Speaking of US things, what's an engagement ring? :)
And yes, most wedding rings around here are plain gold. I only know one couple with diamonds on their wedding rings and they're kinda nouveau riche and snobby.
We're American, but living in Ireland, and when my wife announced she was engaged her colleagues demanded to see her ring, oddly. Cultural imperialism I suppose.
Synthetic diamonds for use in jewellery exist and are quickly gaining in popularity [0]. If buying a diamond ring, you might want to get a synthetic one instead of a mined one [1].
Fwiw, my wife wanted a synthetic diamond and we found they were much more difficult to obtain in practice than was acknowledged. Like going to a listing of many many stones but they were all unavailable because they were out of stock or backordered or no one would ever respond. My sense at the time the supply and/or market were inflated to attract investors and maintain attention.
I do hope that's changed because we were really interested. But at the time it was a big mirage.
We've had human-made diamong rings for years, and their existince highlights the preposterous nature of the whole diamond-jewelry industry
Lab-grown diamonds raise profound existential questions for the industry: for one, if chemically identical stones can be grown in a lab, what is the point of mining natural diamonds?
I think an onload limit is much more useful than file size.
A 700kB JavaScript page can take up to 10 sec. to render on older mobile devices.
And a 500kB image can contain megapixels which will slow down non-PGU browsers.
Personally I always go for a max 2 sec. limit on all devices.
“And these you shall detest among the birds;a they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind, the little owl, the cormorant, the short-eared owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron of any kind, the hoopoe, and the bat."
It is strange. I noticed all the ads lately, sometimes even 2 in a row.
But thinking about it I can't remember a single ad. Today more and more people have an ad filter in their head. This means that Google earns a lot of money from ads that have a lot of exposure but almost zero effect.
The storage and production is highly regulated. Every suspicious event must be communicated with the "Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding" (coordinator counterterrorism).
"...and pretty much have their entire business on there..."
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
> This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
The YT deal is that they take a cut of (ad) revenue to fund storage, cpu, bandwidth costs and profit in exchange for hosting the content.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
The problem being that "the YT deal" keeps being unilaterally changed by Google/YouTube.
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
The explanation I've heard from many of the Youtube "creators" I'm subscribed to is that Youtube have taken a larger and larger slice of the revenue cake on views over the years that creators have been forced to look to other income streams like Patreon, because they're just barely making any money on the platform anymore.
It would be great if YouTube let creators pay for hosting directly (just like other web hosts) if they wanted to maintain the ad-free experience for their viewers.
This explanation makes sense. I would only call it a scam if its against their TOS. Are these youtubers not checking the "paid content" checkbox? Or does that only apply to paid advertisement of the actual subject of the video?
Generally I think many YT creators have multiple sources of income (ads, Patreon, merch, sponsored vids)--as such they have many "customers". It's their distribution channel that's locked up.
I totally agree, but there simply isn't a good competitor to YouTube, so they're stuck. I know LTT (Linus Tech Tips) have tried to divest their content so its available on multiple platforms, but the one they used that was paid and ad free shutdown cause it wasn't profitable. They've now set up their own I think which other tech YouTubers also use.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
The channels do seem to split into other services on groups. Educational/explainer creators went to nebula (not sure who led that one), comedy/entertainment went to dropout.tv (from CollegeHumor), tech went to floatplane (from ltt), etc. There will be more of those and I can't wait to see who embraces/monetizes p2p first.
If their skill is to create popular videos, they did not had much choice. It is not like there would be other popular video services that would compete.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
Typical users aren't relevant here. We're talking about Patreon supporters, people who gave money to a single creator and want an ad free video. They can click a link to vimeo.
But they need to know first. Who looks for something new on viemo? Sure if someone points you to them you will look, but do you go there just to see if there is anything interesting when you are bored?
What are the alternatives that actually offer a better experience? Vimeo, floatplane? Serious question. Because I would love to start spending some time at one.
I had to try a little math to put into perspective..
$ bc -l
365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
There are already 2 known virus mutations: G614 and D514. In Italy new research suggests even a 3rd mutation might go around. And Denmark also had a mutation.
Do those vaccines work on all mutations or are they like the common flu vaccines that must be adapted every year?
