Lucky we don't have a holiday for the spics

I breathe on the lens to create a very fine coat of moisture and then wipe with lens tissue or microfiber cloth. That thin coating is the key. Using a lens liquid is usually overkill, and means many more wipes to remove the,excess moisture, while dry does not allow the paper/cloth to grab dirt and oils.I was taught this trick decades ago and have used it throughout my professional career in the field.

I had to shoot a documentary in the Arctic in late autumn, and needed to make sure I had plenty of batteries in conditions both extremely cold and often without electricity to recharge. I brought a 25000 mAh power bank with a cable for external power if push really came to shove, but I also bought six extra 3rd party batts with included chargers to supplement my three OEMs. I had used some Wasabis on an earlier shoot in the Arctic with a previous model Sony, and they had worked fine, though they started to fail after about six months. I thought for like $100 for six Batts plus chargers, if they got me through the month of shooting that's all I would need.

Not only were they as long lasting as my Sony Batts, they are still going strong more than two years later, every bit the equal of the Sonys except they don't have the little OEM hologram on them. Given that they were 1/4 the price of originals and included excellent chargers that work perfectly, I can live without the holograms...

I have been using aftermarket Batts in Sony for years now. 1/4 the price and have performed as well and lasted as long as OEMs.

Have y'all heard about HP printers, which lure you with free ink for 6 months, but when you accept and install their "Instant Ink“ s/w or whatever it's called, makes an irreversible firmware alteration so that you cannot ever use non-OEM ink. I've hated HP for decades, since they stopped updating drivers for what was an expensive scanner from the time after 3 years, and I will happily never buy another HP product for the rest of my life.

Like any tool which leverages human power, it is beneficial but can also be destructive. The real issue is, I think, our ability to control it and it's catastrophic potential, i.e., its ability to do great harm when it escapes control.

For me it's somewhat similar to nuclear power. I spent a decade covering the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I was in the exclusion zone maybe 50 times, and inside the ruined plant itself twice. I documented the abandoned towns and the disrupted lives. 99% of the released radionuclides - which was only a very small release compared to what almost happened - were blown out to sea, and only through Herculean effort and very good luck was a disaster several factors of ten times larger averted. And even then, look what happened. The Prime Minister at the time became staunchly antinuclear afterwards, telling us that he and his cabinet were trying to organize a plan to evacuate 50,000,000 Japanese. That was never made public.

It is an ongoing disaster, where gigantic efforts to gather, decontaminate and store 100,000 liters of highly radioactive water every day will continue until the plant is decommissioned, for which no technology presently exists.

Nuclear energy is highly beneficial, and in depth safeguards, defense in depth, is built into every step of the process, but not every scenario can be imagined and prepared for. The one-in-a-million chance will arrive sooner or later, and it has to be faced and its potential destructiveness evaluated before committing to the technology.

AI is no different. It means tying technologies of tremendous destructive potential to control by another technology that is ultimately not controllable in real time, nor are its underpinnings fully understood. The Fukushima accident was caused by a series of events that overwhelmed many levels of safeguards. The inventors of AI know the basis of the technology and its potential. For them to raise an alarm should be taken seriously by those of us who are clueless and think that all AI is, is a way to generate cool images or get a story written with minimal effort.

By 'we' I mean humanity. The fact that terrorists might use it, with the leverage it affords, means that state actors will be constrained to employ it, even if they don't understand enough about it to be reasonably certain of its safety. It's no accident that some of the top scientists who literally created AI as we know it are sounding warnings about the need to establish international agreements.

I think it depends on what we task AI to do. Isn't the saying that only a fool would give a loaded gun to a child?

Not quite. AI is capable of creating computer code that humans cannot parse, and AI can create compilers that are black boxes, where the output cannot directly traced back to the input. If the code generated by AI is used in system architecture, things can and will happen that are not anticipated, and which will be impossible to troubleshoot. This can lead to small problems or very, very big ones. That is why it is imperative to control what leverage AI has in the real world.

Imagine that military defense is turned over to AI, which could read threats much more comprehensively than human observers and respond much more quickly. If military planners suspected that an enemy was using AI to plan an attack, they would be forced to use AI as well, to be able to respond effectively. What if nobody understood what AI understood as a threat or what it calculated would be an appropriate response to that threat. This is a lot more serious than a self-driving Tesla crashing occasionally. One "crash" could effectively end life on earth.

It's about a lot more than digital art and writing essays...

Maybe you are not informed enough to understand the potentials. These guys are

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/30/23742005/ai-risk-warning-22-word-statement-google-deepmind-openai

I don't know the D5500, but many Nikons have ultrasonic sensor cleaning. The Sony, with IBIS, cannot incorporate that technology.

Placing the camera on full auto is about the worst way to "maximize details", whatever that means. Camera meter algorithms are usually set to give a pleasing mid-gamma, blowing highlights in many situations. Maximum dynamic range is achieved by carefully considering the dynamic range of the scene, knowing the capabilities and limitations of the sensor, and adjusting the camera's exposure to preserve the highlights according to how much can be pulled out of the shadows. It is always a tradeoff.

As far as adding supplemental lighting: that is often impossible, and in any case changes the character of the image.

https://www.techradar.com/news/this-ai-powered-photoshop-rival-is-the-end-of-photography-as-we-know-it

Many Chinese lenses are excellent, and most all are more than competitive at their price point.Some of the Chinese makers, like Laowa, are making lenses no one else makes.

If it's linear it doesn't matter. If circular hold it up to you eye and rotate (your eye acts as the lens. If all you see is a slight blue/yellow color shift, reverse it.

You need to soft proof the image (I believe the shortcut is Ctrl + Y) to see what it will look like outside PS. PS does not normally display as sRGB