I’d mostly gone there for the colors, which are cool, had only skimmed the historical background. The replies to Lachlan’s reply are worth a glance.
I’m a bit unsure what to think. I am pretty solidly, at this moment in history, anti-LLM. The negative externalities are enough for me, whether or not the stuff is affordable (it isn’t) or useful. As for “useful”, my position would have been something like “maybe, for code and math, but for human communication?” I dunno, STORIED · COLORS kind of works for me, and when I fact-checked a couple of colors I found no problems.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been fooled by LLM output. And on several occasions, I’ve run across recommendations for Pangram as the state of the art in slop-spotting. Its Web site makes strong accuracy claims, and Wikipedia’s sources are generally supportive, in a measured way. I wouldn’t fire a professor or shoot a spy based only on a Pangram report, but I’d take that input into account.
So, based on my experience with STORIED · COLORS, I threw everything I was planning for this Long Links at Pangram. But my free access ran out halfway through, so I signed up for a $20/month account.
Let’s turn our attention back to STORIED · COLORS for a moment. The author claims to be a human named Vinu and they’ve provided About and Methodology pages that discuss, among other things, their use of AI. You might want to read them. But you might not, because Pangram: 100% of this text is AI. for both. Assuming Vinu is a real person, I wish they hadn’t done that.
Each of the following Long Link segments includes a Pangram report. This was generated by copying a few screens-full of the publication and pasting it into Pangram. In the cases where the result is neither 100% AI nor 100% human, it’s interesting to look at Pangram’s highlighting, AI in red and human in green. But there’s just not enough room here to dive into that. For the moment, I’m not tossing out anything I’d selected for Long Links just because it’s AI in whole or part. I’ll have to think about that policy.
Now I’m tired of writing and/or thinking about AI, so I’ve discarded a few of those Long Links. Maybe later. Instead, let’s do…
Most reasonable people are, in November of 2026, in a better mood than they were in October, what with several tens of millions fewer Americans casting MAGA-flavored ballots. Yay! But everything here (except Hegseth) is pre-November.
TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the News is from back in June, and is really just another illustration of how bad and dangerous it is to have social media that is owned and operated by billionaires and why we need the Fediverse. Pangram: 100% human written.
The BIG Newsletter is an anti-monopoly blog founded and run by Matt Stoller, long-term gadfly, a not-terribly-polite person, who is nonetheless essential on the subject, and it’s an essential subject. He’s on paternity leave so How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices is written by Lee Hepner. You can’t understand the pathologies of late-stage capitalism, I think, nor can you plan a way forward, without an appreciation of how massively monopolized the economy has become. I suppose there must be such a thing as principled capitalist true believers, and they would necessarily agree that the current way we are doing things is Wrong.
Anyhow, the Expedia/hotel story is powerful. Pangram: 100% human written.
I don’t know who “VoteHub” is, but The Political lean of pro sports. is amusing. They’re talking specifically about the politics of the athletes, not the owners or fans. Which differ in interesting but, once you think about it, unsurprising ways. Before you look, rank the NFL, MLB, and the WNBA in increasing order of liberal-ness, then see if you’re right. Pangram: 36% of this text is AI.
Here are the articles of impeachment against Hegseth. A long read, but important stuff. Pangram: 14% of this text is AI.
Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? is about the destructiveness of corruption, namely the second-order effect when people start believing that everyone’s corrupt and are then more prone to stepping over the line themselves. Which is fairly self-evident, but then there are a few societies that have been on that slope but climbed off it. Pangram: 100% of this text is AI. (another sample: 96%)
Let’s close the Politics section with Bruno Dias’s This is a Conflict and there are Sides, which was the toast of the Fediverse so quite likely you’ve already read it. From which, “… we are in a hybrid conflict against a loosely-defined but very much unified set of forces: tech corporations, fossil fuels, and international fascism arrayed together.” OK, but I think it’s only a slight re-spin to call the opponents simply “the ultra-rich”. Pardon the Class Reductionism, back to the Long Links, and Pangram: 14% of this text is AI.
