https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Standing_by_the_Crematory
This one. The cost of any war summarized in one picture.
It’s a pity that my app only shows the link text to the photograph instead of the image itself, but I’m glad, in some way, that now I am aware of the existence of such an image of loss. It’s pure loss.
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It is hard to pick one, but this photo has always stuck with me. That is a picture from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.
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The first photo of a black hole is the most historically significant “first photo of x” that happened in my life time and that I actually understood its historical significance when it came out. So I’d say that’s probably my favourite.
Not a photo.
It’s the output of an AI model trained on simulations of black holes being asked to fill in the gaps from sparse observations.
Someone: takes a selfie with their phone under low lighting conditions
You: "not a photo, it’s the output of an algorithm taking the luminosity from an array of light detectors, giving information of the colour and modifying it according to lighting conditions, and then using specific software to sharpen the original capture*
Nah, the hivemind is being cringe as shit rn.
Recreating an image with Ai is not the same even remotely from capturing raw data directly from a digital sensor and cranking the exposure up.
The Ai is approximating what it sees, digital sensors are not, they don’t approximate anything. It’s either there or they don’t see it.
objective and subjective
Modern phone cameras use AI to fill in the gaps in low light photos.
Your brain uses assumptions to fill in missing data like the blind spot in your retina.
The gateway to the Ai processing is still the sensor used. Modern mirrorless digital cameras can use Ai tools internally, but the starting medium is always what is captured to begin with.
Wasn’t the gateway to the black hole image the measurements NASA made?
Its not hard to find that there are legitimate academic criticism of this ‘photo’. For example here. The comparison you made is not correct, more like I gave a blurry photo to an AI trained on paintings of Donald Trump and asked it to make an image of him. Even if the original image was not of Trump, the chances are the output will be because that’s all the model was trained on.
This is the trouble with using this as ‘proof’ that the. Theory and the simulations are correct, because while that is still likely, there is a feedback loop causing confirmation bias here, especially when people refer to this image as a ‘photo’.
This is one team that disagrees out of many that agree.
To explain what you are seeing. The above image is the inverse Fourier transform (FT) of different frequencies of sinus waves that compose an image.
The very large baseline interferometer (VLBI) applied in the event horizon telescope (EHT) is using different telescopes all over the world, in a technique called interferometry, to achieve high enough resolutions to observe different frequencies in Fourier space that make up an image. If you observe all, you can recreate the full image perfectly. They did not, they observed for a long time and thus got a hefty amount of these “spatial” frequencies. Then they use techniques that limit the image to physical reality (e.g. no negative intensities/fluxes) and clean it from artefacts. Then transform it to image space (via the inverse FT)
Thereby, they get an actual image that approximates reality. There is no AI used at all. The researchers from Japan argued for different approach to the data, getting a slightly different inclination in that image. This may well be as the data is still too few to 100 % determine the shape, but looks more to me like they chose very different assumptions (which many other researchers do not agree with).
Edit: They did use ML for simulations to compare their sampling of the Fourier space to.
Most of what you said is correct but there is a final step you are missing, the image is not entirely constructed from raw data. The interferometry data is sparse and the ‘gaps’ are filled with mathematical solutions from theoretical models, and using statistical models trained on simulation data.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10322
We recently developed PRIMO (Principal-component Interferometric Modeling; Medeiros et al. 2023a) for in- terferometric image reconstruction and used it to obtain a high-fidelity image of the M87 black hole from the 2017 EHT data (Medeiros et al. 2023b). In this approach, we decompose the image into a set of eigenimages, which the algorithm “learned” using a very large suite of black- hole images obtained from general relativistic magneto- hydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations
Thanks for sharing that paper. I was indeed missing that information and now agree with your earlier statement.
I think them using magnetohydrodynamical black hole models as a base for the ML is a better approach than standard CLEAN though that the Japanese team used. However, both “only” approach reality.
You’re welcome. I think calling it the output of an ‘AI model’ triggers thoughts of the current generative image models, i.e. entirely fictional which is not accurate, but it is important to recognise the difference between an image and a photo.
I also by no means want to downplay the achievement that the image represents, it’s an amazing result and deserves the praise. Defending criticism and confirming conclusions will always be vital parts of the scientific method.
I think, at best, it shows that the observations are consistent with the model, or to take it back to the blurry low light photo… The photo wasn’t obviously not Trump.
