My kid is 9. I feel like this is a good fit with how I would like her to experience music, especially the sharing and curation part. I have a few questions...
1. I bought her an "old school" mp3 player for Christmas, like an iPod. It's pretty good, but it's really missing the easy to use app similar to the original iTunes where she can load and manage songs by herself, without needing me to grab them from a folder, plug in the device, copy the songs across after it mounts, etc.
Does Muky provide that functionaliy, like an iTunes for kids before everything went streaming and on-device?
2. She also loves audiobooks. You mention audiobooks, alongside Apple Music (I don't have Spotify). Does Apple Music support audiobooks? I would love a similar interface that promotes discover of songs, but for audiobooks.
Congrats on getting this out there. I truely believe there is a viable niche for kids music apps that sits between toddler and access to all-the-music-in-the-world-at-your-fingertips that becomes a huge time sink for kids who can't quite self regulate the shiny interface of modern streaming apps on mobile phones. I almost went down a rabbithole of building one myself, thinking, how hard can it be...thank you for saving me the 2 years to understand its hard! :-)
Thanks! You nailed the niche – that gap between toddler devices and full streaming access is exactly where Muky sits.
To your questions:
1. Unfortunately no – Muky only works with streaming content from Apple Music or Spotify. No local MP3 support or syncing to external devices. You'd still need something like the old iTunes workflow for that MP3 player. Local file support comes up often though, it's on the roadmap.
2. There's actually a lot of audiobook content on Apple Music – especially kids stuff. The new Browse tab in Mukychas curated audiobooks to help you discover them.
And yes – "how hard can it be" is a dangerous question. Found that out myself!
Note, this is painfully out of date, I no longer maintain it.
How did you get the data? I went the scraping route after having difficulty qualifying for access to Amazons API as I didn't generate enough purchases via the affiliate links. Would be interested in hearing how you approached this.
BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together"
Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.
I worked at one of the companies that were acquired by Bending Spoons and really the only positive things I can say about them is: They are honest and stick to their word.
It's a shitty business model, run by people who do not, in any way shape or form, care about people at all. But they are honest.
So if you work at a company and BS comes knocking: relax, accept the severance money and start looking for something new. It will be over soon. And you also don't want to stay even if offered because it will be an entirely alien environment where only people of a certain character can work.
> where only people of a certain character can work
Out of curiosity, could you expand on this? Gutting engineering playgrounds and other inefficient crap to maximize ROI sounds like a fun challenge. It's essentially performance optimization but applied to a whole infrastructure as opposed to individual parts.
Applied through the proverbial front door a few months back to have a chat and unsurprisingly got a generic rejection, but wouldn't mind trying again using a better channel. Question is of course whether they'd be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.
some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.
You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
>some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society.
if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.
as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.
if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
> as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin
That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.
[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not. For life's necessities (eg food, shelter) this is straightforwardly obvious. And you are making this claim in the context of the employment market, which is one step removed from that.
But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselves in the integral. For example your assertion lets you conclude things like a casino owner who has made a pile of money but impoverished the community has made society better.
>No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not.
I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything.
What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin."
however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to participate in a transaction, you will be less happy, i.e. allowing sellers to offer choices and buyers to make choices will increase happiness in every type of market.
before you make another mistake and go shooting off, I didnt say people will be happy, I said they will be happier, but happier is an unmitigated good.
Try harder to not be a condescending dweeb, or you will not be able to have amicable discussions or overcome your own airtight but inapplicable logic.
I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.
what you are actually saying is that a certain class of people "know better" than what another class thinks they want.
If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.
and this explains why the USA doesn't have universal healthcare, or why a generation of the world's population now serve as eyeballs for advertisers using applications specifically designed to be addictive in order to enrich silicon valley startups. You certaintly wouldn't get here if you started with the question "how do we want society to look like?"
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
Here's the rub: Vimeo was profitable, and had no debt. Per their last public filing(s), in 2025 the company had:
- ~$400M expenses
- ~$420M revenue (therefore ~$20M profit for the year)
- ~$300M of cash in the bank (no debt)
Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
Presumably Bending Spoons believes they can optimize a lot of that 400M expenses while keeping revenue flat or even growing it. At least they believe enough to make a 1.4B bet on it.
This sounds more like a reverse mortgage line of business, to me. Bending Spoons is betting they can eek enough revenue out of Vimeo to pay the interest on the $1.4B loan by cutting the $400M expense run rate.
The actual loan principal will be paid out (if it ever does) of the money they expect to bring in when they inevitably go to an IPO.
