Pretty cool, I got as far as secret messages urging me too engage the project chat but there was none, I just get redirected to a blank express project on withmarble
That's a good point, but the nuance matters and understanding why matters too.
Without being too specific about the who, I think your concern boils down to:
1) authoritarian leaders like crypto that they create themselves because it's not regulated and they can use it to raise funds from the gullable and uninformed.
2) authoritarian leaders who can move markets tolerate crypto that is decentralized because it's also unregulated and they can trade against their own words and actions. (E.g. short and then cause a crash, buy and then cause a spike, etc.) Very few authoritarian leaders have this kind of influence, and as adoption increases the influence one person can have over the market will diminish.
I think these authoritarian benefits are temporary artefacts of where it is in its lifecycle. The technology resists authoritarianism the more decentralized and ubiquitous it is.
I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man trying to conquer nature in every way
I have the opposite anecdote. I left a lot of leaves on our lawn last winter (by pure laziness) and it definitely damaged the lawn. Edit: it was a rather young lawn, I guess (less than 2 years).
I live in an neighborhood with a lot of retired people, and I agree with the "busy work" sentiment. As soon as some leaves have fallen, you can hear them firing up their leafblowers.
Why? Why not wait until there is a decent amount of leaves and ... use a rake? I really think it's because they don't have anything else to do and it gives them a sense of purpose.
I basically live in the forest and get an unreasonable amount of leaves each autumn. Most of these leaves are also from oak and do not decompose well, leaving the lawn a mess in the spring. Using a rake is unreasonable for me, and a leaf blower saves me many, many hours each year that I can spend better elsewhere.
I'll tried a leaf blower only once (it was when visiting family) and I raked every other autumn day as a kid. Leaf blower was... extremely painful to use, for me. It felt like it took me 2x more time to achieve what rake would do effortlessly.
But a lot of it was probably familiarity with rake and a lack of skill with leaf blower. I am sorry ready to believe that technology progressed enough that leaf blowers are now usable. I'd like to see how it feels with wet leafs though.
Obviously, I'm not you, but at my previous home I had a lot of pine trees (so needles rather than leaves, and lots of cones to remove as well) on a corner lot (so effectively two front yards). I also had a mulching lawn mower.
During the fall and winter, I would mow two or three times. The mulching blade made quick work of the detritus and it was faster and less work than raking the whole thing. I'm far enough south that snow, while possible, was still a novelty not guaranteed to happen every year.
My main use case for a leaf blower is to blow lawn clippings off the sidewalks, paths, and roads back on to my lawn after mowing and trimming. Rakes aren't effective for such small trimmed parts.
My leaf blower is battery electric though so its a good bit quieter than the gas ones others use, although I do agree its still one of the loudest parts of my yard maintenance.
Sure, a push broom would work for the base task of getting the trimmings moved off the path, but then I'd want to disperse said trimmings somewhat evenly across the yard instead of just piled up at the edges. A push broom wasn't as effective to do the same while taking more effort and time. Especially since for the trimmings that went out into the street I need to get them up over the curb as well.
I used to use a broom before I got the leaf blower. The blower is way faster and disperses the trimmings more evenly across my yard than the broom.
I do end up using a rake though for leaves, as for actual leaf gathering usage the rake is faster and far more efficient at actually making nice, easy to handle piles.
Same here, it is crazy around Autum in Germany, I never seen anyone bothering with leaves back in Portugal, and worse many of those leaf blowers are diesel powered, so much for being eco-friendly.
VibeVoice (according to the repo description) is currently unavailable due to "misuse". But my impression was that it required a significant (>8GB) amount of VRAM? Or that it wasn't suitable for on-device for devices with low specs.
According to this issue[0] the 1.5B model needs 6GB of VRAM. Meanwhile it looks like NeuTTS is designed to be able to run on CPU, which is nice for older/lower-spec hardware.
> It also seems clear that this administration currently views almost everything as a threat to U.S. national security — including its own allies and partners.
My first time hearing of this and I'm very interested.
Does anyone know if it can run a full desktop mode when docked? Windows phones and some Samsung phones used to be able to do this and it was a neat trick.
I would love to have a phone I could hook up to a hotel TV with a keyboard and use like a lite desktop
> "USB-C 2.0" in the specs reveals that. DisplayPort Alt Mode requires at least USB 3.0, the PinePhone Pro would be a Linux phone supporting that.
That's not quite accurate IMHO, as the OG PinePhone also supports the feature, despite being USB 2.0. The fact that PINE64 only got it working in PinePhone hardware revision 1.2a maybe also reveals why few phones (whether they support USB 2 or 3.*, e.g., the Pixel 8 was the first Pixel phone to support the feature) actually support DisplayPort Alt Mode: It does not just add cost for parts, but also makes the design more complicated (and may require multiple design iterations to get right, which are expensive).
So: If DisplayPort Alt Mode or somthing like "USB-C video out" is not mentioned, you can usually safely assume that the device does not support it.
I actually find a bump better for putting your phone down on a flat surface, and my logic is this:
If your camera lens is flat to the body of the phone, it's more prone to being scratched on a table. With a bump, the lens becomes slightly elevated as the phone balances between the bottom of the case and the edge of the bottom of the camera bump, giving the lens(es) a tiny clearance
We're lucky enough where we live to have a surviving map of the area from the 1600s. On this map, north is at the bottom, and south is at the top, as there was no convention that said it should be otherwise. From the same mapping survey there are other maps that are not oriented merely south but also southwest, southeast, West entirely. The survey taken in the 1600s was not even consistent from map to map - it was enough to show a compass to indicate which way North is.
Maybe that's the point?