While I don't doubt it's true, this could be challenging to prove, because Studio Ponoc (ex-Ghibli) has produced work that uh, hews rather closely to Miyazaki's style. Were the models trained on Ghibli, Ponoc, both, something else, etc?
I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!
Ponoc is made of former Ghibli employees who founded a new home when Ghibli's future was uncertain. I am sure they are on friendly terms, if not family, with Ghibli: they worked together for years. People like them can have a gentleman's agreement.
What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain without ever asking for permission?
I don't disagree with anything you said, but it doesn't seem to follow from what I wrote.
I pointed out a reason why litigation could be difficult. I'm quite sure nothing I wrote could have been seen as defending OpenAI. Just that I felt litigation would be tricky.
I'd say their positive image though has lost a good
deal of its shine since their peak.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm also not sure that this would lead to a decrease in engagement. I could very easily see the opposite being true -- more discontent equals more engagement.
Many/most people in tech have to deal with Apple in some capacity even if they're not users or "fans", such as making sites/apps work on Apple platforms.
I suspect there may be a simpler explanation:
a lot of people for some reason really dislike
John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly
praises Apple.
This is most definitely true but he, and Apple, have always been very polarizing. I don't think either one has become more polarizing? And if so, certainly not in some extremely sudden way that would explain DF's popularity on HN falling off of a cliff.
HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.
(FWIW: While I do generally enjoy DF, my interest here is primarily in understanding HN. I read HN probably 5-10 times a day, whereas I read DF perhaps 5-10 times per month. The near-absence of DF on HN doesn't affect me at all.)
He did start to write a lot about US politics,
which for me is enough to stop reading his blog.
That makes complete sense to me. It would take only a very few "major turn-off" articles to make me remove a blog from my feed and/or stop visiting it directly. Even a 1% incidence of such posts could cause that blog to lose 100% of my traffic.
However, that doesn't adequately explain DF articles' swift removal from HN's front page.
On HN's page front page I'd expect article links to sink or swim based entirely on their own individual merit.
Have you looked into the linked article? That's not what gruber is questioning.
1. Obviously, a political article on DF is a poor fit
2. But DF's non-political articles are also seemingly pooplisted, even ones that are clearly relevant to HN's audience
3. There have been quite a few political articles from other sites that have gotten traction on DF without being pooplisted
yeah I dunno it doesn't add up to me. i'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything. perhaps it is just users flagging his articles and not some concerted moderator action.
(Just to be clear, I'm only interested in this from a perspective of understanding HN, which is a de facto barometer of "which way the wind is blowing" in tech and has a looooot of influence in our industry. If HN moderators are steering that influence far more than is previously known, that's huge.)
That really does not follow, for a couple of reasons.
One:
As Gruber freely admits, maybe his writing just sucks now or HN's interests have shifted away from DF.
This is entirely plausible but if this is the case we'd expect a more gradual decrease of DF engagement on HN and not an abrupt and near-total cessation.
Two:
I do not think that the popularity of "organic" traffic to a website correlates strongly with the engagement on HN. Glance at the HN home page, and what do you see? The overwhelming majority of links are to domains that get an order of magnitude less traffic than DF. The current top two:
- Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees (caryinstitute.org) (98 points)
- Architecture Patterns with Python (cosmicpython.com) (369 points)
Here's Similarweb's estimates for traffic to the following domains from 12/24 through 2/25.
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know? Like if the number of high quality, original (many DF posts are just links to content elsewhere), about tech articles is down 90%, then of course his article performance here will be down 90%. And that's before considering that Apple itself may have become less interesting and his writing skills may have slipped (reading too much politics on social media rots the brain, Google Elon Musk to find out more).
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know?
It's easy to answer, right? I scrolled down the front page starting at today while watching some opening day baseball. I generally like DF so I was curious if I was just being biased.
I counted:
- 25 articles squarely about tech
- 7 about politics, though it should be noted that I counted articles about the Signal leak in this category even though they certainly do involve technology
- 6 that I considered "in the middle"; mostly about Apple's technical choices w.r.t. navigating EU legislation
- 3 "meta" articles about DF sponsorships, podcast links, etc
So yeah, nowhere near "90% less tech articles." Discarding the latter two categories it's 78% tech coverage. And it's not like he was ever 100% tech coverage. It's clearly not sufficient to explain his stuff getting insta-shitcanned off off of HN's front page, and he was getting shitcanned before Trump was elected in 2016 and he ramped up the politics.
In Jan 2025 his archive has 13 articles. 5 were about Trump. One about Pebble was more link than original content. His archive for Jan 2014, Jan 2015, and Jan 2016 is 100% tech. Going from 100% quality content to 54% is a big drop. I'm sure you could get different results focusing on different time periods, but there's a clear shift away from Apple.
So here's a question- if John himself is a lot less interested in Apple, and now prefers to discuss Trump or sports, perhaps Apple is a lot less interesting? I still follow it closely, but I no longer try to discuss WWDC or the September events with people I know because generally there's nothing that affects them. Their Apple devices work fine and the improvements aren't big enough to discuss with non-enthusiats. Apple is still a great company, but like IBM and Microsoft before, Apple is no longer the center of innovation.