The world has no better nonfiction writer than Laurie Penny. Recently, she’s turned her hand to a course entitled How to Write Like A Person; the latest offering is Let’s Learn How To Actually Tell Stories. Regrettably it’s on Substack but, like almost everything else Ms Penny writes, it’s excellent. Highly recommended if you think being a better writer, especially now that you have to compete with an infinite swarm of bots, might be good. Pangram: 100% human written.
The Cornell gang-rape incident highlights a terrible pathology in certain male groups. A lot of us males will loudly proclaim that They Would Never. OK, but they (including me) need to proactively combat outbreaks of that flavor of evil. How, specifically, should a man going about doing that? It’s not easy. Fortunately, GOTN’s How to be difficult explains how, in simple and luminously clear language. Highly recommended, especially for people who have Y chromosomes.
A word of caution. GOTN (for “Girl on the Net”) is a sex blogger and her site is full of joyfully filthy sexual storytelling, often featuring colorful kinks. You have been warned.
Also she’s a good writer. Pangram: 100% human written.
Speaking of language and reading and writing and speaking, back in 2023 Douglas Hofstadter wrote Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late. It’s touching and challenging. A few decades ago I could get along fine in French, and I retain scatterings of Spanish and Arabic. It’s one of my keenest regrets that I never really buckled down and became fluent in any of them. Pangram: 100% human written.
I just mentioned Arabic, and I enjoyed every word of An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt at “La Vita Nouva, or, the personal site of Saleh.” This is partly because I grew up in Lebanon and went to kindergarten and first grade there at a mostly-Arabic school. That educational system is French-influenced and thus emphasizes dictation. Let the record show that in Grade One at that school in Zahlé, I was regularly top of my class in Arabic Dictation.
I never really learned Arabic very well. But its script is quite purely phonetic so once I’d learned the alphabet (oops, it’s not an alphabet, it’s an abjad) and how to connect the letters, I could do the dictation just fine.
Note that “connect the letters” in the last sentence? Arabic’s notion of how characters and words are written is really different from those of us who use alphabets; Arabic letters seldom stand alone.
Here’s my name in Arabic: تم براي
Pardon the long introduction. The An interactive introduction piece linked above describes the technical issues involved in displaying Arabic on a computer screen and reveals that it basically just couldn’t be done well on the Web until quite recently. I think many readers would enjoy this trip into an entirely foreign writing system.
But… Pangram: 100% of this text is AI.
I don’t know what to think? Perhaps “Saleh” is not a native speaker of English and uses AI to shore up a lack of confidence. This has always felt to me like a forgiveable use of LLMs. I just don’t know, “Saleh” is not very transparent about their identity. But back in January 2026, they published I'm not consulting an LLM, which is very negative about using AI. About which, Pangram: 45% of this text is AI. Once again, not sure what to think.
I can’t think of a better way to close this “Human communication” section than with Legos, lexicographic humor from the excellent Zach Weintersmith. OK, it’s not long. But on the image, Pangram: No AI.
Here are a couple of entries concerning AWS, my former employer. First, Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale. SQS was and is, by a mile, my favorite AWS service. It’s easy to understand what it does, and what it does is going to be important to almost any large server-side application. As far as I know it’s never lost a message. As for the linked piece, Pangram: 100% of this text is AI. Sigh.
I’ve promoted a variety of technologies over the decades, and I think this Tweet is my single most effective piece of evangelism.
Over at Ars Technica there’s Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data. As far as I know, this is the first direct encounter between a war and AWS’s Region/Availability-Zone architecture. The outcome was sobering. It’s hard to get too exercised about single-AZ data loss, because nobody should store data that matters in a single AZ. But in Bahrain, some combination of the attacker having quality intelligence, smart planning, and good luck apparently led to regional data loss. Ouch.
One of the ongoing debates when I was at AWS was whether or not it’s cost-effective to run multi-regionally with an eye to data preservation. I was generally unconvinced that it was worth the extra effort because AZs, used correctly, provide a lot of backup-to-the-backup.
But you know, if you’re in the middle of a war zone… Anyhow, Pangram: 100% human written.
Let’s turn our attention to silk, the stuff that spiders and silkworms make. People are figuring out how to use it in data transmission, and I mean Teraherz-range, which is to say Really Freaking Fast, data transmission. Here’s the upstream science, in Nature: Hierarchical materials from fused silk (Pangram: 97% human written) and in BGR, Silk Might Be The Reason 6G Internet Is Coming Sooner Than You Think looks at plausible implications Pangram: 100% human written.
