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Note, that JPEG XL was added as a possible compression method for DNG files (Digital Negative - stores raw images with raw sensor data of a camera).

Because of it, for the past couple of years, all new iPhones and almost all Android phones (mostly Samsungs) already contain a JPEG XL encoder / decoder (to generate these DNGs).


Am I the only one who thinks that the classic music notation is 3x harder to learn than the basic music theory (without the rules of notation)?

I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.

I even made my own guide to music :D https://www.jampea.com/learn


This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide: I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.

To give an example, this it of course not true:

> Only a limited set of frequencies is used in music. All these frequencies (that exist in music) can be played by a piano.


Yeah, I think a good discussion on music theory is starting from first principles, explaining Pythagorean tuning, then explaining 5-limit just intonation, the explaining we compromised on 12-tone equal temperament because it made tuning and changing keys a lot simpler, at the expenses of some notes being slightly out of tune (e.g. the minor and major thirds deviate by about 15 cents from their 5-limit just intonated “ideal” tunings).

If someone is going to spend 3 hours learning "as much music theory as they can", I don't think they should start with the history of temperament in music. Also, I think that about 70% of the worlds population does not know what a square root is.

I don’t think anyone said anything about having only three hours to learn music theory. First principles should be taught to computer programmers, who have the needed math (e.g. knowing what a square root is) to understand music from that perspective.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888


You're saying its not possible to tune a piano to an arbitrary set of 88 pitches?

That's clearly not what was meant, even without the context of this following bit:

> To describe tones that exist in music, we can describe tones that exist on a piano. There are only two rules:

> the first key must play a tone of 27.5 Hz each next key must play a tone 6% higher than the previous key

(This is not to mention that at a 1.06x increase per half step you're going to be sharp by 1 cent / octave which starts to add up).


I could write that it is 2 to the power of (1/12), but 90% of the worlds population have no idea what it means. It is easier to remember "6 percent" than "2^(1/12)"

Aside from that not being what was said (the parent’s pull-quote is wrong in multiple ways), it is in fact not possible to tune a piano to any arbitrary set of 88 pitches without changing the design so dramatically and fundamentally that it would no longer be a piano. The triangular shape of a grand determined by the strings lengths, the placement of the pins, the use of double/triple strings in some frequency ranges, and design of the sound board, all permit only a very limited range of frequencies for each key on the keyboard. You very obviously cannot take an existing piano and tune it to 88 keys of A0, nor to 88 keys of C9.

Of course you can, but that's not what's implied by the quote.

In addition to microtonality, many instruments (and the human voice) are capable of infinite tuning, and musicians will deviate from the "correct" note (as played by an even-tempered instrument) based on chord structure, voice leading, etc.


That's not what "tuning" means. Yes, fretless string instruments, the human voice, instruments like the trombone are all capable of being played with arbitrary or semi-arbitrary pitch. But they are still either tuned in some way, or never tuned at all. Performance is not tuning.

Also quarter step bends in guitar and vibrato in general.

there are absolutely pitches that an arbitrary piano cannot be tuned to. it is also non-trivial to tune a piano.

Since an "arbitrary piano" is tuned by turning screws, like simpler string instruments, the only pitches that it cannot be tuned to are those that fall outside the range of each string. Departing from the usual inharmonically tempered 12-EDO tuning would just sound strange, possibly outside some piano tuner's professional comfort zone.

https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq_overview :) Very high quality and affordable software modeled piano. It is rather easy to tune via Scala KBD formatted files.

Not a piano, and not relevant to the parent remark.

And that isn't a nuanced opinion; a common one among rigid materialists. Its not the best piano for a stage, but I am sure it could fool your ears in a recording. Morpheus would think it was a piano too. "What is real? ..."

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4 explains why music notation is the way it is. There are very good reasons for it.

The parts that are really weird (like the C clef) have mostly been obsoleted, unless you play the viola I guess.


It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.

If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.

But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.

