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For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house

katalog-barbaraiweins.com

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Re: For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house

#71

Post by jfil »

netsharc wrote: post #58
Pikamander2 wrote: post #18

Some constructive feedback to the site owner: Instead of having the webpage spend several minutes slowly loading thousands of barely-compressed 500x500 JPG images, please consider this advice: 1. Convert the images to WEBP or AVIF or at least run them through something like TinyPNG to compress them better. 2. Save two versions of each images; a 75x75 version that gets used for the 75px thumbnails shown on the page, a…

I'm still dreaming of an image file format where the file begins with the, say, 75x75px image, and then continues with higher and higher resolutions, where the browser can decide when to stop downloading. Ideally they wouldn't be redundant either, e.g. the 2nd block would contain just the data to upscale the 1st block to twice the resolution.. so the "75x75" thumbnail in a hidpi display would just need blocks 1 and 2…

Check out DZI (Deep Zoom Images), IIIF API and Zoomify.

Re: For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house

#72

Post by smokel »

layer8 wrote: post #69
smokel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for that link, that is a fascinating read! I have to study the text and its references some more before I can say something sensible. For now, it seems that I feel most comfortable with the "instrumentalist" view, even though Wallace seems to reject this quite easily. To me it seems clear that most abstractions only exist in the mind, and the recent successes with large language models suggest that the unde…

A fluid, or an object like a chair, is not an arbitrary or imaginary structure. The way they behave is factually real, and necessarily so. They are not structures that are invented, they are discovered. This fact of the matter is an objective reality. They are real in that sense. Given the underlying reality (substrate, particle and/or fields or whatever), these patterns couldn’t have been any different. They are rea…

Hm, I think we are discussing different topics here.

I doubt that we use the same definition for something being "real". I'd like to avoid that discussion, and talk about what constitutes a thing.

To me, _things_ merely exist in someone's brain, and their corresponding physical representation sure is real, it exists there in reality. But the physical "thing" does not have any relevant meaning other than to us observers. For all the universe could care, the chair is just a bunch of atoms, similar in value to a chunk of space on the left of it.

Consider also some problems, such as the chair not being in an absolute position in time. It is constantly moving with the earth, and with the solar system, at an incredible speed. Also, the chair will probably not be here anymore in 1 billion years. Also, if you zoom in, all the atoms are moving like crazy. It just works fairly well as a chair to us human observers, but it seems irrelevant to aliens with different life spans.

Re: For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house

#73

Post by layer8 »

smokel wrote: post #72
layer8 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fluid, or an object like a chair, is not an arbitrary or imaginary structure. The way they behave is factually real, and necessarily so. They are not structures that are invented, they are discovered. This fact of the matter is an objective reality. They are real in that sense. Given the underlying reality (substrate, particle and/or fields or whatever), these patterns couldn’t have been any different. They are rea…

Hm, I think we are discussing different topics here. I doubt that we use the same definition for something being "real". I'd like to avoid that discussion, and talk about what constitutes a thing. To me, _things_ merely exist in someone's brain, and their corresponding physical representation sure is real, it exists there in reality. But the physical "thing" does not have any relevant meaning other than to us observe…

I believe that the properties that give a “thing” meaning to observers are by and large independent of the observers. They are properties of the thing more than they are properties of the observer. That’s why I believe they are real in their own right, and not (just) as a function of observers (which may or may not be present).

With regard to “meaning”, I would agree that meaning only exists in our heads. But that is true concerning the fundamental description of reality just as with regard to emergent “things”. Reality doesn’t have any inherent meaning. Meaning is something that only exists in our psychology.

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