Your executable is a SQLite database provoked a lot of buzz. You have to know quite a lot about executable file formats to really appreciate it, but damn it’s convincing even if the cost of building and socializing means it’ll probably never happen. A lot of people pointed out that the software is pretty well pure vibe-coded and thus not suitable for production. As for the post: Pangram: 100% human written.
Yuval Fogelson’s Uninterrupted is a compendium of long urban walks from around the world: Vancouver, Victoria, New York, Paris, and Seoul. Interspersed are thoughts on the nature of urban walking and how it interacts with thinking.
I enjoyed it, but Pangram: 35% of this text is AI. In this case, I suggest dropping the text into the free service at Pangram.com; the distinction between the sections marked as AI and human is non-obvious and, to me, interesting.
Lime Bike Jousting is a short documentary shot in London about, well, bike-share jousting. The people on both sides of the camera are having really a lot of fun; I’d call this one a morale-booster for a dark autumn day.
And finally, here’s a new sport in the world: Horse racing on an oval track, but for each rider there are multiple horses and they have to change from one to the next. Looks like it might make great TV. Check out the videos at CBC’s “The gift comes from the horse”: How this growing Indigenous sport is staying grounded in tradition. Pangram: 100% human written.
Until next time.
2026-10-30 03:00:00
This week we had our CoSocial AGM and it came off just fine. I regularly tell the world that Mastodon is the only good choice for social media going forward, and I think it’s worth a few extra words on why the CoSocial model is interesting, and what it teaches.
The long story is here, but in brief: CoSocial is a registered Canadian nonprofit co-operative that operates the CoSocial.ca Mastodon instance. It’s limited to Canadian residents and citizens, and membership costs C$50/year. It only has a bit over 200 members but is growing. The service has good availability and performance. Judging by the people who turned up for the AGM, our members seem generally pretty happy.
I think CoSocial represents a plausible model of the future of social media: Decentralized, self-funding, affordable, reliable, self-governed, transparent, and free of advertisers, scammers and trolls.
Some of these are obvious, but others only emerge from a couple years of hands-on experience.
Fediverse hosting as a service seems like a potentially good business. We use FediHost, who are competent, affordable, and not US-based.
Being a registered legal entity is good. It forces you to have by-laws, elected leadership, regular meetings, and to construct and submit annual financials. Each of which is work, but none are heavy lifts and their existence has a positive influence on culture and resilience.
The membership fee is astonishingly effective at preventing problems. We’ve now had several hundred member-years and have received exactly one actionable complaint against a member; all that was required was an informal dial-it-back warning from the moderation team. The practice of trolling relies on free access; even a little friction defeats it.
Here’s an intuition without any supporting evidence but I’m pretty sure it’s right: People who pay to use a service use the service more. Our local feed is a pretty rich and entertaining experience (but you have to be a member to see it).
It’s not obvious how much to charge. Our $50/year is covering our costs, but we’re still relying on quite a bit of volunteer effort. If our membership grows another order of magnitude, economies of scale kick in and we’ll definitely have to charge less.
Simple governance is the best. We have working groups and projects, but anything that matters goes to a Board of Directors vote, and we elect directors every year.
It was nice to put faces to names. I was a little worried because a few directors were stepping down, but at the meeting, several others put their hands up and offered to serve.
Also cool: We have, by membership vote, an Elbows Up policy, and have successfully migrated most of our infrastructure off US providers. The exception is bookkeeping; QuickBooks and Stripe, sigh.
The only remotely-controversial subject was whether we should change our financial year-end. We decided to do it last year but might be changing our mind. If your organization’s arguments are at this level, you’ve got a happy organization.
…consider becoming a CoSocialist.
[Disclosure: Although I’m a co-founder, I’m not and have never been a Board member or officer of the co-op. I am an active member of the Trust-and-Safety and Finance Working Groups.]
2026-10-20 03:00:00
I continue low-intensity work on Quamina; among other things, it benefits my mental health. At the moment there’s this little voice at the back of my brain that keeps saying “This would be a great job for Claude.” So far I’m ignoring it, but the internal conversation is worth sharing.
