supersquirrel
@supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising 4 hours ago:
Outlook is atrocious what on earth are you talking about?
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 you don’t realize that emotion is leading to you assuming everyone else is as stuck in their ways as you.
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).
Windows is buggy, windows is constantly playing head games with its user by trying to force them to use the edge browser.
Hell 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 worse than trying to use a windows laptop in 2024….
…please get your head out of the sand :)
- Comment on Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising 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?
- Comment on Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising 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 y’all show up everywhere to tell us that we can’t have the future because we are too stupid and lazy.
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 failed computer literacy, there are plenty of smart people out there who can learn how to use a computer absolutely fine 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? 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?
My point is, don’t go looking for confirmation of how stupid or lazy people are or what their limited capacity is by casting the shapes of people’s ignorance onto the floor and trying to read some magic language from that.
Maybe they don’t know because they are hopelesssly stupid, but also if 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.
I’m sorry if I snapped at you a little 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.
- Comment on The wonderful Dune Imperium's digital version is getting its first expansion in July 2 days ago:
I haven’t played the board game but I have heard it is a brilliant complex multiplayer strategy game that really captures the shifting factional politics that the books and movies are so focused on.
I am super happy there is a digital version of Dune Imperium, really good digital versions of really good board games are super underrated. Especially when the core strategy of the board game is so good it makes super complex pc strategy empire games with terrible UIs, confusing resources and a million little fiddly useless decisions look pretty absurd in how much useless stuff they add just for stuffs sake.
I think the digital version will allow many more games of Dune Imperium to practically happen remote than otherwise would happen.
- Comment on any tips for playing CDDA 5 days ago:
If you need more focus to the game play Sky Island, also / and ? are your best friends
- Comment on Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' 1 week 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 but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity 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.
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).
- Comment on Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' 1 week 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?
- Comment on Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' 1 week 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).
- Comment on Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' 1 week 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
- Comment on In Star Trek, Commander Data is socially awkward because he lacks training data. This might be because he was built and developed in isolation from the rest of society. 1 month ago:
Oh honey, let me tell you, he is NOT lacking any training data.
- Comment on descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are 1 month ago:
Or is this a case of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic?
No this is a case of technology sufficiently broken and enshittified to the point that you can’t ever trust it to work right, simply or even logically if it was made by a large tech company.
- Comment on descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are 1 month ago:
A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.
…I am honestly kind of terrified if you think the current state of computers and software is fine, I really hope you dont work in software design for the sake of the rest of us.
Every broadly intelligent computer programmer I have talked to agrees, corporations dont build software like elegant well planned skyscrapers they build them as multistory slums each piece added on in a rush until the whole thing collapses.
- Submitted 1 month ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 9 comments
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 1 month ago:
Bandcamp is in the rapid process of enshittification, so this is a temporary solution at best at this point :(
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 1 month ago:
…what?
Are you angry at me for saying your friends were still getting underpaid for their labor even back then?
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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 was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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!
- Comment on Men of War II will be online-only at launch but an offline mode is in development 1 month ago:
Bad game developers!
prods them with stick
Bad game developers!!!
two sharp prods with the stick
Y’all better not ruin Men Of War 2 for me.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
reddit.com/…/why_youre_9998_likely_to_never_make_…
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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 1 month ago:
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 digitizing a waveform into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on every 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…
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 1 month ago:
It will change, I promise you. I am so confident I will literally bet my girlfriend’s chihuahua on it.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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 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.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 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