> Bottom line: the coronavirus can’t undergo the wholesale changes that we see with the influenza viruses. And the mutations we’re seeing so far appear to still be under the umbrella of the antibody protection we’ll be raising with vaccination, which argues that it’s difficult to escape it.
All mutations share the same spike protein, which the vaccine targets, and as far as we know the virus cannot reproduce without that exact same spike protein. Having the virus mutate in a totally different but still successful spike protein should be very very unlikely.
That is very strange claim. D614G is a mutation in the spike protein, and also there is a document ed case of very rapid mutation of the spike in an immuncompromised patient.
AFAIK the spike protein is used by the virus to gain entry into cells, it's not strictly related to reproduction. In theory the virus could mutate to gain entry into the cells via a different mechanism.
I talked with a Spanish scientist that has developed a vaccine for covid and other vaccines for other illnesses before that.
He said something like that most of the work in testing is for the "carrier" or something like that(in Spanish). Once your vaccine works with that you could modify the vaccine very fast with little consequences.
Hew also told me that you can share "carriers" for different illnesses and he had tried to convince politicians for decades trying to create "generic carriers" in order to be prepared for something like this.
Does this new generation of mRNA vaccines even have carriers in the conventional sense?
But when you can change payloads of a pre-validated generic carrier at will you are roughly on the same level of biotechnological advancedness as the mRNA companies anyways, both are lightyears ahead of ancient techniques like breeding weaker viruses in animals or neutering them somehow before injection. A lot of vaccine skepticism seems to be based on the performance of those old ways, it would probably be quite wise to avoid a vaccine that was come up by old trial&error methods in less than a decade.
Yes, at this time, all virus variants have the same spike structure where the vaccines and commonly produced antibody responses to vaccine/infection target.
Oddly enough, the G614 mutation is moderately more vulnerable to neutralization.
Once enough people are no longer susceptible/vaccinated, there may be considerably more selective pressure for the virus to mutate in ways that antibodies to past variants don't work. Whether we'll get variants that are virulent and bypass immunity is TBD. The spike protein is functional; changes to it that bypass immunity likely reduce function.
Is it correct that once enough people get vaccinated, even if we don't eradicate the virus, it will have to mutate into something milder in order to still effectively spread?
It is not a given that it will be milder, just estimated to be more likely once everything is taken into account.
As an example of why, the comment you are responding to mentioned the spike being functional (it is used by the virus for cell entry) and it is also targeted by our antibodies. So, for the virus to evade antibodies, it would have to change the spike enough so that antibodies don't detect it anymore. But, by changing it would likely lose some of its current efficacy.
There's some nuance to this. The current most common strain is theoretically the most genetically fit strain. Wide use of vaccines targeting conserved regions of the spike protein almost certainly would result in less genetically fit virus progeny becoming more common by simple selection. But, there's no predicting the virulence of the the less genetically fit strains that will pop up. ie) very deadly viruses aren't necessarily very genetically fit. The short of it is, the resultant strains will probably be less transmissible (the "R" number will decrease), but it's hard to predict their virulence/serverity.
I think consensus is we don't know for sure, but there's reason to be hopeful. SARS-CoV-2 probably won't evolve as fast as the flu, which undergoes a "sexual-like" evolution process called "re-assortment." On the other hand, CoV-2 has "re-combination," which gives similar results, and it does have zoonotic hosts.
Note there is some correlation between virulence and severity. For something with a longer incubation time, increased viral load tends to mean both increased virulence and transmissibility. This relationship is far from universal, though.
I thought that these vaccines were targeting the spike protein which seems to be unique to these viruses. Hopefully that would make them easier to vaccinate against.
I seriously consider going away from Android (Google).
Is Linux a viable option as mobile OS? I've got a feeling that it is almost as a 'dumb' phone. You got your calculator and SMS app but that's about it.
Or would going to something like LineageOS be a better option?
> I've got a feeling that it is almost as a 'dumb' phone. You got your calculator and SMS app but that's about it.
GNU/Linux phones are full personal computers in your pocket. They can do everything a computer can do: terminal, desktop Firefox, games, convergence (external screen, keyboard, mouse) etc. See my other links about Librem 5 in this thread.
