Yes, but I bring it up for the specific example of using our own eyes to achieve this effect, rather than relying on a camera. We don't have a choice to change the focal length of our own eyes, or even crop the image, but the effect is still there.
Focal length equivalent assumes a 35mm sensor or film format. 50mm on 35mm is basically the human range of view (although human eyes are interesting in that our resolution is so much sharper in the middle of the sensor than on the edges, and there's significant variation between individuals.
But the important part is that it isn't actually focal length that makes the effect. It's distance from the camera. If you do a dolly zoom with a fixed focal length lens, where you still push or pull the camera towards or away from a subject, you can still see this effect on the nose and the ears.
A flat, two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object will always have distortion. The effect we see here is about distortion that changes with camera distance, and the change itself is what makes things feel strange.
Technically focal length doesn't matter directly, only indirectly, because the phenomenon is almost entirely defined by the distance from the camera and the subject. If you have a 50mm lens and take the photo as far away as the 200mm lens, the person will look roughly the same when cropped down to the same apparent size (minus the loss of resolution from cropping and a smaller effective sensor size).
If you slap on a 200mm lens on a camera within 2 meters of your subject, though, you might not be able to focus, and if you can you wouldn't be able to fit their entire face in frame.
But that also means our eyes, with our fixed focal lengths, can experience the same thing, by just moving closer or further away from a subject. Our visual cortex automatically adjusts a lot of things, but get up close and see someone's ears or hair shrink in relative terms compared to their nose, or get far away and see their nose get back to a normal ratio to their eyes or ears.
Side note, this is a big reason why I don't care for selfies. I don't like the distortion.
The day is the number I want to know most of the time. Day, month, year, in order of which number you most likely need to know first.
No, getting the year wrong by 1 is much more significant than getting the day wrong by 1. If you're arguing that it won't happen because people will infer from context the correct year, then you're actually assuming that the person already does know the year first. The only reason why people don't state the year is because it is already known by the listener. But just because it's unstated doesn't mean that it isn't critically important.
If you're measuring duration, for example, you will put the largest unit first. The longest serving prime minister of the UK served for 20 years and 315 days. Magellan's expedition around the lasted 2 years, 11 months, and 16 days, if you count from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The course record for the Iditarod race is 7 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, and 57 seconds.
And some languages are more irregular than others about numbers. In English, we say "sixteen" where the ones digit is said before the tens digit. French has some base 20 naming conventions that screw up the order, too.
But when we write numbers, we go left to right, largest to smallest. That's why describing time should follow the same convention, and why ISO 8601 exists.
You're using the word "significant" in a colloquial/informal way, but in terms of the strict mathematical definition, most significant digits to least significant is about the size of the unit. If you were to create a dial system, the most significant digits move the slowest and the least significant digits move the fastest.
Or, if you are rounding a measurement to the N most significant figures, you are by definition keeping the largest units and rounding off the rest.
So ISO 8601 properly orders it left to right, largest to smallest, without exceptions. It can be truncated for lower precision, like how 2026-09-14T20:15:35 takes place in a particular year (2026), or a particular calendar month (2026-09) or a particular day (2026-09-14).
It's the best format and everyone should use it.
It's kinda shocking that people can't seem to detect pretty obvious satire.
Here's the original reporting, instead of another website's summary of Bloomberg's actual report:
So it sounds like the agent was investigating allegations, from content moderation contractors, that Meta could access the contents of WhatsApp messages, and came to the conclusion that yes, Meta could.
There are a few possibilities here.
Meta claims that it's #3. They acknowledge they have plaintext access to messages when a party to the thread presses the report button.
This unnamed federal agent believes it's #1, after 10 months of investigation, and sent out an email to other investigators that they should look into that possibility.
I'm skeptical of #1, simply because I don't believe that conspiracies to keep that kind of stuff secret can be maintained. It's not just that there would be technically skilled whistleblowers who have actual access to the code (not the non-technical content moderator contractors who review the content), but a weakness in such an important and widely used protocol would attract all sorts of hackers, state sponsored or otherwise.
But option #2 might explain everything we've seen so far. Full wiretap capability that is rarely used and very tightly controlled.
Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.
They always win, unless they don't. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.
Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.
I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.
That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.
Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).
Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.
Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.
Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.
What if Claude was one of us?