That is one beautiful instrument. What does the front look like?
And I know we can't hear it in its "original glory" anymore, but is the sample only like 10 seconds long because it's proprietary, or is the cello too delicate to play a full number on, or...?
Old string instruments generally remain playable[1] so it most probably wouldn’t be too delicate to play. However most old Amati and Stradivarius instruments will have had a refit during the Romantic period to play on metal strings. This massively increases the string tension compared to the gut strings that would have been used in the original design. This refit often involves a new bridge, soundpost and nut[2] and (if it happened) would have moved the position of the soundpost relative to the bridge. So you’d want to undo all that to hear it in its original state. You’d also want to remove the end pin and use a historically accurate bow as cello players used to play by sort of cradling the cello in their legs rather than having it on a pin and the bow changed shape.
Gut strings have more resonance and a much better sound (in my opinion) at the expense of being less loud and much harder to keep consistently in tune. The romantic movement led to larger forces in the orchestra and more brass, which meant strings had to be louder and in greater numbers to get a balanced sound, and obviously being able to stay in tune over the course of the (longer and longer) pieces of music was convenient!
Here’s an example of a historically-informed performance of the Bach cello suite no 1 in G so you get an idea what the gut strings and bow sound like. https://youtu.be/cGnZHIY_hoQ?si=J1GMF4Yg2h4dQ6-A
Source: Wife is an “early musician” albeit not a string player and teaches at a couple of big conservertoires in London. I was a professional bass player (not early music, Jazz and similar) so know about string set up from that. Have lots of early musician friends.
[1] Unlike old wind instruments (recorders etc) where the players’ breath causes the instrument to degrade so they literally become unplayable over time. That is why even though we have renaissance recorders for example, they are in museums and modern reproductions made by copying their measurements etc play better than the originals. That’s not true of old string instruments. There are 16th century string instruments out there being played all the time.
[2] That’s not as radical as it sounds. The soundpost plays a crucial role in the sound production of the instrument as it transmits the resonance of the strings into the body of the instrument but it’s basically just a piece of dowling rod. The nut and bridge would conventionally be replaced whenever you put a new fingerboard on, which happens a lot as you wear them out.
Replying to myself to add two further things which I should have mentioned before. Firstly I looked at the photos and that instrument is on gut. You can see it clearly here[1]. So you may have found it interesting idk but you can ignore everything I said about setup.
Secondly one thing that makes this instrument so special is that as rare and precious as original Amati and Stradivarius violins are, original cellos and basses are rarer. There are two reasons for this:
1) Because there are fewer cellos and basses in the orchestra than there are violins and violas, and fewer cello concertos etc than violin concertos for high-end virtuosos to perform, the elite makers made far fewer of these instruments originally. That goes double for an instrument like this that was literally made for a king. All of these instruments have a distinguished history but that's on another level.
2) Secondly, it's much easier for a large instrument to be damaged. Let alone just the day to day knocks etc that happen when you have a massive instrument cluttering up your house, given the history of wars etc in Europe since the 16th century it's practically a miracle that any of these instruments survived intact.
The new horniman remains super, but I miss the old dusty, "dolmech recorder collection in a case untouched in decades" horniman.
Museums have to renew. It's a massive improvement overall for community engagement but the old one was a place you could feel like you were discovering things, not being told things. The science museum London is the same: cleaned out the trash, made it less romantic and interesting.
If you look at the R1 pages, you'll see those pages, though scroll-heavy, at least contain more useful info. I'm hoping that after R2 is actually available to order, that they'll update the page with more information. It's still early.
Of course they're down while I'm trying to address a "High severity" security bug in Caddy but all I'm getting is a unicorn when loading the report.
(Actually there's 3 I'm currently working, but 2 are patched already, still closing the feedback loop though.)
I have a 2-hour window right now that is toddler free. I'm worried that the outage will delay the feedback loop with the reporter(s) into tomorrow and ultimately delay the patches.
I can't complain though -- GitHub sustains most of my livelihood so I can provide for my family through its Sponsors program, and I'm not a paying customer. (And yet, paying would not prevent the outage.) Overall I'm very grateful for GitHub.
have you considered moving or having at least an alternative? asking as someone using caddy for personal hosting who likes to have their website secure. :)
We can of course host our code elsewhere, the problem is the community is kind of locked-in. It would be very "expensive" to move, and would have to be very worthwhile. So far the math doesn't support that kind of change.
Usually an outage is not a big deal, I can still work locally. Today I just happen to be in a very GH-centric workflow with the security reports and such.
I'm curious how other maintainers maintain productivity during GH outages.
For us the main shift was accepting that “being able to work locally” and “knowing whether users are affected” are two different problems.
Local dev usually survives outages just fine.
