> I really don't see how this is going to end well, there could be perfectly innocent photos on someone's phone of their own children doing perfectly normal things that kids do. Like a kid running butt naked around the house, or a photo of something like a rash that is sent to a nurse friend for advice on what it is etc.
These are still illegal in the US right now right? It's been a major criticism of these laws that they can hurt people accidentally.
It's super sad that the history of Senet is mostly unknown.
The texture we have of Chess history for example is part of the allure. That the rules have changed, we know how they changed, why they changed, how people played in the past, etc.
The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.
The amount of people that personally attack you and accuse you of horrible things should be zero.
I've also seen users personally using our forums to try to get the software for free and complaining it costs too much money.
As soon as it's clear that one of the developers is listening they go quiet but it's super disheartening when your community, which should be supporting you, feels so entitled.
> The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.
Interestingly enough I used to have a customer facing job in a completely different industry and it was exactly the same situation there. 90-95% of customers were great; they were pleasant and easy to deal with. But man, the bad ones took up sooo much time and energy, it was ridiculous.
Everyone should work a retail or hospitality role for a bit. I’ve never been rude to serving staff, but after I did a stint. God damn. There are some entitled assholes out there.
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
I think what makes the Wuhan lab particularly suspicious is that the lab was specifically doing work on the closest known ancestor to the COVID-19 virus, which as far as we know was only found naturally in bat caves more than a thousand miles away.
I would discount the possibility that this was bioweapons research - the US was funding serial passage and gain-of-function research at this lab, of which the express purpose is to make viruses more infectious in different species, including humans.
At any rate, I don't think we can expect anything to be definitively proven. It is absolutely possible that this came out of the wild. But as the NY Magazine "Lab Leak" article illustrates, we should probably be open to the idea it came out of a lab. I also think we should reconsider whether or not serial-passage and gain-of-function research is something that can be ethically conducted. Anywhere.
It is. But then you descend down the rabbit hole to a government coverup of a release from a secret bioweapons research lab that was intended to target US military members at the 2019 Military World Games in late October in Wuhan. And now it becomes pretty clearly a conspiracy theory.
No, the theory is that the US service members brought it with them and infected Wuhan.
Earlier in March, Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese diplomat, raised a suspicion on his personal Twitter account that it might have been the US army representatives to the Military World Games who brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, after a top US health official admitted detecting coronavirus infections on some deceased flu patients. Zhao urged the US to disclose further information, exercise transparency on coronavirus cases and provide an explanation to the public.
To the people holding the theory that I just gave, that's a Chinese disinformation campaign that is part of the coverup. They are accusing others of what they did.
But, there is more than one conspiracy theory here. And probably will be forever. As a hopefully rational third party, I would like it investigated.
But I'm currently giving good odds to "accidental release from program intended to research possible future pandemics". And if that winds up seeming at all likely, I believe that the whole world should commit to having better controls on this type of research to avoid future accidental releases. Because accidental mass murder isn't OK.
The second order developments of “accidental lab release” could be far larger. Do people have the right to sue for wrongful death?
Given that the CDC and commercial companies were doing research in that lab, is the US just as culpable as China?
What was the reason for the CDC working with that lab? Aside from rationalizations, was it essentially just outsourcing the dirty work like any other polluting industry?
Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.
Why wouldn’t CCP stop all suspicion on this and say the virus originated in another part of China? It almost feels like a murderer trying to use reverse psychology by hiding in plain sight. Like, it can’t be from Wuhan Lab because they actually reported that it came from Wuhan (what idiot that’s trying to cover it up do that?). A calculated person would make such a calculation.
Why does it have to be "built"? It could have been isolated from bats and studied, and an error / human mistake occurred and it got out.
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
The problem is that an accidental release from a lab has been deliberately conflated with the idea of a bioweapon and labeled a conspiracy theory. Coupled with aggressive propaganda efforts from China, and the fact that the Trump Administration pushed the theory of a lab release (turning the concept into political kryptonite for more than 50% of the US population) its discussion has become verboten.
Well that's not surprising, we're trending towards a world of increase tightening of the exchange of data, fact checking, labels of "conspiracy", and there will of course be fallout that people will see in retrospect. Today the mainstream view is to knock the non-mainstream views out of acceptable discourse. I would say with QAnon and vaccine shennanigans, a lot of people support that. At some point something important will be covered up (such as during a war) and they won't be so gung ho. So swings the pendulum.
"Building" it in a lab might be too scifi. But it's possible they were experimenting with things.
E.g. "killer bees" are a product of human scientists trying to engineer a better bee - the release was accidental. It's not like we have the ability to genetically engineer a bee from the ground up. But as a species humans have been purposefully manipulating the traits of living things for thousands of years.
You can, with your own body, the right drug regimen, and starting with just garden variety TB and no skills whatsoever, "build" XDR TB.
The general evidence is this is yet another reason why wet markets are terrible for humanity, not that it was made in a lab and got away. But you can build lots of things.
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
Right, and combine this with a history of lab leaks both in China and the west (which the article outlines) and a lab leak scenario is perfectly plausible. It is however hard to tell whether it was a lab origin because serial passage is also the route the virus would have taken if it naturally evolved outside a lab to infect humans.
Noe that when deployed properly, we MIGHT not need 85% if we have secondary protocols to inhibit the growth of covid.
For example, requiring all airline passengers or anyone leaving their state to be vaccinated and vaccinating frontline workers including those that work at grocery stores, etc.
I mean, is HN really an unbiased sample source? Ask my mom or grandma if she prefers dark mode over light mode and she’ll say whatever she has right now on her phone.
Is that because your grandmother doesn't understand the question/choice, or did she evaluate the two options and decide which she prefers?
I think if I asked my grandmother a question like that she'd probably get concerned that I was about to change something she was already accustomed to, without necessarily understanding what change was being proposed, and would default to invoking the 'don't fix it if it ain't broke' principle.
My mother on the other hand is younger and still has an adventurous willingness to try new things, and last I saw was using the dark mode in Windows 10.
It's not surprising that power users are more acquainted with the options available with a developed preference from trial and error.
Polling someone who likes light themes because they know no better is an answer to a completely different question.
Also, while trendy, "bias" isn't a word you should throw around unless you also have established the question being asked and what the bias is. Informed answers to the poll aren't biased, especially compared to someone who doesn't know what a dark mode is.
Whilst a majority in your case (and that of Discord) may prefer dark, I wonder if it’s more complicated that that. I use light mode everywhere. I like some others have mentioned have astigmatism and I find dark mode only tools much harder to use - to the point that if a code editor only supported dark I would probably not use that editor. I wonder if any that prefer dark have the same issue with light mode only applications, and if so for which is your application usable by a greater number of people, even if it’s not their first preference.
If you tested "option to have a dark mode" vs "that other feature which was already requested 150 times", you might have come to an entirely different conclusion.
the issue we had was that we were using a CSS filter like other commenters mentioned.
The problem is that it inverts images too and pdfjs doesn't actually specify which parts of the document are an image as it's just writing to a canvas.
My plan moving forward is to fix pdfjs so it can invert natively and the actual canvas is inverted so that images won't be inverted.
I think figures would STILL be a problem though.
EPUBs are much easier and we're not inverting there because we can see which one is an img.
Imagine if it was inverted. It would look like a MASSIVE eyeball staring at us during our evolution.
Imagine how that would have impacted religion!