I think what's missing from a lot of these discussions is how much more commerce-driven the present day internet is over the 90s-00s. Social media is highly addictive and destabilizing in order to get it's audience to eventually pay for something in TikTok Shop, or view sponsored content, for example. Dark patterns were introduced to increase revenue or to get users to dole out their personal information for advertising effectiveness.
I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade
The answer here is pretty simple — you take money, resources, etc from people who don't reproduce and you redistribute them to the people who do until the population stops declining.
But even if you do that, you'll have an issue in a generation or so when those childless people are old. They're retiring, they're drawing from pensions and social security programs, they're using the hell out of the medical services, and someone has to pay for that. They don't have kids to take care of them, so all that capital that went towards the children gets siphoned from them in their working years. Now they're in a situation where they can't afford kids, and that trick can't be done anymore. It won't actually get population growth up over a few generations.
As an added bonus, in accomplishing this task society actually becomes worth participating within, and people might naturally wish to bring a child in to this crazy... crazy world.
I really wish Spotify or Apple offered the ability for the listener to simply listen all of the songs released on their platform on a day or a week, good or bad, and directly pay the artists for the songs listeners enjoy.
Spotify's "New Releases" for example, tracks only music that major labels promote, or that fit a predetermined genre, or are similar to the songs and artists that you already listen to.
There are smaller services yes, which allow for independent promotion and distribution (Last.fm, RateYourMusic) but these have fairly obvious flaws in how the listener can approach new music (RYM pushes ratings first and foremost, and both last.fm and rym push trending artists to their users).
Instead, because the value of music is zero (really, negative since the number of listens, streams, album purchases, etc can fail to recuperate the cost to make it ), the act of distributing music presents economic risk unless the release itself can be controlled by the investors through advertisement or paid promotion.
I think it's less about memorizing lyrics, tunes, etc and more about associating certain musical pieces with specific memories, feelings, and life events (like a grandmother baking pies in November while she whistles The Beatles, remembering navigating the pain of a breakup through Taylor Swift, or churning through homework with the soundtrack of Daft Punk)
Something that has bothered me about Hacker News for years at this point is its complete disdain and disregard for an independent, reputable press.
Journalism isn’t a perfect industry by any means, but it hasn’t been responsible for the wholesale discount sale of America's manufacturing sector, nor has it pushed for the erosion of societal attention and trustworthiness like Social Media, nor has it been at the forefront of abusing gig work to the extremes of major players in the Sharing Economy — yet any center-left, traditional media outlet is met with ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies, etc. If anything, that industry has been picked clean like vultures by the financial and thought leaders in this industry.
I don't fully understand the dynamic between the west-coast hate for the east-coast press but it seems inconsequential to me because while the truth has costs, weaponized lies can hurt much more.
If you have Trump, Elon and the New York Times in one post you gonna get some hop-ons that normally do not get engaged the same way with other posts, I guess?
I kind of wish Molly White spent more time researching and disseminating information on CBDCs — the PACs to me are emergent behavior due to popularity and rise of crypto ETFs so there's not much of a story there.
ETFs aren't really financial instruments that the mainstream public will likely interact with or directly invest in, but CBDCs will probably proliferate wildly throughout the global economy in a matter of years so it's a bit of a missed chance for the public to weigh in on them.
The study involves AI based code generation on Leetcode problems using GPT-3.5 — functional code was produced between 0.66 percent and 89 percent of the time, but I'd like to see the same study conducted with GPT-4 or the latest Claude models.
I know a lot of HN readers are probably of the mind already that, "when a product is free, you are the product", and "these companies use zero marginal cost to create economies of scale".
The article hints to much worse impacts than that — with massive data harvesting and collection, companies can effectively monopolize knowledge, create information asymmetry advantages, allowing customers (e.g., data brokers) to charge consumers the maximum that they are able to pay, directly increasing prices.
I'm not quite sure I get it, the album itself is kind of...mid? It's 2+ hours of an aggressively boring take on the previous decade's music ideals desperately in need of an editor.
Honestly, it solidifies the ideal that with the vast quantity of new music released today, that if damn near every song isn't worth the listener's time, those songs don't belong on an album, they don't belong on a remix album, they don't belong on a deluxe edition, they really only have a place in live shows, livestreams, or anthologies when you're dead.
No real barrier to the distribution of music might just mean we're getting less curation from the artists. There was a "discipline" that 12" of vinyl imposed that I miss.
I was going back through Pink Floyd's discography the other day and was reminded that The Wall was a four record album! And yeah I do think that exception proves your rule. They coulda trimmed that up a wee bit.
Its a concept album that celebrates the last 60 years of music history. Understandably a lot happened in those decades and cramming all that onto a single LP would lead spirit of the beehive style insanity. I think a double LP makes tons of sense here, the album is only 2 hours long so not like the length is absolutely insane. Obviously its not the tightest, but I think that lets the influences shine even more.
Music critics also love concept albums, I think because they spend all day listening to music so something unique is especially intriguing to them.
Not the person you are replying to, but that sounds like an attempt to combine Billy Eilish with Godspeed You Black Emperor, while not managing to capture the essence of either particularly well. The result is utterly uninspiring and boring.
I'm not sure why you set the track playback to the middle of song, but it feels very literal. There's the "suffering" starting from 2:50 or so from the distortion of the guitars — I guess it reminds me of 56k modems, maybe?
But because that distortion fades completely by ~ 5:00, and the track ends at 7:30, it feels like 90 seconds of "dead space" so it feels incomplete if that makes any sense.
It's a song which places its emphasis on the dead center of the track, but because it doesn't build on the distortion or play off of it — it kind of overstays it's welcome.
Probably because of the extraordinary reception mentioned in the article and the claim that's being made? This is apparently the highest rating Pitchfork has handed out in half a decade and it's supposed to be an indicator of a major shift in the music industry.
That's quite a lot and after having listened to it I have to agree with the original poster, I don't really get it either. I expected the next Bowie after those reviews.
That’s fair. GP doesn’t really seem that upset, they just don’t like the record.
When I wrote this I was coming off another comment where the commenter seemed genuinely upset over the distribution medium. I think a little bit of my sentiment about that post dribbled through.
Even so, I wish people were more live-and-let-live about very subjective things like music. It’s a big world and art is not zero-sum.
