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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.

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?

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).

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.

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.