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I think this is a weird side effect of how we portray evil corporations in fiction and in journalism. We imagine that everyone working there is a moustache-twirling villain. And then we get a job at Meta or Flock or Palantir, look around, and don't see any moustache-twirling villains. There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.

Even if some of the outcomes seem reprehensible, it's not really evil because we're good people. We do it in a responsible and caring way. We're truly sorry that your grandma is now hooked up on endless AI-generated slop, but shouldn't the media be talking about all the other grandmas whose lives are enriched by our AI? We have strict safety rules for the types of cryptocurrency ads that can target the elderly, too.


Let's me tell you. I worked at a IRS equivalent service in another country, and a lot of what I did was not very different from spying in our own citizens.

And you know what? there's a pervasive ideology in the place that justifies it all.

One day you wake up, and you realize that you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer, even if the official documents say otherwise.

And we are talking about Tax Payers here. Now imagine an organization like Palantir that can de-humanize their targets marking them with the Terrorist label. It is easy to convince people that they are on the right side.


> you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer

Any force employing threat of violence for control does the same. Police presence, military occupation, hell you even see it in the eyes of loss prevention folks.


> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun"

Yes, there is.[1]

[1] https://archive.is/ngaj4


> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.

It can get pretty close at times. Witness Meta and Zuck being told, in clear terms, that there was clear material threats to Burmese dissidents with some of the asks of Facebook. "The features matter more."


Or like, anything peter thiel says ever.

Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later. Sure, it's a classic, but it's hardly a "must-have". At best, it's something you need to read for school, although many school districts have dropped it from their lists.

Having said that, I think the complaints about book prices are mostly an excuse for preferring to spend time on social media or download pirated books for free.

Leaving aside the question of whether they're priced "correctly", books are cheaper than a Doordash meal or a computer game we buy and never finish. Would the average person really read more books if they were $4.99 instead of $29.95?


The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.

Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typical example of that good today, without digging into the details, because the typical example today is often a lot worse-made but in ways that aren't apparent just from looking at a wide-shot image of the two things. Often it takes destructive tear-downs to really get at the differences (as it would to do a deep comparison of book binding quality) if you don't have access to watch the manufacturing processes directly.

Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.

(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)


> books are cheaper than a Doordash meal or a computer game we buy and never finish. Would the average person really read more books if they were $4.99 instead of $29.95?

As a data point I'm reading some series I enjoyed the first 2 volumes of. I just picked up the next 7 ones because they were there and each of em were ~$5. Wouldn't have done that if they were $30, and I'm not guaranteed to get to the end!


> Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later.

Well it doesn't matter. Even if you compare to books that are newly published, new hardcover fiction is not $43-54. Typical is about $30.


What's especially frustrating is that the posts about AI are also disproportionately written by AI. I can sort of understand that people who are very enthusiastic about LLMs also use them for blogging. But the most bizarre part is that a lot of anti-AI opinion pieces are LLM-generated too. Either cynical click-sploitation or extreme hypocrisy.


At this point it's easiest to just ignore and/or flag everything with an .ai domain.

They're now paying and training people to produce more AI doom slop, so it's only going to get worse: https://www.plzdontkillus.com/

How else do you expect me to illustrate my LLM-generated blog posts about AI?

Oh my. You still make those? Ever since model chupacobra 2.46 we have AI agents making those for us. At one point I was on the fence about totally outsourcing it to agents but it's way more efficient. Now I have 50 posts a day under different names.

Unfortunate. Tindie is (was?) a pretty unique marketplace. Amusingly, a lot of what they were selling was probably illegal due to FCC rules: for the most part, you can't sell electronics without EMI certification and "I'm just a hobbyist" is not an excuse. Kits get a bit of leeway, but finished products don't.

Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mails asking me to start selling my designs with China-based outlets: they would make the PCBs, assemble them, and pay me some money for every item sold.


Can you share more information about the undercutting? I've heard of places like Elecrow trying to incentivize people to sell via their platform/OEM service but it sounds like you've had people asking you to license your designs?

I never followed up, but I didn't read it as some serious IP licensing thing. It sounded like they've come to the conclusion that they're making the stuff that's sold on Tindie anyway, so might as well set up a website and ship directly to your customers.

Free market is a good thing.

It's good until some unregulated electronic device creates interference that makes some poor guys pacemaker act up and kills them.

As a RF expert, I can assure you that is not possible. And basic common sense should tell you why.

It's AM radio that gets interfered with.