What hurts is losing external signals and assuming things are okay when they’re not.
After a few incidents like this, we stopped relying on a single monitoring setup.
One self-hosted probe plus at least one fully independent external check reduced blind spots a lot.
It doesn’t prevent outages, but it avoids flying blind during them.
As an alternative, I thought mainly as a secondary repo and ci in case that Github stops being reliable, not only as the current instability, but as an overall provider. I'm from the EU and recently catch myself evaluating every US company I interact with and I'm starting to realize that mine might not be the only risk vector to consider. Wondering how other people think about it.
> have you considered moving or having at least an alternative
Not who you're responding to, but my 2 cents: for a popular open-source project reliant on community contributions there is really no alternative. It's similar to social media - we all know it's trash and noxious, but if you're any kind of public figure you have to be there.
The autonomous vehicle should know what it can't know, like children coming out from behind obstructions. Humans have this intuitive sense. Apparently autonomous systems do not, and do not drive carefully, or slower, or give more space, in those situations. Does it know that it's in a school zone? (Hopefully.) Does it know that school is starting or getting out? (Probably not.) Should it? (Absolutely yes.)
This is the fault of the software and company implementing it.
Some do, some of the time. I'm always surprised by how much credence other people give to the idea that humans aren't on average very bad at things, including perception.
I'm not sure what your point is here since this was better than many humans. Was it better than all humans? No. But there also isn't a single human who's better than all humans.
Hmm, I'm getting "Failed to request WebGPU adapter. No compatible adapter found. This may occur if no GPU is available or WebGPU is disabled." but brave://flags reports that WebGPU is "Hardware accelerated." Any way for me to try this out?
Yeah, it's a bit far fetched but after Cloudflare CEO basically threatening to cut off Italy I was wondering what would happen if US really invades Greenland.
A simple windows to linux migration is not enough. If certificates expire without a way to refresh you'd either need to manually touch every machine to swap root certificates or have some of other contingency plan.
Remember that there are lots of CAs, and quite many of them are based outside of the US. Those CAs currently do not offer ACME services for free, but there’s nothing stopping them from doing so.
I would say that the WebPKI system seems to be quite resilient, even in the face of strong geopolitical tension.
Windows (and apple, google, mozilla) trust dozens of root certificates. I've got 148 pems in my /etc/ssl/certs directory on my laptop. 59 are from the US and thus 89 aren't. 10 are from China, 9 Germany, 7 UK. Others are India, Japan, Korea etc.
The far bigger problem is the American government forcing Microsoft/Apple/Google to push out a windows/iphone|mac/android|chrome update which removes all CAs not approved by the American government.
Canonical/Suse may be immune to such overt pressure, but once you get to that point you're way past the end of the international internet and it doesn't really matter anyway.
I hope so, but can we really be sure that .se or .de would still work in such a scenario? Is the TLD root management really split up vertically or is the (presumably US-based) TLD parent organization also the final authority for every country TLD?
It would be nice to at least have a very high level contingency plan because in worst case I won't be able to google it.
Not sure what the exact concern is here. So far, virtually all countries on Earth are still represented in DNS. Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, etc etc.
You can also read a lot of anti-Trump articles and comments on countless web-sites, some under .com and some under other top-domains. As lunatic as Trump is, he hasn’t shut that down.
“Is the TLD root management really split up vertically”
AFAIK, yes, it is.
But if the global DNS would somehow break down I guess you either have to find an alternative set of root servers. Or communicate outside of the regular Internet. Such an event surely would shock the global economy.
Global DNS servers are spread across the world. Most are operated by America but three are operated by Sweden, Japan and Netherlands.
The majority of people use their own ISP or an anycast address from a US company (cloudflare, google, opendns). Quad9 is European.
However any split in the root dns servers signals the end of an interconnected global network. Any ISP can advertise anycast addresses into its own network, so if the US were to be cut off from the world that wouldn't be an issue per-se, but the breakdown of the internet in the western world would be a massive economic shock.
It wouldn't surprise me if it happens in the next decade or two though.
But in general, one of the points of ACME is to eliminate dependence on a single provider, and prevent vendor lock-in. ACME clients should ideally support multiple ACME CAs.
For example, Caddy defaults to both LE and ZeroSSL. Users can additionally configure other CAs like Google Trust Services.
It's less about IP address transience, and more about IP address control. Rarely does the operator of a website or service control the IP address. It's to limit the CA's risk.
And I know we can't hear it in its "original glory" anymore, but is the sample only like 10 seconds long because it's proprietary, or is the cello too delicate to play a full number on, or...?
Edit: Found the museum piece with full pictures: https://emuseum.nmmusd.org/objects/6684/violoncello?ctx=7735...
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