I have no interest in defending Notion or anything but... have you actually used it? It's not even close to a "simple notepad app." I mean, that's what it started off as, and you can use it that way, but "simple notepad app" is ludicrously wrong.
Yep. And I've hated every second when I needed to write something with it. The editor of Notion is horrible, compared to Zed, Vim, Emacs et.al. The markdown import has been broken for years, and it is not easy to export your writeups for storage outside Notion
I'm really happy I got our company out from using Notion. We just do markdown in Linear, which you can copy and paste from an editor easily.
I assume this will turn into some kind of insane tiktok "life hack" trend that makes increasingly outrageous and false claims, and then in a couple months dentists will see their revenues jump.
Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.
If it's that easy to upload a video from your camera roll to YouTube (Two clicks) it's not that hard to imagine that this can happen by mistake or by someone who doesn't know that it uploads as "public" by default.
Maybe they just wanted to send this video to a friend and didn't have the technical understanding that this will then be visible for everyone searching for it on YouTube.
I'll take one idiotic state senator's public bill that'll never pass over hundreds of government employees colluding with big tech in the shadows to ban speech.
The performance is better than it was at that time. At that time performance was the #1 item for improvement on their roadmap.
I currently pay for Notion and I don't usually mind the performance. However, things like opening a new window and changing it to a new document with the "quick" search (command-p) is still almost unacceptably slow (it's an Electron app). The benefits for me do outweigh the costs though.
I've never seen native apps anywhere in their stated plans.
Native vs electron is probably not the thing that makes notion slow - AFAIK (last used notion ~2 years ago) everything has to go through the web, nothing is local, and the performance bottleneck is their server.
Funny seeing Pd randomly on the front page of HN! I once (a LONG time ago) built a browser-based GUI for a remote Pd server: https://github.com/t3db0t/PureeData
Audio is real-time and performance is everything. Freezing tracks should take the least amount of time possible and no skipping should occur unless you are using the most complex modular VST out there. With WASM being like 1/3 of native and having extremely limited SIMD support I would probably expect it to not work at all for serious work.
Quite frankly, even native performance is often not enough.
That said, I can see it being relevant for learning audio, synthesis and how signal processing works. And of course, just for fun!
Source: Worked with DAWs for a decade. Also currently writing a paper on the role of native performance.
I’ve played around with ableton before- im wondering what are the high-level aspects of a DAW that take up that compute? Off the top of my head if you have like 10 channels of synths, what in there is super intensive? What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so expensive?
It's not the high level aspects, but the low level ones.
Audio DSP is doing a lot of math. CPUs are good at it, sure, but modern synths and effects are legitimately pushing up against how much math a CPU core can evaluate in the few milliseconds you have to render (in the worst case, low latency realtime rendering time is actually dominated not by how much DSP you can do, but how long it takes to move audio from userland to kernel and out to the hardware and back).
Some of the DSP algorithms are really hard to optimize with SIMD, in fact most of the common audio DSP operations can't be trivially converted to SIMD forms (and when they are, they aren't N times faster for N more lanes). Filters are especially tricky because converting the math from one form to another changes the topology of the signal flow, which is only equivalent in the steady-state of non-linear and time-invariant filters. DAWs are using non-linear time variant filters that are being modulated in realtime, so your super fast SIMD optimized biquads might not sound as good as the converted SVF that can't be trivially optimized (there are tricks, but it's a game of tradeoffs).
And there's the other aspect of the scene that there's just a lot of bad or naive code out there. There is a lot of know-how floating around, but a lot of tools are designed by folks without it to begin with. That's a good thing because it makes a lot of interesting and cool tools, but it also means that institutional knowledge is kind of locked away. It doesn't help that some of the largest examples for newcomers (JUCE's DSP module, RAFX/Aspik with the accompanying text), as well as classic (and new!) textbooks teach people to do things in the least performant way possible, and those algorithms make it into production.
Thanks for the informative comment. Are there resources you would recommend for learning more about performant algorithms? At the moment I'm just messing around with JUCE
> you have like 10 channels of synths, what in there is super intensive
The synth itself. Samplers, hardware emulations, and effects can eat a lot of memory and CPU, to say nothing of a monster 100+ voice synth patch (very easy to achieve with unison, used in supersaw-type sounds)
> What does freezing tracks mean and why is it so expensive?
Freezing tracks means recording the output of that track to a WAV and using that output as a stand-in for the real thing. Freezing tracks isn't expensive, it's what you use when another plug-in is too expensive and you want to reduce your CPU load.
