4 ms·

Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 https://x.com/aki

by plorg 2mo ago

Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.

tonyhart7 2mo ago
Yes, that is the primary reason people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing same happen with physical games
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > same happen with physical games And now it’s faster to get them online than to go to the store, even if the game doesn’t have to download itself again for updates.
  - rustcleaner 2mo ago
    ... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.
    - rbanffy 2mo ago
      Companies like this are why strong customer protection laws need to exist, and be full of teeth.
  - smcg 2mo ago
    the stores also have terrible physical stock. getting a game you want by blindly walking into a store is a gamble now.
    - rbanffy 2mo ago
      Record stores are the same - subscription services for music made them very niche.
- SirHackalot 2mo ago
  Does that mean capitalism is not an efficient system to meet the needs of well-informed consumers? Why am I being lumped in with an 8 year old who asks their parents to buy them an online game? There should be a market for physical media and devices with physical buttons if people exist who want them. These companies won’t work on anything that doesn’t bring them a gazillion dollars, so billion/million dollar ventures never get off the ground.
  - tonyhart7 2mo ago
    capitalism is the most efficient system ever the statistic literally says it all, any person that think otherwise its delusional
    - psd1 2mo ago
      Is it, though? Rule of thumb: when a fanboy asserts that any person holding an alternative view is defective, you should immediately abandon the fanboy's position and adopt the alternative view. It's heuristically more likely to be correct, and it gets you out of an odious fan club. Case in point: China proceeded through stages of development more efficiently than any western nation. Case in point: South Korea incubated its industry in a command economy.
      - tonyhart7 2mo ago
        case in point: bringing 2 best example of why capitalism is the best system
        psd1 2mo ago
        Care to explain?
      - SirHackalot 2mo ago
        Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.
- tancop 2mo ago
  people buy physical games when its an option. take god of war ragnarok where more than 60% of copies sold were on disk. its a totally different situation from niche products with no existing supply chain. sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.
  - ectospheno 2mo ago
    I have five PS5 discs from around launch. Gifts. It is such a pain finding them and putting them in only to download a patch anyway. I’d sell them but I don’t want to perpetuate them as a thing so I’ll likely just throw them away.
    - tonyhart7 2mo ago
      why tf you have five PS5
fsuts 2mo ago
But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... People still use google translate? Most browsers now have translate built in, as do llm I imagine grok on x will do this too
- dijit 2mo ago
  X’s auto translate of tweets has been really awesome actually. I wonder why its so much better than localised titles and subtitles on youtube.
  - numpad0 2mo ago
    LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations. Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is. 1: I just literally asked Gemini Flash to do it
- gpvos 2mo ago
  Firefox didn't offer to translate this, so initially I wasn't aware that it could. But I could get it to translate via the menu. And Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.
  - ahartmetz 2mo ago
    Unless something changed recently (and things change all the time where LLMs are involved), deepl.com does the best translations. I have a sister who translates professionally; she said it's the only one where she can use the result and make some improvements instead of throwing it away and starting over.
nine_k 2mo ago
IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed). Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.
- ndiddy 2mo ago
  The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.
  - saltcured 2mo ago
    It was also nearly magical how long my final Walkman could run with a single AA cell.
  - williamDafoe 2mo ago
    The jump from TPS-L2/WM-1 to WM-2 was ENORMOUS. Like, WM-2 was TINY - 75% the size of TPS-L2/WM-1. They were almost done before they got started! I know I got one Xmas 1981 and it was stolen in 1984 but now I have 3x.
smcg 2mo ago
I don't have a twitter account and do not want to go there. Anything good brought over to another format is value added.
SirHackalot 2mo ago
I don’t see why anyone should be obligated to direct traffic to Twitter. Let the author post on his own blog or digital garden. I don’t want to go on Twitter. Echoing the same as others, it’s good to bring any content from Twitter into the open web.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  To be fair, the site guidelines encourage submitting the original source, not rehashing it on a blog and posting that. > Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

