I'll take one idiotic state senator's public bill that'll never pass over hundreds of government employees colluding with big tech in the shadows to ban speech.
The performance is better than it was at that time. At that time performance was the #1 item for improvement on their roadmap.
I currently pay for Notion and I don't usually mind the performance. However, things like opening a new window and changing it to a new document with the "quick" search (command-p) is still almost unacceptably slow (it's an Electron app). The benefits for me do outweigh the costs though.
I've never seen native apps anywhere in their stated plans.
Native vs electron is probably not the thing that makes notion slow - AFAIK (last used notion ~2 years ago) everything has to go through the web, nothing is local, and the performance bottleneck is their server.
Funny seeing Pd randomly on the front page of HN! I once (a LONG time ago) built a browser-based GUI for a remote Pd server: https://github.com/t3db0t/PureeData
Audio is real-time and performance is everything. Freezing tracks should take the least amount of time possible and no skipping should occur unless you are using the most complex modular VST out there. With WASM being like 1/3 of native and having extremely limited SIMD support I would probably expect it to not work at all for serious work.
Quite frankly, even native performance is often not enough.
That said, I can see it being relevant for learning audio, synthesis and how signal processing works. And of course, just for fun!
Source: Worked with DAWs for a decade. Also currently writing a paper on the role of native performance.
I’ve played around with ableton before- im wondering what are the high-level aspects of a DAW that take up that compute? Off the top of my head if you have like 10 channels of synths, what in there is super intensive? What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so expensive?
It's not the high level aspects, but the low level ones.
Audio DSP is doing a lot of math. CPUs are good at it, sure, but modern synths and effects are legitimately pushing up against how much math a CPU core can evaluate in the few milliseconds you have to render (in the worst case, low latency realtime rendering time is actually dominated not by how much DSP you can do, but how long it takes to move audio from userland to kernel and out to the hardware and back).
Some of the DSP algorithms are really hard to optimize with SIMD, in fact most of the common audio DSP operations can't be trivially converted to SIMD forms (and when they are, they aren't N times faster for N more lanes). Filters are especially tricky because converting the math from one form to another changes the topology of the signal flow, which is only equivalent in the steady-state of non-linear and time-invariant filters. DAWs are using non-linear time variant filters that are being modulated in realtime, so your super fast SIMD optimized biquads might not sound as good as the converted SVF that can't be trivially optimized (there are tricks, but it's a game of tradeoffs).
And there's the other aspect of the scene that there's just a lot of bad or naive code out there. There is a lot of know-how floating around, but a lot of tools are designed by folks without it to begin with. That's a good thing because it makes a lot of interesting and cool tools, but it also means that institutional knowledge is kind of locked away. It doesn't help that some of the largest examples for newcomers (JUCE's DSP module, RAFX/Aspik with the accompanying text), as well as classic (and new!) textbooks teach people to do things in the least performant way possible, and those algorithms make it into production.
Thanks for the informative comment. Are there resources you would recommend for learning more about performant algorithms? At the moment I'm just messing around with JUCE
> you have like 10 channels of synths, what in there is super intensive
The synth itself. Samplers, hardware emulations, and effects can eat a lot of memory and CPU, to say nothing of a monster 100+ voice synth patch (very easy to achieve with unison, used in supersaw-type sounds)
> What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so expensive?
Freezing tracks means recording the output of that track to a WAV and using that output as a stand-in for the real thing. Freezing tracks isn't expensive, it's what you use when another plug-in is too expensive and you want to reduce your CPU load.
The most charitable interpretation of "broken culture" would be America, across all slices of society, has trended towards selfish shallow values, less intellectual interests and value on hard work, more aggression and an empathy defecit.
I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.
This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.
An analogy I heard is that there is no single American culture. Or even an "American Culture" at all, and that there probably shouldn't be one. And that various powers/forces/etc have tried to homogenize America into a shared American Culture which can't possibly exist. So, the analogy is America is like a soda machine that has many different flavors of soda and each of them is different and unique and loved by different people. Some flavors disgust some people too and they don't want it. However, we've decided to mix them all together anyways and no one actually likes that. So instead we'd be better off leaving each other alone, allowing different communities with different values to do things the way they want to and to rely less and less on Federal government oversight into social issues. Give more power to the states and in turn the states give more power to localities.
Wholeheartedly agree with your analogy. Americans share a federal political system, but not much of a collective culture, at least not too far beyond that shared by liberal societies around the world. It's one of the best thing about the states. You're 100% right that the Federal govt should step back to allow local government to handle issues differently. Local people care about local people and understand their needs/concerns.
That's it's considered acceptable for kids to be born into situations like this. This is "broken" because it reliably leads to failure and undesirable outcomes.
You’re making a lot of strong assumptions when you say that it’s considered acceptable. I strongly doubt that it is normal for anyone to want to be a single parent (there are of course anecdotal exceptions to this, but not on a cultural level).
This is great, and it made me realize I had started doing something similar recently: when I become anxious about something, say money, I ask myself: are my kids healthy and safe? The answer, so far, has always been yes, and that calms me down immediately.
