Are there alternatives to Netflix? Amazon Prime certainly isn't. Serious question - especially for German audience. I would like something with older and more niche movies. F.x. on Netflix Germany neither is nor ever was a Fellini flick ... actually "Federico Fellini" is not even suggested upon searching for "Fellini".
Time for moonshine again then, because you're not getting it any other way. I work in TV and Film industry (also in Europe) and there's just no way, no service, which will give you things you're after. Probably all of my peers pirate, it's the way it is. I even pirate my own content, because it's more convenient then asking for a master copy and getting it from the archive. No one loses any money out of it. Industry knows that. Netflix did damage to the industry and to themselves though. Lynda Obst talks about it here (how Netflix did damage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg
I wrote, in detail, several times here why Netflix and similar will never (in foreseeable future) crack the code with their business model in this industry. And no, you can't draw analogies with music and games. It's a vastly different business, even though it might seem it's not.
I have a Netfilx account and yet torrent all their stuff because I watch on my monitor and can't stand watching videos on a browser. I don't watch Youtube on a browser either.
Using stuff like Radarr/Sonarr/Jackett/... makes for a higher quality experience.
Chinese here. How do you guys reconcile your own torrenting, usage of sci-hub etc with the tendency to portray us as monsters for "theft of American intellectual property"?
I'm granting that we did (and on a large enough scale) for the sake of argument.
Is the idea that it's okay to steal so long as it's stealing from the rich and powerful (netflix, disney, record labels whatever)? If so, do you see how that argument might be something we can also appeal to?
(I would add "genuinely curious", but I feel it's become a device not for canceling for but for indicating sarcasm, so I won't do it)
I don't think normal Americans would portray you as monsters for this. Of course, the MPAA and RIAA would complain, since it is their business.
There are other types of intellectual property that are much more likely to upset normal Americans. This includes trade secrets, trademarks, and possibly patents. Trade secrets are stolen by hacking, by forcing American companies to give them up in exchange for market access, and by employees who fail to abide by non-disclosure agreements. Trademarks are stolen by simply making clones, or sometimes by unauthorized operation of a legitimate factory in China. For example, I have a USB power adapter marked "SAMSUNG" that clearly isn't made by Samsung. This is very common, and these devices often catch fire or damage the electronics that are attached. Patents can sometimes be an issue, with Chinese companies able to evade enforcement.
When USA was new, we were a bastion of creativity. We didn't acknowledge the Old Country's laws on intellectual property, and we were the better for it. Things were crazy; you did stuff and you didn't let someone else that the thing in your head had ownership by someone else. There was a long period in which our goods were beneath European quality.
Not much time passes, and new and unique things were made here. The regime for patent/copyright protection got just as authoritarian and wicked in protecting 'stuff'. Hollywood was one such case - in which the devices to make movies was patented and the company that made them wanted their cut. The escape to California was to avoid those fees.
Again, China's been playing the same long game. "Rip off others' IP, allow extreme growth by being very liberal with copyright/patent, and eventually playing very protectionist once the economy is stable and advanced". This isn't anything unique with China, or the US, or anyone else.
> How do you guys reconcile your own torrenting,
Because once a country hits the protectionist point, they usually go way overboard and stifle all sorts of things. It pisses people off - is it really piracy if you buy a blu-ray and download it? Is it really piracy if you download a turd film and delete it? There's a lot of edge cases that are called piracy which in reality aren't. It's just called that cause Disney et al have lobbied to call it that.
Also, as I have gotten more money, I have been more willing to pay for media. When I was poorer, I was spending perhaps $10 for a ticket per every 6 months to a movie.
> usage of sci-hub etc
Sci-hup and "academic piracy" is a whole different ballgame. Predatory firms have put paywalls in place that alienate the creators of the papers, the reviewers of the papers, and the academics who use the papers, for $37 a paper. These predatory firms add nothing, and deserve to die. But again, this is completely different than movie/tv/music media.
