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How new is this? About a month ago I tried to get Claude (forget which model but probably Opus 5) to transcribe a low-res hand-written lyric sheet from a relatively obscure punk band and it refused.

Of course, since then I had the idea of having it build for me an automatic solution for charting out songs in Clone Hero, a Rock Band clone. It had no problem ripping the audio from YouTube, using Whisper to generate and match the timing of the vocals, etc. Responsible AI at work.

I've always been curious about what it means for a movie to enter the public domain. A few years ago I sent a mail to Planet Money in what I thought would be an interesting hook but never got a response:

"Hi Planet Money, today is public domain day. I see that Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis is now in the "public domain." I was curious what that meant at a practical level for a German language silent film.

If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own? What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray? What about the work that Transit Film did in restoring the film from the original negative? Does that count as some sort of newly original work? It's a silent film and a foreign film. How does the soundtrack and translation work?

If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).

Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.

I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.

I think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.

The latest episode of the excellent video game history podcast They Create Worlds (https://www.theycreateworlds.com/listen) does a good job debunking some of these myths.

I'm actually shocked that even before these layoffs there was anyone working on Pocket. I have not noticed a new feature in this product for maybe 3 years, with numerous things getting worse. How big is the team? What are they doing all day?

This podcast goes into a lot more detail than most of the replies here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-4...

It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.

Eh, I think this is overstating the case for the typical user (Zoom or gaming rather than something like podcasting).

The sound quality is more than acceptable, even when placed relatively far away from the speaker, for Zoom meetings. It will be night and day compared to a laptop microphone or AirPods (although this is true even with cheaper USB headsets). Unlike the other recommended non-headset microphones, you don't need a special stand or to ensure you're very close to the microphone. In terms of aesthetics, you also don't have to have a large microphone in your face on camera. Sure, this is the norm on Twitch, but every time I've been on a Zoom call with someone with this setup it's always at least a little awkward.

I also find the speakers in a lot of USB headsets to be either not the best or uncomfortable. I use a separate output-only headset and a Yeti as my input and this works well enough for me.

I find the microphone to have one of the most convenient hardware mute buttons of similarly priced options. Of course, mics with more intelligent muting may reduce your need to mute so often, but I personally prefer to have 100% control over this and not rely on software. One of my biggest pet peeves about all teleconferencing software is they give you almost no feedback on your sound quality and what's coming through in the background. I'd rather control that than the software doing something wrong.

Big picture, though, is to use any form of external microphone and headset rather than laptops + speakers. Even a cheap $15 headset is going to be a much better experience for everyone else on the call. Better sound quality from you and less echo (yes, software tries to take care of this, but in practice I've found this highly unreliable on the other ends of Zoom, Teams, Discord, etc. calls).

VCD is a very undercovered format. Any budding media scholars out there could make a good book out of the format.

It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...

My car still has an amusing WMA logo above the CD player to advertise its support for playing CDs with WMAs burned to them. Never actually used that functionality though.

See also Defender of the Favicon: http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/

I read this over the summer, it's a great read.

I've seen some apps recently move to only having icons and no text label. I think Paint in Windows 11 is an example. I really dislike this as for an app I'm not using every day it takes me extra time to decipher the icon. And on desktops where screens keep getting larger I have the extra real estate for the app to be clearer.

This is connected to another UX trend I don't understand of dumbing down interfaces because too many options are "too distracting." Probably not the best forum to ask this but has anyone ever stopped using an app because they got distracted by the menu?

I've used a series of them for over 20 years and never had this issue.

The only place I do this anymore in hotel rooms, although I'm usually foiled by how horribly slow this experience has become. I've stayed in hotels where it's up to 5 seconds between channels. This was a real sacrifice in the move to Digital Cable (although I recognize hotels have their own reasons for being extra extra slow).

Maybe it's because, as a post next to this on HN tells me, attentions are off by one?