Android apps on a big screen are not desktop apps [0]. Can you run desktop Firefox with all plugins there? Can you run native GNU/Linux applications in a terminal? Can you use the latest Linux kernel?
I have read it, and again I was already coding in the age of 8 and 16 bit computing, with their OSes built-in into ROM, no issues with them.
I also only cared for Linux because Microsoft wasn't serious about POSIX support back in the day and it was a solution for my problem to avoid commuting for an hour to access a DG/UX system.
If you computer places artificial restrictions on what you can do with it, then it's company participates in the war against the general-purpose computing.
If it's a technical limitation, it's a totally different thing.
I'm sorry that you do not care about the freedom of users. Users who do not know about all these things suffer from unlimited power of developers [0] and cannot do anything to escape various walled gardens and traps of proprietary systems [1].
Staying away from the proprietary software is already hard in practice (I'm trying hard, works in 95% cases). Not sure if staying away from those licenses will help more.
As someone in the US, I would have to say no, for one reason:
None of the mobile Linux distros yet support group texts (reliably, anyway). If someone sends you a group text, you won't see it. (The only distro that seems to have partial support for it is Ubuntu Touch, and there it seems incomplete; sometimes I would receive group messages and sometimes not. I missed a few important ones this way.)
This is probably only relevant to those in the US as I understand MMS is not as prevalent elsewhere.
> This is probably only relevant to those in the US as I understand MMS is not as prevalent elsewhere.
I've heard this a few times in connection with the Pinephone, but we certainly do use MMS in Europe.
I seem to recall, assuming my memory is at all reliable, that when the iPhone first launched, Europeans were complaining about the lack of MMS and Americans were saying it wasn't a problem because everyone should just use e-mail.
2007 was a different time. (A time when almost nobody had smartphones - how foreign is that from today's perspective?) Have a look at the plan available in the US for the iPhone at the time: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26AT-T-and-Apple-Anno...
Even the cheapest plan has unlimited SMS and effectively unlimited MMS as a result. Whether it's used more because it's included or whether it's included because it's used more (probably a bit of both)... I don't think 2007 is a useful reference point for what people expect from their phones today.
The cheapest plan on that page is $30. I get unlimited MMS on my $17 plan in Europe, so I don't see how the pricing would make MMS more prevalent in the US than in Europe.
Do you have a reference supporting the idea that MMS is mostly relevant to the US and not the rest of the world? It doesn't match up with my experience, but maybe my family and friends are atypical.
> You got your calculator and SMS app but that's about it.
Well, thankfully it's not the case. The heart is a ARM processor with plenty of code already ported to run on it, and the surrounding hardware isn't that different from many single board computers that already run complete Linux distributions. As an example, Firefox, GIMP and Libreoffice -the real ones, not dumbed down versions- already do run on the Pinephone.
Keep in mind that the video is one year old, meaning old phone model with less RAM, very young OS and likely no code optimization for apps to run on a phone rather on a desktop PC.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised at all if one year from now we would have more software available for the Pinephone compared to Android. Sometimes it's just a matter of recompiling (huge argument in favor of Open Source).
As another example, if Lazarus (lazarus-ide.org) would run on it (it already does on the Raspberry PI and many other ARM boards), one could develop native GUI apps directly on the phone. Probably not comfortable, still possible.
The only problem in my opinion would arise from the unavailability of phone specific apps, particularly closed ones or those depending on proprietary servers whose owners wouldn't give a damn about recompiling their client and are particularly anal retentive wrt allowing 3rd party apps accessing the services, for example Whatsapp. In that case one would have to attempt to emulate a different platform in which run the original proprietary app, which very likely would make things too slow to be useable.
With regard to Whatsapp, it should run on Anbox (Android emulation for PinePhone), because Whatsapp does not require Google Play Services and runs on vanilla Android.
Do you have any data on performance? Having Whatsapp run at acceptable speed on Linux phones would represent a great bump for their acceptance among normal users.
No, there’s a lot more. Also, some Android apps work via Anbox. I have been blogging (https://linmob.net) about this since June and created a bunch of videos. If you have more specific questions, feel free to email me.
And I guess most people could not even distinct a diamond from polished glass.