I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.


Exactly. Music theory is a programming language for musical composition and performance.

Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.

And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.

You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.

You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.

Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.

The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.


> Exactly. Music theory is a programming language for musical composition and performance.

Not really. Here in the 21st century people mostly use DAWs, and there's a piano roll inside that thing instead of staff notation.


Don't forget about the dynamics (loud or soft) dimension of music.

Have a look at http://terpstrakeyboard.com/about/ and the janko keyboard

I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.

For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)


Context: I played piano for about 15 years.

I think the discussion around changing the piano keyboard is somewhat more obvious and less subtle. It's pretty obvious that the main thing keeping the current piano keyboard alive is the same thing keeping QWERTY alive. Now, the current piano keyboard is not as bad as QWERTY, which is all but an objectively bad layout, whereas the current piano keyboard is one with pros and cons.

I am typing this comment in Dvorak on a split keyboard so split that the two halves are literally on one side each of my chair's armrests, separated by about two feet, so I am no stranger to heterodox opinions about keyboards and putting them in action, and have a track record of not defending the status quo just because it's the status quo.

The current piano keyboard, while it does require you to learn the 12 keys separately, is something that is demonstrably possible for a normal human being, and the advantage is then that you are in fact in those 12 keys separately. You can not be playing in D major and then, for any period of time, accidentally slide into D# major and be confused, which Terpstra makes very easy to do. Of course, recovery is then not difficult either, but it might take a moment.

But other than that, the debate around the piano layout is really a matter of just trying it out and seeing what works.

For notation, I see a lot of people trying to replace the current notation without realizing how many subtleties are in it. It's not just about single quarter notes being banged out in a regular rhythm. It's about many different instruments. It's about dynamics, how the notes are struck, it's about subtle details in how the notes are horizontally spaced, it's about how the notes are played, even things like vibrato can be indicated as starting halfway through the note, and it's about a lot of other things. It's about having a representation for the conductor, it's about working for percussion, it's about guitars and other things. The usual "notation sucks, let's use X" is "let's just use piano roll notation", but if you make a full inventory of what conventional notation has and compare it to "piano roll notation", piano roll notation isn't even close to filling the gaps.

A more fully-fleshed out proposal could. A more fully-fleshed proposal to break up the proposal based on instrument (classical notation does some of this anyhow) might get closer. But that's not what people propose. They generally propose that piano roll notation is already what we need. But it isn't even close to fitting the bill. I don't even have to start asking questions about how exactly one distinguishes between a minor and major 10th interval with their notation (a huge problem generally left unsolved) because they haven't even developed their supposed notation far enough to be a serious competitor. Maybe there's a solution to that too, if someone puts the work in. I wouldn't care to try to categorically exclude it... but I've never seen anyone demonstrate it or answer the question. Conventional music notation doesn't necessarily even have the final word on that question, it certainly has issues if you go too far above or below a clef, but it has an answer to that question. Proposals based around something other than piano roll notation are generally even less fleshed out than piano roll notation, which at least does have some decades of prior use in computer software, which I've also clocked some years with, I used to compose music for fun. Even whackier proposals are generally complete nonstarters even on their own terms.

I think if someone is going to come up with a new, useful notation, it is going to have to retain the non-representationality that the current notation has, where we are not trying to directly encode pitch changes into a literal, 1-to-1 geometry on the page, and especially not a direct 1-to-1 representation of time. Current notation is correlated to those things, but it's not even close to a 1-to-1 map (for example also 8ve block notation for jumping up and down). I have no problem with the idea that there could be something much better if it was worked out, but I doubt that much better thing is going to have those characteristics either.


Thanks for your writeup! Nice insightful read.

Personally I think musical notation should be optimized for ease of playing first and foremost - and I think that would be best achieved with a 1-to-1 mapping to the pitch. I.e. if I just want to play a piece in an orchestra, it's easiest if it just literally says the notes. Having to parse what a note with a double flat actually is on the fly is just unnecessary mental labour, when the information you need as a player is just 'what note do I need to play'.

