Cable TV begs to differ. I grew up working poor and plenty of people around me dumped a lot of money into cable TV subscriptions, and $120 back in the late 90s is $240 now.
Computer costs keep collapsing. Image and audio generation is turned out to be less computer intensive than text (lol).
First company to launch 24/7 customized streaming AI slop wins!
I think the poster was saying giving away the models for $200 isn't sustainable for the provider, not that a user won't pay $200 for the latest and greatest models.
That is ultimately where it is headed and has been headed for over 100 years now.
The question is when will we get there.
If the answer is tomorrow, money means nothing and none of these investments matter. If the answer is 30 years, well lots of money to be made up until the inflection point of machines being able to design, build, and repair themselves.
Linux has Snap, and Flatpak, and sometimes an app works with one or not the other.
It is the worst of both worlds.
I especially love how flatpak has its own version of graphics drivers, which results in my browser flatpak updating to a version that has a mismatch between my system drivers, flatpak, and the browser.
But say the Flatpak strategy were adopted fully, would it solve this? I've never noticed the permission difference between using (Snap or Flatpak) vs not, but I need to try it more.
I got an android based epaper device and installed Libby on it. Overall it is a much better experience than doing the library to Kindle dance. I can just browse my local library's ebook collection on device and immediately open them in one tap.
Battery life standby time isn't nearly as good, but being able to also read Notion pages, review full PDFs, and other benefits from having an actual tablet, make the battery life sacrifice worth it.
If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???
> If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.
Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.
No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.
This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.
I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.
The middlemen are giving your book some (still probably rather small) chance of being bought in significant numbers. If you just want a big stack of books and don't care if anyone buys them, they're not especially expensive to produce.
When you consider that different ebooks and different font selection can result in lines and pages breaking at any random place, ebooks may actually be more expensive to produce.
Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.
Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.
Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.
I converted ebooks into PDFs specifically formatted for my reader size and typeset in the fonts I like. It had proper kerning, hyphenation, widow/orphan control, drop capitals, etc.
However that PDF is not reflow-able (or changeable in any way) once it's on the device, and that's not what people are buying ebook readers for.
Amazingly open live writer seems to be a very active project that is getting ready for a new release sometime soon!
It is sad that these sort of local apps are a thing of the past. It is all every changing web UIs. One of the blogging platform I use (hashnode) recently rewrote their entire experience and it is now 5 types of broken and they removed a bunch of features. (Their latest company announcement saying that "focusing on blogging was a mistake" also doesn't inspire confidence...)
I'm also hosting a Hugo blog, and using a markdown editor, but the blog posting workflow (edit markdown, run Hugo command from cli, commit and push to GH, webhook on server picks up changes and updates the website) isn't exactly a user friendly experience and even having an editor that automated that all away would be nice.
Hey remember local image management software? Or just owning our data in general?
> Their latest company announcement saying that "focusing on blogging was a mistake" also doesn't inspire confidence
Well, the original quote is:
>> Hashnode started with forums. Discussions were how this community began. We discontinued them years ago to focus on blogging. That turned out to be the wrong call.
Focus is on "discontinuing forums". But yeah, the framing gave me a chuckle.
Still reads as if the blogging part they feel bad about.
The platform got a rep for blog spam instead of being a medium competitor, which sucks because Hashnode has really good inline code syntax highlighting (why I picked them).
Unfortunately I can't submit and of my blog posts to HN because the entire domain is blacklisted... :/
Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps.
Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.
It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.
Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start.
The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
> carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches
Led Zeppelin III actually used that lead in as part of the music experience, and the original CD pressing didn't capture it. I've heard CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl) that do capture it, I don't know when that started.
The name comes from the CDs being manufactured by pressing into a master mold to create the pits. Replicated (mass manufactured) audio CDs are pressed not written with a laser like duplicated ones (CD-R/RW).
Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.
You could add all of that to CD. Bigger packaging for "audiophile pressings", a play ritual, extra distortion and compression, especially in the low end, limited dynamic ranges, minimal stereo separation, even a little randomness so each listening experiences was slightly different.
This is consumer narcissism. It's the driver behind Veblen signalling - the principle that a combination of collecting physical objects. nostalgia, and the elevated taste and disposable wealth required to create a unique shrine to the superior self.
Buying houses, watches, cars, vinyl, yachts, jets, and politicians are all the same syndrome.
You could add the audio distortion. You couldn't add the ability to place it on your DJ turntable or vintage record player (which you might have paid a small fortune for or obtained from Dad or a car boot sale). The CD is also unnecessary to obtain the music anyway.
Tbh freshly pressed vinyl is a significant way down the food chain from new cars, never mind jets and conspicuous consumption fine art, and the demographics that buy it don't necessarily have more disposable income than the demographics with Spotify subscriptions hooked up to a mid range modern soundsystem. If you really want to go full Veblen you can probably buy an NFT to give you all the bragging rights of having signalling money to waste without the inconvenience of actually having anything to look after or listen to :)
> This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS;
The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.
Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.
SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.
It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.
Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.
There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.
I grew up in a neighborhood that had a drug den next to the 7-11 that all the kids went to buy slurpees at.
The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not to go into that yard.
There were plenty of street walkers on a particular stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who wasn't looking to buy.
Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts. There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in regards to violence.
I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on societal problems!)
The drama on HN alone would last for days. Twitter would implode in on itself.
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