It's not likely, but if you're an expert I'm sure you could think of a few ways it would be possible. The reason we give people with pacemakers a list of machines to avoid is definitely not to waste their time because there is no possible way any of those things could be dangerous to them.

I mean, more or less, we do. The NIH list includes cell phones, e-cigarettes, and headphones.

As an RF expert I can assure you that I could create a device to wirelessly interfere with a pacemaker. A pathological one, maybe, but the point remains: regulation is needed.

The question is whether such interference could be created by a device as a by-product of its normal operation, not by a weapon that's intended to cause harm.

Blind dogma is rarely a good thing. A free market is not a virtue or end goal in itself, but a means to other ends.

Every freedom has limits

Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.

As to why we want to make phones as thin as possible... I don't know, but I guess it makes them look futuristic, which helps with sales. The same goes for highly-reflective, glossy screens. I guess I'm not gonna cry if that gets regulated away.


> Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.

Fairphone 6, recent with replaceable battery: 9.6 mm

Galaxy S5, has a replaceable battery, released _12 years ago_ - battery tech has improved a lot since then: 8.1 mm

iPhone 17 Pro Max: 8.8 mm

iPhone 12 Pro Max: 7.4 mm

We want to make phones as thin as possible so the latest flagship iPhone is 1.4 mm thicker than the one from 5 years ago? A whole 0.8 mm thinner than a recent one with a replaceable battery with maybe 0.1% of the iPhone's R&D budget, and 0.8 mm thicker than one with a replaceable battery made 12 years ago?


Galaxy S5 had a tool-free replaceable 2800mAh battery, with hard sides for protection. NFC. Wireless charging (as a user-installed option -- again, no tools, but did add some thickness and weight). USB 3 with OTG. HDMI over MHL. An excellent camera for the time. An OLED screen. A headphone jack. An SD card. A sim card. An IR blaster for changing TV channels at the pub. (I'm probably missing some functions here.)

The bootloader was unlocked in many regions (and became unlockable in all regions). Custom roms were abundant.

And it was waterproof.

(In the subsequent decade+, I have heard it said over and over again that this is an impossible combination of traits. And yet, there was a time when we had all that.)


You're thinking about "hot swappable" batteries, but the EU is only mandating user-replaceable batteries, which can even require specialized tools.

I don't think there's any requirement to make the batteries themselves safe to throw into a backpack where they might be punctured.


Bullshit. This was the reason the industry gave for why they were removing battery replaceability support. Everybody hated it when it was first introduced, and to this day I only buy phones which have easily accessible ways to put a new battery on when the day comes. Fuck this BS of "people wanted thinner phones".

It’s also very hard to make them resistant to water and dust, I really like that I can wash my iPhone in the sink and don’t have to worry about it getting wet in general. This is a lot harder to achieve with battery doors, especially if they need to be as big as a phone back.

Completely untrue and debunked ad nauseum.

Rugged phones with removable batteries has vastly superior IP ratings. Glues go bad faster than O-rings used in removable batteries do.

I've had water intrusion with an iPhone, and it drove a sales of a new display panel from myself. Not so much with an actual rugged phone.


Rugged phones are so far removed from any consumer phone in terms of size and weight the comparison is about as apt as comparing military use laptops with a MacBook.

You... wash your phone in the sink?

Easiest way to get rid of dust and other buildup, free flowing water for a few seconds and done. Compared to the Middle Ages of using tooth picks or similar to clean the ports and speakers it’s much nicer. And no, I don’t have my phone in any weird places, just my pocket.

This is an interesting sentiment given how desperate AI labs seem to be source any new internet content from any walled-garden platform willing to take their money (and how willing they are to try & take it even if you don't consent).

Abusive, sneaky scraping is absolutely through the roof.


I feel as though you are confusing AI use in scraping by random companies and actual AI companies scraping. The AI companies seem to see value in walled garden sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. However, I don't think there has been any major instance of a major American AI company doing aggressive online website scraping and not respecting robot.txt.

Per https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by..., all of the major American AI companies are not respecting robot.txt and participating in the AI-fueled DDoS of the internet.

The issue is that UA are editable by the user, and there is no proof that some random person/scraper isn't just using a suspected trusted bot's UA string. Every ethical service also posts what IP addresses they use, so that people can compare the traffic they get to see if it is actually their bot scraping. What this article describes is the game of every third-party unethical scraper; they do anything and everything to try and get their request through. They steal UA's, they steal residential IP addresses through botnets, they attempt to circumvent CAPTCHAs using AI, etc. So the behavior in this article is not prove for any major AI provider doing unethical scraping.