I’m not a GenAI expert, have never relied on it for any substantial piece of work. However, I’ve seen plenty of PRs with LLM fingerprints, and I follow a whole lot of indie devs who are in it up to their elbows. It seems to me that a pretty clear picture emerges of what it can and can’t do, where the wins and losses are. This essay reflects that picture but maybe I’m just wrong, in which case I’ll confess my errors.
For me (and I’m not alone), the biggest issue isn’t what GenAI can and can’t do, it’s the ethical and economic discomforts. This technology is being peddled by terrible people who are rich and whose goal is to get richer. It’s bought and deployed by terrible people who want to slash their payrolls by throwing thought workers onto the street. It facilitates the oncoming climate catastrophe and devalues human creative effort.
Notice that I said “ethical and economic”? That second issue is all about the bubble and how nobody knows what GenAI technology will really cost, post-explosive-decompression. It wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up in a future where most software devs are using beefy “desktop” computers running open-weight models; or else they’re using AWS/GCloud/Azure (but still open-weight). Or something completely different. Or we’ve learned that the cost of AI, as measured in mental fitness and organizational health, is simply too high.
The stage has been set; let’s talk about bits on the wire.
At the moment Quamina does its super-fast-matching magic on JSON blobs. But it should be perfectly possible to work with any other data format that has nested fields and boolean/numeric/string values at the leaves. Oh, and arrays of the above. There’s no shortage of candidates: Thrift, Protobufs, Apache Avro, and CBOR come to mind immediately.
Quamina has the built-in notion of a “Flattener”, that turns input data into a sorted list of “Field” structures. For example, here’s a JSON blob:
{
"X: {
"Z": 22,
"Y": 21,
},
"A": 33
}The output of the flattener, what the matcher works on, would be something like this:
{"A": 33}, {"X\nY": 21}, {"X\nZ": 22}In Quamina, flattening eats more time than matching. It used to eat dramatically more time, but the JSON flattener has been heavily optimized by me and other contributors.
Maybe the most important optimization is maintaining a list of which fields are actually up for matching and skipping over the ones that aren’t. Obviously this means that the parser can’t be the typical thing that turns your JSON blob into a fully-serialized tree of structures and arrays in a one-shot call. In fact, you need a parser that’s a tokenizer and lets the calling code decide how to deal with each little piece of it, one at a time.
Someone out there asked Claude to build a Flattener for Protobufs. It seemed to partly work but was kind of buggy and I found the code hard to read. Hmm. Of course the usual GenAI “That was six months ago, it’s much better now” narrative applies.
For those who don’t know, CBOR is JSON but binary, which is claimed to make it more compact and faster to process. It’s also got a richer type repertoire, but whenever I’ve run across it in the field, it’s basically being used as JSON-only-faster.
So, I’ve started working on a CBOR Flattener for Quamina.
The default CBOR processor for Go, from Faye Amacker, looks very polished. But it’s not a tokenizer, it’s a “deserialize your whole blob in one call” thing. So the simplest thing would be to make that one call on each incoming blob, then run around the deserialized tree and compute the flattening. Ignore all that stuff about bypassing for efficiency. Because it might be plenty fast enough and that optimization would have been premature. After all, if you read Faye’s page linked above, they seem to be something of an optimization fanatic.
And you know what, I bet if I gave Claude the problem of turning CBOR into Fields, I’d get OK code back; tell it find a way to fuzz-test the process and it’d be surprising if it didn’t work.
Right at this moment in history, I could make a case for that being a good engineering decision. Code, in the LLM-pre-bubble-pop era, is cheap. Time is still expensive. This task has clear, clean success criteria, easy to point an agent at. The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work is a powerful design principle, one that I’ve forced down the throat of more than just one or two over-aspirational engineering team leads.
But I’m not gonna do that. I mean, there’s the nauseating state of current AI culture and finance. But also, I’m doing this for fun. Writing high-performance tokenizers is fun! [Really? -Ed.][Serious fun. -T.] I’ve started poking around inside Faye’s library, raised an issue, and I’m confident that there is plenty of code and tests in there that I can steal.