My understanding is that Readwise uses the HTML you're seeing on your browser to make the copy and this works with paywalls better than most services I've tried. The downside is you need to give their desktop browser plugin more permissions than is ideal and this doesn't work when saving from mobile.

I've long had issues on Android where lists that should effectively be infinite scrolls instead have a cache of maybe 20 items and they just repeat as you scroll.

It says it does but in practice this is a "we will do our best." I've run into this with now paywalled articles I can't get to my highlights on.

By the way, I'm curious if there are any Pocket communities anywhere. Readwise, for instance, has an active Discord. I haven't been able to find anything for Pocket, which is perhaps telling.

This is absolutely an advertised feature of Pocket and it's frustrating they're so inept in supporting this.

Very much agree that Pocket has gotten worse as I've used it over the years. It's so bad I've mostly moved to the much better Readwise (https://readwise.io/). I'd be fully over if they actually supported a decent export (see below). It's sad because I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Pocket users in terms of usage and am happily paying them for Premium.

I can't remember a significant improvement to Pocket in 2 years. Meanwhile, here's a non-exhaustive list of major, basic features that don't work: -Searching my own archive. This works maybe 75% of the time on articles I am 100% sure are in there. -Having a "permanent copy" of articles. This is Pocket's version of "full self driving," in that it doesn't mean what you think it means. -The ability to do any sort of advanced search. Pocket's web app has had a regression for exact match searching or multiple word searching for the longest time. I've raised numerous tickets with support and never get any meaningful responses. -Reliability of text to speech. There have been weeks-long spells where the better TTS voices just don't work. -Highlight exports or really any decent API interactions.

I'm guessing that this software is just on life support now. I'd love to hear from someone actually at Mozilla on what's happening with this software. What's been the headcount on this project?

Anyway, anyone on Hacker News is almost certainly served better by Readwise. Matter also looked promising but they didn't have an Android app so I never bought in.

Relatedly, there's a new drama out about the history of pinball: https://pinballfilm.com/

It's good!

I bought a new modem over the holidays. Xfinity required me to install the app to activate it. But their login system was broken. It was impossible to talk to a human over the phone because I had to go through the app. Really terrible experience. Had to lie and say I was cancelling to finally get a human on the phone to do this for me. Still can't log into their stupid web wrapper.

Another option I guess is Bloomberg Businessweek which has at least some of the same news coverage as The Economist. But if you're not liking The Economist for having too much opinion you don't agree with, I'm guessing you won't like Businessweek. (You can usually find a print sub to Businessweek that's a lot less than a regular Bloomberg one).

I agree with others that I don't understand where you're coming from in some sort of decline or big change in The Economist. Maybe if you're overly obsessed with the editorials, which I've always skipped, something has changed. But the basic news reporting remains more or less the same as it has been for the 5+ years I've been subscribing.

I subscribed to Le Monde Diplomatique for a year and rarely found more than 1 or 2 articles a month that were interesting info I couldn't get elsewhere.

I subscribe to Foreign Affairs and find it to be 80% boring junk on the same set of topics about the rise of China, what to do about Russia, etc. The occasional article or book review on a less covered country makes it sort of worth the subscription price to me.

If you're just looking for something like "interesting book reviews," I'd take a look at the Literary Review. Or maybe the Times Literary Supplement. And New York Review of Books and London Review of Books offer much more in-depth reviews, but reading between the lines it seems like the op is saying The Economist is too liberal for them and is not going to like the tenor of most of what's in these.

Yeah I feel everyone around me who used this word added a bit of a "t" sound to the end. It wasn't until I was an adult I saw it spelled out like "jawn".

My friend had a great sound card while I didn't. I remember being jealous of how good midis from vgmusic.com sounded on his machine compared to mine. Night and day.

Yeah this is exactly what happened to me, although I didn't report to phishing. It both looked real and like a phishing attempt and after independently logging into my Paypal account and not seeing anything I concluded it was definitely phishing. Pretty terrible of the Paypal system to allow this to happen though.