If you use OpenCode, the sessions are all in a local sqlite database. After lunch I'm pushing one of my agents to crunch some data from that using duckdb...
Yes. It's been so good for a while now. And never I'm scared about major versions: we just get iteratively better desktop. Commercial desktops should take a note.
I'm not from the US but I would think something like this would go directly against the 1st amendment?
Also in general if you're on the losing end of a "fair" vote I assume a decent person would look within themselves to see why they lost, instead of creating a false alternative reality.
The First Amendment covers government censorship. There's nothing about this that would violate the first amendment.
"Looking within oneself" might make you a better person, but you don't get to be a billionaire by wanting to be a better person. If your choices are "losing" and "creating a false reality in which you win", the choice is pretty simple.
I'm not from the US either, and can't say if it's against the 1st amendment or not. But I'm also considering if the constitution matters there anymore, or will it be bent for the billionaires to keep their power.
Yes, a decent person would definitely look within themselves. I'm not sure are these billionaires decent people...
I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
i didn't read that as snark. they're just saying compressors were/are used to maximize the broadcast range of a source over AM radio. without them, the broadcast range is shorter, which means fewer people hear the ads on the radio show, which means fewer dollars for the radio station producing or broadcasting the show.
Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
Large format artwork, limited edition/numbered pressings for collectability, limited edition/numbered pressings to try and sell on for a personal profit, supporting the band by purchasing a physical piece of merchandise perhaps directly from them, being part of a trend they've seen on TikTok/Instagram, etc.
Many reasons. A lot of the same reasons people buy, say, Pokemon cards and don't play the card game.
As objets d'art. The thinking is that owning (and crucially, displaying) vinyl records marks you out as being more discerning than the rest of the herd.
> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
> I've always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
Yes. Many musicians want their stuff to sound like the music of their heroes they grew up with, and that music is often compressed to a block as well. So compression isn't just about making things sound louder, it also has its own aesthetical value. Whether that is good or bad aesthetics can be argued about, but some people also like to distort their instruments which was also a thing people frowned upon in the past.
> I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
The official themes often are quite compact, but there is often also highly dynamic orchestral work used that is way less recognizable and used with more dynamics (think about te soon creating orchestral atmospheres). Cinema mixes are a thing btw. where many consumers complain about too high dynamic ranges. They complain that the dialog is low and the explosion loud. Cinemas being among the few spaces we mixing engineers have where we have a bit more control over the presumed levels, especially if we are talking about Dolby certified venues.
Ah, I hadn’t thought about the generational aspect that’s interesting. The aesthetic totally makes sense to me when the music is intended for it / designed with it in mind, which I guess quite a lot of music is.
I particularly dislike when old intentionally-dynamic music is remastered to be “modernized” into a brick, which is sort of the opposite direction.
> Cinema mixes
I didn’t know about these, that’s neat! Makes sense that the levels can’t really be the same in my living room as a theater. Is it really a whole separate mix or just some compression in mastering?
I really hope that’s not another masterings collection rabbit hole I’m about to fall down haha. I’ll look out for some Dolby certified venues in my area too
I've been to IMAX cinemas where the volume was so loud my ears physically hurt
I understand them, they want to shake you in the seat, to make it an experience (unlike watching at home), but it's ridiculous I have to consider bringing earplugs
All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
There is no such thing as over the ear monitoring. There good headphones like HD600. It has good mids and great highs, however the base rolls off towards 20hz. Many AirPods, include AirPod Pro 2 have better low end than what people use for monitoring, which is what, by the way? I play electric guitar, and use different types of audio equipment, and I really wouldn’t care if I use BD DT770 for tracking, despite the fact that it has absolute terribly inaccurate response curve. Just because they call it “studio” on the box, doesn’t mean that it’s the pinnacle of audio fidelity. There are many IEMs, including Bluetooth ones that are better for listening to music for music sake, as opposed to trying to hear some exaggerated spikes in 8khz.
Given that the highly vague cliche reference of your comments, this conversation is probably concluded, all the best.
To all other readers, please enjoy your IEMs and TWS but make sure they have an EQ and try to turn down the boomy base and piercing highs of some manufacturers like Bose and Sony.
>There is no such thing as over the ear monitoring
Uhh, what? You go into any recording studio its is probably going to have a set of mdrv6 or mdr7506. Most of what you listen to are probably mixed and mastered with these same cans and its been that way with these same cans for like 4 decades now.
You're wrong. Here is the ranking based on aggregate sales to studios:
1. Audio-Technica ATH-M50x
2. Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro
3. Sony MDR-7506
4. Sennheiser HD 600 / 650
These are used in different situations. Most of the time headphones are used for tracking, which is listening to the live recording of one track. What most people call "monitoring", which is listening to the studio mix, is done on speakers, not headphones. Furthermore, items 1-3 represent quite distorted and inaccurate sound signatures, and people only buy these because it's their reference headphone, something they're used to. They're not actually the best sounding or accurate headphones, like say >1k Focals.
Most of the music is absolutely, definitely, is not mixed and mastered on headphones, let alone Sonys. Any decent mix requires speaker monitors for proper soundstaging. Mixes done without speakers sound quite wrong. This has been true since stereo recordings existed.
I'm sorry, but you're regurgitating cliches, and probably don't have deep knowledge of this subject.
You should get some Airpod Pros, you might like them.
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago.
You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the volume knob. You do not need that much compression to keep your volume in a listenable range, and you certainly don't have to slam the entire master bus through a limiter. The loudness wars really was just about having a louder track than everyone else. So much so that the whole process of mastering became how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would not do it through the master bus. There are so many interviews with mastering engineers who are frustrated with the pointless chase for volume.
Arguably, listeners have heard it so long that they've gotten used to the exaggerated compression, and they just like it now stylistically. Some of my favorite records are very loud.
Yes it was a race to the bottom that nobody was winning. A lot of plugin developers were marketing Limiters around how transparent they sounded. It was a weird time.
Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
Just outta curiosity, as I’ve never gotten a spend anywhere near that, what variant were you using? Like max context window and fast mode? Or was it just chugging along non stop for three days?
Fast mode max content window. The task was: replace all 1600+ queries from one database to another and make the whole integration test pass. We did multiple passes, with different concerns when changing from database to another. My OpenCode session right now says $4,365.02.
I haven't gotten close to this either before, but now we wanted to move fast because this branch gets conflicts all the time and we want to get over with the migration asap.
It's a bit of a left field question, but I am curious: Let's say that if the company wasn't paying the whole bill but only subsidizing it - e.g, if it paid 90% of the $4000. What would you do?
I don't know, why would I pay to do my job? It's not my first database switch for a startup. Only this time it doesn't take two months of grueling work. I know exactly how this is done, but the amount of grunt programming and testing and repetitive work is just not great. And it's not a task that brings new customers or a new product. Just a mandatory and annoying thing to deal with when we are growing.
And don't get me wrong. Opus did an absolutely horrible job at first, second and third round in this task. You really needed to steer it to get to the right solution.
And now Fable is out. And its first round of code reviews for this huge PR was definitely worth the money too...
Don't think that I'm just shrugging to that number. I see it every day, and I don't like that it's in the thousands now. But for people paying the 100 or 200 dollar plans, I'm not super sure if you will be able to use them in the future if the token price is in the thousands for a bit bigger task...
If I'd pay this from my own pocket, I'd definitely go with DeepSeek or local models and figure it out how to make the best use of them.
> If I'd pay this from my own pocket, I'd definitely go with DeepSeek or local models and figure it out how to make the best use of them.
IOW, you don't really think the value of this work is really worth $4k.
> why would I pay to do my job?
The question is: how long do you think that you employer will be willing to pay for you and Anthropic, if you yourself said if it were your money you'd put some time and effort to work with an open model?
> The question is: how long do you think that you employer will be willing to pay for you and Anthropic, if you yourself said if it were your money you'd put some time and effort to work with an open model?
I wonder what this question really means? Anthropic is useless if you don't know what to do with it. It's very useful if you do, and you can guide it to do the right things. Yes, it will for sure reduce the amount of people we need to hire. But we are always looking for hires who know what they do and can utilize agents to be faster.
But if you think about how long employer is willing to pay 10-20k per month per seat for Anthropic? I can't see this to be feasible and it will have to end at some point.
Regardless of the actual value produced by the models, if I am the CTO of any company that has the budget to spend $10k/month/seat on Claude, I'd take 5%-10% of that to build an alternative in-house.
I'm with you here. We can't slide into a situation where you put a sizable amount of your budget for an American mega corporation if you want to survive in the competition. We need local models and we need them to be good enough to help us.
As a Nordic (Finland), I think this is true. In the history, US has been always admired and we've loved to travel there and cherish the culture. Damn, I was there when Conan O'Brien traveled to Helsinki, and greeting him with this massive crowd of people who really love him. I married an American, I've traveled through the country multiple times with my partner. Love the food, people, the nature, the cities.
But this has definitely changed for me now. The idea of crossing the border and having to flip a coin is the border control guy a nice guy or not is not appealing as a diabetic who needs his phone to be with him untampered and who doesn't want to sit in a cell somewhere for days/weeks because they posted a funny meme of a person you can't joke about. Or who just witnesses this absolute inequality happening, and who witnesses the leaders of this country coming to my country and giving their support for parties who want me to not marry and who doesn't want to see me existing.
I am just tired. And sad. I wish I could get our relationship back with the US but I don't know... Even if we backtrack from here, get back to the "olden times", it will take a moment until I can enjoy US again.
Well... Strip searching and jailing young German girls in the border is not something I hear happening very often in countries like Canada, Germany, Denmark, Finland... Actually I have not heard that happening even once! My American partner has crossed the German border countless of times from US. Before they got an EU passport, even then the border queue was prompt and the guard sometimes asked a joke in German and a minute later let them pass.
I waited hours in Newark even before the current joke of a government. The risk of being in a jail without my phone which has a life-saving app to manage my diabetes is a risk I am not going to take.
> Actually I have not heard that happening even once!
Have you heard that happening more than once?
Having your luggage searched, long interrogations, dog sniffing, and then more interrogations - that has been common on international borders. All for no other reason than the border guard didn't like your face. That's my real life experience as a person who used to travel a lot. And many others I've met told similar stories, including being denied entry. So it's been a coin flip for a long time.
Last time I read that story they were given the option to immediately fly back to Germany for free after their tourist visa was declined but the girls declined the flight because they wanted to fly somewhere else on another flight which wasn’t available yet, which means they had to be detained. So they stayed overnight in an immigration detention facility which included a search.
They also flew to Hawaii without a hotel booked which is something the guards always look for (that was basically 101 common knowledge when I first crossed 15yrs ago). Just like how having a flight out prebooked is important.
They have a first class MCP server, and you can basically run a project from your agent. Implementing something, and you find out there's more to do later on in a separate issue? Agent creates the issue for you and off you go. It works very nicely, and also has a great UI but I mostly using it from my agent.
I still use 4.6 if I need Opus. It's mostly GPT-5.5 for me. Only if I know it cannot do some thing like push without running the tests (because AGENTS.md said so), I switch to 4.6.
Although GPT's been acting weird since Thursday...
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