Quamina has 14K lines of test code and 47M of of test data. A high proportion of the tests amount to “Run the code against this JSON and require these results.” Obviously, now I want to run 100% of those tests with equivalent CBOR input. It seems to me that Claude could do a great job of automating plenty of this work, which I predict will be grinding, tedious, and not fun at all. On top of which I tend to be lax and forgiving about test-code quality.
My internal engineering-leader mind has no doubt, it’d tell the devs to automate the hell out of replicating the test suite and not be picky about how. But I bet that it’d burn a whole lot of tokens, which means routing money to bad people with bad goals. So once again, I’m not going to do it with LLMs.
Post-bubble, it might be somewhere between forgivable and praiseworthy. But not as I write this.
2026-10-14 03:00:00
Recently John Gruber, whom I’ve followed for decades, published X Once Again Marks the Spot. It’s short and I’m not going to try to summarize it so go read it if you haven’t already. But here are two key quotes: “I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is.” and “The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place.” Reaction on Bluesky and the Fediverse has been pretty fierce.
I think the following things can all be true.
Well yeah, Elon isn’t in everyone’s feed, clearly a major quality-of-life improvement.
Go read X is bad, though by Lex Freidman. I mean, Musk delivers sieg-heil Nazi salutes in public and boasted about how he, the world’s richest man, cut off food rations to the world’s poorest children. Lex has a longer list of reasons but those two are all I need.
Then there’s the unforgiveable doctrine of tuning the algorithm to bury posts that have links in them.
This was Gruber’s starting point. But, uh… CEOs are boring. They have to be ruthlessly on-message and never stray a millimeter from their core mission, which is promoting their company to the investment class. If I want to learn about Apple I’ll go read actual humans like Gruber or Friedman and ignore the vacuous arm-waving from the executives.
It’s not just CEOs, I saw Macron and Burnham and Zelenskyy and Modi. In fact, today’s reality on X is that the people posting are mostly public figures, already established as writers or politicians or executives or whatever. Most of them are there with a business or party or product to promote and that’s what they do.
There are very few who are just interesting voices you haven’t heard before; and that’s part of what I go online looking for.
I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out. Putinist propaganda. Zionist settler hasbara. Rod Dreher ranting incomprehensibly, and I quote: “…young Jews became Bolsheviks in part to "murder" their fathers - that is, to destroy Judaism.” LLM cheerleading, that get-on-board-or-you’re-history flavor we all remember from the heydey of crypto. Joni Mitchell gleeful at her US-Citizenship ceremony. Slanted political propaganda, against the incumbents in the current BC election, until I switched to Explore and it switched to pro-incumbent puffery.
This is fun?
People, I mean, who are there but should really know better and of whom I now think less: Joni. Nicholas Kristoff. Josh Marshall. Jeet Heer. Nate Silver. Aaron Rupar. Corey Quinn. Stephen King. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation. Miguel de Icaza. Fortunately none of them care what I think of them. I could go on but I’m already blue enough. And I’m not going to even start listing the many featured voices belonging to people whom I already thought of as unsalvageable scumfucks.
Twitter is part of the SpaceX LLMs+rockets conglomerate. If you believe, as I do, that the bubble is going to pop soon and loudly, it’s going to be desperate times when SpaceX’s valuation collapses and it can’t borrow billions to keep the doors open. Twitter has never made really significant profits (and I saw exactly zero ads in the hour I spent poking around).
So what happens then? Feels to me like the choices are extinction or enshittification. We’ll see.
I’m still a happy Fediversian, here’s why. Yeah, there aren’t as many people and it’s kinda geeky and leftist and queer; also unattractive to billionaires and CEOs. I can see why that’s less appealing for some folk out there and, well, OK. But I’m having fun on Fedi. And it’ll be a loooong time before I waste another hour on X.
2026-10-13 03:00:00
What happened was, Lauren’s NZ family includes a nephew who’s currently living in Brisbane and got married last month, so a dozen or so Kiwis and three of us Canadians got on airplanes and converged on easternmost Australia. We went on to tourist a bit and visit friends in the Melbourne area. Came away with impressions and pictures.
Australia’s different. I don’t claim any particular deep understanding, but at least we were mostly among locals and often off the tourist trail. Also I find some of the pictures pleasing.
Damn, that’s a long plane flight.
