I wouldn't be surprised that the beer apps cost less to develop than one AI generated video.

I can see some usage for this use case - "look Morty, I turned myself into a pickle!" - but just like image / meme generators, this is like 10-30 seconds of engagement within a friend circle at best (although some might go viral, but that won't bring in much money for in this case OpenAI).

There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.

It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?

And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.

I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.

I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.

The HTML generator meta tag (f11 to open dev tools) says it's Astro: https://astro.build/

Vinyl (IMO) isn't about it being retro or having "better" sound quality (whatever that means, it's mostly subjective), but about having a collectable, physical item. I think CDs were a step backwards, not because the sound quality was off but because the boxes were smaller and fragile; I've never owned any music CDs.

Digital music is neat for listening to music, but it also feels like it lowers the value of it.

Like retro PC game collectors, they realpy just want that giant box! Most of their games are probably just ISOs on an SSD.

Jewel cases may be fragile but LPs are far more vulnerable to damage than CDs are. There are much better ways to hold a CD collection.

> I think CDs were a step backwards, not because the sound quality was off but because the boxes were smaller and fragile

Smaller, yes, but fragile? Certainly not more fragile than Vinyl.

The jewel cases absolutely were more fragile than the cardboard that was typical of vinyl, but vinyl itself is more fragile than CDs, though the failure modes are completely different.

The jewel case does have the advantage of being easily replaceable too though - you can transfer album art/booklets and in most cases the result looks the same as the original.

With vinyl, album artwork and the case are the same thing and damaging or destroying the case also damages or destroys the album art - you can’t really replace the case without repurchasing the record if the art matters to you.

> The jewel cases absolutely were more fragile than the cardboard

CD cases more easily break catastrophically but I think that, for most kinds of impacts, CD cases are less easily damaged than vinyl sleeves.

Water damages them less easily, they’re less susceptible to smudges, corners don’t get creased, etc.

Most people buying vinyl in 2026 don't own a record player. Because that's not the point.

This probably isn't the point either, but I get an almost perverse level of calm knowing that for my most favourite albums, I own a physical representation of the waveform trapped in a medium.

I very rarely listen to them in that form, but I honestly like the idea that in a post-Carrington event, zombie apocalypse or mad-max style future where electricity or electronics become scarce, I can (if desperate enough) listen to them with a nail and a cone.

I think there's something to be said for _any_ physical media when it comes to audio.

I hate opening my phone/laptop to put music on, inadvertently opening HN/lichess, and watching the next few hours vanish in silence.

Also deeper engagement, and a big second hand and artist-driven markets keeping my money out of the hands of NastyCorp.

Vinyl is just the nicest.

Exactly, there have been loads of tools over time to make software development easier - like Dreamweaver and Frontpage to build websites without coding, or low/no-code platforms to click and drag software together, or all frameworks ever, or libraries that solve issues that often take time - and I'm sure they've had a cumulative effect in developer productivity and / or software quality.

But there's not one tool there that triggered a major boost in output or number of apps / libraries / products created - unless I missed something.

Sure, total output has increased, especially since the early 2010's thanks to both Github becoming the social network of software development, and (arguably) Node / JS becoming one of the most popular languages/runtimes out there attracting a lot of developers to publish a lot of tools. But that's not down to productivity or output boosting developments.

>>It has type hints, which are optional, which means they’re not there.

>I mean it is there, and it works.

The argument is that developers will avoid using things if they don't have to, especially if they're not used to it. But this isn't every developer nor an universal truth, just a jab at things.

Counterpoint, inlining CSS / JS used to be an optimization in early website optimizers, because fetching multiple files incurred more HTTP overhead, and (...I think) compression was more efficient working on a single file vs three.

I don't think these arguments hold up anymore with http 2/3, but still, it used to be an optimization.

Which is why a lot of people are called jerks when in truth they're not actually doing anything wrong.

If it wasn't for laws stating "horns should only be used in emergencies", I really wouldn't mind a softer "caution" horn... although it'd get abused and annoying.

Trams in e.g. Amsterdam have it, single bell 'ding' for caution, 'ring' for "get the fr*dge out the way now"