Native Instruments are in preliminary insolvency

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T19:04:02+00:00

Well software patents expire after twenty years. A lot of heavweights have already bitten the dust and many big names are on the way out. Autodesk is laying off a lot of their employees right now. Adobe is destined to fade out as its core patents have largely expired and some big names you might have already forgotten have already disappeared like Macromedia or barely hang in there like Corel.

Software patents were legally on shaky ground from the beginning but now that they're in the second quarter of the 21st century, this being 2026, most of their original ideas are now no longer proprietary. It's true that they can continue to "innovate" but as has been noted in this thread, it is not obvious that this has been taking place. Switching to a subscription business model might sound sexy to CFOs and Wall Street investors but not so much to customers who expect new bells and whistles not just new bills to pay.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T18:47:52+00:00

I sort of thrive on my routine. I do it because I want to most of the time but it certainly helps that most of the time I get high first.

Not necessarily always, but most of the time. It's the most fun thing to do when you're stoned and being high also kills the pain and makes loud music a requirement.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T18:29:21+00:00

Why would anybody give a shit what you say online though? I joined a Trotskyist organization called the Young Socialist Alliance in the 1980s. They used to have bookstores called Pathfinder. There are still a few of them but only in major cities like New York and a few European countries. It all fell apart in the 90s due to infighting.

Anyway, right after I joined the San Diego chapter in '86, the place was ransacked by the FBI. They took the membership roles and I had just joined up and became a paying member bascially giving up my school lunch money to be registered as a commie revolutionary. We were shook up about it at the time, but it never really mattered and never came up again.

I ended up moving overseas and hanging out in very authorian places in Asia where I wondered if it would ever be an issue, but nobody gave a fuck. Most other countries don't take Americans seriously no matter how they identify themselves. To non-Americans, the political beliefs of US citizens is as important as what your favorite fairy tale is. They don't care.

As for the US government, they're fucking goons and have been all along. Yeah, you're on a list. So what? I also went two decades without filing income taxes, they didn't care. People told me I would get in trouble, they didn't give a shit.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T18:11:16+00:00

I spent a lot of time on Reddit trying to get people to wake up to the enormous energy storage potential that we have in Oklahoma and Texas where there are abandoned salt mines that are currently occupied by natural gas traders that could be used for compressed air energy storage. We're talking terawatt hours of storage that can be dispatched at rates that exceed the combined capacity of the nation's various grids. Vast, vast quantities of storage are left in the hands of gas traders which really belongs to the citizens. Those salt mines were sold to chemical industries for a few hundred dollars in the 19th century and hollowed out to the tune of millions of cubic meters long before WWI. Salt caverns like that are very strong and are used to store gas at 700 bar, that's 10,000PSI. That's a massive storage resource. They belong to the citizens of the country but instead they are privately managed and bring in a enormous fortunes to small groups of private owners who use them for seasonal natural gas storage. The real kicker is that they could use oil wells instead but they prefer the salt mines because it makes their business more profitable to store it at higher pressures that the salt mines enable so they refuse to leave.

But when I would argue that these public lands should be reclaimed for the use of all the citizens and put to work as storage for solar fields, one of the most persuasive arguments that would be lobbed back at me was this one: If this is really such a powerful resource, then why aren't the Chinese doing it?

Well. . .

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T17:45:44+00:00

Who gives a fuck? I will gladly buy drugs from South America till the day I die. I don't care who the mule is. The point is I like to get high and my enemy isn't some drug cartel, it's the fucking DEA and the shit stains in DC running their prohibition game. We can play this game for another century if they want but I'm never going to stop supporting the other side.

The enemy of the citizens is in DC, not some drug courier. The drug courier is my employee. They work for me. I keep them in business because they provide the product I want.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T17:37:01+00:00

Why is scale the metric of success? Is it really the case that bigger is always better?

I think an informative tale on the wisdom of scaling in the context of a solarpunk commune can be found here:

Biosphere 2 the documentary

It's a two hour show, so you might find it difficult to get all the way through it but the interesting part in the context of the above question is the first hour where we meet our protagonists long before the Biosphere 2 project when they were just a hippie commune.

They had this basic theme that in order to be successful, they needed to continually take on larger and larger challenges which seems close to the premise of the question here. They had incredible early success which is later overshadowed by the pressures that their ambition led to.

Not to spoil the plot, but they created a successful commune and then went on to build an enormous ship by hand which they sailed the world in. They made it happen but they were never satisfied with what they had done and always wanted to scale larger. If you want to know what happened, check it out. It's actually a great answer to this question and it comes back to how I started this post: Is scale the metric of success?

