Camera shows reality is visually disappointing.
Also JavaScript's midlife crisis and the chip shortage.

The Unflattering Truth of the Raw Sensor

The number one headline today confirms a deep corporate truth: the reality behind the marketing materials is ugly; speckled; and requires a massive amount of computational effort to look remotely presentable. A deep dive into what an unprocessed photo actually looks like reveals a bizarre, color-mismatched patchwork that resembles a cheap heat map, confirming the camera is basically incompetent.

The modern camera's sensor, which costs thousands of dollars, is fundamentally only a partial data collection device. It is built on a Bayer filter array; which means every pixel only measures one color: red, green, or blue. The vast and complex job of the camera’s firmware is to subsequently guess the other two colors for every single pixel, a process called demosaicing. The raw file that everyone fetishizes is just the un-guessed spreadsheet of data. It looks exactly like someone spilled a bowl of fluorescent M&Ms all over the image plane; and the camera’s entire job is to hide this fundamental incompetence from the user by aggressive, proprietary post-production.

The '404 Not Found' Departmental Annex

Turns out that China's secret nuclear city in the Gobi Desert was, for a period, literally unlisted on maps; earning the unsettling nickname, "404 Not Found." This is less a geopolitical drama and more a profound cautionary tale about poorly managed asset lists and the perils of ignoring your server inventory. The city, Jinchuan, was a secret hub for the nation's nuclear program.

A former resident, now a writer, wrote an entire memoir about growing up in a place the public routing table said did not exist. It is a stunning example of state level bureaucracy failing at basic documentation. The takeaway, as always, is that if your location is important, ensure your sysadmin updates the DNS record before you try to operate critical infrastructure there; or else you are just going to confuse the delivery drivers.

The Return of the Server Side: JavaScript’s Midlife Crisis

Web developers have apparently completed the 15 year round trip of complexity and are now ready to replace JavaScript with just HTML. This is the corporate equivalent of an agile development team realizing the "innovative" new system they spent five years and millions of dollars building is just a slower version of a basic spreadsheet they already had.

The entire industry is now entering the mature phase of disillusionment, where we collectively realize that the core user experience we wanted was available in 1999 and we just had to use the `

Briefs

• AI Slop Report: Confirmation that the vast majority of AI generated content is low quality videos. The algorithm is officially just eating its own tail now.
• Automated CEOs: Suggestions that the highly lucrative role of Chief Executive Officer is formulaic enough to be automated. It will probably cost more than a human CEO; but at least the automated version will only fire you, not yell about synergy.
• The Chip Shortage Continues: The AI gold rush is gobbling up chips, so your next new device will be 15 percent more expensive. This is the supply chain equivalent of the Chief of Staff taking all the good office snacks for their private stash.