How much of this is the consequence of piracy? So many musicians use NI VSTs, but because of the expense they're pirating. What if they'd targeted the hobby musician more?
Almost nothing i assume. NI really lost the plot several years ago when the original founders left the company. Crappy after-sales support, lack of product vision and corresponding crappy execution, and a ton of technical debt all over their product-range. Plus competitors made better/right moves, came alongside, and then moved faster and better, leaving NI in the dust. It's sad to see a company that once was leading in several categories now in this state.
I'm sure piracy has an impact, but they are already targeting hobby musicians with all the soundpacks that can run on Kontakt Player or Reaktor Player and lite versions of Traktor.
I think it's more due to things like - the brilliant founders are no longer there...folks like Stephan Schmitt used Reaktor (node-based audio DSP environment) to prototype so many products over the years, hard to find a bigger product evangelist than founder/COO/CTO types who eat their own dogfood.
When they released Massive X it was way too early, clearly a cash grab and IDK if they ever added back basic UI features like "navigate menus with arrow keys" that worked in all previous versions. Then there are clearly decades of technical debt that still need to be addressed - I stopped using Reaktor and Kontakt several years ago because the tiny anti-aliased fonts still used in various key places are literally too painful to look at.
Is it me, or has every major operating system (macOS, iOS, Windows and now Android) variously shot itself in the foot in some spectacular way over the last year?
macOS and iOS 26 are the most unstable, unpolished operating systems I've used from Apple since the early 2000s. Windows has had a set of baffling bugs, like the crashing File Explorer – seemingly the result of overzealous layoffs in favour of AI development. And on Android, restrictions to APK installations and now this – which, yes, general consumers are unlikely to care all that much about – but it all signals something deeper going on in management across the board.
I can only hope the time for Linux-all-the-things is slowly but surely arising – even if it remains a minority, seeing Linux emerge from 1-2% market rate and becoming a usable alternative for most people would be fantastic.
My guess is all these execs realize there's no more growth left in the tech industry, so everyone is just trying to maximize profit capture to cash out while they still can.
Why? You have many examples throughout history when an overconfident manufacturer lost their momentum before they even realized it. I mean, take Sony for example. They had the best product but completely ignored public's demand for MP3 and thought they could peddle their own proprietary shit forever. People's private sentiment towards product/brand can change simultaneously en masse often without notice to the manufacturer. Especially if something better comes along out of the sudden — and it usually does.
I have been an Apple fanboy for 10 years and their recent abysmal software quality and complete lack of the 'final touch' they've been known for made me go back to Linux and Android. Because there I can at list fix those annoying bugs myself — or at the very least, I can have them reported publicly for visibility.
I went from an advocate to 'fuck that shit' in 6 months, and if I recall it was one annoying bug too many that was the tipping point. I have a feeling many people share a similar experience roughly at the same time. And I actually think same thing is happening with Windows. So why not Android, too?
So yeah, I think companies can absolutely inadvertently reach a tipping point with one of those seemingly benign decisions.
I'll be moving off a google phone running GrapheneOS to Apple on my next phone refresh because of this, how is this not Google shooting themselves in the foot?
GrapheneOS is doing well and has an OEM partnership for devices launching in 2027. The switch to 2 major releases per year applies to both the Android Open Source Project and non-Pixel stock operating systems. Non-Pixel OEMs weren't shipping the quarterly releases but rather at most the yearly ones, usually with massive delays. Google is trying to get them to ship 2 releases per year on time instead. They gave up on getting them to ship 4 releases. It's not clear if the stock Pixel OS will continue having 4 major releases per year, but it's clear that if it does that the 2 other OEMs are meant to ship will have more changes. Bear in mind they only had 1 major release per year until trunk-based quarterly releases began with Android 14 QPR2. Android 16 QPR1 being pushed to AOSP delayed until almost right before Android 16 QPR2 was released to AOSP on launch day, they already came close to implementing the new policy in practice without telling anyone about it. The whole thing appears to be due to massive cost cutting for Android and ChromeOS. Android 16 QPR1 appears to have been delayed for AOSP due to major bugs in the code which they worked around for Pixels.
Everything at Google is going downhill due to cost cutting, not specifically this. It's more of a neutral thing for GrapheneOS than a bad thing since it presents a lot of opportunities too. Google is likely to lose control of Android via antitrust action but whether that ends up better for open source is an open question.
> That’s like blaming a pen for writing something bad,” DogeDesigner opined.
Genuinely terrifying how Elon has a cadre of unpaid yes-men ready to justify his every action. DogeDesigner regularly sub tweets Elon agreeing to his latest dumb take of the day, and even seems to have based his entire identity on Elon's doge obsession.
I can't imagine how terrible that self imposed delusion feels deep down for either of them.
> Genuinely terrifying how Elon has a cadre of unpaid yes-men ready to justify his every action.
A similar article[1] briefly made it to the HN front page the other day, for a few minutes before Elon's army of unpaid yes-men flag-nuked it out of existence.
bump, tbh I think this is hyperbole as on my w11 pc the ctrl alt delete menu hasn't changed since 2021's RC (which was just a reskinned version of w10's, which was just a reskinned version of w8.1's... going all the way back to vista)
Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it
could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.
By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.
Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.
AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music
Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].
Nice wall of text, which part of that says painters jobs were killed?
Or did you just read the title of the second article and not realize it’s not being literal but capturing the anxiety of the painters in the 19th century?
I think the first article which is highly recommended (where the excerpt comes from) goes over subsequent effects on the profession. The second one goes over the different genres that disappeared, and concerns less with the artists themselves
Apart from that our interaction seem overly emotional for me so I'd leave it as that
It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.
I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.
This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.
If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
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