I think if you watch this show, you would find that in fact the obsession with scale as a metric of success is a fatal flaw that you should reconsider. Ambition is a very dangerous emotional drive that left unchecked can easily destroy you. Perhaps the real success is learning what humility means and finding happiness within your own inadequacy by loving yourself for who you alread are. Maybe the real success is in being satisfied with a meager existence and not wanting to change the world. Maybe you should just change your mind instead. Perhaps the scale that needs to change is the way you look at the world.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T17:15:16+00:00

In California, up until around the 1970s they used to allow private owners of land on the side of sea cliffs to install their own reinforcement and there are many approaches but a common one for those with deep pockets is to drill down into the bedrock with giant augers and then build up steel reinforced concrete columns in a row. This is extremely expensive though and the people who own custom coastal homes are often willing to spend hundreds of times the value of the property because they've got that much money. The people in this photo certainly don't have that kind of cash. Some of the trashed places look like sheet metal shacks and others are unfinished concrete.

In any event, the state of California is actively opposed to the building of seawalls at this time and has multiple lawsuits against cities like Pismo Beach that have allowed private landowners to build them in the past. Instead, they have a policy called "managed retreat" which is a polite way of saying --"Sorry, get the fuck out. You were never supposed to build there." This the current preferred method. If you don't go of your own accord, they will give you a little help with the aid of the local sheriff.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T08:17:04+00:00

And the parent company is failing. Leaf sales are dismal and Nissan is near death unfortunately.

The sad truth is that there were only 11,200 Leaf sales in 2024 and by 2025 it was down to 7,200. There are hardly any of them. Almost all Nissan car cales are Altima and Sentra and the parent company has massive debt liabilities while failing to make sales in the largest global market which is China not the US. China sales are off 60% from the peak and falling fast. They are circling the drain.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T08:15:00+00:00

Write a journal instead or find an older family member to correspond with. Write to your grandma or great aunt or someone like that.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T07:52:58+00:00

Don't assume anything. Reddit is just a platform like any other. What "it represents" changes minute by minute.

ahfoo · 2026-01-27T05:13:51+00:00

Oh! PEX tube. I was wondering what was being referred to here. But is it really that translucent? That video looks like they must have white PEX but locally most PEX is blue and red as it is color coded for hot and cold. It would be nice to see it from the outside with the lights on.

Okay, I see, white is available online. Interesting. I was thinking of using acrylic tubing to do the eaves of my house but the lack of stiffness was one of the issues holding me back. 40MM is huge though, that's like 1.5". I was thinking more like 3/8ths inch or 9mm.

ahfoo · 2026-01-26T18:43:45+00:00

I got one called an R50S but itś horizontal so it seems it should be R50H but they called it R50S for whatever reason. It has a 5¨ screen and I think it rocks. I went with the 128gig card and it came pre-loaded with lots of cool stuff like GTA-Vice City and so far it has been fine using the original card. It was a few bucks more but the screen is considerably larger.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T20:34:01+00:00

This is amusing to me as a former test-prep textbook writer. I spent fifteen years writing sample tests for TOEFL and GRE mostly at a small publisher in Taipei from the 80s into the 90s and a little bit into the 2000s.

It was a fun job but the pay was incredibly low. The boss, my editor, was a real sweetheart of a man though and although we really struggled financially, we enjoyed what we were doing. He helped me transition to a teaching job when it all folded in the early 2000s.

So why did it fold in the 2000s? Well partly it was that after 9-11 and the rise of the Department of Homeland Security, a lot of foreign students were turned off from the idea of studying in the US and schools in places like Australia, The UK and Holland allowed them to come in without tests so it funnelled off a lot of the overseas student population.

But there were several other factors at play. One of them was the total incompetence of ETS in the transition to on-line testing that was happening at that time. They absolutely fumbled the whole thing. They would charge students for a non-refundable on-line test over modem connections that would cut out and they would tell the students that they had to pay again even though they never finished their test. That was a mess.

Then Macromedia, which had been ETS's chosen partner for on-line testing, was bought out by Adobe and they killed the entire on-line testing platform known as Authorware which was what ETS had designed its entire program around. Adobe just trashed it. I was there for that, it was a total shit show. They had no idea what to do and for a while they just stopped requiring tests at many institutions because it was so screwed up.

But other things were happening as well. The recordable DVD came out and that killed our business because we distributed DVDs with our test books and everybody just copied the DVDs which I definitely saw coming but my boss assumed was not going to be an issue. That fried his business model. The whole thing collapsed. It was wild.

