Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met. That's fair, in that this is a website intentionally privileging the quality of discourse in prose over the quality of credentials behind a screen name. (Historically, at least. I do get the sense being called a 'robber baron' enough might go to some people's heads, possibly coinciding with a noticeable increase in the occurrence rate of epistaxis. But never mind.)

In Hacker News threads about photography, there is invariably a sizable fraction of comments made by people who know nothing of the subject, have never engaged with it to a meaningful degree, and despite such radical ignorance nonetheless feel themselves empowered to speak as if they had any idea what they were talking about, or indeed understood even what they don't understand about it.

It's so common in fact as to qualify in practice as an archetype or invariant of the genre, and it's that to which I'm responding. You're right that I'm talking past you, but don't make too much of it. It's just that I've seen this all many times before.

For the same reason, I predict your next effort would have been to claim I have no stronger basis to speak on the topic than do you, and demand I distill the experience of ten years and something like a hundred thousand exposures into a tidy, ChatGPT-compatible bullet list which you can then performatively evaluate and find wanting. Oh, you won't do that now, of course. But you thought about it two paragraphs ago. Unfortunately, when asked the impossible, I am able to reject it as such.

If you want to see the conversation go a different way, then try taking it in a different direction. I admit you have already done this once! It's rare to see someone claim at once that two other people, strangers all, are both lying. I don't actually mind, being if anything ennobled by the association, though the gentleman with whom you confused me would be entirely reasonable to object.

But to answer your proximate question with respect to the distant antecedent, I referred to the quite long thread [1] in which I hashed out this whole question with the developer of the B2B SAAS for photographers, Candid9, which this article exists to advertise. I also offered some critique of the article itself.

You having spoken as if from great and very confident knowledge of so complex and nuanced a topic, I suppose it seemed reasonable also to expect at least passing familiarity with the actual conversations among which you were doing so. Excuse me. I do have this regrettable habit of assuming people intend to contribute to a discussion when they choose to participate in it, but I realize you're not alone in appearing to have other reasons.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44729594

> Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met.

That's a really deranged way to approach interacting with people! It does, however, explain a lot about how you post: you're basically arguing with your internal constructions of how people on Hacker News are and not at all with what they say. Your posts, this one quite specifically, are just you disagreeing with your internal construction of posters:

> Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met

I do consider you a person, though! That's just a really weird thing you have decided on and it doesn't extend to everyone else.

> For the same reason, I predict your next effort would have been to claim I have no stronger basis to speak on the topic than do you, and demand I distill the experience of ten years and something like a hundred thousand exposures into a tidy, ChatGPT-compatible bullet list which you can then performatively evaluate and find wanting. Oh, you won't do that now, of course. But you thought about it two paragraphs ago.

I wasn't considering doing that at all! I don't care about challenging your photography knowledge. I don't know anything about it other than you claim to have a lot and I only got that because you made sure to tell me.

> It's rare to see someone claim at once that two other people, strangers all, are both lying.

I never claimed anyone was lying! I claimed, based on your reply implicitly asserting we had already conversed, the logical conclusion that you would have to be the other poster and were using an alt. Why else would someone explain to me what they have already said without having ever said it to me? Now you've explained that: you don't talk to people; you talk to ideas of people that you have internally constructed. That's not typical.

> You having spoken as if from great and very confident knowledge of so complex and nuanced a topic, I suppose it seemed reasonable also to expect at least passing familiarity with the actual conversations among which you were doing so.

I responded to one specific leap of theory of mind! It's actually a really narrow and simple topic: can someone infer from the blogpost that the boys were grimacing because the photographer was fiddling with a camera instead of fiddling with an iPhone. The answer, of course, is you can't with the knowledge presented.

> I do have this regrettable habit of assuming people intend to contribute to a discussion when they choose to participate in it, but I realize you're not alone in appearing to have other reasons.

I did contribute! I even went so far as to watch a large portion of the video you claimed showed that the stated theory of mind could be seen in action. I then wrote that the video doesn't show that at all. That's a contribution and a constructive one!