Slow_Hand

Not to mention that Amazon drivers are delivering to dozens of stops along their route to you, making them far more efficient compared to each consumer traveling to the store in their own vehicles.

I've been using Macrofactor for many years (after a HN recommendation) and now that you mention it, I've been super happy with the experience and don't detect a whiff of dark patterns, unwarranted tracking, or bad business practices that plague other apps.

The value of tracking my diet and health has been well worth it. I will happily pay their asking price and it's heartening to hear that the founders/owners are committed to good practices.

Side note: I recently switched over fully to the Proton Unlimited ecosystem. Another ethical service that I will happily pay for.

I'm beginning to think that we might be able to turn this shitty ad-industry-lead ship around, folks. Or at least we have strong alternatives these days for the people who care.

Now if I can just get my social groups to use Signal.

It's not. You're putting the cart before the horse (or attributing the horse to the cart?).

Contemporary music began using a click track because it makes techniques like sequencing, non-linear editing in a DAW, and tempo-synced effects far easier to incorporate. Click tracks and rock-solid tempo are also an aesthetic choice.

It's far more difficult to sync these techniques to a wavering tempo, so the trend has been for bands and records to conform to the click as the central authority for the pulse in order to unlock the benefits of the above-mentioned techniques.

The author's product allows users to slave the click track to the drummer's playing (which may now waver). This opens the door to real-time tempo-following by the click. The band can now push/pull the tempo AND use all of cool synchronized techniques in real time.

As a career musician with a heavy interest in electronic music and DSP, hearing the author work through designing the algorithm is interesting to me. They make several good points along the way of how a band relates to the implicit tempo of a performance when the drummer goes "off road" with a flashy fill or a hemiola. I'd never heard it articulated in this way, but it makes sense.

For that reason I like that the author is talking through their trial-and-error process in this way.

I understand the desire to have well-crafted writing, but this example shows sufficient care (for me) and doesn't throw up any red flags and it relates it's content well. It's not Nabokov, you know?

I also say this as someone who has never considered LLM-augmented writing, because I enjoy the process of articulating my thoughts and the creativity that comes with it.

Not once did this pop on my radar as AI-generated. And if it is that’s fine, because it reads extremely clear and coherent to me.

Larger point: I am so sick of HN comment sections filling up with obligatory comments speculating about whether a post is AI-written.

At this point I don’t care. People now write with AI. If the writing is deficient in some way, then comment on that. At least that way the “writer” can steer the writing towards greater coherence.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Yeah. Whenever someone starts explaining to me that "they" - meaning some vague and undefined cartel - want you to (blank) I immediately flag their reasoning as suspect until proven otherwise. More often than not it's indicative of a lack of serious critical thought.

Examples include some version of "They want us to act like slaves" or "They want to control our minds".

More often than not the simplest explanation is short-sighted profit motive, or institutional dysfunction, or multiple parties with conflicting motivations with no central agenda. It's far less likely to be a grand coordinated conspiracy.

Since 2025, the Chinese government has made “anti-involution” a priority in its economic agenda, introducing policies to strengthen labor protections and curb race-to-the-bottom price wars among e-commerce platforms, solar panel companies, and electric vehicle manufacturers.

I don’t know enough about the Chinese government to know whether I should feel cynical about such resolutions, but as an American it would be so refreshing to hear about this as a platform for improvement. Can’t say I’ve heard anyone on a national level ringing the bell for this kind of reform.

It would be far more interesting if you did. Not sure why you feel need to keep it secret.

I wouldn’t mind more foreign car companies if it means alternatives to what’s being offered today.

I don’t see why they should be restricted if most industries don’t also have similar restrictions.

This has been my experience as well. Many owners want to know about issues before they fester.

I'm fortunate to have an attentive property manager and a landlord who is interested in doing the preventative maintenance to keep the units from degrading.

I inherited a mold and moisture problem under the kitchen sink when I moved in, one that I neglected for a while. As soon as I told my landlord they sent a crew out to tear down the wall, fix the plumbing, and rebuild it in a more robust manner.