I also imagine that transposing is a lot easier if I was reading piano roll notation - just play the note but X down.

It's easy enough to extend piano roll notation or something like it with hints regarding what interval it is etc, so you have both benefits.

For the rithm though I always found the existing notation intuitive, piano roll probably would be hard to parse in that regard.


love that video, it made me lol so hard the first time I saw it :D

Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.

What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations. How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.

The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.

There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.

You can explore it here on Monic Theory. (mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)

https://monictheory.com/project-templates


Note that in historical Byzantine musical culture, there are no absolute pitches at all. Their notational form is entirely intervals from some arbitrary root note.

Similarly, in Carnatic and Hindustani classical traditions, the note names (Sa, Re, Pa etc) do not denote pitches - Sa is always the root, whatever it is, and the rest have a somewhat well defined intervallic relationship to it.

I personally would not use "harmonic value" to describe this, since it occurs in music that (broadly speaking) lacks harmony. The key point, IMO, is that what matters are sets of intervals (ratios, if you prefer) rather than actual pitches (as frequencies).


^^ THIS

Hindustani (and Carnatic) music indeed do not denote pitches for a very sound (pun intended) reason: They let singers choose the root note (Sa), and thereupon the melody is built. Most (all?) of Hindustani music is melody-based, not harmonic based (like Western music). And the melodies are themselves created within the Raga framework. Raga is like a mode (but not exactly that), and is hard to explain within the constraints of Western music theory precisely because that concept does not exist in western music per se. Which is why most Indian classical theorists call a raga a "melodic framework", and leave it at that (or expound on it, as the case may be).

A great reference for Indian classical music is [1] and and more recent one [2]

[1] The Ragas of North Indian Music, N.A. Jairazbhoy, https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725

[2] Rāgs Around the Clock, A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0313#r...


much love for the Just Intonation in the house

Actual frequencies matter in bass-focused dance music. You want a root note around 40Hz to 60Hz, which is high enough that it's easily heard and reproduced, but not so high that it loses the tactile body-shaking effect.

As a semi-professional trombonist, C clefs are very important to me. Alto and tenor as-written, tenor as a means of transposing Bb treble, mezzo-soprano as a means of transposing F parts… they are not obsolete.

My favorite genre of hacker news comment is when someone lacks sufficient imagination to wonder why something that’s commonly used by many people is still in use

FWIW, there's no real need for imagination here. The comment says "mostly", and added a parenthetical comment that was simply meant to name the viola as a prominent remaining use.

In particular, trombones have almost entirely stopped using the tenor clef in jazz.


It's true that jazz charts are unlikely to use tenor clef. Nonetheless, it remains career limiting for a trombonist to be unable to read clefs.

Commercial players are likely to use the skill for transposing Bb treble lead sheets, or playing in a pit. Tenor clef shows up in modern musicals regularly.

Not to mention being shunned from quartet or choir opportunities that are the basis of networking in the industry.


Transposing is an important skill for all instruments. It's true that trombonists get some cases for free if they learn the tenor and alto clefs, but it's possible to learn it without knowing the C clefs.

And even trombonists have to learn how to handle sharps and flats in chromatic passages, so there's a lot more to transposing than using a different clef.

> Tenor clef shows up in modern musicals regularly.

This I didn't know, thanks!


Yes, I did write "mostly". Sometimes the bassoon uses the C clef as well. Still, overall it can be safely ignored in most cases.

I suppose it makes historical sense, and even ingeniously designed.

But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)


> But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard.

I don't think this is true—I was under the impression that, at least on piano, keys other than C major are sometimes chosen specifically to make things easier on the fingers.


Easier on the fingers - maybe (I don't know what you reference), but not easier on the mind: Instead of learning each chord once, you have to learn it 12 times (for each key).

