I feel like the price here is a bit dorky, at $10/yr, sure. $30/yr? No.
They obviously know some people just want to make one quick purchase decision and that's why they have a much more expensive, single month plan - but then, just make it pay for 1 week access for like $5 and don't make me have to remember to cancel.
I'd happily give them $10/yr, but $30/yr is better off just spending more on a given product under the assumption money=quality for anything below $500. Anything more expensive, and there's other review sites. Just all around weird pricing.
With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.
I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.
Synths with mod wheels are the bomb, I used to have a roland that had a pitch wheel for bends and then push it for tremolos, vibratos and such, and way more voices, envelopes etc and that was a few decades ago and I'm sure that nowadays guitars are not going to compete except at one thing, making guitar sounding noises, you can get guitary sounds but somehow they come off to me to be too clean and lack the slop that various fingerings produce lol
I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.
The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.
An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.
> The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature
Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
Being instant-on is so, so cool. I really like seeing projects like this and Adafruit's Fruit Jam as they really show "Yeah, by having all this junk in the way, we do lose some things"
Absolutely would give something like this to a kid as a first computer.
Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.
> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them
Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.
Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.
You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:
When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.
Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.
My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.
She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.
Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.
But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.
You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.
You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.
You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.
All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.
Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.
I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.
Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.
i’m catching up here. we have two kids. i dropped one off at pre-k this morning.
i replied to an email from a person whose full name was already in the email and is publicly listed on all of their sites. i said we should talk together about the pile-on. at the time, they believed we had done nfts. we never did.
i can and will apologize. i am not a double-downer. i like changing my mind. if this is the worst thing that happened to this person in their life, and a sincere apology would help, i am fully on board with that. i would mean it. why let something like this linger and turn into prolonged suffering.
there are no other examples anyone has pointed to of doxxing or misgendering. i believe i said “he.” that’s it. i am available, and they know how to reach me.
at the same time, there are people creating alt accounts, including ones using my handle. i see that pattern clearly. still, i understand what you are saying: that i should always take the higher road and be the bigger person, regardless.
my email is pt at braincraft d0t com, open to talk
I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
this all reads like a bunch of nerds with difficulties assessing on where to draw the line. Is it really that hard to figure out that neither registering a domain to meme a person, nor going on a spazz-posting spree and messaging folks over etsy DMs is considered normal, adjusted behavior??
Over the years it’s kind of becoming clear that “running major businesses” is kind of orthogonal to “having emotional integrity”. In larger businesses it’s mediated by layers. But just take a look at some of the deranged tweetstorms we’ve become used to in recent times.
Really? Normally it's just like: "Can we access your contacts list so we can match your 'friends'?" And then you do it and it shows you the list of matches. It doesn't ask each individual "Hey, do you want to be matched to this person?" unless you try to friend them. Most ask you when you sign up and usually somewhere in the settings if you want to enable email matching for your account though. So if that's on it's kinda just part of the system unless you turn it off.
Is it? It was (as far we know) a mild shitpost of a public figure like from a decade ago. Photoshopping someones head over the Pepe Silva meme is not nice, but its hardly harassment. To me the "worst" thing was registering the domain, which he gave to Torrone and apologized quite well in my opinion https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505....
Sure, if this was a pattern of behavior it would be ridiculous to play the victim, but there isn't as far we know. 9 years later, Torrone starts Mullenweg-posting because some random criticized him for AI stuff. He posts their private email taken from a receipt and when blocked he continues with sock-puppets. Sparkfun guy gives a (quite measured) opinion colored by the fact that Torrone is still is doing this shit to random people. Torreone acusses the Sparkfun guy of being his personal Moriarty.
The most unhinged (and cowardly) thing to me is bringing up his partner and his newborn at every turn in his Twitter shitflinging, when any "slights" just seem only directed at him.
(Dude, if you are reading this just log off, this might literally just sleep deprivation. Take focus on caring of your child instead of fighting on the internet)
And he apologized to you and handed the domain over to you.
And now you've decided, 8 years later, to blow up your relationship with a number of other folks in the industry, over a shitpost and some mild criticism?
Please, for the love of god, just drop this whole thing. Dredging this up from years ago has lost you a supplier of a popular product already, and a number of customers. I know a bunch of people who used to want to buy from the cool woman owned hacker manufacturer, and now won't touch it with a 10 foot pole after everything you've done.
And please, for the love of god, stop hiding behind Limor when people are criticizing you. You have repeatedly claimed that people are harassing Limor, when every single piece of criticism I've seen here has been directed at you or the Adafruit social accounts that you post through. And stop using your child as a shield as well.
You are a public figure, and sometimes people are going to disagree with you. They might find your use of GenAI image models to be problematic. They may find your over-hyping of drama happening in the open source hardware community to be a bit much. But you know what? That's OK. People can disagree with you, and make jokes about that disagreement.