I don't even have a particularly nice apartment. My apartment just turned 100 years old, but it's maintained well enough. I've been here seven years now. I keep my house clean, don't leave food out, and still see the occasional cockroach in the kitchen. Probably once every 1-2 months. Fine.

I intuitively put this much effort into asking good questions when I need help, and what I often find is that by spending time to formulate a question that makes it easy for others to help me I end up discovering the answer for myself or identifying a much more salient problem that I should be asking instead.

In this way, putting more effort into the question ends up putting me closer to the answer without actually receiving help.

There are tools to mitigate clipping artifacts, and tools to generate new transients for overly compressed files, but they're not a silver-bullet and the new material that is generated is more of a best guess than a true replacement for not over-compressing a mix in the first place.

These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.

What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.

If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4

He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.

This. The loudness is an aesthetic choice.

The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.

And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?

I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.

If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.

Yes. Zero dynamic range.

If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.

It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.

I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.

Agreed. It's not a great analogy.

I'm annoyed because you keep referring to the cost of a license as "gate-keeping" or somehow "hiding away" your ability to use the software. Pay the cost for a license or don't. It's a reasonable price for the tools.

I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me. t's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.

You seem mistaken about Max/MSP being free or open source, which it has never been. Certainly not in the last eighteen years since I've been using it.

You seem to be saying that it would be a whole lot nicer if Ableton were an open source tool that we didn't have to pay for and could develop ourselves. Maybe that WOULD be an improvement in some ways. It would at least be free. A lot of things might be better. Some things not so much.

But it's not. Live is a paid product. And so is Max/MSP. And I'm very happy to continue paying these developers to keep doing a great job because they make tools that are tremendously helpful to me and they don't abuse that relationship with things like monthly subscriptions or unreasonable restrictions. In many ways Ableton is a model company that is self-governed and largely free of outside influence like private equity. I want them to succeed and I want more companies like them to thrive.

-----

There is a free and open-sourced alternative to Max/MSP: Pure Data. If you think open-sourcing this type of software is such a great idea, then you should develop in Pure Data instead of Max/MSP. There are probably open-sourced DAW projects out there too that you can integrate into as well.

Maybe then you'll realize that Live and Max/MSP's asking price is not so high after all.

Max/MSP has always been a paid tool. There was never a situation when you were going to be able to participate without paying.

This sounds a little like you're complaining that you cannot watch all of the free Youtube content because you don't want to pay for the device that will display it.

You mean the job where his entire department was murdered?

fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.

It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.

GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.

I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.

It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.

If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.

I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.

I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.

My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.

Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".

If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.

This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

I’d hardly consider a movie theater a liminal space. To me a theater is a destination, not a transitional area.

That said I do like your description of “falling through the skin of the world.” A+.

Agreed. When conditions are bad we need to stand tall and fix it the best we can, rather than vacating and conceding a once-loved institution.

Once we vacate and leave it to the unsavory forces, then it’s truly lost and corrupted. Scrap to be hollowed out.

Gosh. Great choice. That video (Nothing Is Punk Anymore) really gets to the heart of Lewis and Luiza’s writing. Their ethos.

I come back to this video once a year to renew my spirit and orient myself.

Good movie criticism is alive and well. You simply need to expand your vision beyond anyone who relies on Rotten Tomatoes or (probably) Letterbox. That's probably not it.

Youtube is a great place to start looking. It has a lot of trash, but there are some extraordinary essayists and writers giving robust and insightful looks into films new and old.

Off the top of my head:

1. House of Tabula - Essays on art and culture, with a heavy emphasis on film, old and new. https://www.youtube.com/@TheHouseofTabula/videos

2. Deep Dive - Lewis from House of Tabula doing 10-15 min reviews of recent theatrical releases: https://www.youtube.com/@DEEPDIVETHOT/videos

3. Spikima Movies https://www.youtube.com/@SpikimaMovies/videos

4. Thomas Flight https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasFlight/videos

These channels (expect for #2) all diverge from straightforward reviews, but what they give you are the tools to articulate what the film is doing, how it is doing it, and therefore equip you to become your own critic. Someone capable of thinking critically.

That’s wild. I had no idea.