See http://terpstrakeyboard.com/about/


I have some great news: you're a nerd ! :))

... or is it geek, i can never remember the difference ...


It's all about the integers modulo 12. Classical notation obscures that (while making it easier to figure out which of the integers modulo 12 you're using, minus being able to assign them to integers in an obvious way).

> It's all about the integers modulo 12.

Only in 12TET.


24, 128, approach infinity -- I know there are microtonal systems, but if you want to understand them, choose the nearest multiple-of-twelve (or really, choose whatever TET contains the closest approximations to the exact notes) TET and look where their intervals land with respect to the symmetries (factors) within that TET, and where those symmetries are broken by a note moving by a perceptual 'slide' (one note 'moves' into the other position) rather than sounding like a new distinct voice.

More like, only if you're playing Schoenberg it's about modulo 12.

Almost all sheet music that you play uses 5 or 7 unequal subdivisions of the octave, and occasionally the rest. Sure, sometimes you'll have one or two of the rest on a regular basis (blues, harmonic/melodic minor), but still most music won't use all twelve.


Isn't modulo-twelve (if we ignore microtonal) the core underlying structure, and then you pick scale (like 2 2 1 2 2 2 1) and a key as a mapping, and then use degree as an 1-based index into the scale?

I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.


The point is that to a player the mapping is more important than the core 12-note structure, because highly chromatic (12-note) passages happen but they are the exception.

At least in western music you pick the seven basic notes on the scale, and that gives you the sharps and flats you place at the beginning of each line. That choice, from the point of view of notation, is even more important than the exact scale. And the choice is constrained to 15 sets of sharps and flats because it implicitly tells the player (veeeery roughly) to expect some patterns that probably will occur.

It doesn't always work great, for example if you want to write the Simpsons theme the set of notes in the scale doesn't fit any of those 15 sets. But it uses an unfamiliar scale in any case, so there's not much to gain and as a player you just deal with it.

See around 32:30 in https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?t=1950


I fun little exercise is to work out what would be different if we found aliens that also used 12 tone equal temperament, and also used a subset of 7 of those 12 notes to make their major scale, and also followed the same convention that we do of naming the notes of the major scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B like we do and naming the other 5 by naming a major scale note and adding modifier to tell how far away the not is from that like our # and b modifiers, and we both have the convention that when naming the notes of a transposed major scale we use each letter exactly once--except they picked a different 7 notes to be their major scale.

Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:

  C.D.EF.G.A.B
Suppose the aliens have a very different idea of what makes a good sounding major scale, and their system is:

  CDE.FGAB....
Suppose we transpose ours up 7 tones. We can represent this graphically by drawing out major pattern for two octaves, and below that drawing our major scale pattern with names replaced by X (X.X.XX.X.X.X) shifted over by 7, then look above to see how to name the notes (remembering we can only use each letter once):

  C.D.EF.G.A.BC.D.EF.G.A.B
         X.X.XX.X.X.X
Our major scale transposed up 7 is G A B C D E F#.

Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get

  CDE.FGAB....CDE.FGAB....
         XXX.XXXX...
That's B Cbbbb Dbbbb Ebbb Fbbbb Gbbbb Abbbb.

At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.

It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.

In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.

I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.


Hey, I am the creator of https://www.photopea.com and if a user decides to publish their work, it compresses PSD files (inside a browser) and sends them to the server for storing. Right now, we have about 2 TB of files. I use the DEFLATE compression which I fully implemented myself (compressor and decompressor, inside a library called UZIP.js).

I wish I could use something better :D but it must be implemented in Javascript to run inside a browser, and the library should not be too large (mine is about 8 kB ZIPped). I would love to switch to ZSTD once someone implements a compressor in Javascript that is under 40 - 60 kB. Or do you think that bzip3 could be re-implemented easily in JS using some AI?

I really admire you for being so smart at such a young age :) I wish you best of luck in your scientific career! I visited Warsaw this year, but I am not sure if that is where you are from :D


Hi Ivan,

Please send me an e-mail! Perhaps we can figure something out.