> with the tendency to portray us as monsters
Humans have a bad tendency to 'otherize' people. See, you're Chinese, and not in my peer group, so my decisions have little effect on you. I can also have a poor opinion of you (having not even know you!) and people in my peer group don't care too much.
And it happens the other way around. Americans (USA) are horrible aggressors and evil empire and bad. Lots of places agree with that. But they don't know me, my friends, or my social groups. And in the end, other people 'otherize' the US, knowing what happens in DC isn't what we're like where we live.
It's best to think of this as "out of sight, out of mind, out of emotion". Because it is all too easy to consider someone else on a different point on this planet as "monsters". Eventually, we'll change that; although I think the internet like here is doing the ground work.
i usually try to materialize a hot chick and have sex ... afterwards i tend to blame myself for not having used the opportunity for constructive self-inspection.
i usually drink a glass of water with a little bit of table salt. it's more isotonic and therefore more refreshing. the benefit is even more sensible when i do sports. fewer or no muscle spasms/jittering because the minerals of the salt improve nerve signaling.
I wouldn't be "offended" by others playing with nerf guns but certainly annoyed ... but I would be offended if others would involve me in this pretty infantile and sub-radar-bullying pastime. who do you think is going to get shot at on a regular basis? but of course it's just fun - right?
and no - repetitive exposure to sexualized remarks without positive feedback is sexual harassment.
and I am saying that as a European guy who is slightly infamous for very direct and obvious flirting - even at work. but as soon as I get a rejection - even a polite one - I'm going to just accept it and move on.
guys like you make work life a terrible experience for others by forcing your idea of fun on them. you should hope to never meet a guy like me b/c that's not going to be a fun experience for you in the end.
>I wouldn't be "offended" by others playing with nerf guns but certainly annoyed ... but I would be offended if others would involve me in this pretty infantile and sub-radar-bullying pastime. who do you think is going to get shot at on a regular basis?
Everybody and nobody in particular?
>and I am saying that as a European guy who is slightly infamous for very direct and obvious flirting - even at work. but as soon as I get a rejection - even a polite one - I'm going to just accept it and move on.
Well, you could have been fired multiple times in the US just for this, so there's that.
Have you checked out this "very direct and obvious flirting" against more HR departments? Or because that's where you draw the line you're OK, but anything else suggested by other people is bad (like e.g. complimenting someone on their looks, or telling a "dirty" joke among colleagues).
>guys like you make work life a terrible experience for others by forcing your idea of fun on them
"Like me"? I guess you felt free to infer that since I'm giving an argument against puritanically singling out sexual expression from various spheres of life I must be some pervert. Which is like believing that no vegan should ever argue in favor of others being able to eat meat...
>you should hope to never meet a guy like me b/c that's not going to be a fun experience for you in the end
Oh, and physical threats. Yeah, because sexual talk between colleagues is bad, but violence is fine. Typical anglosaxon puritanism (even if from a European), the kind that pushes all sorts of violence on tv, but goes into moral outrage about Janet Jackson's nip slip...
that you interprete that as a physical threat tells more about you than me. I'm certainly not getting physical against anybody at work or pretty much anywhere else ... I'm talking about standing up against bullying by verbal or legal means.
Yeah, because "you should hope to never meet a guy like me b/c that's not going to be a fun experience for you in the end" is so open to various interpretations, right?
I guess the "tells more about you than me" part is also not an attempt at cheap pop psychology ad hominem either, I just interpreted it as such....
whiteboard tests are always going to produce fuzzy red and white flags. those will come handy later when it gets to assessing the applicant based on sympathy and arbitrary objective arguments are required to back whatever the interviewer wants to conclude.
now we don't need stand-ups. couple of months ago they were the best since sliced bread. in job interviews i still get asked every time how often we do stand-ups - right after whether my team is lean, agile or design thinking. good lord have mercy ...
i had very bad experiences 1st and 2nd hand with Acer, though. unprovoked crashes, WiFi not working without significant research and fiddling. multiple models.
