I’ve been curious about macrophotography for a while, and recently I got hold of some extension rings for my OM-20 to give it a try. I took them out with me on one of the first properly sunny days of the year, and snapped these photos I’m quite pleased with. Both were shot handheld, using the 7mm and 25mm extension rings for a combined 32mm extension.

📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 + 32mm extension
🎞️ SantaColor 100 (Kodak Aerocolor IV)

Technically these are not “true” macro photos, as the magnification factor between the subject and the image captured on the film negative is less than 1× (for this lens with the 32mm extension I’ve calculated the magnification to be somewhere around 0.8×). However, depending on the screen you’re using to view this post, the scans above are likely being displayed significantly larger than the 36×24mm film negative anyway, rendering the point somewhat moot.

Since taking these photos, I’ve also added a 14mm extension ring to my collection (all three can be seen in the photo up top). With the addition of the 14mm extension ring, the magnification I’m now able to achieve should theoretically extend slightly past the 1× mark into “true” macro territory.

Georgia State Patrol used its system of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras to issue a ticket to a motorcyclist who was allegedly looking at his cell phone while riding, according to a copy of the citation obtained by 404 Media. The incident is notable because Flock cameras are not designed for traffic enforcement or minor code violations, and many jurisdictions explicitly  tell constituents that the cameras will not be used for traffic enforcement. 

The incident happened December 26 in Coffee County, Georgia. The ticket lists the offense as “Holding/supporting wireless telecommunications device,” and includes the note “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.” 

A spokesperson for the Georgia State Patrol told 404 Media that the ticket was issued because of a “unique circumstance” in which a Flock camera happened to capture a traffic infraction, and that Flock cameras are not usually used by the department for traffic enforcement.

“This incident was a rare and unique circumstance where the captured image from the camera exposed an additional violation beyond the vehicle’s expired registration,” the spokesperson said. “This situation does not reflect a standard enforcement endeavor by the Department of Public Safety.” The traffic citation obtained by 404 Media does not mention that the man’s registration was expired. 

Still, the incident is notable because Flock cameras are often pitched to police as tools for solving serious crimes, finding stolen vehicles, and locating missing people. They distinctly are not traffic cameras and are not pitched as such; the use of a Flock camera in this way shows that the images they capture can sometimes be detailed enough to be used as the pretext for a traffic violation, anyway. 

Many police departments go out of their way to tell community members that Flock cameras are not used for traffic enforcement. For example, the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, states in a FAQ that “GSPD [Glenwood Springs Police Department] does not use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, or minor code violations.” El Paso, Texas, tells residents “these are not traffic enforcement cameras. They do not issue tickets, do not monitor speed, and do not generate revenue. They are investigative tools used after crimes occur.” Lynwood, Washington tells residents “these cameras will not be used for traffic infractions, immigration enforcement, or monitoring First Amendment-protected expressive activity” (Flock cameras have now been used for all of these purposes, as we have reported.) 

The fact that police in Georgia did use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement highlights yet again that, essentially, law enforcement agencies are able to use these cameras for whatever they want. There are very few limitations on what Flock cameras can be used for, and police do not get warrants to search Flock’s network of cameras, either locally or nationwide. Network audits, which are spreadsheets of Flock searches we have obtained via public records requests, have shown that police use Flock for all sorts of reasons; they often do not list any reason at all for searching a license plate. 

The man who was cited in Georgia posted about the incident in an anti-Flock Facebook group asking for advice. He said that he showed up in court and the ticket was dropped. The man did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media and because he is a private citizen cited for a minor traffic violation, we are not naming him. 404 Media independently obtained the citation. 

moser's frame shop wrote:

I Am An AI Hater

And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry, their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.

…

I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.

I've assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

I saw Liz England posted about a market research survey from a reliable vendor, Quantic Foundry, which showed that audiences genuinely loathe the technology. Unsurprisingly, players who care more about story hate it even more than the rest of them. Less than 8% of gamers have any positive feelings toward it at all.

62.7% of the survey respondents have very negative feelings about it. Over 85% of all the respondents had at least some negative feelings about it.

This is wild as hell. GenAI boosters are very common on Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms where people speculate about What Gamers Want and what the future of game development will be like. As long as these survey numbers hold, I'm going to dismiss that kind of boosterism out of hand, and you should, too. There's no reason to assume that this tech will be the norm going forward for game art, audio, or story. The people who insist the audience will prefer it have no idea what they're talking about.

Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park’s Cartman doing ASMR; a pixel-perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn’t actually exist; a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or La La Land; Rick and Morty in Minecraft; Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild; Rick and Morty talking about Sora; Toad from the Mario universe deadlifting; Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian; Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence, and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture. 

Sora 2 is the new video generation app/TikTok clone from OpenAI. As AI video generators go, it is immediately impressive in that it is slightly better than the video generators that came before it, just as every AI generator has been slightly better than the one that preceded it. From the get go, the app lets you insert yourself into its AI creations by saying three numbers and filming a short video of yourself looking at the camera, looking left, looking right, looking up, and looking down. It is, as Garbage Day just described it, a “slightly better looking AI slop feed,” which I think is basically correct. Whenever a new tool like this launches, the thing that journalists and users do is probe the guardrails, which is how you get viral images of SpongeBob doing 9/11.

The difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X’s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people’s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work. I recall a time when Nintendo and the Pokémon Company sued a broke fan for throwing an “unofficial Pokémon” party with free entry at a bar in Seattle, then demanded that fan pay them $5,400 for the poster he used to advertise it. This was the poster:

With the release of Sora 2 it is maddening to remember all of the completely insane copyright lawsuits I’ve written about over the years—some successful, some thrown out, some settled—in which powerful companies like Nintendo, Disney, and Viacom sued powerless people who were often their own fans for minor infractions or use of copyrighted characters that would almost certainly be fair use. 

No real consequences of any sort have thus far come for OpenAI, and the company now seems completely disinterested in pretending that it did not train its tools on endless reams of copyrighted material. It is also, of course, tacitly encouraging people to pollute both its app and the broader internet with slop. Nintendo and Disney do not really seem to care that it is now easier than ever to make Elsa and Pikachu have sex or whatever, and that much of our social media ecosystem is now filled with things of that nature. Instagram, YouTube, and to a slightly lesser extent TikTok are already filled with AI slop of anything you could possibly imagine.And now OpenAI has cut out the extra step that required people to download and reupload their videos to social media and has launched its own slop feed, which is, at least for me, only slightly different than what I see daily on my Instagram feed. 

The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.

The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.

“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.

“I am livid,” they added.

The person said earlier this year they were verifying their income in order to start a lease at an apartment complex in Atlanta. The apartment complex used a tenant screening service called ApproveShield, the person said. The landlord required 60 days of pay history, or four pay stubs, the person said.

ApproveShield is in-part powered by a tool called Argyle, which verifies peoples’ income. It does this by having people log into their corporate employer HR services, such as Workday, and scraping information stored within. I’ve covered Argyle before, when I found it was linked to a wave of suspicious emails that offered people cash for their workplace login credentials. 

The renter said ApproveShield’s Argyle-powered widget asked them to log into their employer’s Workday. That's when they noticed something unusual.

“Argyle hijacked my live Workday session, stayed hidden from view, and downloaded every pay stub plus all W-4s back to 2024, each PDF seconds apart,” they said. “Workday audit logs show dozens of ‘Print’ events from two IPs from a MAC which I do not use,” they added, referring to a MAC address, a unique identifier assigned to each device on a network.

“ApproveShield knew the 60-day limit yet mined everything,” they added.

The person provided 404 Media with a screenshot which shows them receiving a wave of emails from Workday saying the PDF of their paystub is now available for download. The screenshot shows 14 emails concerning payslips, many more than the four the service was supposed to download.

As I previously covered, Argyle’s approach of having individual people give up login credentials for their employer’s corporate environments may violate U.S. hacking laws. Broadly, employees do not have the authority to share corporate login credentials. In 2013, journalist Matthew Keys was indicted, and later sentenced to two years in prison, for providing hackers with his credentials for the Tribune Company. Christopher Correa, a former executive for the Cardinals, was sentenced to four years in prison for logging into a system owned by his former employer.

The renter 404 Media spoke to said the same “credential-harvesting model now dominates Georgia rentals.” They pointed to other companies such as PayScore, Nova Credit (whose leadership includes an Argyle co-founder), and Snappt which also uses Argyle.

Realistically, if a potential tenant doesn’t give up their login credentials, they won’t be able to rent the apartment. “Opt-out means no housing,” the person said.

Neither ApproveShield nor Argyle responded to a request for comment.