nluken

Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.

Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.

I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.

I have shared similar sentiments with friends, but I think that the answer isn't a chain like Alamo, it's the independent theater. Every repertory event I've been to at an indie in the last year has been packed to the brim. These theaters can also show new independent or international films that might not get a showing in major theaters. Plus, a theater with one or two screens can focus specifically on that niche while everyone else dukes it out with the major studio stuff.

So does H&M in the clothes world (at least, that’s what they’ll tell you). At the end of the day it’s still a sales tactic.

"We are not sustainable, and we know that, but buy our products anyway" is still greenwashing...

Airports work this way because they’re obscenely large. Train stations don't have this issue, especially in NYC where the rail yard is underground. Why would we move the primary intercity train station outside the city when its main advantage over flying is its proximity to the actual city itself?

edit: misread the comment at first but edited since the core argument still stands.

Even so, the spider has 10 legs!

Not sure if you’re being serious but that is indeed how it works at many places. I was straight up told that I could get a spot on some schools’ track teams over others who were faster than me because my test scores would increase the team average

I go back and forth on this. Athletics definitely have outsize influence on college admissions that should be diminished, but surely it should still count for something, right? Most people wouldn’t argue against considering artists’ portfolios and musicians’ performances in admissions. What makes athletics a less important pursuit?

There’s no need for deflation, at least in the long term. Just home prices that don’t increase relative to inflation.

Missed the catalog section, so makes a little more sense in the context of browsing the site from the start. Still, I shouldn’t have to add to cart to actually see the price as configured.

I don’t want to get too far in the weeds here since we’re not generally supposed to critique site design on HN. But it feels relevant to the conversation given the product text doesn’t have that information.

All of those specs and not a single mention of how much this thing costs. How can any potential customer reasonably compare this to another laptop without knowing the base price?

Minimalism is always in. Even in high fashion, Issey Miyake, whose association with Steve Jobs is called out in the article, remains beloved beyond his death.

Perhaps it's not explicitly a uniform per se, but you could build a fashionable psuedo-uniform out of only a few garments relatively cheaply and without getting looks like you mentioned. That kind of fashion isn't for everyone, but neither is the color and fit maximalism that seem to dominate today's outfits.

I'm sure the output of this LLM could be improved with some hacking but why bother? Are we really at a point where we're nitpicking about the best way to automate away any kind of interpersonal communication?

You're not going to get a sporty ride from a model Y. Or any SUV really, as much as Tesla, BMW, and every other luxury SUV maker would have you believe. These vehicles are simply too tall for that. It's a tradeoff for which you get practical benefits in return.

That said car enthusiast types were never Tesla's target market post-Roadster and they've excelled at building a product the public likes for other reasons as you've mentioned.

Not sure how this is clickbait? The article reads a bit like a PR post, but the headline isn't an exaggeration and there's no bait and switch. In fact, it's relatively dry.

That isn't what I'm saying. I agree that this behavior needs to be fixed. I'm saying that "Tesla's self-driving algorithm makes an error at a single intersection in SF" doesn't meet my threshold for news any more than a human doing that would.

A story called "Teslas systemically drive unsafely at intersections", with an investigation into this kind of behavior at mass scale? That's actual journalism, not just a glorified quote retweet.

This is a non-story. It's pretty clear to me the car should have stopped (and I question the original tweeter's road judgement for suggesting otherwise) but plenty of bad drivers do the same thing in the city.

Fair enough. Unverified LLM output as a comment feels spammy to me even if it’s correct (hence my knee jerk reaction), but I guess that sort of makes sense.

If the poster wanted to ask GPT4, don’t you think they would’ve just asked GPT4?

Yes, it went into all asset classes, even normally depreciating assets like cars. That said, the massive influx of cash into an asset with no underlying value seems like an especially egregious symptom of this trend.

So what you're saying is that one piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers can match another piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a different piece of software and hit a button.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. McMansions are defined by their attempts to outwardly demonstrate wealth, which makes deriding them easy but justifiable. Many of the kinds of homes the author discusses here are multimillion dollar properties. Yes, there's a little snobbery involved, but I don't find it classist to point out the irony in wealthy folks appearing cheap by yelling "LOOK HOW WEALTHY I AM!"

I was excited to see that Kate Wagner was contributing to this most recent issue of the Baffler. A related article from the same issue discusses the cheapness of the construction in modern housing: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/construction-time-again-sisson

What is "winning" here? How do you "win" art? Human writers don't exist anymore? Seems like a really odd way of viewing writing.

No, but there's a difference between selling a convertible Corvette alongside the hardtop and discontinuing the hardtop to sell the convertible.

I think your perspective is pretty common among Americans but your argument undercuts itself when you point out that for as good a driver as you are, you've been involved in multiple accidents outside of your control. The insulating environment of a car gives you the illusion of total control, but all the race training in the world can't help you if a drunk driver swerves into your lane just a little too quickly to react to. Even the best drivers in the world can only mitigate risk on public roads, not eliminate it. I'll cynically point out that you can mitigate that risk on public transit too.

I feel for the psychological safety aspect, I really do. There are some cities in the US where the public transit system gets underutilized and hosts more bad behavior. From personal experience, MARTA seems rough after COVID, and psychological safety rightfully becomes a huge factor in avoiding the public transit system. But your second to last sentence is pure hysteria. If you feel that unsafe in Boston or NYC, I'd advise you to drive armed too, because you could experience trouble from a "random crazy" with road rage.

A good public transit system hits all of these marks. Hell, even a shitshow like the NYC subway ticks most or all of the boxes, and it's faster than taking a car too. Admittedly, it's not perfect on point 1, but it's still waaaay safer than driving. Americans grossly underestimate how dangerous driving is.

Million, with an M? Might as well be a jaywalking ticket.

... or it will homogenize that lower 80th percentile (which needs to do something out of the ordinary to stand out) and decrease interest in it even more.

Genuinely confused how people think AI will "democratize" music by allowing people to "create without a gatekeeper". What exactly does this mean? Music has already been democratized. You don't need a label to release music and build a following anymore. Mainstream acts like Radiohead and Chance the Rapper have proven this over and over again.

The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way. Training a computer to generate a Drake song (or imitate McCartney's voice) doesn't empower new artists like AI evangelists think it does. If UMG can pay someone else to copy Drake's flow and release a new Drake track for 1/10 the cost, that isn't "democratizing" artistry, it's extricating the artist from the art altogether. If you do want the support of a label for your own work, you need to meet the right people. AI-generated music doesn't change that.

The only "gates" these people want to get by are ones put up by practicing music enough to make something novel. AI might be useful as a tool to assist actual musicians in their processes, but in my experience the musicians that create interesting music do so because they have a strong vision, not because they're exceptionally technically proficient.