leviathant

Flagging seems extreme, but this is a very low information post about audio adapters, with a smidge about amplification. I went in expecting some kind of arduino-to-electromagnet jiggery-pokery, but I suppose that just means set myself up for disappointment.

There is an Ikea in south Philadelphia not far from the Old Swedes Church, but they do not do anything to promote the Swedish history there, however brief.

The colors of the flag is Philadelphia pay homage to this Swedish heritage.

And now automate and scale that with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini/whatever. It's insidious and terrible.

What I do love is that when you're a mod, that post history isn't necessarily hidden.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough just how deeply pervasive the spam is at Reddit. I'm a mod at the ecommerce subreddit, and I've only caught some of the AI-powered marketing operations because in one particular campaign that was making fictional claims about things I had direct knowledge about. Once I looked into the post history, and started to untangle the web of accounts that formed a self-supporting community of posters and commenters, just subtle enough to get genuine engagement, but specific enough to make the kind of posts that the LLMs will siphon up and regurgitate.

It's not just shady little operations. I'm speaking specifically about the SCAYLE ecommerce platform, in my example. They've got Zalando money to play with, and as a German platform that's trying to break into the North American market, it appears they've made a bet on indirectly spamming the LLMs with fictional tales of commerce replatforming horror stories. At first, they're some of the more interesting topics in a sea of really useless posts, with contributions from people who seem to have some real experience with enterprise ecommerce. I was a little suspicious, but these interaction campaigns were spread out enough that I didn't put the pieces together for months. Of course, to go back on what I said at the top of the paragraph, maybe SCAYLE is shady, and I'm giving them too much credit.

The good news is, some of the AI powered tools that mods have access to are getting better at surfacing suspicious patterns of behavior. However, I still find I have to manually address these campaigns.

In the cat-and-mouse game with these marketing jerks, I'm always reluctant to surface what's working and what isn't. This is an interesting post, but it's going to make things worse. Ah well.

What is better? My colonoscopy came with a dose of propofol that made me understand why Michael Jackson went out the way he did. Best sleep I've ever had.

I did a colonoscopy at 38, because I saw something in the toilet that looked like the lingonberries at Ikea. Everyone was like "Man that seems early" but when I woke up, the doctor expressed some surprise when he told me they removed a couple of polyps.

A week or two later, I got a bill for several thousand dollars, and I just had to roll with it. I believe that in the US, there is a certain age, after which, they're covered.

I'm paying $16/mo for Photoshop and Lightroom.

I have to imagine that the majority of people who post to HN can afford $16/mo.

I'm not a professional photographer, but it's an excellent hobby, and just the other week, a neighbor stopped me to tell me how much they love the pictures I post to our neighborhood Facebook group - so that's something I guess!

I really enjoyed Photosynth. I remember coming across an account from a guy in Tehran, and there was something really moving about sitting in Pennsylvania and being able to explore his house ("Hang on, does that box say Barf?"), local parks, memorials, and other buildings, while thinking about how unlikely it was that I might ever see these things in person.

I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.

I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.

Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...

Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.

It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.

What I am hearing is that while you like to read, you do not feel like authors bring enough value to the table for you to actually reward them for their work.

I was exposed to a lot of really interesting music from Trent's what.cd profile back in the day.

NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.

The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.

Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums

And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial

Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.

(p.s. wot up volk)

Please respond to what's linked, rather than make assumptions based on the headline.

Yes! I regularly share a link to Mike's talk - I was about to post it myself before scanning the comments.

I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.

People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly.

lol, lmao even.

In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.

When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.

I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art.

Man, maybe you don't hang out with enough artists. It's true, people typically don't make the equivalent of a tech salary for art, but people absolutely pay for art, and artists are able to not only survive, but have the capacity to thrive.

I get what you're saying, and for ad agencies, game studios, etc. that's always been the case (I remember when office supply stores sold CD-ROMs full of Clip Art) All of the sound effects in Doom were from commercially available sample libraries. And this isn't even touching on "gallery scene and art auctions as money laundering facilities" side of things.