I am the creator of https://www.photopea.com (a popular photo editor).

Recently, I wrote https://www.jampea.com/learn , which is the music theory for "technical people". I believe it is the fastest way to get to understand the theory behind music (will take you 2 to 5 hours in total, 10% will be reading and 90% will be thinking about what you just read).


I just tried to make an Instagram post at www.instagram.com. It was possible a year ago, but they removed this option recently :(


In the future, it might be extremely hard to find a camera which records exactly what is in front of it :D


The year is 2036, when dialed up to maximum space saving, the latest generation of smart phones now turn camera pictures to a textual description and later when you want to view them, re-generate them on the fly using a text2image model. Not that "saving space" really means something, the phones refuse to unlock if they don't have an internet connection and store all your data on multiple cloud servers anyway (one for each five eye country).


It won't even have a camera. Could just infer from location, time, and orientation data.


It's already 14 eyes, and it'll be 195 eyes by then


194. That one country will not be invited.


*rolls the random number generator* What has Senegal done?


Ask me in 10 years. If I call it now it will make the prophecy fullfil itself even earlier.


It's one Monarch, but many eyes. All information flows to the Crown.


That one monarch is not a person or organization of people. It's an aggregation of all the loosely connected ones, competing on some things, coordinated on others, but you, the end user are never the beneficiary. That, my old school human friend, is the one commandment no one challenges. With all those players locked into a Nash equilibrium, no one can do anything about this, while all humans complain that things are not the way they should be.


The constitutional monarchies respect each others' land ownership and colonies, but in terms of actual power the British Crown dwarfs everything, especially if one correctly recognizes the USA as their vassal state.

Outside of this there are few strongmen-led states of non-royal blood, of which China is the most important one.

And then there is Switzerland, which is part of the democratically-pacified buffer zone around Liechtenstein ;)

Let's hope the people at the top don't become too crazy.


This is conspiracy theory territory. The USA is not a vassal state of the crown in any way at all.

I just note that one of the few people to face fallout from the Epstein scandal is Prince Andrew, because he's not inside the US unaccountability protection field.


The British crown is powerless apart from their money. The USA is a vassal state of Israel, not Britain.


The ultimate image compression algorithm: The txt


A lot of smartphones support raw format.

It's fascinating to see how much post-processing gets done.


There was a post on HN a few months ago showing the stages of post-processing on a photo of a Christmas tree in a room - the original photo was unrecognisable.

I would find the link, but I’m balancing my phone on my knee while trying to eat dinner and pretend I’m not playing with my phone while eating dinner…



Often the "RAW" output is still DSP'd, just less (e.g. only debayering + noise reduction).


With the rise of AI-generated content I would actually love a camera with no post-processing by default and a watermarking system that proves the picture is authentic. I can see Apple going that way eventually.


Every dedicated camera is like this, more so if you shoot in raw.

There's also a lot of confusion around the processing here. The iPhone is mostly just taking multiple pictures and stacking them on top of each other to make up for the poor performance of the small hardware, denoising, and then applying a mask to subjects to lift shadows and adjust skin tones. This is the same kind of edit a photographer would do in Lightroom. It's not straight up AI generating content in the image.

Sadly Android phones are willing to pull cheap tricks to show better numbers or look better in some comparative youtube video so they pull this stuff.


Leica and Sony offer this as “Content Credentials” and anti-forgery digital signatures done on camera. It’s also been standard for many years for digital cameras used in criminal evidence procedures, Olympus tough series IIRC.

Me I just switched back to film. It’s about a buck a picture but I like the results I get, I’d rather have 30 photos than 300 to look through anyway.


Apple is apparently working on the latter, although it'll be opt-in and it's unclear whether it will also reduce the processing (I hope it does!): https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/10/ios-27-apple-reference-...