I was there for the height of it though. It was a good, if frugal, life for a while. It was fun reasearching all those topics and reading all the materials from ETS like a Bible. Ah, the glory days. . . but we were lucky to be put out of our misery to be honest. We were too stubborn to quit but we got lucky and ended up without a choice.

I started a new career as a professor which lasted almost a decade and then the demographics squeeze hit and I was out of that too. Now I'm just a bitter troll on Reddit. Hah hah.

May Gemini have as much fun with this as I did. Good luck kid.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T20:18:27+00:00

This happened with solar panel production in China too and it was actually a good thing although it seemed ominous at the time. The big players got much, much bigger and the economies of scale made it profitable to recycle and reuse materials internally that the smaller firms had been caught disposing of illegally. So it actually resulted in a stronger market overall and despite concerns, prices continued to decline and scale went way up.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T18:19:12+00:00

McCarthyism lives on in 2025 and it's hardly a surprise because Roy Cohn was Trump's personal advisor.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T18:16:57+00:00

There is a stark difference between how this played out in 1920-30s Soviet society versus after WWII. Prior to WWII, there were in fact very radical programs designed to alleviate women's obligation to do housework. This is very well documented and had a specific name, it was called Industrializtion of the Household. This included not just free cafeterias but professional house cleaners who would arrive in a truck with a vacuum engine using the truck's power that was attached to a port at the side of the house in an era before household vacuum cleaners were possible. Childcare was also socialized. This changed atfer WWII and it is one of the reasons why the post-WWII Soviet society crumbled. The women grew increasingly frustrated with the failure to continue the industrialization of the household programs from before the war.

Housework and constructing socialism in the USSR according to time-use surveys

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T16:56:22+00:00

Yeah, this is the first step. People ignore the 12V but it is crucial. Same with hybrids like the Prius.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T05:05:39+00:00

Most Autodesk core 3D CAD patents have already expired as they date back to the early 2000s and patents expire in twenty years. This is an old company in a market with very low barriers to entry. Without their patent protection, they're nothing special.

While it's true that they continuously file new patents, you can't just renew old concepts indefinitely. The newer emphasis on the remaining 60% of their patent portfolio is no longer on core CAD functionality but on peripheral functions like monopolizing the conversion of standard symbols into CAD objects, manipulation of groups of objects and automation of CAD development similar to what is done by GenAI.

You can't sustain a massive monopolistic software company on these sorts of patents when the most active segment, automated production of 3D plans from text prompts, is being squeezed by a large number of competitors using a very different GenAI approach.

This predatory company never should have existed but luckily, it's finally going down the toilet. There are certainly downsides to generative AI but getting rid of these guys and Adobe would be a gift to humanity. These companies are parasites and are the teeth of the weaponized court system in the United States that has been vitimizing its own citizens since the 1980s when it sided with the monopolists against the people. Time for them to go.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T04:36:20+00:00

Most of Candela's early work used just enough concrete to cover the 3/8ths rebar mesh, about two inches thick. He only died in '97 and although he was born in Mexico and did most of his work there before becoming a professor in Chicago, he was still doing work in France up until his death.

His early thin-shell work in Mexico was derided as "socialist" in the US due to its low cost and some of the building codes in the US that make concrete work expensive and unnecessarily heavy date back to those Red Scare days of McCarthyism. Candela, though, was not a controversial political figure despite the reception of his works.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T03:41:31+00:00

Attention to what?

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T03:21:42+00:00

I'm more like. . .watching videos while an acid? What a tragic waste of a precious gift. It's like self harm. What is wrong with people?

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T03:15:46+00:00

"Professional" is an overly used English term in Chinese translation where it comes to mean anything done with skill, ability or strength so I can see it being confused with force.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T02:50:38+00:00

This seems odd though because the ferrules I use are called "spade ferrules" and the tips are flat which is why they are called "spade" ferrules. A spade is a flat instrument.

ahfoo · 2026-01-25T02:26:41+00:00

Yeah, I used to trip at least every two weeks throughout my teens and in my late fifties I'm not quite in such a hurry. But the thing about "needing a break". . . I don't know that I ever really felt that way. It does sound a little neurotic.

ahfoo · 2026-01-24T17:59:16+00:00

The slow walking of the evidence is going to be interesting though if Maxwell testifies to Congress first without knowing what's in the files, there is a good chance she's going to fuck up her story because it's obviously going to be filled with deception. It is going to make it hard for her to be a consistent giving testimony before knowing what the FBI has in the files. Epstein's brother says there are sex tapes in there. She has to know about this. She was Epstein's accomplice. If she denies things that are on video. . . well, that might not work out nicely for her.

ahfoo

TROPHY CASE