Eleven or so hours into the journey, dawn over the Pacific; ice crystals on the windows plus something put the Pixel into Macro mode and thus the reflections. Vaguely self-portrait-ish.
It was great; she’s a Grade 4 teacher and he’s a cop. They’re both exceptionally attractive and have large supportive families. It was well-organized and good fun.
The mothers of the bride and groom both looked very sharp.
Niece of the groom sends a silhouetted heart.
The city didn’t do much for me, but maybe that’s because we were mostly out in the burbs: Our Airbnb, the Kiwi-branch Airbnb, the bride & groom’s place, and the wedding venue. All in decent but (except for our joint in Brighton) not terribly memorable neighborhoods.
Also there was “Chermy”, the Westfield Chermside Mall. OMG. It’s the size of a small European nation and getting prepped for the wedding required enough time there to drive my nervous system nearly to meltdown, I’m not good at malls.
I’m left with the impression that Brisbane is designed and optimized for automobiles but, once again, maybe we just came at it wrong.
Low tide off Flinders Parade in Brighton, Queensland.
Kookaburra of course.
After the wedding there was a gathering at Felons Brewing, an absolutely massive gastropub on the banks of Brisbane’s river, which I totally recommend. The place is too big but somehow they make it work and the food is really good.
Our dear friend Sally, after a long career in Melbourne, sold her house in a decent Melbourne neighborhood and bought something of a palace in Warragul, a couple of hours by train to the east. It’s in Gippsland, a green and pleasant part of Australia.
Warragul is small, busy in the center, and very quiet outside it.
Warragul.
My favorite thing about the town was Bandolier Brewing, which has a friendly and relaxed small-town vibe and terrific pizzas. The beer is OK but not memorable.
The countryside around it is remarkably nice.
Looking down on Gippsland pastureland
from the
Cape Horn Lookout.
Lauren got her Ph.D. here and has lots of context on the place, plus still a few friends. It’s a cool city; the fact that it’s got twice Vancouver’s population shows. A whole lot of style statements were really working, plus the streets and alleys operate on a welcoming human scale.
It’s a foodie city, which as a side-effect highlights a big difference between there and here: Pay is better in Australia. Here are the minimum-wage rules (for Americans, those Aussie bucks are worth about 70¢ just now). Those rates are a lot higher than where I live. “But,” our taxi driver told us, “nobody’ll work for the minimum, you have to offer more than that.”
This is in your face when you eat out; first, because everything on the menu is expensive. Second, nobody asks for a tip. I kind of like this set of trade-offs and wish North America would get a clue. If you follow that minimum-wage link above you’ll observe it’s from “Australian Unions” and they claim a lot of credit for the pay structure. To the extent that’s true, good on ’em.
Anyhow, back to Melbourne. The center of the town is Flinders Street Station, which I’ve pictured on this blog before and will again; the place makes me happy.
At Flinders Street station.
On our last day we visited the Vic Market, where a huge and remarkably random selection of merchants sell, more or less, everything imaginable. A cheery place; my daughter and I had a food-truck lunch (me: Ethiopian, her: Mexican) that was at least competitive in quality with the fancier-restaurant fare.
Here’s a place near Sally’s in Warragul.
It nicely illustrates a few of my take-aways. Item: Vast lawn. Item: Nice brickwork. Item: Capacious roof overhang for shelter from rain and sun. Item: Since they don’t have alleys, every house has a front-facing garage (behind the bush in this pic). Item: Solar; in reasonably new/modern areas, somewhere around a third of residences have these. It’s subsidized enough to make it a financial no-brainer. Item: Impeccably clean road and curb. Item: Single story, no basement or upstairs.
I actually like a lot of the Aussie residential architecture. Pity about those front-facing garages.
Finally, speaking as a full-time hat wearer, for my money Akubra makes the world’s coolest. Expensive, but rugged and stylish. Check ’em out.
2026-10-11 03:00:00
Our neighorhood has many deciduous trees, which means, in Canadian October, lots of bright colors overhead and also on the ground. The camera (from its corner in my office) and phone (from my pocket) both quiver with eagerness to be pointed at those colors. Sinced I’ve grumbled a bit recently about the Pixel’s color rendition, I thought I should try some side-by-sides. So here are three pairs of pictures from the mobile and the “real” camera.