But claiming that you are being harassed because people occasionally make a joke at your expense, blowing up relationships with your suppliers, driving away customers because you expose emails and deadnames (or legal names, in cases where people go by pseudonyms online), and doing it all while using your wife and child as a shield is not very professional behavior.
Step back, take a deep breath, pick your battles, own up to your mistakes, apologize for the places where you've gone wrong, and stop using your wife and child as a shield, and maybe you can repair some of this reputational damage. But you really need to get some distance from this.
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.
Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.
Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
> if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious
That argument breaks down if the person hiding their identity is doing malicious things. If you hide behind anonymity and you're harassing people and sending threatening or hateful messages, disclosing their real identity is a public service.
Or could I set up an anonymous account, doxx people all day long for the lulz, and then cry wolf when you doxx me for being a prick? :)
If someone punches you, and you punch them back, you're being hostile, but so are they, and a lot of people would say that was reasonable.
If you deliberately go find someone's secret that they hid after you think they hurt you, and disclose it, it's because you're trying to hurt them, justifiable or not.
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage?
There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.
> Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it?
Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools.
I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended.
It didn't augment your skills, it replaced skills you lack. If I generate art using DallE or Stable Diffusion, then edit in Krita/Photoshop/etc. it doesn't suddenly cover up the fact that I was unable to draw/paint/photograph the initial concept. It didn't augment my skills, it replaced them. If you generate "music" like that, it's not augmenting your poetry that you wish to use as lyrics - which may or may not be of good quality in it's own right - it replaced your ability to make music with it.
Computers are meant to be tools to expand our capabilities. You didn't do that. You replaced them. You didn't ride a bike, you called an Uber because you never learned to drive, or you were too lazy to do it for this use.
AI can augment skills by allowing for creative expressions - be it with AI stem separation, neural-network based distortion effects, etc. But the difference is those are tools to be used together with other tools to craft a thing. A tool can be fully automated - but then, if it is, you are no longer a artist. No more than someone that knows how to operate a CNC machine but not design the parts.
This is hard for some people to understand, especially those with an engineering or programming background, but there is a point to philosophy. Innate, valuable knowledge in how a thing was produced. If I find a stone arrow head buried under the dirt on land I know was once used for hunting by native Americans, that arrow head has intrinsic value to me because of its origin. Because I know it wasn't made as a replica and because I found it. There is a sliding scale, shades of gray here. An arrow head I had verified was actually old but which I did not find is still more valuable than one I know is a replica. Similarly, you can, I agree, slowly un-taint an AI work with enough input, but not fully. Similarly, if an digital artist painted something by hand then had StableDiffusion inpaint a small region as part of their process, that still bothers many, adds a taint of that tool to it because they did not take the time to do what the tool has done and mentally weigh each pixel and each line.
By using Suno, you're firmly in the "This was generated for me" side of that line for most people, certainly most musicians. That isn't riding a bike. That's not stretching your muscles or feeling the burn of the creative process. It's throwing a hundred dice, leaving the 6's up, and throwing again until they're all 6's. Sure, you have input, but I hardly see it as impressive. You're just a reverse centaur: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11...
And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving better control rather than just meakly pawing in the direction of what you want with prompts.
Because none of these AI tech bros give a dam about music. I thought with ai we would be able to put all the "timbres" of instruments into vector database and create a truly new instrument sound. Like making a new color for the first time.
But no we get none of that. We get mega shitty corporate covers. I would rather hear music that's a little bad than artificially perfect sounding.
I had a seaboard. They didn't catch on because the surface isn't very consistent, it's hard to actually hit a note and not bend without setting the "dead zone" pretty large, and the surface itself is just not a great texture to play on.
The ExpressiveE Osmose is proving to be quite popular. I have one, as do 3 other musicians I know personally. It's a very similar idea, but a lot more mechanical.
There's other options too. The Ableton Push 3, Linstrument, Haken Continuum, and a few other MPE synths/controllers all do a better job than the Seaboard by miles. The Osmose is my reccomendation for most people currently, based on the half dozen or so MPE controllers I've had my own hands on and it's price, but I'd love to get my hands on a Continuum.
There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord.
I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.
This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.
I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"
Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?
That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.
This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.
I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:
Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.
Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
A colleague of mine had the idea that an easy solution for a lot of social media content issues would be any content given by an algorithm is exempt from safe harbor laws. You pick what users see? You’re responsible and liable.
> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.
That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.
They obviously know some people just want to make one quick purchase decision and that's why they have a much more expensive, single month plan - but then, just make it pay for 1 week access for like $5 and don't make me have to remember to cancel.
I'd happily give them $10/yr, but $30/yr is better off just spending more on a given product under the assumption money=quality for anything below $500. Anything more expensive, and there's other review sites. Just all around weird pricing.
reply