I can travel in my mind by reading and meditating.
Actual traveling is mostly just an excuse to distract oneself from exploring one's own inner unknown territory.
I never gained anything by visiting a new place b/c at the end of the day everything is pretty much the same. Of course it is exciting and I also totally enjoy it - but real growth is not dependent on that at all.
i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented.
my impression is that this is coming up every couple of years but nobody so far succeeded at actually producing a system that gains meaningful popularity. not to mention how difficult it was too compile/set up the software for the various projects i have tried.
another problem is that very few YouTube tutorials showcase rythms and melodies going beyond something resembling a ping pong match on speed.
I think the relative lack of a strong community around programmable music generation probably originates from a lack of a particularly good use case. To me, as both a programmer and an electronic music producer, applications like Sonic Pi and Supercollider are not all that appealing, and actually come off as downright tedious.
First of all, music creation is too chaotic a process to allow for simply getting things right on the first try. Single notes in arpeggios are changed, entire progressions are taken up and down steps, parameters are continuously played with until you find the right levels, and all of these and more are much better suited to graphical abstraction purely for ease of use. I'd much rather spin a virtual knob to find appropriate levels than type and re-type a variable quantity, especially if I have to wait for that quantity to update every time.
Second, music is all about edge cases. Using control flows to automatically change a piece is nice, but not as nice as quickly rearranging tracks in a visual playlist. Deciding that a particular loop should end in a different way is simple in a visual editor: cut off the tail and put something else in, or make one instance of the loop separate from the others and edit in place. These are processes that take less than a second for me, but would involve careful crafting of conditionals to achieve in Sonic Pi or the like.
All of that said, I think this approach probably has its merits. I've been wishing for scripting in DAWs for a long time, and having a synthesizer that supports writing code to modify waveforms or change how parameters link would be awesome (if this exists, someone please tell me). Projects like Sonic Pi, though, seem to take this past the point of usability.
>> "I've been wishing for scripting in DAWs for a long time, and having a synthesizer that supports writing code to modify waveforms or change how parameters link would be awesome (if this exists, someone please tell me). Projects like Sonic Pi, though, seem to take this past the point of usability."
Reaper has a scripting language. It even comes with a few synths written in it, complete with source.
I want a DAW with the flexibility of Reaper and the UX of Ableton.
If you spring for the full Max4Live Ableton package, you can automate quite a lot via the maxmsp JavaScript object, which gives you scripting access to the Live environment vis the LiveAPI object. It’s kind of an awkward API to use but still much nicer than using the traditional graphical max objects.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, I still wonder what's the difference to graphics. Is drawing easier, for lack of a better word, than gfx-programming? I would argue this comparison is apt and yours falls flat. B flat.
For starters, you could have a skeleton of a script with accessible parameters, given knobs. That would look like a DAW, except for text instead of pseudo design with screws and LCDs that mimic real objects (skeumorphic). Yes, you want buttons, visual programming still sucks. Demo coders like Farbrausch program their own demo tools, eg. Werkkzeug 3, for exactly that reason, isn't it? Considering gfx programming as the comparison, of course textures, models and so on are modeled in an analogue fashion. Nobody programs a human.md3 to evolve from an embryo for fun, but in principle, somewhen it could be done. Music is a lot like vector graphic art, you can do a whole lot with simple shapes and gradients. And you can program complicated sound effects perhaps easier than as a 5 second loop rendered to wav and pitched by the DAW, if you know what I mean.
Note composition as you remark is especially besides the point. The drone noise perspective might be an extremely misleading example, but music programming should be able to paint outside the classical frame. It should allow to define sweet points of resonance, instead of chasing harmony by ear. This does require deep understanding, so instead I'm happy with finger painting ... because it's so close to the metal, err, paper.