The mobile is a Pixel 10, shooting with the default Google camera app. Since it shoots at a wider angle than either of the camera lenses I used, those shots have been cropped down quite a bit, but I don’t think that affects the fairness of the comparison.
The camera is a Fujifilm X-T5, four years old now but not too far off the state of the art. For camera nerds only: The sensor is APS-C not full-frame, which is why the body and (especially) lenses are smaller and lighter.
Two lenses are used; amusingly, they are the pair I bought with my first Fujifilm camera in 2013, the 35mm F1.4 and the 18-55m F2.8.
For each pair, the pictures were shot at the about the same time.
I used Lightroom, but only to crop and rotate the Pixel shots. Which you could argue is a flaw in this comparo because normally I touch up photos quite a bit before I share them. But I think these straight-out-of-the-camera versions have something to teach.
Pixel above, Fujifilm + 35mm F1.4 below.
I could have made a flip-to-compare widget but that’s too much JavaScript for the weekend. Get the enlarged versions open in
adjacent tabs and flip back and forth
if you want that kind of thing.
Look, I like the Pixel, it’s not a “great camera for a mobile”, it’s just a great camera. I use it all the time with confidence that it’ll give me an excellent chance at a keeper. But it doesn’t come off well here.
I can guess why: First, this was a cloudy afternoon with a row of big houses between the leaves and the part of the sky the sun was in. Apparently the Fuji sensor does better with this particular flavor of low light.
Second, that lens; I think a whole lot of people in Fuji-land would agree that that 35mm F1.4 is one of the greatest lenses ever made by anybody ever. Things just look better through it. Go looking online and you’ll find lots of moist but inarticulate voices and they’re all saying something along the lines of “I dunno what it is but I like it.”
In this case, the Fujifilm picture looks strikingly more three-dimensional than the Pixel’s. Lens design is one of the last domains of analog engineering design. For which I’m thankful.
The Pixel version is light on context and the less-dark leaves look blown out. It would benefit from Lightroom adjustments but I don’t think it’d catch up.
Pixel above, Fujifilm + 18-55mm F2.8 below.
When I got these two up side-by-side on the screen I wondered “Is the Fuji exaggerating the saturation and contrast and brightness?” Maybe so. But if the Pixel version is accurate, I don’t think I would have been impressed enough to take the picture. The cameras’ opinions on the relationship between the red and yellow differ sharply. I think the Fuji is right but I can’t remember where exactly I shot that, so I haven’t checked.
If you zoom way in, the Pixel actually got slightly better focus. Which is irrelevant to the way the picture looks on screen. You might be able to notice on a really big print?
Anyhow, I’m not sure what’s going on here. There was plenty of light; the Pixel was at 1/180sec, the Fuji 1/60. Now I’m going to be suspicious of my camera, is it lying to me in a pleasing way?
Pixel above, Fujifilm + 18-55mm F2.8 below.
Obviously, all the light anyone could want, loads of contrast, and it’s hard to pick a winner. The Pixel does a little bit better at capturing branch textures; those branches are mostly just silhouettes per the Fuji. If you look really close and care a lot, the Fuji’s take on the color of the sky is better. I’ve griped about this before, I think there’s something in the Google computational photography that detects sky and slams the pretty-sky-blue lever over on the color mixer.
I’m pretty sure I would have been willing to share either version of each of these pictures, especially post-Lightroom. Since the Fuji is shooting RAW, those files would have had “deeper data” and thus more scope for pulling light out of darkness or texture out of highlights.
The differences in image quality are there, and they’re significant. But the “real” camera’s biggest advantage is that it’s shaped to fit in your hand and has physical knobs and dials to adjust things, and is awake more or less instantly when you turn it on. It’s not trying to be anything but a camera. Also, you can attach a huge variety of funky lenses, including extreme telephotos. The bottom line: Cameras are immensely more fun to shoot with. But you’re going to have the mobile with you more often.
I’m pretty sure my conclusions would have been the same had the camera been a Canon/Nikon/Sony or whatever. But the Fuji cameras have better ergonomics than those.
The phone-cams will go on getting better. But until they can do the hand thing and the lenses thing, I can’t see going without a real camera.