My strong suggestion to you: pivot to hardware. I still use Ruby but most of my development efforts are ESP32-P4 and RP2350-based these days.

Learning CAD and mastering various additive and subtractive fabrication techniques, getting PCBs made to make ideas real... it's been a roller coaster but LLMs are remarkably good as engineering mentors these days.

And yes, as several others have already said, this might be the time to learn woodworking and/or video production skills.

You'll find that you still need your programming brain, instincts and intuitions. You just deploy them in a different way in support of creating a device instead of an experience [or yet another CRUD form].

Absolutely nothing you're saying is in good faith. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing.

So, no: you don't have my permission. You haven't earned it.

Tell me: when someone says that the shit hit the fan, do you furiously start looking around for actual shit?

Sometimes we have work to do.

I'm well aware that there's nearly infinite opportunities to yak shave "perfect" OpenRouter setups and some people appear to enjoy bouncing from IDE to IDE as though change costs aren't a thing, but I discovered that I genuinely like Cursor and at least right now it's insanely subsidized by Auto clearly defaulting to whatever Grok's most powerful model is.

I dropped my $200/month subscription to $20/month and stick to Auto for all but really important Plan tasks, and I have basically zero chance of using up my monthly credits even using it 6-10 hours some days.

There's a recurring pattern on HN where any time someone talks about knocking dozens of personal projects off their list - things that almost certainly would never have actually been addressed in the finite span of a normal life, the way things go - and you AI doomers show up and demand receipts as though that's a total reasonable and definitely not obnoxious request.

It's like if you tell someone that you love your partner and they demand to sit in the cuck chair or else you're obviously lying. I keep hoping people will move past this "prove that you're actually productive" reflex, but it just keeps happening in basically every AI thread.

In reality there are many reasons not to list out projects that you've worked on with LLMs, and while "none of your damn business" is always going to be at the top, the simple truth is that I want my products and projects to be judged by what they do and how well they work, not by how they were made.

On a small device like the M-VAVE, "sampling" usually means that you take (or record) an audio sample and perhaps if you're lucky, algorithmically pitch it up/down so that you can play it on the keyboard.

There's nothing wrong/bad about that, but when I talk about sampling, I'm talking about usually large libraries of professionally captured sounds. These are often the product of teams of specialists who rent a professional studio and use an array of high-end mics to capture every sound an instrument makes in an intimidating number of ways.

Indeed, they often capture multiple takes of each sound so that if you play them quickly, they don't sound like they are repeating.

Really what I'm getting at is the difference between recording a high-end snare or cymbal at Abbey Road with a fancy mic and putting white noise through an ADSR and a voltage controlled filter. Wildly different strokes for different folks.

I'm a weirdo, but I love the sound of acoustic and/or sampled instruments - especially drums - over the metallic plonks that supposedly sound like "flute" any day of the week.

Don't get me wrong: the M-VAVE is looking like the Flipper Zero of music hacking, and the price is a steal. But at the end of the day, these sounds only really work for certain genres of music and even then there's only so many wavetable shapes before the same-ness has to set in.

So, the main thing that many/most people do not remotely understand is how incredibly difficult, time consuming and expensive it is to get hardware to the state where it can be sold to strangers. Even HN folks who on the average understand software well frequently just have no way to grasp how much R&D actually goes into even a very simple device. It's playing in hard mode from start to finish.

In a bigger company, there's entire departments whose job it is just to source components. For a small team like pre-CBA Chompi, all of the electronics, firmware, enclosure design, UX, documentation, not to mention the certifications and environmental certs and marketing and packaging and shipping logistics and returns and support and.... two people. I forgot lots of steps, but the number of people stays the same.

The reality is that a product like Chompi can't address a larger market like a product from Roland or Korg can, and everything costs more at smaller scale, and yes, they were doing a lot of the work in the USA so this is directly comparable to the ongoing arguments around categories like fast fashion and how if you wanted to buy a high quality T-shirt made in the USA without any branding it should cost about 5x more than most people think that they should have to pay.

Basically, you want to pay an Ikea price for a limited edition shelf made by a single woodworker. This translates quite literally to stating that you wish Chompi would give you a product that only breaks even at $600 when they sell thousands for $300 because you've convinced yourself that that's what a Chompi should be worth. It doesn't make you bad, it just means your working from a different set of expectations which don't line up with the economics of Chompi. The snarky response is to tell you to just go to Ikea like the other people who don't really care what they are buying but just need a shelf that isn't terrible.

Every year in May the Superbooth festival and trade show happens in Berlin. Almost everyone you meet there is either making or has made gear, so it's an incredibly cathartic opportunity to collectively process shared trauma.

Anyhow, I'm going to leave you with a strong suggestion that you check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-AmJUQ1m0

It's a masterclass in empathetic communication around this stuff.

However, I have noticed that the only people who look at a product like Chompi and think "overpriced" are people who have never built and shipped a hardware device. Perhaps you'll be the one to prove me wrong.

I'm not saying that Chompi wasn't expensive, or that you couldn't get a mass-produced device like a Roland SP-404 for less on Reverb. I am saying that that is not a fair comparison, however.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769639

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

It's the single largest difference between frustrated and feeling like a ninja. You will, quite simply, never regret it.

I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...

Storm Summoner takes a pedal with lots of parameters [that would normally be set-and-go] and gives it that missing live performance UX. Singers in particular could use the sensors to modulate their voices.

What excites me is the flag-based system described in the review video at 11:45. You can set up stuff to happen (launch an LFO?) in response to other things that happen, like a value crossing a threshold. That takes it out of the realm of a dumb controller, and we already have enough dumb controllers.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471614

Points: 32

# Comments: 8