This is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is that simply changing the price structure on Japanese customers overnight with no acknowledgement of this comes off as entirely the wrong way. It ruins business relationships. Sure, Fontworks might have had a compelling product, but part of the product was their domestic presence.
Now the choice is realistically between Monotype (doesn't really understand the Japanese market) and DynaComware (Taiwan-based, but has previously interacted with Japanese companies). I wonder where their customers will go on short notice? As is mentioned, at least one company switched to DynaComware. SEGA's rhythm games contain both DynaFont (DynaComware) and Fontworks fonts, for example.
Basically, if you're going to raise prices, at least do something about the fact that your core market is heavily relationship dependent and won't take kindly to a sudden rug pull.
There used to be a meme of people thinking that the Japanese market was somehow inherently biased to domestic companies and unwilling to touch western products. When the reality is moreso that almost every western company that tries launching products in Japan assumes they can just crush the local competition and gets their shit kicked in for the trouble.
The few companies that actually did well in Japan did so specifically because they spent at least five minutes to understand the local context and adapt their business to actually make sense there. Any western companies that actually do this get embraced like nothing else by the Japanese audience. I'm reminded of Apple deliberately pushing for emoji in Unicode just so they could sell iPhones that weren't beholden to the horrible mess that was Japanese telecom emoji standards...
> The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something.
In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.
I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.
Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.
There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first.
You can see it like pizzas:
there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc.
But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale.
You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone.
On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day.
Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone.
The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end.
After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.
It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.
I for one, love it. I want every single mega corporation using crappy AI to the point where we can identify and not buy their products. Leave the little guys alone, they don't print money yet; so have not much choice.
Please don't be irrational. We all can make fun at clueless suits desperately throwing money at the AI buzzword furnace while still recognizing there are practical applications for it.
You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.
I have a friend with life circumstances that are complicated and she survives on SNAP. Every move like this is detrimental and jeopardizes the ability for her to stay alive. I do not understand or fathom why this program is run in such a cruel, uncaring way. I’m sure there is fraud, but there are many people with permanent disabilities and other things going on who don’t have the capacity to “just reapply” without significant effort. There is no need to do this when they can simply audit the usage.
I think this is one of the many indicators that even though these models get “version upgrades” it’s closer to switching to a different brain that may or may not understand or process things the way you like. Without a clear jump in performance, people test new models and move back to ones they know work if the new ones aren’t better or are actually worse.
ChatGPT when using 5 or 5-Thinking doesn’t even follow my “custom instructions” on the web version. It’s a serious downgrade compared to the prior generation of models.
AT&T has a history of lying about what its network is. They were advertising HSPA+ as 4G and then recently started advertising LTE as "5G E". I can't find a lot of articles about the 4G branding one since the 5G one started.
> show_4g_for_lte_data_icon_bool
Realistically I think this is just a choice that many carriers made. It's quite common to see 4G instead of LTE outside of the US. Technically speaking I think WiMAX counted as 4G when there were competing 4G standards and you could make an argument that LTE is just one of the 4G standards.
Signal strength is a measure of how proximate you are to the tower in terms of radio connectivity, but it says nothing about whether or not the tower will respond to you in a timely fashion, the tower backhaul capacity, etc. Usually this happens because you have a great connection to the tower in theory, but in-practice you can't get meaningful bandwidth and everything appears broken. This is really common at sporting events and other large crowd gatherings, which is also why a lot of the promise of 5G was that increased work with OFDMA in trying to service more customers in the same physical space adequately.
It's probably a reasonable pitch to say that phones should instead display something closer to "meaningful available bandwidth" crossed with strength, because a strong signal doesn't mean a good connection.
They also say "Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.". I wonder what products they are thinking about. If I sell you a EC2 image with GPT-5 on it, is that a API?
My assumption is that they mean PaaS model hosting (so azure's ai service, bedrock, vertex), but I don't know what other product OpenAI is thinking about selling via a cloud provider unless it's training tooling or something.
I don’t believe you dogfood your own service when it’s critical infrastructure. It’s common to use competitor infrastructure for core services so you have fault tolerance if it fails. Ideally your status page is on a separate cloud in a separate region too.
I imagine this is a choice to prevent circular dependencies on AWS within AWS itself.
That makes sense. But then the idea of a simultaneous failure preventing, say AWS and GCP/Azure, from restarting due to accidental circular dependencies in the init sequence needed to reboot the two competing cloud infrastructure is interesting.
A significant part of the prosumer NAS market isn’t running these for storage exclusively. They usually want a media server like Plex or Enby or Jellyfin at minimum and maybe a handful of other apps. It would be better to articulate this market demand as for low power application servers, not strictly storage appliances.
Simplification is the key. My setup went from: Custom NAS hardware running vendor-provided OS and heavyweight media serving software -> Custom NAS hardware running TrueNAS + heavyweight media server -> Custom NAS hardware running Linux + NFS -> Old Junker Dell running Linux + NFS. You keep finding bells and whistles you just don't need and all they do is add complexity to your life.
