site banner

Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Alright i have an extremely low stakes bone to pick!

So I live in southern Canada, and like many people we got Northern Lights the other night. Except - our northern lights consisted of a greyish haze basically. Yeah you could see something, it was cool! But it wasn't colorful.

Then, when you took a picture with your phone, that monochrome grey turns into a brilliant symphony of color, perfect for social media! But, it's basically a lie - I assume AI upscaling of some kind. And now I'm seeing all these photos from the US/Mexico Border, other southern states, of these brilliant reds and greens and I'm like, is everybody comfortable just lying like this? Surely they didn't actually see any color IRL, right? Did anybody actually see real colors outside of the phone AI upscaling, in any areas of the continental USA?

For me it was a very faint red in person but a very dynamic show in photos. This is also just typical of iphone photos at night which more or less never show what I want them to in the dark. I assume there's settings I can fiddle with to make it correct but I've never bothered.

I don't think it's AI upscaling so much as what the phone does to try to make things visible in low light. When I try to take a picture of the moon it comes out screwy as well.