I get the impression that most of the people who post about this topic in tech circles are general consumers, already primed for slop by mass manufacture and pop culture. But even through that lens, "people don't pay for art" falls flat - looking at what people pay for Star Trek prop replicas, or buying into the now very diverse Disney ecosystem. Now, a lot of those kinds of folks might be more prone to slurping AI slop (Hey Gemini turn me into a Funko Pop!) but there are still tons of people who value artists and their artistry. I suspect you're just not among those people.

As someone in the process of building a niche museum about hyperlocal archaeology and history in my Philadelphia neighborhood, the timeliness of this post is excellent.

Speaking of, The Amsterdam Pipe Museum is fantastic. On the surface, it seems like some kind of stoner side show, but the people running it are very, very experienced archaeologists, and we ended up buying multiple books from them on the topic of pipes. Trained archaeologists in Philadelphia will look at a clay pipe and say "That's Dutch" but these guys are like "That's from Gouda, and was probably owned by a farmer"

Once or twice, I've clicked through on a link in an email that was convincing enough to fool me, and what saved me both times was that I run NoScript.

It's so frustrating just standing by and watching as we descend into a low-trust society.

Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.

In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.

You're upsetting the kind of people who leave their shopping carts in the parking lot instead of putting them away when they're done.

Nano Banana was the first generative image tool that seemed to understand architecture. I have some 18th century engravings that I've been trying to get AI tools to visualize as though they were photographs of real structures, and the results were comically bad until Nano Banana came along. I remember seeing the announcement, dropping a sketch into Gemini with the prompt "Make this a photo" and it preserved all the features and dimensions, but added photorealistic textures.

I still do a lot of modeling of historical buildings in Sketchup and Twinmotion, but Nano Banana has really helped me with more easily visualizing a world before photography.

The trick I keep in mind in situations like this is to look at brake lights ahead of me. If cars are braking and I'm accelerating, I'm probably going to end up driving very inefficiently. By letting off the accelerator, I don't close the gap as quickly, and eventually, the turbulence in the traffic flow steadies out. Instead of stopping and starting, I roll at an averaged out speed, which doesn't feel as frustrating (it's kind of relaxing) and is better for fuel economy. There are, of course, the weavers who jump from gap to gap, tailgating and pushing. Sometimes it works, sometimes they just get jammed up.

I don't drive as often as I used to, but on I-76 coming into or out of Philadelphia, traffic gets snarled and becomes stop-and-go. Every now and then, someone next to me appears to have the same understanding of fluid dynamics as I do, and we build up enough of a buffer that we are able to eliminate the stop-and-go, even if it means rolling at 5mph with a big gap between us and the cars in front of us.

There's no good way to communicate what we're doing, even to each other. But I like to think that when this happens, it has a positive effect that ripples out for miles.

How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't effectively write well?

It's embarrassing to see this question downvoted on here. It's a valid question, there's a valid answer, and accessibility helps everyone.

An assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Any guesses as to what trends in firearm related deaths looked like when the ban was allowed to expire in 2004?

Legally speaking, the Republicans have been losing in court over and over. That doesn't mitigate the damage they're doing during the lag, and the consequences for breaking the law have never been as strong as they should be when officers of the law and elected officials are the ones breaking the law.

But it is important to acknowledge the wins. They do have an effect, and that's the only path we seem to have toward slowing down the march to autocracy.

It's easy to look at the politics of individual states as a means of breaking things up if you ignore the economics. Things get very complicated, very quickly when you set a political threshold for breaking up the country.

While you're remembering things you shouldn't forget, pay attention to how the Black Panthers are out in Philadelphia, and ICE isn't messing around over here. We chased those Patriot Front clowns out immediately, too.

But yeah, focus on the peaceful citizens making their voices heard, if that makes you feel more secure about how things are going.