supersquirrel

supersquirrel , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Can y’all IT people please stop with the condescending “you don’t know how stupid people are about computers”, it seems like there is always one of you showing up in a comment thread to tell us that we can’t have the future literally all of us want including you all as well… because WE are too stupid and lazy about computers.

I helped a grown ass human who was my age at 40yo how to install a Firefox extension.

Were you as condescending to them in person as you are being in referencing them right now? Why is not knowing how to install a Firefox extension some indicator of foreclosure on the possibility of that person becoming computer literate along whatever metrics you define? There are plenty of smart people out there who can learn how to use a computer for very complex tasks who have just simply never learned about extensions for Firefox. This is a very feasible and normal reality.

Do you know how to change the oil on your car yourself? Do simple plumbing jobs? Could you run a classroom of middle schoolers and keep them all focused while keeping your eye on the shy sad kid in the back who tends to disappear if you don’t engage them? What about basic healthcare changes or cooking? What about outdoor work or basic small engine maintenance? Do you even know shit about the most basic species of trees in your backyard? Do you know the species of songbirds you often hear outside your window? Do you even pay attention to that? Do you know how to drive a dirt bike extremely fast on a rough dirt road? Do you know how to adjust for the violent explosive power of turbo lag in a car with a turbocharger so that torque oversteer doesn’t launch you off the road? Do you know how to sew and repair basic garments? To weave? Can you even fish? Like could you literally even just catch a fish to save your life right now if I handed you a fishing rod unassembled with no instructions?

My point is, don’t go looking for confirmation of how stupid or lazy people are or how limited their capacity is to evolve and grow by casting the shapes of their ignorance onto the floor and trying to read some magic language from that.

Maybe they don’t know because they are hopelesssly stupid, but maybe not? If they are intelligent and they don’t know computers then those are the perfect people to teach linux. Then it is their first language instead of windows, many linux distro are perfectly fine for this at this point.

See here is the bottom line, legions of IT people show up online always arguing they think they know that the average person is too dumb, lazy and uninterested in computers for Linux adoption to seriously take off in the personal computer market and challenge Microsoft, but y’all don’t know shit about humans. You are experts in computers who think that makes you experts in human potential.

Go take some theater classes (or get an degree in education) and get educated before you start drawing conclusions about people when you really haven’t spent time closely studying how people engage with their potential and what situations facilitate that in basic human interaction and framing of conversations (both literal and abstract).

I’m sorry if I snapped at you but I think it is existentially important to recognize here that we don’t know what people are capable of, you can’t know the essential capacity of people to change, don’t try to predict it. Focus on creating the material opportunity for change and the rest may follow depending on what people desire, no matter to us, we desire to create that positive opportunity for change because it is the right thing to do, not because we like the future growth charts of the things we believe are important and vital.

supersquirrel , 1 day ago

Bringing it back to the whole thing about Linux, can you imagine how frustrating it would be to have to help debug a user’s Linux installation when they already need help with installing a browser add on? I work with tech and Linux on a daily basis and I already find it frustrating doing it for myself (fuck Nvidia drivers). No way am I gonna recommend it to someone else.

Are you honestly going to still claim at this late date of 2024 that a decent popular linux distro is actually going to be MORE of a headache than Windows?

....?

Have you tried Windows recently?

supersquirrel , 7 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

Outlook is atrocious what on earth are you talking about? Just trying to use it at work it is so frustrating and the UI is horrendous for everything. Truly even basic things like trying to read when a meeting actually starts just from looking at the calendar is a headache, and because all of this is proprietary unlike with Linux, tough luck, that is how things are and you can’t do shit to change it. Neither can an experienced computer user trying to help you.

I am sorry you really don’t have an accurate handle on the state of things anymore, I think you are stuck in your ways and stressed out by life and you don’t realize that emotion and lack of mental plasticity is leading to you assume everyone else is as stuck in their ways as you (including your future self when you are able to feel less overworked and stressed).

Windows is atrocious at this point, search doesn’t work and purposefully confuses new computer users about where is being searched and what is being searched. Ads pop up everywhere in the UI and will continue to spread like a terminal cancer in the UI.

Search on windows also just sucks and takes ages with the default settings (an inexperienced computer user will be using).

