parkaboy

Why not? This thread is a goldmine of great resources and conversation.

vOICe is a vision to sound sensory sub system. Works pretty well apparently.

UCLA has a $10B endowment. I find it bollocks that they and these other academic institutions can't just dip into that for their researchers to (hopefully) ride out the current funding situation at a minimum.

I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing

You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.

All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.

Also speaking from similiar experience, ^^^ this is the best combo. Where both parties have a certain degree of humility and self-awareness and understand how their skills, personalities, and personal circumstances (ability to travel, life stage, etc.) compliment one another.

I like the idea as someone working in a regulated environment. We just paid ~$10k to a counsel to help craft our documents, but they are highly bespoke to our needs.

That being said, I don't know how much I'd trust the results without having a human legal review in the loop. Perhaps that could be an up-charge/add-on: partner with a few firm/counsel that has deep experience different niche regulated areas (e.g. FDA), and then say e.g. for an add'l $500, get a stamp of approval on the document from a counsel who is well-versed in the space.

They were one of the earliest to adopt bitcoin and monero payments--if they didn't convert all those payments immediately to cash, they're probably sitting pretty right now.

Came here for this! One of the best music video concepts ever devised.

Snap, thanks for those tips. Am a total fan (also the music he puts out is really good).

Snuff box, Mitchell and Webb Look, Toast of London, Spaced...

Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).

Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.

Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.

All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.

*you mean "The Facebook" ;)

Adding: commenter @schoen's above comment is making me second guess myself on this. I'm pretty torn.

Yeah this is a weird one where their m.o. on privacy/security are at odds with their first amendment side of things...sounds like the latter won out. I also disagree with them on this. This isn't something like net neutrality. It's one of many privately-owned social media platforms and one such with deeply privacy-invasive software that has adversarial foreign ties against the US.

The software in the article looks like a fun little oldschool cracking/RE project.

I signed up for the hosted version to try things out. Some quick feedback is that the dashboard copy (text) could be crystallized a bit more or provide a hint tooltip to help explain things a bit better.

Some examples:

* "Set up return email to return an email to users who submit your forms." - this is pretty clear what it means, but the phrasing is a bit awkward. -> "Set up automated response email for form submissions"

* "Allowed Domains": allowed for what? Allowed to receive form submissions from?

* When giving numbers (e.g. under API Usage), suggest adding units (e.g. "submissions") to the end.

* "Recipient Email" This seems a bit too ambiguous. suggest something more like ->"Address for receiving form submissions"

I wonder if we will see (or already are/have been seeing) the XR/smart glasses space heat up. Seems eventually like a great way to generate and hoover up massive amounts of fresh training data.

That was both impressive, weird, and 90% coherent. Which does give it a special kind of uncanny vibe.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to post this (not being a professional dev by any stretch) and I'm sure there are embarrassing bugs and code hiding in this.

I found that getting up-and-running with Google Appsheet's API in Python was not straightforward from their limited documentation. I suspect Appsheet's demographic is geared less towards professional developers and more towards scrappy individuals in orgs trying to build internal tools (i.e. people like me).

You might wonder: why would anyone use Google Appsheet when all sorts of other great low-code/no-code products exist like Bubble, Xano, Glide, etc. Especially for its database features?

Quite simply: it's by far-and-away a total steal of deal if you're developing any sort of applications where HIPAA matters. I work at a small biotech startup. Other than Google and MSFT offerings, the cost to get a BAA in place is just obscene and total price gauging of the highest order (shout-out to Jotform for actually being reasonably priced in this department). The second you need a BAA, all of these companies say you need to get on their enterprise plan. Many of which start out at $XXXX/year.

It's absolutely insane how far we've come in DIY/Maker capabilities. Short of making your own ICs (thankfully a rapidly developing space), this is an incredible demonstration of what's now achievable by a single person.

"Crypto" like Bitcoin and Monero have legitimate (non scam/non-greed-driven roots) academic roots and solve entirely real non-scam product problems. ETH is academically interesting as a platform, but as far as I've seen has not "solved" any real product problems people care about in a real way at scale that has persisted (I.e. not fads) or that don't actually NEED the concept of a Blockchain. Being able to transact and store value without a central entity solves a myriad of problems, including, but definitely not limited to:

* Sending funds internationally is much much easier, an order of magnitude less expensive, and several orders of magnitude faster than going through the traditional banking system. It's entirely next level and there are plenty of legitimate reasons why people need to send international wires.

* Transacting in legal, but morally divisive areas, where traditional banking/finance might shut down your business just because it doesn't like what you're doing or is scared of the risk. E.g. selling cannabis products, sex industry stuff (porn, sex work), gambling, etc. people may not like some of these businesses and want to impose their own morals to get rid of them, but crypto makes this impossible in ways the traditional banking system can't.