This is a feature a lot of companies are looking in to right now. It's less about reducing processing and more about proving something is real and not AI generated. The iphone processing doesn't straight up generate things that aren't real.


It's also something I've been looking into. I've completely broken Google's implementation and I can sign any file as if it were real, more details will be public in the coming weeks.

Signatures are nice, but the contents of the image still matter. Any signs of manipulation should still be treated with suspicion, even if they're "legitimate" edits. The best way to avoid such signs is to have the bare minimum processing.


The technology is fundamentally flawed. It's essentially DRM that relies on making the signing key hard to access.


This is also my opinion. However, I still think it's worth raising the bar for plausible fakes. Minimising processing is another way to raise that bar (or at least, lower the floor). It's also not something you can do by default, because consumers demand image processing.


How does that watermark feature work if you can just point the camera at an AI-generated image?


One of the proposals I saw was using the lidar to capture a depth map. You could also embed the GPS location.


> I can see Apple going that way eventually.

I can’t.

Historically Apple is a late adopter of the mainstream. And they implement it as default, with little to no customization options.

Not to mention that iPhone cameras already perform heavy photo post-processing.


On Android, you can use OpenCamera. Optionally save in RAW and process in desktop RAW software.

Alternatively, buy a mirrorless or DSLR with some decent lenses.


If it's watermarked then it's by definition inauthentic. Watermarking is in-band signal manipulation.


Instead of watermarking you could add a cryptographic signature.


Telling if a photo or a video is "true" is the same as telling if the written text is "true". You can not tell it by analyzing characters / words in a text, or pixels in a video.

You should analyze the subject who is providing that text / video and decide for yourself, whether you trust that subject or not.

E.g. "Elon Musk is 10 feet tall" - are you reading it on an anonymous X account or on a Business Insider social account? An attached photo of Elon Musk being 10 feet tall does not make a difference.


Eh, there are plenty of third party camera apps which do that (See: Halide and their Prozess Zero). I doubt a built-in one will go that way.


Well, they do their best, they don't do any userspace post-processing. They can't really help whatever the firmware in the camera and/or the camera driver are already doing.


It's not really possible to have zero processing of an image. At some point you have to interpret the sensor data and turn it in to a JPEG. The line people decide an image is "processed" is pretty subjective though. It's somewhere between the camera deciding what the white balance / exposure is, and AI replacing the sun with a moon.


The line I draw is at semantic editing. Manipulating images based on abstract geometric or statistical features like edges or color histograms is acceptable. Attempting to guess what those features mean is not. Traditional sharpening, color balance correction, focus stacking, lens distortion correction, etc. is fine. Red eye removal, skin tone correction, traditional dodging and burning, replacing a detected moon with a higher resolution photo, etc. is not. Unlabeled semantic editing is dishonest. AI image processing does not distinguish between geometric and semantic features, so it's always unacceptable, even for simple tasks like sharpening.

The one exception I make is cropping, because photographers have always had the ability to choose where to point the camera. Cropping based on meaning is not dishonest because it's inherent in the process of photography.


That doesn't seem like a very sharp line (hah). "Abstract geometrical or statistical features like edges" have semantic meaning. An "edge" is just an area of the image with a high derivative, but as soon as you use that information to process it in some way, you are making some implicit assumption about what this statistical feature means - the boundary of an object, a discontinuity in depth, etc.

There is no dividing line between syntax and semantics - semantics is just syntax scaled. Godel proved it, LLMs exploit it.


If I run an unsharp mask filter I'm not making any decision about what individual edges mean. I might look at the result and decide to apply more or less sharpening, but that's still not "semantic editing", because the edit itself only sees derivatives.


raw images exist


You can't see a raw image though. Any time you look at an image, decisions had to be made about how to interpret that raw image.


It's still not a jpeg


Any file format or data structure you can display on the screen is processed. The whole point is the debate around phone processing is not as clear cut as photos being processed vs unprocessed.


only because you're arguing in bad faith. The layperson does not consider the result of standard sensor debayering to be "processed".