The file manager on windows in most marquee windows programs like word, excel etc.. all open up an entirely different file manager half way through the process of saving a file in perhaps the most insane UI pattern to keep from the mess that was Windows 8 (even though I actually really liked the core idea at first).

Windows is buggy AND windows is constantly playing head games with its user by trying to force them to use the edge browser. It is very very confusing to a new computer user what the hell is even going on.

I mean, Windows illegally changed the entire operating system countless people had without getting consent because it would look good for their numbers.

Seriously you are WAYYY out of your league if you are going to claim a nice Linux distribution on good hardware with good driver support (such as some dells or thinkpads) is categorically wayyy worse than trying to use a windows laptop in 2024….

…please get your head out of the sand :)

I mean do you want to get into the massive security vulnerability at a tactical and strategic level that Microsoft’s co-pilot represents? This is endgame for business security, Windows is in a worse spot than it has been in probably a decade at least and they deserve it. IT people and corporations have to seriously wonder if Windows even cares about following the law, which makes trusting Windows for the software relied upon by their company a complex question indeed…..

It used to be that Linux was better ideologically because it gave you agency over your computer, but now things have gotten so much worse that the reason is practical and no longer ideological.

supersquirrel , 9 days ago

Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.

waves from over in the linux corner seize the day, and microsoft's throat :P

supersquirrel , 9 days ago

If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.

They aren't just overinesting in AI, they are foreclosing the future of programming and software design as a prestigious, respectable and valuable career.

It doesn't matter if the AI works or not, it just matters that programmers sat there and took it because they thought they were special and the ruling class would never betray their trade.

Well here we are kids if you want a realistic career that will pay the bills dont follow your heart and go into programming and computers, that is a passionate hobby you shouldnt expect to be highly paid for it. Go into the trades, anywhere else, programming as a career is fucked (and again it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not).

supersquirrel , 7 days ago

Hell yeah, it is so much easier than it used to be right?

How was your experience?

Any tips for someone who might be about to do the same?

Did you create a ritual pyre of Microsoft jewel cases and old manuals and stuff and burn it while dancing around it chanting burnnn babyyy burnnn?

supersquirrel , 7 days ago

Windows Phone was never given a chance to pan out. There wasn’t space for Windows Phone to force its way on the scene when it finally began to fire on all cylinders as a smartphone OS but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity to when it came.

It is wild to me that upper management at Microsoft was too dumb to understand that and just killed their perfectly good apparatus for gaining a foothold on the mobile market. Simply put a tech company that large should always be thinking seriously about maintaining a practical entrance to an industry as important to their bottom line as this.

They are fools and they ultimately threw mud in the face of the small amount of windows phone fans (of which there definitely were loyal fans especially for the great Nokia cameras and extremely focused UI) who could have delivered that initial burst of energy and excitement/growth when the opportunity eventually did come. Thus they have actually sealed and barricaded the door to Microsoft ever EVER being in the mobile space since they betrayed ALL of the early adopter nerds who would have stuck around for the rough beginning.

supersquirrel , 13 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

What they are trying to point out is that as self confident as you portray yourself in your skills, at one point you sucked and you got hired anyway.

The new reality is you never would have been able to get into this industry because nobody would have given you a chance.

supersquirrel , 13 days ago

Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.

supersquirrel , 13 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.

supersquirrel , 13 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.

Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.

supersquirrel , 13 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.

supersquirrel , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

I'm talking from a perspective of reality. What you "predict" or "feel" or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn't really interest me much.

Damn... not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn't really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don't give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren't getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary "return to using horses while we get cars figured out better" approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future...

It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class....and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not

supersquirrel , 19 days ago

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

supersquirrel , 19 days ago

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

supersquirrel , 19 days ago

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

supersquirrel , 19 days ago

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

supersquirrel , 24 days ago

Don’t forget Inkscape!!!!

Inkscape is amazing for vector editing

https://inkscape.org/

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

GIMP

https://www.gimp.org/

supersquirrel , 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago)

First problem, that URL link goes to a dead website for me, which is a major issue given the name of Paint.Net is it’s URL…

But yeah I mean sure Paint.Net is good in terms of functionality!

I wouldn’t recommend it over Gimp though, sure Gimp is annoying but Paint.Net is a shovel where as Gimp is a fully featured construction crew with excavators and equipment. Different uses and design goals but the important bit is you can easily ask a construction crew to dig a random hole for you whereas it is much harder to ask a shovel to clear a building site and dig out a pit for a foundation for you… so I tend to recommend familiarizing yourself with Gimp and just skip Paint.Net unless you have a specific need where it fits better.