And at that point you have speculators carrying risk, bankers getting rich off interest, leadership raking in millions, and a once reasonably healthy business is jeopardized (subject to the performance of other Bending Spoons properties, risky management, etc). All in the name of growth that may or may not be achievable.
Your options are too coarse. There's good and bad ways to get fired (and there's nothing here saying they got a severance to begin with). How about a 3 month warning? How about guaranteeing a 6 or more month severance after those 3 monhts? How about even before this sell goes through you make sure employees benefit from the 1.4b with more than "well my company stock got a tiny bump"?
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."
at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.
The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .
And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.
Bending Spoon's business model has been -- at least for a decade -- buying companies that didn't operate profitably; stopping or slowing ongoing eng investments; and operating them profitably. Often that involves raising prices, but everyone is adults here.
Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
You can't point out the place where they promised the workers jobs. Because there was no such commitment, either before or after the sale.
The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics (they only made $27m last year!) to a negligent extent.
It sucks for the people let go, but they can't be surprised.
you're arguing de facto with de jure. Not a historically healthy way to argue. We aren't lawyers here.
>Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics
Dude, I just want layoffs to be signaled ahead of time. You can defend billionaires all you want and gaslight engineers for not being marketing majors. My demands are very simple.
Everyone saw 21: -50m, 22: -80m, 23: 21m, 24: 27m and knew this was a dead company walking. With one or more annual founds of layoffs since at least 2023. Oh, and low revenue growth and falling subscriber counts.
That's not marketing or gaslighting, that's expecting people to pay minimal attention to their employer's financial performance. Minimal here being on the level of possessing object permanence.
While you may be correct in the sense that, in a public acquisition statement, people should be inferring enormous context and not taking anything said at face value.
It's simultaneously true that this is the farthest thing from effective, honest, and clear communication. Reading between the lines here is required precisely because we all know that any acquisition statements made are, at best heavily coded, if not completely just fluff.
You can recognize that and still get angry that it's par for the course for such things to be not just devoid of useful information, but often actively deceiving.
Tbf, and in support of your broader point, there's no reading between the lines, because genuine intent is indistinguishable from deception with this kind of stuff, because the latter imitates the former. There's only expecting the worst, and being only occasionally wrong.
You'd be surprised, even by navigating in this comment section. I guess they continue to do it because it works. Or because they no longer care about public sentiment.
You're not wrong, but how screwed up is it that we expect leadership at companies we spend most of our waking time on to bullshit through their teeth at the people that make the damn thing work in the first place?
It's a moral failure to fire people without any notice for reasons unrelated to your company failining and not being able to afford you, yes. Let's not mince words here.
There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.
Obviously sometimes a business is unsustainable, and it's unavoidable, but it's pretty sociopathic to not consider that people are harmed by being laid off.
>The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm.
So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet.
I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
They were at-will employment. That should have been considered with their every purchasing decision ever. Their personal and moral failures is not their employers failures.
Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.
After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.
I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.
"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"
> There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
What? Just because a statement says "we're excited to do X" doesn't mean they're not also planning to do A, B, C, Y and Z.
I'm not defending the layoff. It just seems weird to interpret the statement itself as somehow being misleading about a subject that it literally didn't mention.
There's letter and spirit of the word. You're arguing against the spirit of the word because the letter of the word is technically impossible to prove as a lie right now.
We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)
Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?
Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".
I don't like layoffs, but if the statement in September said "we are going to lay off most of our talent in January for blah blah blah corporate mumbo jumbo", it'd suck but I'd see nothing wrong with it. The employees get a 3 month warning to plan around, and the company can do whatever it wants from there.
A reasonable person, when told "Company A is buying and will operate Company B," would interpret that as "all of Company B" including its assets, liabilities, cash, property, patents, AND employees. They would not think "Well, ackshually, they're just buying the corporate entity itself, which doesn't technically involve keeping the employees..."
If "reasonable person" means "someone with literally zero experience reading any business or acquisition news whatsoever" then I agree with you. Hell, the OP literally begins the announcement with, "As expected."
if corporations only exist to make the rich richer, maybe it's time to eat the rich. Corporations' outward goals used to be to satisfy their customers. That may have never been the internal case, but it isn't even pretended to be so nowadays.
Severely downsizing the company isnt a good vibe to a customer. I'd definitely be migrating off Vimeo if I did any serious business with them.
Any reasonable person who has paid attention to business news over their lifetime would not be surprised to see layoffs following a corporate acquisition.