I remember reading the original paper at the time and thinking, if I had been a reviewer I’d have wanted clear acknowledgement of the confirmation bias danger in the methodology. Ideally some sort of quantification of risk. It just seemed like too large a flaw to just be glossed over.
What do you mean AI? This is an interferometric Image reconstructed from information of the very large baseline interferometer (VLBI).
Edit: Although I wouldn’t call it AI, they used machine learning (ML) with simulations in their image reconstruction, so I agree
I don’t mean LLM. I mean a specific ML model for the job, but still trained off simulations.
Had some conversation with another commenter, I agree with you now. Cheers
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Malcolm X holding an M2, looking cool as hell
Bad trigger discipline though
Deepwater Horizon sinking in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 2010.
It caused an equivalent oil spill of 4.9 million barrels and exposed the surrounding wildlife to toxic materials, covering thousands of animals in oil. The cleanup efforts took years.
A prime example of humans messing up this planet for their own gains.
Oil executives aren’t humans
dehumanizing people never leads to something good.
Looks like a screencap from District 9 or some other Sci-Fi movie
Free Huey is a great one:
Maybe that time a dove landed on Fidel’s shoulder during a speech right after the victory of the Cuban revolution.
OP’s photo is my favorite, so I will have to mention my second favorite (though calling it a “favorite” feels off).
This photo was taken in 2003 in Iraq. This man is comforting his son. They are being held in an American camp. IIRC to this day we don’t know what happened to these two.
I think if I had to explain the last 25 years to a time-traveler, this would be the one photo I would choose.
The self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc never fails to amaze me. It’s just unreal.
And Antonio Turok’s photograph of the 1991 total eclipse of the sun in Chiapas, Mexico. This one because even when I know what an eclipse is and how does it happen, there’s a moment in my head when I think “What if it never ends? What if everything stays like this forever?” I see that instant of terror in this photo.
First time I’m seeing the second one, that’s amazing, thanks for sharing.
Believe me, that photograph can’t be unseen, it’s like the Sun itself is watching you, mad at you. Sorry I couldn’t find something of better quality to upload.
The terror of war.
Nobody wins in war, and I hate how angry this photo makes me feel.
Nobody wins in war
The Vietnamese won, as a matter of fact, and liberated themselves from colonialism as a consequence
True, and admirable. But the cost of winning, even if losing isn’t an option, is still loss.
So many people lost.
Yeah but I’d shift the phrasing from “nobody wins from war” to “carpet bombing of civilians by an imperialist power is evil”
Yeah true. It’s fucking sick. Can’t really say it any other way.
Don’t forget napalm and defoliants.
President Taft riding a water buffalo. Always gives me a chuckle.
This is Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara.
The emirate existed from 1785
This is a pre-WW1 colored photograph (1911) by Prokudin-Gorsky
Great choice. I love his pictures, they look so good, it’s as if he had traveled back in time with a digital camera.
The method for the color photos is interesting. He used three images with 3 colored filters on them. The film was black and white but when the same color was projected with them and they were added together you got the original colors.
All of the photos taken by Prokudin-Gorsky are incrediblely breath taking
The “Pale Blue Dot” image of earth taken by Voyager 1. Carl Sagan pushed to have Voyager take a parting shot before they turned off the camera. The earth is about one pixel in size.
This one always makes me melancholic:
Such a big turning point in time, captured on a photograph.
Is that Batman on a horse?
I’d have guessed emperor Wilhelm II, but it seems to just be a German officer.
Similar ones:
WW1 cavalry soldiers who still carried a lance, for charging against infantry.
(Even in the later stage of the war, when they already had steel helmets and gas masks)
Great post and I really enjoyed the replies. Mine is of Chavez visiting Castro in 2006 in Havanna, as Castro was dying of cancer. Both men were imprisoned for a failed coup but later rose to power (Chavez democratically and Castro by revolutionary liberation of the country), and both men died in a hospital bed in their respective countries in 2013.
and both men died in a hospital bed in their respective countries in 2013.
A fact the US bitterly weeps about still
There’s a good chance the US actually did kill Chavez with a slow-acting poison of some kind. You can find a lot of articles about his rapid deterioration.
There’s a good chance the US actually did kill Chavez with a slow-acting poison of some kind.
Well that fucking sucks.
They still would have preferred him rotting at Guantanamo, isolated of his loved ones, with Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, giving away all the oil he could to American companies. I’ll take it like a win.
Indeed! Castro famously opted for a moral vest over kevlar when visiting the US.
Yury Gagarin and Gina Lollobrigida. First man into space and one of the most famous actresses back then.