Learn Gimp once and use it the rest of your life, shrugs it is the nature of successful Open Source projects like this that after they reach a critical mass of functionality from two decades of development or so there just isn’t a great reason to go with anything else in my opinion (unless you want to drop money on a paid image editor from a company less shitty than Adobe).

Gimp will be around, being developed and used all over the world long after you are dead. Paint.Net mightttt be if it continues to grow.

supersquirrel , 28 days ago

I am unfamiliar with the grunt flip, only the warthog flip.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CgDGl-aFD0Q&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&feature=emb_title

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Just because it is wrong and obviously contradictory to other established precedents doesn’t at this point mean that it won’t be enforced unfortunately.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

shrugs framing it this way feels like a finance industry tactic where business people attempt to seem intelligent and beyond the public’s capacity to understand by taking concepts and renaming them to finance concepts and then pretending their grift is different than every other con man’s grift in history.

Steam sells games, that is far as I need to zoom in, any farther and business bros are just wasting my time with their sandcastles made out of PowerPoints and economic spiritualism that is grounded in absolutely nothing other than absolving the person running the business for the harm they may enact in doing so.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

In a world that isn’t drowning in late stage capitalism what we call that is the overwhelming gift given to us by the generations before us so that we may in turn give it to the next generation. Video games are only a tiny subsection of those gifts compared to everything else we just get handed for free.

Wealthy US boomers brutally executed that way of looking at the world though, so literally any form of passing on gifts to the next generation other than being rich as fuck and directly leaving an unbelievable amount of money to your kids is unfathomable or framed as unfair or absurd in modern day society.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Valve is a business, they don’t give a shit about vibes, when Valve gets sold off and it will one day (probably sooner than we expect) none of these “vibes” or “culture” are going to matter one single tiny little bit.

That is the point of this whole system, we receive assurances up down left right and in every which direction that entities like Valve won’t be ripped up and destroyed by venture capital, private equity, or whatever the fuck the current grift the 1% has us in… and they are empty promises by design.

A company is not legally defined as the will of its creator/creators, rather the labor and particular genius of a company’s workers is purposefully rationalized into a structure that we are supposed to accept is fundamentally designed to be ripped from our hands brutally because “that is just how the adult world works, shut up and get back to work”.

Justification of unnecessary violence and destruction is one of the primary products of the system.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Or… hmm yes of course Putin trolls love the Palestinian genocide as it distracts from Ukraine but maybe just maybe tax payers are existentially fed up with the US committing a genocide with their money and lying straight faced to tax payers about the impossibility of doing anything about it?

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Well said thank you

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Gaza situation

Sorry, call it how it is, the Palestinian genocide

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

A dolphin would likely play something more like a trombone with an articulating system of pipes that could be played through vigorous contortions of the body. Think playing a trombone but with a hula hooping/swimming motion. Perhaps a small lever could extend out to the dolphin flipper that would allow nuanced fine pitch control with lateral contortions of the dolphin’s flipper.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Just a bunch of sheep

nope these are all great pyrenees mountain dogs fuck

(Seriously these dogs look exactly like sheep from far away, it must be a very rude awakening for a wolf or other predator to realize no that is just a massive dog).

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!

I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.

I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.

It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.

🙃

It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

🤷‍♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

It’s all I can think to do.

I think you thought of a lot of good things to do!

I don’t mean to be overly cynical about people, this is a problem of systems and normalization of things that shouldn’t be normalized primarily, the people are mainly just trying to survive.

sigh

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

I mean, we'll see.

Maybe.

Maybe we will just look back at the period that is rapidly coming to a close as a golden era of music (and video games for that matter) where the tools became sophisticated, affordable and distributed for music production but venture capital hadn't yet destroyed any last vestiges of the monetary value of musician's labor (audio engineer's included) in recording contexts.

Of course, I am sure Spotify and other streaming services are coming around to the value of recorded music being unsustainably low, I mean everybody knows it deep down right? That is why they are going to continue to raise their prices. From the perspective of Spotify, the artists that actually do the work of making Spotify a valuable company aren't in principle excluded from their share of the pie when the line starts to go back up and the company has a chance to reverse some of the belt tightening and sacrifices everybody had to make to keep the lights on.... but every single one of these vapid losers believes deep down in their bones that the rules of the game say that it isn't the responsibility of shareholders or upper management of Spotify to just hand the musicians their fare share of the increasing profits, or even alert them to the fact that profits are in fact increasing in the first place. Musicians are not the customers nor the shareholders of Spotify, they are the commodified, interchangeable contractors that aren't much different than the day laborers who hang out outside of most Home Depots in the US looking for handyman work.

This is like when the English saw that the only crop Irish peasants could afford to grow on the side for subsistence farming to feed their families, potatoes, were getting destroyed by a potato blight, and decided that it would send the wrong message to let those Irish peasants have any of the rest of the crops that Irish farmers were growing to sell to foreign markets to simply pay the English rent for their farms ...... crops that were not significantly impacted by the potato blight because it would make the Irish reliant on handouts and encourage a problematic tendency towards apathy and entitlement stubbornly latent in the Irish population.

🔥 Burn 🔥 It 🔥 Down 🔥
(with love)

supersquirrel , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

It will change, I promise you. I am so confident I will literally bet my girlfriend's chihuahua on it.

wikipedia chihuahua

better hope lefties and artists get their shit together you tiny little monster

supersquirrel , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Edit: I didn't really make it clear, my interest in services like Bandcamp wasn't higher quality music, it was that it was run by at least a relatively benign company that seemed to treat artists like actual human beings who artistic labor was inherently valuable. I would buy craft beer/cider/meader even if Budweiser or Coors Light was actually better quality beer, what I care about at the end of the day is my money going to someone or something good

I have spent a lotttt of time messing around with music production and learning what is pseudo-science (a whole fuckton of it) and what is real science. In all of the ABx testing I have done, read about, and seen demonstrated in person myself a quality MP3 with a decent bitrate encoding (idk 128kps or so?) using a decent algorithm and hell even a sampling rate of 41khz will produce an audio recording that when played back on a hifi audio system and level matched (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it is well known in mastering and mixing that a louder mix always sounds better at first glance) is indistinguishable from the source .wav file to the human ear (I don't care how super human you claim your ear is).

People make this silly mistake of thinking that digitization introduces these sharp staircase edges into audio waveforms, which is actually kind of a hilarious misconception (which I completely understand, not trying to insult people's intelligence) because the entire idea of converting a waveform (an analog non-bandwith limited phenomena) into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on the idea that the analog reproduction of a digital square wave/stair step function with a voicecoil and diaphragm, physical hardware components with shape, size and crucially mass, must necessarily create a smooth analog waveform because physical hardware components have mass and momentum, they aren't theoretical ideas. It is better to think of a bandwith limited digital waveform as a series of movement commands for an RTS unit in Starcraft 2. The unit will naturally path between discrete points in a way that creates fluid movement, fundamentally it wouldn't make any sense for the unit to just teleport directly to where you click and then teleport directly to where you click next etc....

I mean let us consider Vinyl records for a second, maybe you like most people have a vague perception they are kind of a hifi audio thing for people that reallllllly care about audio quality and don't want to listen to chopped up and compressed digital audio files using a gasp consumer DAC that came stock in their laptop.

This quote from an old reddit thread discussing how CDs actually have far better signal-to-noise ratio fidelity than Vinyls (and really all decent quality digital audio files) about sums it up.

As for quantitative audio quality differences between the two mediums, the CD is superior. CDs operate at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. These are discrete points, versus the continuous signal produced by a physical vinyl groove. However, the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem explains why a 44.1kHz sampling rate is sufficient for completely reproducing frequencies up to 44.1 / 2 or 22.05 kHz (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem ). True response will actually be lower than 22.05 kHz due to the various anti-aliasing filters involved in the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion process to prevent frequencies above 22.05 kHz from aliasing down into the audible range (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing#Folding ).

Furthermore, the CD is recorded with 16 bits of resolution, results in an output with 65,536 discrete voltage 'steps' on the output. This does introduce some quantization noise, because the real signal is 'rounded' up or down to the nearest of the 65,536 steps. This is another area where some people claim vinyl is superior due to the lack of quantization of the output. But in practice, vinyl only has 9-10 bits of resolution (IIRC) due to manufacturing tolerances. To achieve around 16 bits of resolution, the tolerance of production for the groove would have to be on the order of 1/65,536 or ~0.001%. That's not going to happen on those tiny grooves. Also, you have to consider the non-zero inertia of the physical pick-up moving across those tracks, which will introduce a separate set of distortions as it moves around.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ic9f0/do_vinyls_really_have_a_better_audio_quality_than/

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Many of us here might even be toxic in other contexts (I am certainly not perfect at keeping away from being overly negative or argumentative with people), but what matters is which version of someone we invite in the door to our community.

We can invite in any version of people we want, and I agree in general I think the fediverse invites in the better version of people and it is one of the primary reasons I love this weird, loosely connected blob of non-corporate social media.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

the artist now earns from stream payouts.

Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?

The issue is that artists don't make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.

Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/08e35e66-b22e-4654-a84b-2eeb5f679330.webp

https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/mlemlh/why_youre_9998_likely_to_never_make_real_money/

Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Chicken and the egg, be the change you want to be, but also I am not absolutist about using Spotify.

I just think Spotify and other streaming services are vehicles of class warfare against musicians that also happen to play music. I understand if you like the playing music part!

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.

I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

facepalm we are literally the same species of Homo sapiens we have been for thousands of years, the problem is most certainly inherent in the system and we need to smash the system and make something kinder.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Like I said in my op: it’s good service for the consumer. It might not be if enshittification ensues.

Are you seriously throwing might into this sentence?

I suppose you could say when you throw a ball up in the air it might come back down but that is kind of being disingenuous isn’t it.

Here’s another thought, doesn’t it impact the quality of the service for the consumer if the workers doing the labor to create the substance of the service, the basic thing that gives the service value to customers, are not being rewarded in a sustainable fashion for their time and labor?

Do you really think all your favorite artists are going to keep cranking out music in this environment? More importantly, do you think your favorite artists would have ever been able to invest the time and effort to get big enough to become that 1% of the successful musicians if the environment they began in was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?

The amount of quality recorded music being released is going to plummet as musicians just stop bothering to do it. We will look back on the 2000s-2010s as a golden era where music production tools were distributed and affordable but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed the ability of up and coming recording artists and audio engineers to actually devote the time and focus to becoming professional.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.

Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.

Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

…what?

Are you angry at me for saying your friends were still getting underpaid for their labor even back then?

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Bandcamp is in the rapid process of enshittification, so this is a temporary solution at best at this point :(

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

They already fired half the employees who work for Bandcamp, Bandcamp is dead as an entity, just because is still flying through the air based on its own momentum yet and hasn’t coming crashing back to earth doesn’t mean that isn’t what is about to happen.

Bandcamp has always been amazing because it was run not like a massive corporation and those days are over.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

I don’t understand where you are getting the impression that I think money is the point, I never said that.

What I said is the labor of recording musicians being totally eviscerated by capitalism is a tragedy and that I don’t buy the narrative that this was inevitable for one second.

supersquirrel , 1 month ago

Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).

I am focusing on money because I think it is wrong the society exploits artists for their labor and then tells itself this is fine to do because artists love what they do.

Making music because money is the worst reason to make music, I don’t dispute that (why would I?) but that means for 99% of extremely talented musicians that they can’t devote very much time outside of day their job that pays the bills to make music. I want musicians to get materially rewarded for the labor of creating recorded music so they can afford to divert time from their day job to do it.

The math is very simple, every dollar less that a musician can realistically get from recording music is a dollar they have to make up elsewhere (especially in an environment where, at least in the US where I live, most people are on an economic knife edge and are one or two disasters away from their life spiraling out of control), and even if the amount of money an average moderately successful musician could realistically make even without a middleman like Spotify taking the lion’s share (to say the least), every dollar more a musician makes from their recording hobby on the side is one step closer to that musician being able to invest real time and energy to their craft (not just the vanishing amount of energy left over after they have paid the bills).

I live in the US, people cannot afford to devote actual energy and time into something unless it is their job or they are young and have a huge amount of extra energy. This is why I keep talking about money, it isn’t because I think musicians should approach music from a cynical money-making perspective, quite the opposite I want to live in a socialized society where housing, healthcare and basic necessities are provided as a baseline, so people can choose to develop their musicianship and audio engineering skills into professional careers without feeling like they are buying scratch tickets for a lottery they are likely never going to win anything from.