The layperson also doesn't really consider the result of their smartphone app to be "processed", until they get slapped in the face with it. The layperson's intuition isn't reliable.


The layperson doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about so it’s hard to pull a coherent statement out of it.

People claim they want unprocessed photos but it’s not clear what they even mean by that. I think we can rule things like ai replacing the sun with a moon as obviously too far, but most phones like the iPhone aren’t AI generating or filtering things.

Someone manually selecting an exposure, white balance, and tint in Lightroom isn’t any less real than letting the camera do that automatically because the camera doesn’t know which values are real either.


pretty sure even Xiaomi can do it, just disable stupid AI Camera and/or Super Moon, one of the first things I disable in camera on all Xiaomi phones (wife and me both have Xiaomi 13t and 13 respectively), don't forget also to disable Beautify (switch to Original) for selfie camera and don't remember what is the default selfie mirroring setting, this is very common issue with all brands they are not displaying real sides in selfie photos (real right hand becomes in photo left hand)


It’s a legit possibility that “FaceTime” in the future will be super low bandwidth because the phones on each end do local animations of a deepfaked/skinned model to match live capture rather than transmit high resolution video.


This is actually how FaceTime works on the Apple Vision Pro. Though that’s because your face is covered by a giant headset.

We can already compress video massively, enough to video call on crappy mobile connections without much care. I can’t imagine network connections would get worse in the future so it wouldn’t seem like there would be a need to compress further.


NASAs Deep Space Network? Making calls from space mean you don’t have the bandwidth (tho latency also killer)


I am wondering if the AI enhancement should be opt-in rather than the default and saving the original as well. Even if you want AI enhancement, future models are likely to be better.


I am worried that this might happen to websites soon.

If you want your website to be openable on Apple devices, you would have to pay Apple a fee each month. If you want your website to be openable on Android devices, you would have to pay Google a fee ecah month, etc.


I am worried that this might happen to websites soon.

You mean the new recaptcha that requires remote attestation?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/googles-new-remote-att...

Obviously, it doesn't have the fee part. But Google can decide soon for a substantial number of websites which devices can visit them and which not.


That's not a new version, that's a variant of v2. v3 is still completely non-interactive.


I am thinking how this would split the web.

You would have the "new web" consisting of the top n major websites paying this fee.

And then you would have the "old web", accessible only to people still owning their own PCs with unrestricted browsers. And probably heavily scrapped by AI companies to reguritate to the masses through the new web.


That's already the case for Netflix and other video streaming services.

You don't have to pay a fee directly, but you can't use open source web browsers.


we can just fork android

edit: I not realizing that I been replying to wrong comment


Ah yes, Android without the Play Store.

So you won't be able to use your banking apps, your local transport app, public services apps, health services apps, etc.

But sure, you can do SMS (no RCS though), use the device calculator, and maybe browse the Web… until websites kick you out because your non Chrome/Safari browser isn't supported anymore. Even Signal won't work well due to the lack of FCM.

And I'm a GrapheneOS user happy with Obtainium and without Play Services installed in main user space.


I always disable everything Google that comes preinstalled other than maps, including the App store. You can download stuff that you can only get there through Aurora, but really most of what I use comes from F-Droid.

Not that I trust a device running Android enough to do banking, mind you.


the situation is not ideal but this is the best we can do


I think the screen resolution is also fingerprintable. That is why a browser should resize your window to a random size each time you visit a website.


browser report where your browser window (not position in tab) is even page itself never need to use it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/zh-CN/docs/Web/API/Window/scre...


Instead of "AI cannot" you should always say "current AI cannot".


Even that would be false.


Were you able to make it work? It never works in my case.


https://simonw.github.io/moebius-web/

choose "samlple image" or upload something

then mark something with the mouse (and press 'run inpaint') and it'll work a bit and try to hide it, sorta like that "magic eraser" some newer android phones have


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