I had a chat with a photographer friend about jpeg-xl. For those who don't know, this is really a super format that may finally replace jpeg. I know I know, there have been a lot of contenders over the years, but so far none has been able to gain enough support to supplant jpeg. This one may finally do it.

It has a lot going for it. A short list: It makes for smaller files with higher quality, has support for transparency and animation, more colors, HDR, layers, and is faster. It's open source too, which is something most of the formats that have challenged jpeg over the years haven't been. All in all, it is an amazing format. It has already gained widespread support, including from Apple and Microsoft. The big holdout is Google, which seems to be angry more people don't like their webp format. But Google may not be able to stand in the way forever, as even Adobe is in the process of adopting the format. When Adobe fully switches over, all photographers will too, as it is much superior to regular jpeg and can save us tons of space.

Anyway, if you are interested go read about it. We had a nice conversation about it anyway. Many people in the photography world are very excited about it.

Speaking of jpeg-xl, the iPhone 16 Pro supports jpeg-xl compression for it's RAW camera format, meaning the raw files will shrink from about 70 mb to about 20 or less. This is huge.

Mainly for the camera, I am upgrading to the latest iPhone Pro, marking the first time I will be using a current model iPhone since way way back with the iPhone 4 in 2010. Ever since that phone I have always bought 1+ year old models when I upgraded. I'm not much of a gamer so I never needed the power of the latest phone processor, and the latest iPhone camera never really appealed to me too much, as I liked the cheap lofi feel of the cameras and so any were good. I had all my professional cameras for good photos anyway, so quality in the iPhone camera was never a concern.

But this year I think the camera has finally reached a level where it can replace my DSLR for many things. That in mind, I've decided to buy into the latest phone just for that camera system. We'll see if it's a good choice or not.

I see this morning that HIVE has fallen back down to 0.189. So I just put in a buy order for some more of it. I just can't resist. My gamble continues. As I keep saying, if HIVE fails and goes to zero, I'll be sad—both for the loss of a nice social place and of course for the loss of my money—but if HIVE succeeds and goes back up to $1 or more, well... Fortuna audaces iuvat—Fortune favors the bold.

With AI posed to take over all driving work, putting truckers, taxi drivers, and more out of work, and with it threatening knowledge work, which would put many to most white collar works out of a job, bold actions are required. I'm not so arrogant to think my job will be one of the few to survive AI. Chances are my job will be just as easily replaced as all the rest. All but the best teachers at the highest levels will be replaced fairly quickly. Being bold in our investing may be one of the best chances we have, so that's what I'm doing.

(or maybe I'm just making excuses to buy more HIVE so I can be an orca. Only 13k or so more before I can reach that level)

Not that I think HIVE is going anywhere (like I said, I put in an order for more), but I just started a Medium blog the other day. At this point I don't have the idea of making money from it—I did enable that option, but I haven't chosen to hide any posts behind the paywall (which is required to be paid). My main motivation is simply attracting more people to my writing. If I do actually start to build up any kind of an audience, I plan on seeing if I can lead any of them back to Hive.

Medium is an interesting place. It does have a lot of quality articles, but it also has a lot of crap—top ten lists and other junk that people make simply to game the system and get money. Anyway, I'm considering this an experiment. It really won't take much of my time. I am just copying some of my old Hive posts about haiku there.

If you do happen to hang around Medium and want to kindly give my posts there a thumbs up (or wave or whatever the Medium "like" is), here is my site.

Anyway, that's about all in my head for now. Hope you guys have a great day!

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.