Per the article, DF started getting (seemingly) disappeared from HN over a decade ago.
Before the years in which you cited his posts were still 100% tech.
So, to recap: your hypothesis is that a perceived shift in focus in January 2025 retroactively affected his placement on HN in previous decades? Does this involve time travel?
The MBP mic is generally preferable to most headset boom mics in my experience with good noise reduction. You also get the benefit of not picking up extraneous mouth noises (gum chewing, coffee slurping, whatever)
I feel like 99% of people I conference with use regular headphones + MBP mic
Main problem with that setup is not being able to hear your own voice in the headphones (feedback, or whatever that's called) which can be annoying sometimes if using NC headphones
It's called sidetone. Headsets do it so your ears don't feel clogged and to avoid subconscious yelling.
Some headsets let you adjust it either through a regular Sidetone volume control or some dedicated app. Soundcards also often have this feature in the form of a Mic output volume control, done in hardware to reduce latency.
A significant difference in headset quality is in sidetone latency. The heavier the DSP processing required to get a reasonable mic output, the harder it is to hit latency targets. Headset SoCs have dedicated hardware for this - a user-space solution like Apple pulls on their laptops would not be able to meet a usable latency target.
> Another benefit is not paying the '90s GSM handsfree BT profile codec pain
LE Audio includes the LC3 codec, solving this once and for all.
In the meantime while this rolls out, various alternate codecs exist that are fairly widely supported. This is especially true when using fancier headsets with a dedicated bluetooth dongle as they have more flexibility when it comes to codecs and compatibility.
Actually my complaint relates to open office designs, the macbook mic picks up louder people from across the room. So if I do use headphones and the MBP mic, other people will hear random noise blurbs from anywhere in the office .
I don't think I recall having a meeting with anyone using plain headphones with the laptop mic instead of a headset of some kind. Wired headphones without a mic are somewhat unusual nowadays to begin with outside audio file circles.
AirPods of various versions is common, as is many other buds. Enterprise headsets like those from EPOS (the old Sennheiser Communication) and Jabra (with or without boom) and speakerphones are common in corporate settings, casual headsets (e.g., Sony, Bose) and wired gaming headsets are common at home.
Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here
Could the author of this package comment on this statement? I'd be really interested in their opinion of their speaker implementation.
What's overly complicated there? The hardware? The software?
As a MBP user and hobbyist audio guy I've been really impressed with the implementation of those speakers, particularly on the larger MBP models.
But I'm just a hobbyist and don't have any knowledge of them other than the driver arrangement (tweeter + dual opposed woofers). It certainly seems like they're pulling the same tricks used by "good" bluetooth speaker designers in order to wring acceptable perf and bass extension from teeny tiny speakers (adaptive EQ etc)
Getting reasonable speaker support in Asahi Linux was a big deal. Part of the problem is that limiting the power usage to prevent overheating requires sophisticated DSP. Without that, you get very limited volume output within safe limits.
"Modern" speaker design is all about software, it's super interesting.
In some ways speaker design is all about trying to cheat "Hoffman's Iron Law": bass, efficiency, and compact size.... you can only have 2 of the 3.
Part of it (as we know thanks to Asahi's work) is that you are varying a lot of speaker parameters dynamically. For example at low volumes you can dump extra energy into the bass frequencies. But at increasingly higher volumes you need to limit that. To get really dynamic you need to know not just the user's volume setting but like, real time spectral analysis of the actual program material
A speaker designer from 50 years ago would not be impressed with a modern pair of $500 or $1000 bookshelf speakers, those have barely changed. But they would be absolutely astonished at how some semblance of performance has been extracted from teeny tiny speakers on a Mac laptop or a high quality bluetooth speaker
> Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here
It is just a reference that Apple Laptop speakers have been waaay above anything the competition uses - and this is true since multiple generations. Had a MBP from 2014 and multiple friends were astonished about the sound when we watched a movie on the go. Same with the M4 MBP - sounds quality from the speaker is at a level that you probably don't actually need.
I feel like this must be some kind of a language barrier thing - the dev’s name appears to be Spanish, so English may not be their native language. And I think that most native English speakers - as demonstrated by multiple comments asking about it in this thread - would interpret “trying too hard to be fancy” as implying “because you can get similar high-quality results without using such sophisticated techniques”; but it seems like you’re saying (and this makes sense) they meant “because getting such high-quality results is overkill for a consumer laptop”.
Language is fascinating - I can convince myself with enough effort that the latter is just as valid as the former, given the literal meaning of the words, but my linguistic intuition is screaming at me that it’s wrong. How does someone ever learn that? How would a textbook ever explain it?
Agree with you, I was confused why everybody else interpreted in a different way. Am not spanish but german and not a native speaker, so the language barrier thing might be a good explanation.
