WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote
Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason) but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy them as a means to cut out the voters.
I had a Patreon subscription I forgot about. I went to Patreon and ended it. It took about a minute, including filling out the feedback form about why I was quitting.
That's not worth 30%. Imagine if Youtube charged 30% for anyone who clicked a link under a video in a web browser.
Even if people do enjoy browsing through the PAtreon app and choosing creators they want to subscribe to, that's not worth 30%. Rent-seeking is a cognitive disease.
As noted, the company has been in decline since going into private equity in 2020. Pro audio users have felt it was less and less about innovation and more about selling preset packs and slim-value upgrades, as well as increasingly onerous license management. At the same time people are distressed because the firm has a very impressive history of software and hardware products.
Inmusic (which owns Akai, Moog and several other premium pro audio brands) is a potential buyer to acquire them as they already have some product crossover in the form of NI plugins available exclusively on Akai hardware. However this would mean two flagship products that compete against each other (NI's Maschine and Akai's MPC, two very advanced drum pad/sequencing powerhouses). That would mean abandonment of Maschine, whose development was already stalled, and disappointment/bad feeling from many owners; pro audio consumers are necessarily emotional about their creative tools and tend to hold grudges.
OF course, the best of both products could be combined in a Secret Third Thing that embodied the best features of both, but the reality is that Inmusic has just released new flagship Akai MPCs (the 3rd generation of the current design paradigm), and they're such a big upgrade upgrade in both hardware and software terms that they're steamrolling their direct and indirect competition. Those flagship units (and some lighter-weight entry level units to come) have a ~5 year sales life before being replaced, and the latest software still runs well on the Gen 1 machines from 2017, albeit more slowly and without the fancy additional hardware features. So Inmusic is positively basking in brand loyalty at the moment, because they've prioritized capital investment for product development across multiple brands. They've saved by optimizing supply chain efficiencies, manufacturing more stuff in Asia, keeping materials costs low and exploiting economies of scale, while still encouraging designers and engineers to follow their hearts which has resulted in a lot of very happy customers.
Native Instruments had all this, with a very deep software stack and very well-engineered hardware offerings that operated perfectly together (ie no synchronization issues, no or minimal manual configuration required for hardware user interface mapping etc). But the product line got more and more bloated, the license management more of a pain, and development on the hardware stalled. When they were taken over by their existing PE owners in 2020 they seemed not to have any innovation or investment ideas of their own but were more focused on how to squeeze more money out of existing IP. This lead to a series of missteps - low value 'upgrades', abandonment of beloved software flagships, and the absence of any discernible roadmap for the hardware side of the business. This really matters in the pro audio space because as I mentioned above creative people are passionate about their tools. It's not unusual to see people who have the latest and greatest sequencer or audio interface hooked up to a 45 year old synthesizer and/or a slavish modern clone of that older design with additional features. music tech buyers want the heritage of the past to be maintained, but also to be excited with a steady supply of new music technology, and NI's private equity owners have completely failed to deliver the latter,w ith no significant hardware developments since 2019. The company went from arguably having the best hardware offerings in its niche (in terms of capabilities, ergonomics, firmware reliability, software integration, consumer loyalty) to seeing those edges disappear to their primary competitors one by one.
It's hard to guess what happens from here. Good managers could revive the company and build it back to its previous greatness, but the market has already seen it wrecked once by private equity and is wary of getting/staying invested in a product ecosystem that may not have a long term future. Music tech people are also acutely aware of the impact of tariffs and AI on hardware component pricing and product design. Currently the mood about NI's long term future is pessimistic; people are already talking about preserving existing setups as museum pieces, ie maxxed out as much as possible and then disconnected from the internet so they can be maintained in working order but otherwise frozen.
EDIT: Tell us what characters you want to see in the comments and we can make them for you to talk to (e.g. Max Headroom)
Sure, that kind of thing is great fun. But photorealistic avatars are gonna be abused to hell and back and everyone knows it. I would rather talk to a robot that looks like a robot, ie C-3PO. I would even chat with scary skeleton terminator. I do not want to talk with convincingly-human-appearing terminator. Constantly checking whether any given human appearing on a screen is real or not is a huge energy drain on my primate brain. I already find it tedious with textual data, doing it on realtime video imagery consumers considerably more energy.
Very impressive tech, well done on your engineering achievement and all, but this is a Bad Thing.
The dichotomy of AI haters and AI dreamers is wild.
OP, I think this is the coolest thing ever. Keep going.
Naysayers have some points, but nearly every major disruptive technology has had downsides that have been abused. (Cars can be used for armed robbery. Steak knives can be used to murder people. Computers can be used for hacking.)
The upsides of tech typically far outweigh the downsides. If a tech is all downsides, then the government just bans it. If computers were so bad, only government labs and facilities would have them.
I get the value in calling out potential dangers, but if we do this we'll wind up with the 70 years where we didn't build nuclear reactors because we were too afraid. As it turns out, the dangers are actually negligible. We spent too much time imagining what would go wrong, and the world is now worse for it.
The benefits of this are far more immense.
While the world needs people who look at the bad in things, we need far more people who dream of the good. Listen to the critiques, allow it to aid in your safety measures, but don't listen to anyone who says the tech is 100% bad and should be stopped. That's anti nuclear rhetoric, and it's just not true.
The primary purpose of generating real-time video of realistic-looking talking people is deception. The explicit goal is to make people believe that they're talking to a real person when they aren't.
It's on you to identify the "immense" benefits that outweigh that explicit goal. What are they?
I am not an AI hater, I use it every day. I made specific criticisms of why I think photorealistic realtime AI avatars are a problem; you've posted truisms. Please tell me what benefits you expect to reap from this.
This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.
No, we're upvoting the solid and novel (to many of us) mathematical derivation. I don't really mind what woo-woo statements sacred geometry enthusiasts make as long as the math checks out.
The chord through the midpoints of two sides of an inscribed equilateral triangle cuts a diameter in the golden ratio. This interesting method gives a purely geometric construction of positive Phi without using Fibonacci numbers.
> This interesting method gives a purely geometric construction of positive Phi without using Fibonacci numbers.
There's nothing particularly interesting about that; phi is (1 + √5)/2. All numbers composed of integers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square roots can be constructed by compass and straightedge.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that phi is _merely_ (1 + √5)/2, I didn't have a good conception of what it was at all but I didn't think it was algebraic.
Suppose you have a rectangle whose side length ratio is ϕ. You draw a line across the rectangle which divides it into a square and another rectangle.
Then the side length ratio of the new, smaller rectangle is also ϕ.
If you substitute b = φa into the other one, you get
ϕ(ϕa) = a + ϕa
And since a is just an arbitrary scaling factor, we have no problem dividing it out:
ϕ² = 1 + ϕ
Since we defined φ by reference to the length of a line, we know that it is the positive solution to this equation and not the negative solution.
(Side note: there are two styles of lowercase phi, fancy φ and plain ϕ. They have their own Unicode points.
HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)
HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)
I'm glad you posted this. I'm not a unicode expert and have always assumed these weird dichotomies were some sort of user/configuration error on my part. Realizing the unicode glitches are actaully at the website end instead of between my ears is quite a relief.
To be more specific, that usage note strongly suggests that the problem is in the font used by HN. The font is what complies or doesn't comply with the Unicode standard. We can also say that HN has a problem, but HN's problem is "they're using a noncompliant font for monospaced text".
(On further investigation, I got the characters backwards, and HN's ordinary display is correct while the monospaced display isn't.)
Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason) but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy them as a means to cut out the voters.
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