But even more, it seems like the statement implies layoffs if they are acquiring a startup or growth-orient company. Bending Spoon is saying they intend to run the web site/web app as-is and make money. That means they will discard employees who have been employed with hope of growing/pivoting/etc the company. In start-ups, that can be a lot of the employees.
Yes. It's a zero trust society. Nobody can trust anybody else. The only thing that's trusted is money in a bank account... And we really shouldn't be trusting our eyes there because the money is backed by nothing and there is no reliable consensus between different banks (look at the details of correspondant banking and factor in things like the Eurodollar, stablecoins...).
It's like; the thing we trust the most cannot be trusted but so long as we keep using money in its current form, this implicit form of trust is devaluing the trust of everything else that's not money.
Our relationship with money sets the bar for all other relationships. If it's a deceptive relationship and we tolerate it, we will tolerate every other relationship which is equally deceptive. We become accustomed and tolerant to a certain level of deception. We are also emboldened to deceive others.
Our relationship with money is highly deceptive and getting worse over time. We can expect to see the same trend in our relationships.
I think money CAN buy trust; it works by devaluing the entire concept of trust to the level that it can afford to buy it outright. It maintains a monopoly on trust.
So are we just going to acept that words no longer mean anything and carry on through life distructing of everything we navigate through? That isn't the only way.
Imagine what would happen if we tried these actions like we do for real murder trials.
"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."
Are many, many Agents going to produce better quality outputs than 1 Agent?
Assuming this isn't a parody project, maybe this just isn't for me, and thats fine. I'm struggling to understand a production use case where I'd be comfortable letting this thing loose.
No. It is going to produce a mindboggling amount of code in a very short amount of time, and hopefully in the process bad variants somehow would be pruned out as the horde of agents engage in an orgy of edits.
> AI changes that. Now you don’t need to know anything at all.
This is democratisation. Is the cheating the problem, or is the system the problem?
If it's so easy to cheat that a person with no previous knowledge or experience can appear to be very knowledgable and/or experienced by typing a few words into a computer, I would probably suggest the system, and all the gatekeeping and profit extraction that has gone into that system over the years, is the problem.
Usually cake baking of some kind. The kids will get bored after the initial mess making part, but will be expecting a yummy treat at the end, so the parent has to see the whole thing through, _and_ clean up the mess.
For an added bonus, the kid then eats the sugary treat, and they have that to deal with.
I just want to say I found this quite an insightful comment. I similarly would love to use a pay-as-you-go pricing model as a way of safely trying out various SaaS services.
Unfortunately I feel it is not in the SaaS businesses interests, who want to replicate the gym membership model where the 70% who don't use the service are supplementing the other 30% who use it frequently.
It's no longer "live" so I wouldn't try and use it. I was using Supabase free tier to manage auth, and got tired of keeping it live. Good lesson learnt.
I wonder how different the perception of these projects being late or (massively) over budget would be if we used different words. Bear with me here...
Words mean things. Estimate carries a certain weight. It's almost scientific sounding. Instead, we should use the word "guess".
It's exactly equivalent, but imagine the outcome if everyone in the chain, from the very serious people involved in thinking up the project, to funding the project, to prioritising and then delivering the project, all used the word "guess"
Now, when the project is millions of dollars over budget and many months/years late, no one is under any pretence that it was going to be anything else.
I tried this once. It turns out serious people don't like the idea of spending millions of dollars based on "guessing", or even letting developers "play" in order to better understand the guesses they are forced to make, even when it turns un-educated guesses into educated guesses.
Of course, none of this would improve the outcome, but at least it sets expectations appropriately.
It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.
1. I bought her an "old school" mp3 player for Christmas, like an iPod. It's pretty good, but it's really missing the easy to use app similar to the original iTunes where she can load and manage songs by herself, without needing me to grab them from a folder, plug in the device, copy the songs across after it mounts, etc. Does Muky provide that functionaliy, like an iTunes for kids before everything went streaming and on-device?
2. She also loves audiobooks. You mention audiobooks, alongside Apple Music (I don't have Spotify). Does Apple Music support audiobooks? I would love a similar interface that promotes discover of songs, but for audiobooks.
Congrats on getting this out there. I truely believe there is a viable niche for kids music apps that sits between toddler and access to all-the-music-in-the-world-at-your-fingertips that becomes a huge time sink for kids who can't quite self regulate the shiny interface of modern streaming apps on mobile phones. I almost went down a rabbithole of building one myself, thinking, how hard can it be...thank you for saving me the 2 years to understand its hard! :-)
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