George Antheil’s autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, is quite entertaining. In it he recounts his adventures related to this patent. If I recall correctly (I read it decades ago but I think I’m right here), he describes a close and co-equal collaboration with his friend Hedy Lamarr on this invention. Therefore I think these remarks by the author:
‘Since the actual invention is a player-piano-like mechanism, and since experimental musician George Antheil had expertise in the inner workings of player pianos, and further since Hedy Lamarr evidently had no such expertise, it may be more appropriate to call the Lamarr-Antheil patent “Antheil’s patent.”’
Moreover, Hedy Lamarr was the one who had the idea of using FHSS, not being aware about the unknown patents where the same idea had been proposed earlier.
The contribution of Antheil has been in the practical implementation of her idea, so it would be ridiculous to call it "Antheil's patent".
There are plenty of inventions like this, where one inventor has the idea on which the invention is based, without having enough practical experience in that domain to complete the invention, so a second inventor with appropriate experience is brought in, who may be the author of the bulk of the practical implementation, but who is not the author of the original idea.
In such cases, both are rightly called inventors, as none of them could have completed the invention without the other.
i don't think that qualifies. because the alignment issue is about multi-line alignment of upward arrows. APL usage is clearly meant to be covered by some single Unicode glyph.
Ah, yes, I see now. I can’t imagine using a programming language where I had to compose symbols vertically. I don’t know if any such infernal language exists, and I don’t understand why o11c thinks it matters.
Definitely. I use KittyTerminalImages.jl often, and also the image.nvim plugin for embedding images into a Markdown or other buffer in Neovim: https://github.com/3rd/image.nvim
I don’t grok all your lingo, so I may be missing something, but if you’re blind to anything it’s this: if users don’t have to pay, they won’t. No matter how valuable they say the service is to them.
At least one super-famous bestselling author tried to serialize his novel online with voluntary payments, and had to abandon the experiment. Nobody payed.
This attitude doesn't reflect poorly on the users. Outside any kind of charity situation, if you pay for something that is free it makes you a sucker. You need to make sure users understand that paying makes them savvy/smart or otherwise benefits them.
Right now, paying for my app DOES make you a sucker - the Level 177 user proves it. She gets full value free.
The Kagi model Lee mentioned above would flip this: free tier is limited (50-100 completions/month), heavy users pay to continue. Then paying makes you smart (you're getting 800 completions/month for $5), not a sucker.
But that requires confidence the core is worth paying for. And based on my conversion data (0.8%), most people try it and decide it's not.
So maybe the real issue is: the core isn't valuable enough to limit. And if I can't confidently say 'this is worth paying for after 100 uses,' then I don't have a product.
One thing I have observed (but this is in B2B) is that developers can be a lot more cautious around asking for money than they should be. Sales can often tell customers they need to pay and they will pay. Complaints about cost are part of the negotiation process in this environment. In B2C I don't know.
I’m not criticizing the non-paying users. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call those who pay when they don’t have to “suckers”. I don’t think I’m a sucker for tipping people when I don’t have to, or for dropping money in a street musician’s hat. I’m happy to pay for what I’ve received, when I can.
Fair point. Two of my Level 100+ users have zero subscriptions - the free tier works for them. But here's the twist: I DO have paywalls (alarms, AI chat, analytics, infinite history). They just don't care about those features, or work around them. The one power user who IS paying (CV 0.86, irregular schedule) stopped using it 7 months ago but forgot to cancel. So the question becomes: are the wrong features locked? Or do power users just not need premium features?
I even ran an A/B test (hard vs soft paywall):
- Started by "recommendation" from popular entrepreneur
- 3 months, 3k users
- Baseline (soft paywall, can skip): 0.8% conversion
- Hard paywall (must activate trial): 0.6% conversion
- Revenue tracking broken (Firebase showed $0 both variants)
- Killed experiment yesterday.
The only thing that occurs to me is the example of one of the few online services I pay for: Kagi search, for which I pay $10/month.
They have a bunch of features that I don’t care about and never use (AI, their web browser, ...). I just need their core search product (because Google is useless). Instead of putting features behind a paywall, they offer search free of charge up to a certain number of searches per month (I think). It’s enough to learn if their search is good enough to pay for. I pay to continue to use their core service more frequently (and I guess it’s the same with most of their paying customers).
Your customers seem to find value in your core service but don’t want to pay for the extras. Maybe you could apply the Kagi model?
Power users like the Level 177 user are getting unlimited value from the core. They complete 800+ habits/month on the free tier. The extras aren't compelling enough to upgrade.
Kagi model applied to Respawn would be: free tier gets 50-100 completions/month. If you're crushing it like the Level 177 user (800/month), you pay to keep using the core.
This makes more sense than what I'm doing. I'm trying to monetize peripherals when the core is what they value.
The risk: does limiting completions kill the habit-building momentum? If someone hits their limit mid-month, breaks their streak, do they just churn instead of convert?
But worth testing. It's at least aligned with value - heavy users pay, light users stay free.
‘Since the actual invention is a player-piano-like mechanism, and since experimental musician George Antheil had expertise in the inner workings of player pianos, and further since Hedy Lamarr evidently had no such expertise, it may be more appropriate to call the Lamarr-Antheil patent “Antheil’s patent.”’
are inappropriate and unjustified.
reply