No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.

> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18.

Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?

It takes away two years of your life, possibly delaying your education, entry into the workforce, or having children. So again, what's the rigorous justification for this? The government already calls dibs on a good chunk of your economic output, on a percentage of every penny you spend, and on certain types of property you own; so why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on?


It also implies that most normal work isn't in the interest of society, which if that were true, would be a major problem on its own. In what sense is 2 years of military service or "community service" strictly better for society than going to school, or working as a waiter, or starting a small business?

Roughly speaking, 2 years of community service should be worth some % of local & federal taxes.

In a developed society, I'm not sure what kind of labor an 18-year old can perform (what I mean is that it would be mostly unskilled labor), that would be better than taxing this same individual later in life, without delaying their education by 2 years.

I suppose there would have to be exemptions for college students as there typically are in such schemes in other countries?


Shouldn't be. Just have a more-level playing field, make everyone (college-track or not) participate.

You seem to assume that tax dollars are equivalent to labor. A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there, it takes a human to do something for the most part. Money is a tool sitting there, not actual work.


> A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there

Luckily, we don't have a pile of quarters sitting there doing anything, because the US operates at a deficit. So dollars are being borrowed then spent on projects.


Sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say there. Borrowing money somehow does useful work without being spent?

I mean, yes? I think when we say, we should force 18 year olds to do something useful for society instead of working doordash or taking college classes that they don't care about, that is kind of saying something about the usefulness of those things.

If the market figured it out we wouldn't be having these discussions in the first place.


It's not a market failure. If you pay enough money you can attract either citizens or even destitute African people to volunteer to get blown up for the glory of Trump and the oil companies.

The only reason to force two years of service is to reinforce conformity and suppress outward signs of neurodivergence.

I'm not sure what I believe is right but one thing I can think of is there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias. The same goes for companies that work with the military/defense which I think the parent article lays out as well.

If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or already have ended up) with all of the talented people and cutting edge businesses chasing money here and only second tier folks working with and for the government.

I think a great example of this is with NASA. They are doing a big hiring blitz (someone posted about it recently here). They have a ton of openings but I have to imagine that the talented folks that work in the field are chasing the money that is paid by private companies right now. I personally believe NASA is an important thing that needs to exist and we need to figure out a way to make it happen. Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government? Maybe even more so if you working for the armed forces because you lose a lot of people based upon the sheer fact that your life is more at risk.

It would definitely be worth some research. I don't think free market concepts align well with working in the armed forces and there could be some arguments that we need to tip the scales to make it work better. For some things like the usual government services that aren't vital for our existence, I think we can all accept the longer wait at the DMV or the two decades to get a Real ID implemented. I don't think we can accept not defending our own country from an adversarial invasion so we need to make that importance reflected somewhere.


> there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias.

Not only is there a bias, there is one on purpose (not saying that's a good thing). For example, the Marines are known to prefer recruiting from lower-income and lower-education backgrounds. They want scrappy, tough people.

Conversely, the Air Force is the "geek" branch of the military.

There are lots of other examples. If you go on YouTube you can see funny videos of the branches poking friendly fun at each other; e.g., Marines eating crayons.

> Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government?

In the US I think this may be the only way. Private industry pays so much it's hard to compete.


> why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on?

You can only prepare for a fire before it starts.


In the conventional view, the earliest preparations for war involve building a strong industrial base, reducing corruption, and securing alliances through cooperative foreign policy. The near-term preparations for war include diverting a fraction of total resources away from compounding growth and towards non-compounding defense manufacturing. A draft is something you do after the war starts.

The strategic idea is to remain in a pose of compounding growth as long as possible by avoiding war and war preparations until they're known to be absolutely necessary. Peacetime investments like scientific research build on themselves, while military spending sits in a depot until it's obsolete and then costs even more to safely dispose. The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.


> The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.

This may be true in an American context (though I don't actually know) in the sense that the US military is highly specialized and matrixed. In smaller militaries soldiers tend to be more generalist, while still having specializations.

e.g., they say in the British forces, if you ask an artillery soldier what they do, it's a little bit of everything. In the US military, a soldier might say "I pull the rope!" Not a good use of talent.


There are other bases besides war for national service, eg disaster prep, taking care of the poor and so on. In any case, being somewhat prepared for war at the human level and understanding what that entails is more productive that not being prepared and having to educate people in an unwelcome emergency.