Point is: there is absolutely a toooon of BS scammery in crypto. And many naughty things it can enable. It's the financial Wild West. But to call all crypto a "BS scam" is simply untrue. It would be like calling the entire Internet a BS scam just because of what it enables (plenty of scams, online gambling, porn sites, darknet markets) and the immense energy it consumes. But like the Internet, the technology is fundamentally useful. You've got your blinders on a bit too strongly if you believe otherwise.

I wish they supported Monero!

I bought a new Ford F250 a few years ago and it came with a built-in fleet management service/subscription with GPS tracking. I flipped it a few months later to a dealer and I had to proactively bug them to take over the access to the service. Would have been very easy to spy on the future owner.

For better or for worse, people (the masses) adopt technologies based on actual usefulness, the product experience, and trust. Most people's actions tend to disregard social/environmental impacts of a technology. This is why airtravel is popular even though it's terrible in terms of CO2 efficiency. This is why people use Amazon and Walmart while driving out small family businesses.

If you look back over the last decade, pretty much all uses that have been invented on top of blockchain technology have been overhyped in terms of actually widespread REAL world utility. Ideas like NFTs, DAOs, Smart Contracts, etc. are cool technological solutions to a number of problems, but they are not THE ONLY solutions to the problems that they solve. I.e. the problems they solve don't necessarily need a blockchain or real decentralization, and blockchains still make for a rather clunky and confusing user experience.

Contrast this with the solution of a truly decentralized way of electronically transferring funds instantly(ish) and without regards to intermediaries, laws, or borders. THIS solution exclusively solves a number of very real world problems that other solutions just can't (Traditional banks, CCs, PayPal, e-Gold, Liberty Reserve, etc.). Having a centralized system mediating financial transfers can create lots of problems in certain situations. (In other situations of course, centralized financial systems are nice).

In this regard: Bitcoin does a perfectly good job, is the most established, and has the most robust decentralization. It's fixed supply, whether or not overrated in actuality, certainly helps psychologically drive adoption, which creates a feedback loop (more adoption -> more trust). It's founding story also adds the the long-term trust as well. Being the first of its kind and totally out of left-field, there are none of these shenanigans with the currency being developed by VC-backed companies or founders pre-mining a ton that may be in conflict with the public interest.

While Bitcoin may not be "the best" or "sexiest" in certain technological factors (e.g. energy consumption, smart contract capabilities, etc.) compared to other blockchain technologies, it does a job and it does it well. I would be careful to not conflate how advanced a competing technology is with its actual value.

Also to clarify, yes: I understand most digital pianos have midi baked in. It's an easy signal to get out. I think this is a great product concept and there's nothing wrong with it--people will buy it! Just spitballing if hardware and all the baggage a hardware business model comes with is necessary.

Sorry I'm not sure you're following me.

I'm suggesting that the user's phone that they already need (since the hardware pairs with the app in the article) is the hardware in this context. A phone already has a microphone and--if the environment is too noisy- many also support direct audio input through the phone's charge/data port with a simple off-the-shelf converter. Most smartphones can perform real-time audio progressing nowadays.

The trade-off is that midi is going to be lower error than an audio processing algorithm and much easier to implement out-the-gate, while it's certainly a step-up in the software engineering needed to develop and implement an audio processing algorithm to implement pitch/key detection as well as capture relative timing and velocity.

Correct the product in the article has no dependence on synthesis, but in pretty much all contexts in which someone will be using the device, there will be a corresponding audio signal present. Most people don't tap out music with a midi controller just in silence/without some sort of synthesis in conjunction.

As someone with a professional background in consumer hardware (and music production) my first thought is always "how can I solve this problem without hardware" first. Don't get me wrong--hardware is fun--but manufacturing and selling consumer hardware is brutal from a business perspective (of course fun in its own masochistic way). With hardware, you're dealing with annoying cashflow issues unless you can easily build to order (money tied up in inventory or even the supplies), supply chain management, inventory management overhead, logistics and fulfillment overhead, additional regulatory overhead.

My understanding from OP's product is that there is an inherent assumption that this is targeted towards people dabbling on standalone digital pianos that also typically have built-in synthesis/sound modules.

Anyway, I'm just giving my reasons for why wouldn't you start with a software approach to answer your question. Putting all that aside, OP's solution is really cool and, independent of the decision to go custom hardware, it seems like a great product solution for the problem it's solving.

This is awesome! One question, though: why not just work with straight audio and convert to midi with some basic* signal processing assuming a use case of instruments/sounds that aren't crazy synthesized. You could then also use this app for certain acoustic instruments as well and make this run all on mobile, potentially with an audio jack dongle/splitter if connecting to a digital instrument. Could also focus the audio processing on specific acoustic instruments out the gate and role out algorithms one at a time for each kind of instrument (e.g. piano vs saxophone)

The even wilder thing is that the CIA actively hired former Nazis (and relocated them and their families) in Operation Paperclip after the war to aid in Cold War operations...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

This is amazing. Would love an actual geophysicist to chime in to verify how accurate this was. I really felt like I learned something...but did I?