It's very sad because I have no idea of the potential. Composition to me is choosing an instrument and arbitrating simple known melodies to complexer ones until it sounds harmonious thanks to obeying the circle of fifths, but that's mostly it and mostly rather superficial, which doesn't matter as long as the instruments sounds niceand if it doesn't I'll split the melody by octaves e.g. and choose two different instruments, alter the octaves to get a high contrast (shout out to my man). Because of the loop nature of pattern based composition, I am mostly not interested in arrangement. This again compares to shader programming. And even big studios basically just stitch together single scenes. ... yadda yadda yadda.
You might also compare the violin to the voice. Far more people can or think they could sing. Making the violin sing is just much more complicated, but not exactly boring.
> I've been wishing for scripting in DAWs for a long time, and having a synthesizer that supports writing code to modify waveforms or change how parameters link would be awesome (if this exists, someone please tell me).
I'm working on a DAW that you can live-code with JS and math expressions if you're interested: https://ossia.io
C++ just-in-time compilation of sound effects is coming in the few next months (JS just does not cut it for real-time audio with per-sample access).
Music coding is conceptually challenging, which immediately limits the community of interest to people who like coding for its own sake, and not usually very rewarding musically, which limits the community further to academics, students who are forced to experiment with code (usually briefly), and the odd hobby experimentalist.
Given all the other tools available, from DAWS to trackers to VSTs to hardware synths, why would a musician - as opposed to a coder - want to climb the incredibly steep learning curve?
Music production with ableton and the like is programming. All the synths and effects are functions operating on a signal and the various knobs and sliders control parameters.
There should be a special name for this fallacy, because it occurs so often on HN.
Just because a domain looks a bit like a trivial mathematical operation to mathematically inclined outsiders doesn't mean that the math really is trivial, or even that the real core of the domain is best summarised as a trivial mapping.
interesting that you come forward with music resulting from this approach as not being very rewarding. but why is that so? I'm not a musician, so maybe I'm naive - but shouldn't music programming be able to produce anything and beyond?
I have a much longer comment above that addresses your point, I think. The gist is this: programming music, as compared to using a graphical DAW, is highly tedious. Unless you know exactly what you want, down to the note, writing music in code would take far longer to produce results.
I've been thinking about the differences a lot, and the basic problem is a misunderstanding of what music is.
To a coder, music looks like a sequence of instructions that make sounds, so of course it's natural to assume that it's just like code. Music is a series of events, so let's write code that makes a series of events. How hard can it be?
To a musician, music is tactile, improvisatory, and sculpted. It's nothing like code. At all.
Even if you're using a DAW with a mouse, you're still shifting elements around in time and sculpting fine nuances of the the sound with controller curves.
So code is a terrible UI for music, and live code is even worse. You have to spend so much time on irrelevant distractions - creating buffers, managing objects, iterating through arrays - that there's almost no connection left between the sounds that are being made and your expressive intent.
So live coding only works if your expressive intent is trite and lacking nuance and depth. The only people who do it are hobby coders and a small community of academics who are trying to sell it as a valid revolutionary activity.
Interestingly trackers, which are by far the most successful coding environment for music, also have the lowest conceptual overhead.
Yea thats a problem for all of the most popular livecoding libs (tidal and sonic pi depend on supercollider). One alternative is to use js (gibber.js) and doing livecoding in the browser. I've been playing with the idea of creating this lib that uses ruby and compiles to js under the hood: https://github.com/merongivian/negasonic, one drawback is performance though
Having tried both Gibber.js and Tone.js I would give the edge to Tone.js - less crackles and pops and generally more a more stable bridge to the Web Audio Api. Give it a look if you like.
> Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/oct/...
- Fandor: only US and CAN
- Mubi: also Germany
- Filmstruck: not Germany
- Yaddo: apparently worldwide
(skipped what didn't appeal to me)