Altman is an idealist?

I read this as: I know ads are likely if not inevitable but I can’t say that while I’m trying to gain users and inspire trust but I’ll start to float even in this non-denial the justification for the thing I’m ultimately going to do.

Altman wanting to look idealistic and inspiring.

See it as a brand image advertising campaign of the time.

That may be the point. Simple inflation adjustment gives us x but the real price is more or less than x. Why is that?

> Simple inflation adjustment gives us x but the real price is more or less than x. Why is that?

Restaurant economics are a function of ingredient costs and labour. I suspect ingredient costs are close to OP's estimated multiples. But real wages are way up since the 1950s. Anything with a large labour component of costs will have tended to rise faster than inflation, which is an average of goods and services.

(There are specialised metrics if you actually wanted to dig into this question.)

Are you saying the prices listed were just for the ingredients and not the actual cost to the person ordering? They mentioned they saw the price in a photo which suggest it is what the person would be charged. I get that labor costs would cause an increase of raw ingredient price comparisons for total prices. But if you could pay buy a burger for a nickel but now need $10, there is a definite issue in just a "simple" adjustment that suggests you'd only need $5. If the numbers are that far off because the simple needs to be more advanced, what's the point of the simple numbers? Bad data is worse than no data.

> Are you saying the prices listed were just for the ingredients and not the actual cost to the person ordering?

Sorry, no. I'm saying labour is probably a larger fraction of the burger's costs today than it was in the 1950s. (I'd naively guess profits are, too.)

That may be true, but I suspect that it’s also hard to compare apples to apples. A burger in 1959 is hard to compare to a burger today. Today’s burger almost certainly has twice as much meat. The invention of (and ubiquitous advertising of) the quarter–pounder means that everyone had to make their burgers larger to match. Sides are larger, drinks are larger, etc, etc.

But labor costs certainly have gone up too.

This would be a genuinly-interesting bit of analysis for someone to do. (Also do the patty melt!)

Inflation is a measure of change in overall purchasing power.

What a specific purchase costs is highly dependant on the inputs, the cost of its labour (which might grow faster or slower than the average wage), and a lot of other factors.

Food is way more expensive today than it was 50 years ago. Airplane tickets are way cheaper. Everyone has a cellphone now, and middle class families have multiple cars, but a trip to the doctor will mean that ~15% of the population will be on the verge of not paying their bills. On the other hand, I have access to ~every major piece of music ever made for ~$15/month, so that's something.

You’d have to go company-wide to sync schedules and norms. Not just opt in. Many would not like a 20% pay cut. The best talent would disproportionately leave.

Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.

Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?

Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!

> Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?

> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time

Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.

Isn’t it both - ROI must exceed whatever cost benchmark?

"..is more of a function of cash flow potential "

"more of".

If you wanna finesse the discount rate by a few percentage points go ahead. Cash flows contribute more toward the end value number.

in b4 some numpty writes about the fed changing a market set rate.

Not if the actual vs stated reasons for the layoffs have nothing to do with AI.

As you note, most people aren’t power users. That core functionality is enough for 80%+ of users.

Even I, a definite though intermittent power user, am fine with the Google versions most of the time.

Collaboration also just feels faster in Google.

They let others run that costly costly costly race. It's not where Apple is most competitive.

We in the US can't hide forever.

Forever is a long time.

Once FSD, we will make rules about the software that will have the effect of excluding Chinese companies. I seriously doubt that I'll see Chinese cars here in my lifetime.

Cool, we can be like Cuba except we did it to ourselves

I read this as: how you can motivate yourself to do something you're currently not motivated to do but "ultimately" believe is worth doing.

I’m not in those communities anymore, but is stem separation not legit useful?

Kinda? The biggest thing is that it's been done by so many other places already that it's sort of a waste of time to spend any time on it when there's already a number of other services. It doesn't really fit into the rest of the design and purpose of Bitwig, so it would really just be a gimmick, or at least seen as one by the core community.

Also, they're sort of an legal-ethics dilemma in that The only time you would really use stim separation is if you don't have the stems already, and therefore almost certainly don't have clearance and can't really use them for anything commercial. Probably not as big of a concern but definitely something to consider.

Really the big one is that a lot the creative online community and especially the kind of community around Bitwig has a pretty strong opinion against generative AI, which includes things like stem separation.

Still strange to advertise it as a feature. Only reason I can see essentially would be virtue signaling to people who are afraid or mad at AI

It wasn't advertised by the company. The post is a third party reporting news about Bitwig and inserted its own opinion.

I've never actually seen Bitwig the company refer to "AI" in any capacity, probably be cause it's not relevant to what they do or make, so no "virtue signalling".

The third party reporting site is maybe the one doing the virtual signaling.

I think it is, before it was built into Logic I had a little script setup that would use Meta Demucs. I would use it on my own tracks so I could remix (especially old ones which I had no stems for). It’s also great for sampling and experimentation

I'd expect most cases of stem separation to be handled well by applying specialized software to source music, exporting the stems as audio files, and importing them as individual tracks or samples in the DAW. Are there workflows that benefit from integrating stem separation in a DAW?

It's like a lot of other feature; ease of use. Imagine your DAW only supports import of wav files, you could argue that there are already services / programs that convert * to .wav, so no need to implement that. But if it's build in not only is it one less program to install, it's also convenient.