by plorg 2mo ago

tonyhart7 2mo ago

Yes, that is the primary reason people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing same happen with physical games

rbanffy 2mo ago
> same happen with physical games And now it’s faster to get them online than to go to the store, even if the game doesn’t have to download itself again for updates.
- rustcleaner 2mo ago
  ... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    Companies like this are why strong customer protection laws need to exist, and be full of teeth.
- smcg 2mo ago
  the stores also have terrible physical stock. getting a game you want by blindly walking into a store is a gamble now.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    Record stores are the same - subscription services for music made them very niche.
SirHackalot 2mo ago
Does that mean capitalism is not an efficient system to meet the needs of well-informed consumers? Why am I being lumped in with an 8 year old who asks their parents to buy them an online game? There should be a market for physical media and devices with physical buttons if people exist who want them. These companies won’t work on anything that doesn’t bring them a gazillion dollars, so billion/million dollar ventures never get off the ground.
- tonyhart7 2mo ago
  capitalism is the most efficient system ever the statistic literally says it all, any person that think otherwise its delusional
  - psd1 2mo ago
    Is it, though? Rule of thumb: when a fanboy asserts that any person holding an alternative view is defective, you should immediately abandon the fanboy's position and adopt the alternative view. It's heuristically more likely to be correct, and it gets you out of an odious fan club. Case in point: China proceeded through stages of development more efficiently than any western nation. Case in point: South Korea incubated its industry in a command economy.
    - tonyhart7 2mo ago
      case in point: bringing 2 best example of why capitalism is the best system
      - psd1 2mo ago
        Care to explain?
    - SirHackalot 2mo ago
      Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.
tancop 2mo ago
people buy physical games when its an option. take god of war ragnarok where more than 60% of copies sold were on disk. its a totally different situation from niche products with no existing supply chain. sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.
- ectospheno 2mo ago
  I have five PS5 discs from around launch. Gifts. It is such a pain finding them and putting them in only to download a patch anyway. I’d sell them but I don’t want to perpetuate them as a thing so I’ll likely just throw them away.
  - tonyhart7 2mo ago
    why tf you have five PS5

fsuts 2mo ago

But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... People still use google translate? Most browsers now have translate built in, as do llm I imagine grok on x will do this too

dijit 2mo ago
X’s auto translate of tweets has been really awesome actually. I wonder why its so much better than localised titles and subtitles on youtube.
- numpad0 2mo ago
  LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations. Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is. 1: I just literally asked Gemini Flash to do it
gpvos 2mo ago
Firefox didn't offer to translate this, so initially I wasn't aware that it could. But I could get it to translate via the menu. And Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.
- ahartmetz 2mo ago
  Unless something changed recently (and things change all the time where LLMs are involved), deepl.com does the best translations. I have a sister who translates professionally; she said it's the only one where she can use the result and make some improvements instead of throwing it away and starting over.

nine_k 2mo ago

IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed). Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.

ndiddy 2mo ago
The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.
- saltcured 2mo ago
  It was also nearly magical how long my final Walkman could run with a single AA cell.
- williamDafoe 2mo ago
  The jump from TPS-L2/WM-1 to WM-2 was ENORMOUS. Like, WM-2 was TINY - 75% the size of TPS-L2/WM-1. They were almost done before they got started! I know I got one Xmas 1981 and it was stolen in 1984 but now I have 3x.

smcg 2mo ago

I don't have a twitter account and do not want to go there. Anything good brought over to another format is value added.

SirHackalot 2mo ago

I don’t see why anyone should be obligated to direct traffic to Twitter. Let the author post on his own blog or digital garden. I don’t want to go on Twitter. Echoing the same as others, it’s good to bring any content from Twitter into the open web.

al_borland 2mo ago
To be fair, the site guidelines encourage submitting the original source, not rehashing it on a blog and posting that. > Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.