The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.

Exaggerated tropes like this don't make for useful discussion.


One of the paradoxes of military service is that the real experiences of servicemembers sound exaggerated, while what sounds like reality is expressed through Hollywood tropes.

Sure, but you also don't keep 1.3 million firefighters idling in case of a really big fire.

Of course you do, thats how fire brigades work!? Though you are somewhat right, its closer to only 1.1 million firefighters across the US.

https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...


Don't we? That is pretty close to the number of firefighters in the US, and they rarely fight fires

From some quick googling, I think the average firefighter fights about two fires per month, which is pretty good! And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.

But firefighters don't just fight fires, they mostly do medical emergencies, which keep them very busy. And that's the problem with standing armies: we generally don't want soldiers doing a bunch of other kinds of work besides wars because they're around.


> And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.

For the most part, only during fire season.


> Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility"

I have found that when older people ask young people to do this kind of "mandatory service" they never specify what exactly are they going to do while being on the government's leash.

It's always this warm fuzzy hand wavy "civic responsibility" or "build communities" thing, that they always seem to think is something someone else should do when they are fully capable of doing it themselves.


> but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?

if you want rights, you need to do more than just exist.

gunpoint is optional; West Germany used to force people to go either into the Army, or else do a longer stint of service in hospitals, firefighting, old folks homes, rescue services, youth organizations, or other civil roles.


Do you believe that in American civil society there are only privileges and not responsibilities?

Government already got the tax dollars to pay for the service at gunpoint. And makes you get a passport to travel internationally or a driver's license to get yourself around at gunpoint.


> Do you believe that in American civil society there are only privileges and not responsibilities?

Funny enough, the only true responsibility I'm aware of is jury duty. And that's only for citizens and everybody tries to get out of it.


All of this is only for citizens. Many try to get out of it, but "everybody" is flat wrong. It sounds like you are aware of, and accept, responsibilities. Nothing wrong with adding to them.

> free labor

I'm not sure anywhere expects people to do their national service for free - which is to say that such a programme would also likely be very expensive.


What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.

Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me than someone who was forced to another literature or geology course.

Have someone demonstrate a command of the English language by following written instructions that require coordinating activities with a small group of people.

Instead of learning how to read a topographical map for first year geology lab final actually put the map in their hand with a compass and have them do an orienteering exercise as a group.


> Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me

For when daily standups go south or just the monthly All-Hands?


> What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.

In a world where 1 year of civil service was normal for most people, I'm skeptical that this is the choice the labor market would consistently make. Remember, if pretty much everyone in society is doing the same national service, then that means the military had to find jobs for everyone to do, including people with mediocre general competence or who are in fact bad at following written instructions in English. "I completed my mandatory national service, just like pretty much everyone else" is not that strong of a signal.

In the Soviet Union, smart math and science students often competed hard for academic and technical positions that would let them fulfill their military obligation by doing some kind of math or science for the Soviet state, instead of being a conscript foot-soldier for a few years like was normal for Soviet males (boot camp sucks for everyone, but it really sucks for most smart nerds). If the US had a system like this, there would definitely be industries where it was normal for everyone working in them to have avoided the worst of actual combat training somehow or another - or for actually having done normal soldiering to be a culturally-unusual thing to do. Just like how in our actual society it's unusual for someone who works at a silicon valley tech company to have actually volunteered to serve in the US military earlier in life.


I'd prefer someone who is confident enough to take another geology or literature course over the gun-handler. I'd make sure that person is in a supervisory position over welfare-state products of our armed forces, certainly.

If you were presented with three options for hiring, each with identical professional experience, but the first has a four year degree, while the second has a three year degree, and the third has a three year degree plus + year of national service in a country with an effective military which one would you pick and why?

Who's going to pay for that?

Taxpayers in non-failed states like Finland that are able to provide astoundingly high quality of life for their citizens while also providing a strong military that is based around mandatory national service.

Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world what, eight or nine years in a row now and was able to secure they borders against a overwhelmingly more capable neighbour with no participation in a mutual aid defensive alliance like NATO until very recently.

In so many ways Finland is the model we should all be looking at emulating in Western countries.


While the majority of Finns speak highly of their conscription system, there's also an understanding that it's propped up by Finland's unique history and place in the world. I think people are seriously naive as to how much shit the Finnish people have suffered over the last millenia, and how that has contextualized their modern existence.

> Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world

"Tilastollinen onnellisuus" is a concept relentlessly mocked by Finns. Finns are very proud of their country, but many are also very quick to call it a shithole, to engage in valittaminen, and for good reason. Their love for it is practically an expression of sisu. The contradiction of it being an absolute dreg of a swamp populated by insufferable FINNS, yet they would all agree to throw their life away to defend it anyways, is not a situation that was conjured out of thin air with some clever social policies and progressive tax reform.


Devil's advocate.

First, "national service" does not necessarily mean relocation like a military deployment does. Second, there is no requirement that national service be free.

This has me thinking about a way to encourage some level of public service in exchange for better access to government programs, like an extra 10% in retirement benefits or something.

Reminds me of Starship Troopers: "Service Guarantees Citizenship!" Yes, I know it's a play on fascism.


> Starship Troopers

So, disclaimer: I'm very aware that Verhoeven created Starship Troopers satirizing fascism and holding up a mirror to American society.

That said, I am somewhat a fan of the idea that citizenship is something that should be earned. For example, birthright citizenship - I think it's a good thing and should be kept around. That said, as far as I know no natural-born American is required to raise their right hand and swear that they will take up arms to defend the United States in case of war. A naturalized citizen is required to do this. That creates a real bifurcation in the society in my opinion.


you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this

I'm so sick of libertarian tropes. Starting every argument with oerwrought emotionalism has made me increasingly indifferent to your 'plight' over the years, because it's just victimization politics. Perhaps if we rebalanced public/private obligations overall tax burdens owuld be lower and society would be more pleasant to live in.


I'm not a libertarian but I think they have a point here - conscription is tantamount to slave labor. The fact that it was accepted by societies for hundreds of years doesn't make it any less so.

All work can be compared to slave labor to the extent that you need money to live. Just think of it as practical training for which you also get paid.

Personally I think it'd be a massive net benefit for society if every able person had a decent standard of first-aid training and a bunch of other general competencies that gave them useful job and emergency skills which they didn't have to expend a bunch of money to pay for.


> the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison

You'll never guess what happens if you choose not to pay taxes.


They use tax money to house and feed you?

> They use tax money to house and feed you?

Indeed — just not in the style to which you'd like to become accustomed ....


And this justifies it why?

Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.

It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.


It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it.

Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it.

The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.


But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case.

If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.


What is “mostly” AI in the context of music?

Of course ~nobody wants low-effort "I pasted a one-line prompt into Suno and got this out" in their feed. If they did they'd be listening on Suno and not Spotify. The problem is there's no objective, let alone automated, way to tell the difference between that and the corner cases. Artistic quality is an inherently subjective metric, not something that can be enforced via rules.

Who is listening to that crap anyway when you got literal decades worth of great music to choose from?

New great music is being released every day. What should I do, arbitrary decide to never consume any music made past today?

Nah but I venture that you could distinguish AI generated music from great new music. And if you can’t, what’s the issue?

The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.

Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.

But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.

Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.


The solution is easy, don’t use Spotify. They are money grubbing vampires leeching off musicians anyway and using your subscription money to fund shady arms companies.

Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.

Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.


If they don’t care what is the problem?

The biggest issue for new musicians is not AI generated slop, it’s a predatory industry and a backlog of 80+ years of excellent music.


The biggest issue for new musicians is getting people’s attention. AI music that people are happy to over human music listen to is absolutely part of the problem.

I agree that this is the biggest problem, but the existing backlog of hits is far that have been recorded since way before I was born is far “worse” in that regard than AI slop.

It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.

It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.


The engagement mechanisms and audiences for heritage artists vs new artists are very different. New artists are not in competition with heritage artists like the ones you mention: those artists are a constant passive consumption baseline against which new active “lean in” consumption needs to fit. A lot of music listening is passive consumption. Start an algorithmically generated “radio” style playlist from one of those big name heritage artists and Spotify will then serve up payola content (baked in in the major label deals, “Spotify Discovery Mode” for indies) that positions new music within that playlist for algorithmically receptive listeners. If AI created music is going head to head in that algorithmic market for listening slots, that has a significant disadvantage for new human-created music.

Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.


I can assure you it’s not a corner case: this is one of the things that a lot of creators are concerned about. If a major streaming platform decides your music is not acceptable because you used some AI as part of your production process and blocks your song as a result that has pretty big consequences.

Spotify, for example, already said that any track that gets under 1000 streams will not get any money. What if it says “any track that uses more than a proportion of AI will not make any money” - but refuses to say how it makes those decisions so that people can’t game the system.


If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?

You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.

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