What a violin is supposed to look like and how that affects price is interesting. As a violinist with a particular interest in old music I think it's sad how little diversity there is in violins. There's really only a couple of models that all luthiers build and those models all look similar to the untrained eye. In medieval, renaissance and baroque periods there was a lot more variability.
Aside from some experimental luthiers everyone builds the same style of violin because there's an assumption that if you're deviating from that form (e.g. cornerless violins such as the Chanot model, or baroque style piecrust violins) you must be sacrificing sound quality. And if you decorate your violin, it must be that it didn't sound good enough and you need to make it look good instead to sell it (strangely, as you mentioned, artificially making the violin look older is exempt... probably because it makes them fit in with the uniformity of classical violin)
The best sounding violins I've had were all a bit ... crooked. The simple reason is that being slightly asymmetric really hurts the value of a violin, even if the sound is fine. As a hobby musician I don't really care and am not ashamed of having a violin that looks a little "off" when close up. If you're not playing professionally this, or buying from upcoming luthiers who still have to make a name for themselves are good ways to find good-value buys.
Even worse, when the password has an arbitrary length requirement of 20, but the site doesn't tell you and just cuts of any trailing characters exceeding the requirement during account creation.
You have no idea how long it took me to figure that one out.
Slightly easier to figure out but no less annoying is when the maxLength attributes on the password fields for the two forms (create account and login) are different.
Is it a privilege to have gender-specific programmes and scholarships at universities?
Particularly if that gender is now the majority at universities...
And it's not only at university level. Boys are doing worse than ever before at all levels of education, yet the focus is still on helping girls succeed. And I don't believe that it's due to discrimination, I think boys are just more vulnerable to modern distractions (including girls) and schools are doing a very poor job compensating for that.
No one is saying they can't be, but they tend not to be.
When you ask for a photo of a viking and 75% of the results are Asian/African/native-american, and the only picture of a "viking" is Netflix adaptation version with dreadlocks, leather bracelets and dirt over his face then whatever anti-bias thing they were doing clearly is doing the opposite of what it's supposed to and it's objectively making their product worse.
Stable Diffusion will happily make me Germans, Scandinavians and black people, no matter whether their job description includes raiding coastal cities or not. And it will do so whenever asked for. And without annoying moralizing lectures. Also it runs on my computer and they can't take it away from me tomorrow because they've deemed cats eating fish to be "harmful" overnight. (context: Gemini sometimes refuses to make pictures of animals eating animals, but it's not consistently refusing to)
This mishap is Silicon tech bros engaging in cultural colonialism imposing their own narrow view on the world because they think the hallucinogens they took on holiday somehow made them more enlightened and better than those plebs slaving away outside of their citadel.
Funnily enough they took it offline because it was generating black soldiers when you asked it to generate a picture of a Nazi. Which ironically is more realistic than the black Scandinavians that Google doesn't have a problem with. The Nazi's did indeed have African, Asian and Middle-Eastern soldiers, and even Jewish ones.
Google doesn't care about truth or history. They are doing exactly what Orwell described in Winston's job: alter [the perception of] the past to control the future. I happen to think the ends don't justify the means, and Google has become Evil.
Also on the food topic: How to Cook that with Ann Reardon is one that I like, aside from her more useful cake-related videos, she has a great series on historical recipes as well as amusing food hack debunkings.
My experience is completely different. I've painstakingly scanned my family's old pictures, transcribed the letters they wrote when on holiday, and still have some school crafts made by my grandparents.
After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.
Elevators tend to be restricted to a specific group of people (inhabitants, customers, employees, etc.) in a way that public transport is not. If an elevator smells like urine, has suspicious stains or trash, chances are I'd look for an alternative. But it just so happens that the elevators I come across tend to be clean, unlike the public transport.
And I say this as someone who still takes public transport a lot, but it's increasingly less comfortable.
that's wishful thinking
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