> It is just a reference that Apple Laptop speakers have been waaay above anything the competition uses
More like the opposite. The MacBook speakers are absolutely rubbish, just like all laptop speakers (there's only so much you can do when constrained to a laptop body). The reason why MacBooks sound good is entirely god-tier signal processing which manages to extract extraordinary performance out of some decidedly very ordinary speakers.
Not sure what you are saying (or just ranting?) - MBP speaker are the opposite as in the rest of non-apple Laptops have way better sounding speakers? That is definetely not my experience at all.
If they are all rubish together, well, they are laptop speakers - and as such you have to treat them. Still there is nothing preventing some set of laptop speakers being objectively better than others.
They're saying that the physical speakers inside the MacBooks body are not what makes them sound good (and that the physical speakers are on par with other manufacturers) — it's the fancy, custom post-processing that does.
2Quote from their own link: "In the case of Apple Silicon machines, Apple has taken things one step further by including actually good speakers on most modern Macs"
In my experience MBP 2015 sound is pretty thin and high frequencies are prone to clipping at even a moderate volume – soprano vocal parts suffer from this quite a bit. Of course for most uses that’s not a big problem and I’m sure the sound is still much better than that of many other laptops though. But the M series MBP speakers are a crazy improvement.
Similarly they can't be used very effectively without special, complex software that involves physical simulation of the speaker hardware. Doing things this way allows them to reach an amazing level of compactness + volume, but at the cost of complexity
If Apple intended to support platform openness, they'd likely have made such software available to hackers. But they never enthusiastically encouraged that, so people like the Asahi team are left to reverse-engineer and reinvent everything they need that lives in software
It seems like a good choice. It’s computationally extremely light and you can update it much more easily with new features (they actually did this once - to let you change the beamforming mode in the menu bar)
It is also notoriously time sensitive however, and while likely the hardware can already ensure the synchronization between mics, processing in the OS itself necessarily means buffering for a significant period so you don't run the risk of draining the pipe in a non-realtime system.
That's not at all the takeaway. macOS has the requisite software built-in; the hardware is designed in such a way that it requires software assistance to function, which is a choice that has advantages and disadvantages. The OP exists for situations where you aren't running Apple's own beamforming software on this hardware (to my understanding)
I don't think that's really fair here? The comment suggests the hardware doesn't work well without relatively complex software to support it, which seems to be the case on macos. That suggests the software group are keeping up their end at least.
I have a feeling that this package is for folks that want to run Linux distros on the laptops, and have access to the same capabilities as native MacOS.
I'm confused too. These days, "spatial audio" on speakers (different from on headphones) and beamforming mics is starting to feel standard, at least on premium hardware.
Dumb, noisy, cramped, unbalanced audio just doesn't cut it anymore.
if you think fake 5.1ch sounds better, not like better for enjoying action movies, you've never had exposure to a >$99 pair of bookshelf speakers with a non-USB powered class D amp. change my mind.
This is about laptop speakers that just pass audio directly through, vs. laptop speakers that process the audio including spatially. Yes, it sounds dramatically better. And it's not just about "fake 5.1" but even just mono or stereo.
External speakers are a totally different conversation.
It seems very clear to me that the feedback loop is utterly broken in all democracies.
Two big reasons:
1: It's incredibly difficult to judge the effects of an elected leader's actions. Even assuming an educated/informed/engaged populace, there's nearly always an extremely long delay between an elected leader's actions and the results of those actions.
2: Even when the results of the actions are very tangible, it's still extremely difficult to assign credit or blame for the outcome.
A prime example would be the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Americans can tangibly experience the outcome of the ACA and form their own opinions. However, the final product is objectively quite different from what Obama and the Democrats initially wanted.
So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions? To make an informed decision here you need to know "how the sausage was made" and you're also comparing the actual outcome versus a number of hypothetical roads not taken.
It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too
misaligned with a large share of the population.
I think, at best, in America we've basically just achieved a kind of schizophrenic perpetual see-saw between parties that has almost nothing to do with how effectively either one governs. Which is I guess slightly better than having one party perpetually in power forever, but is not great.
It precludes any kind of long-term thinking, or stable relationships with other nations.
> So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions?
Classic class warfare at work.
Here you stand, trying to blame 1 of the political parties, when the people responsible for ACA were company boards of health insurance companies and any other front-men of large business interests (doctor cartels, medical supply companies etc.)
In the US, both parties are captive to large business interests, with mostly non-overlapping areas of interest.
In almost all cases, you should be looking very closely at large business interests and elect leaders who have shown strong anti-trust tendencies and understand how the social contract works.
Well, when a party has lost an election, what's supposed to happen is they spend the next several years figuring out what the people actually want. (Or, more cynically, at least what the people want to hear.) That's where the feedback gets listened to - when they're out of power.
It’s been longer than a few months. Biden actively snubbed multiple high ranking dignitaries and even world leaders during his presidency, avoiding them due to his advanced mental decline. Multiple countries, such as Hungary, France, and even Germany, saw the waning relevance of US power and allied themselves with Russia, or in France’s case wishes to disassociate from NATO and have Europe handle its own military separate from the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies