thesmokingman

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Technology in After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year

At least 50% of the bands I’ve seen, toured with, or heard don’t record music to make money. There’s just too much music for it to be dependable income. They do it because they wanna share something neat with their friends. They upload it to sites like Spotify or a decade ago MySpace or a decade before that zines so other people can find cool shit. If they get lucky, that stumble upon nets a shirt sale which actually nets the band some income.

The sweeping generalizations you’re making do not apply. Stop trying to make music about money.

Edit: mailing tapes was a thing a few decades ago. Are you saying I ripped off those folks because I wanted friends on one coast to hear shit friends on the other coast recorded? That’s a really fucking hard DIY tour to build. You’re fucking Skinner saying all us kids are wrong.

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Technology in After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year

So you’ve bought every album from every artist you’ve ever listened to? Or, like the rest of us, do you have a limited amount of resources and have made strategic decisions about who to support? Because if you’re not dropping $20 in the tip jar of the next busker you see, you’re a huge fucking hypocrite.

I have not devalued music at all. You have, multiple times. You’ve also said that music has to be about money which is pretty fucking capitalistic. I’ve highlighted it’s about fun multiple times. You keep advocating for labels and ignore DIY which means you’ve already established a class system in music. You’ve provided no quantitative evidence to show you support any music and seem to hype up record labels whose business is built on licensing.

Should everyone get paid for all their music? Fuck yeah. Can I afford to pay every band? Fuck no. Did Spotify or streaming or even the fucking radio do that? Nope. Sure fucking didn’t. The market saturation did because music isn’t about money, it’s about fun. If you want it to be your job, good fucking luck. That’s just simple commerce. Not capitalism. If everyone on the commune is just making bead necklaces and there’s only one customer looking to buy one necklace, is that customer fucking all the people on the commune except the person they bought from?

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Technology in After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year

Who the fuck has a label? Do you know anything about music that isn’t already incredibly corporate? When was the last time you went to a DIY show and bought handmade merch off a band touring in their minivan? Compare that to the last time you bought a record from a label or merch from an online store run through not the band.

There are more than likely 300+ bands in a 20 to 50 mile radius around you. Do you support all of them as much as you’re pushing people on the internet to support all music? What about the really bad cover bands? Them too?

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.

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Technology in After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year

The thread you linked says what I said.

I’ve been doing DIY music since I was a kid. The vast majority of bands are never going to make any money ever. Spotify didn’t change that. Streaming didn’t cause that. The reality of every kid with a guitar thinking music is about making money not having fun is what did that.

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Technology in After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year

Walk me through this.

Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).

Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.

Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?

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

thesmokingman , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in What's a good graphics card for jellyfin?

A problem so common it has an official page

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Privacy in The TRUTH about Bank Privacy

It’s okay to be naive! The video talks about what data your bank has and how that gets used, as a security professional I know how all of this data is tied together plus the other data (assuming you don’t vote either?), and you don’t think there is anything tied to you so cool. Have fun with that. Keep pushing crypto.

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Privacy in The TRUTH about Bank Privacy

Do you have a drivers license? A social security number? A phone number that you’ve used for anything else? Utility bills? Relatives? A car? Other large property?

Cash doesn’t mean shit unless you pay for everything in cash and never use the same info (including name, address, phone number, social, etc) for everything.

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Privacy in The TRUTH about Bank Privacy

If you’re in the US, your bank knows way more about you than that and it’s naive to believe otherwise. A lack of credit doesn’t mean a lack of tracking; it just means your data is being pulled from elsewhere.

If you’re not in the US, you might have a better chance at privacy.

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Mildly Infuriating in You have to type www. to access the Texas DMV website.

If you find the relevant department and start harassing them on Twitter and other socials at least once a day they will eventually fix it. This has happened before with other departments and security issues. My record is eight days.

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Technology in Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100

See my link for 47. Its Wikipedia has more context. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen it a ton.

thesmokingman , 2 months ago to Technology in Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100

42, 47, and 50 all make sense to me. What’s the significance of 37, 57, and 73?

thesmokingman , 3 months ago to Memes in He can't prove it?

wat

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/dbac1147-212a-4aef-884b-735849e3d93c.png

thesmokingman , 3 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again

If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.

In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.

Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.

thesmokingman , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Free and Open Source Software in Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again

There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.

There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?

Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?

Edit: Here is a fork with 200+ stars that isn’t a direct GH fork. Given its premise is an opinionated and branded Floorp, is it morally wrong for its maintainers to not contribute to Floorp (assuming they don’t only for the sake of argument)? Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance often explicitly without the technical skill to suggest patches?