I'm confused, surely there's a contradiction between "piracy was so good, we had this panacea of completely open, free, infinite music" and "streaming is bad even though it's the same infinite music library but we charge a small subscription". I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.
> I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.
No it's not. We'd _much_ rather you steal our music if it means we are part of a free, permissionless, seeking-to-be-comprehensive library of the traditions of humankind.
We don't give a fuck about whether you get our music according to the prescribed notions of some particular state or corporation.
I'm a bluegrasser, so maybe my lens is pretty shifted (given that our tradition is one of passing on copyright-unencumbered tunes from time immemorial). But this view is very widespead - essentially universal - in bluegrass. There's a reason that every IBMA and bluegrass grammy has gone to a drm-free record the past bunch of years.
Piracy encouraged buying music. You'd learn of this cool band through a friend and would buy their next album when it came out. People still had the same budget for music but weren't so much at the whim of what music executives wanted to push at the moment. The network effects more than made up for the "lost" revenue.
That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. What music piracy did was make it impossible for artists to sell albums without engaging in parasocial celebrity-building and shameless merch.
And everyone knows this is true!!! Music pirates also like to point out that historically musicians only played live, so it's totally a-okay that jazz musicians can no longer make a living from the studio, that even John Scofield, the greatest guitarist alive, is only middle-class because he is constantly on tour in his 70s.
People talk out of both sides of their mouth on piracy because their only real motivation is "I like getting stuff for free and don't like moral responsibility." There is nothing more contemptible than tech folks telling easily falsifiable lies about how digital music affects working musicians. The cynical dishonesty is so depressing. Ever since I was a kid I knew it was just people rationalizing theft.
At least for me, I pirate music, but I make an effort to contribute directly to the bottom line for artists. This is best done by buying overpriced merch at shows or donating directly if possible.
The article is mostly an interview with a journalist who wrote a book about Napster. The claim comes from his book. That's the source. I have not read the book. If you have concerns about the methodology you should read it yourself.
It's unfathomably weird of you to frame an article as a source for your claim and then wait for someone to point out that the article does not support your claim before admitting that the source is actually a book that you haven't read.
This whole thread does have me questioning my understanding of cited sources behind paywalls.
A contrived example I have in my head "My friend has more definitive proof in HIS book that <claim>, it only costs $1 trillion. Go read it yourself." For this particular thread its a bit disingenuous, but in a general case how does one go about understanding / disproving arguments made like this?
You decide whether or not the benefits from you obtaining the information outweigh the cost of obtaining the information. Or you convince Elon Musk to buy the book and leak the EPUB on twitter
> "Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested."
> "What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"
I am also sceptical that my burning questions will be answered in the book, thus I choose to not buy it. Also, the Goodreads reviews don't look too good
I actually had a similar idea that I cam across in my own research in brain-to-video applications. You could theoretically train the model in real-time by using brain data as a reward signal, such that the model would find the image or video that most strongly produces the desired response (e.g. an increase in certain brainwave bands associated with pleasure, or alertness, or fear).
I can imagine this has some very undesirable usecases if used in the wrong way.
Using a Muse EEG headset to read brain activity and use that to drive the output of a GAN. Similar to other projects that try to visualise or decode thoughts, but at the moment it's an art project. Obviously quite limited by compute and hardware. I'm sort of looking for collaborators / co-founders / opportunities in the AI + neuroscience + creativity space.
I've been working on my own GAN for a while, trained on a few different datasets. Then the EEG data is fed into the GAN in real-time and used to interpolate within it's latent space. I assign each brainwave band (e.g. alpha, beta, etc.) to it's own point within that latent space, so the core idea is that as alpha increases (for example) the output heads towards that point in the space and that's reflected in the output image. Happy to talk more.
Using a Muse EEG headset to read brain activity and use that to drive the output of a GAN. Similar to other projects that try to visualise or decode thoughts, but at the moment it's an art project. Obviosuly quite limited by compute and hardware. I'm sort of looking for collaborators / co-founders / opportunities in the AI + neuroscience + creativity space.
I'm sort of thinking out loud here but could you have two batteries running simultaneously but on opposite cycles, so while one is cooling the other is heating? Obviously it wouldn't be 100% efficient but it might reduce some wasted energy.
The heat and cold are created by the compressing or decompressing the CO2 (our any other gas). If one battery is heating while the other needs heat that would imply that one is charging while the other discharges, which is rarely useful in normal operation
I was also confused by this. I think you're right, but in the original text they specifically mention a 'static background' that they remove, so it's not just a simple 'wrong way round' error, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening. Makes me wonder if the author actually knew what they were doing, or just using an LLM to vibe-code everything.
I have very recently been setting up HA and various Hue products and tbh I'm quite disappointed in both.
For one thing, the Hue bridge requiring an ethernet cable is mind-blowing to me. My router doesn't have an ethernet port, and yes it does say on their website, but I wouldn't have expected it to be a requirement, especially when it actually has wifi capabilities on-device, they're just disabled.
Setting up HA was a real pain, it's definitely not "Plug and play". I used a Pi 4 and got a bunch of weird errors, and debugging it is not for the faint-hearted. Eventually I did get it working by downgrading to a year-old version, but now it doesn't recognise my Tapo (TP-Link's brand) lights, the integration just doesn't work.
Overall, it's quite a hassle to get set up so I see why people don't bother unless they've got a lot of free time or are really into it, or just pay the premium for an all-Hue system that does actually work out of the box.
I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.
The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
Awesome! For me, the desire is very much about the place and not personalities or any kind of ego attached to their posts, so I've avoided any kind of functionality that will allow to follow a person, or see what else a particular person has posted, but we'll see how it evolves. If you have any programming experience, I do recommend just diving in rather than waiting for someone else to do it, as I have discovered that a lot of people seem to think that they share my vision but when it comes down to the details they have their own thing in mind. So if you want this Instagram with locations to exist, you might find that someone else's vision doesn't quite meet your desires for it.
