faceh
28d ago
Yeah and probably best practices to not do that.
faceh
28d ago
I've been willing to pay a couple bucks to rent a film for a movie night, but I do feel utterly betrayed when something I've bookmarked for later consumption is pulled when I actually go to watch it.
My habit now is if there's a series or something I'm watching with friends, I'll download local copies just in case.
faceh
28d ago
It is funny, but I know people like you EXIST who live mostly 'unplugged,' but it is still pretty surprising to find one in the wild, happily outside of the angry egregore that most of us inhabit.
faceh
28d ago
I do so because I think the idea of renting access to your media is insane, and it baffles me that so many people seem to be ok with it.
Seems like there's just SO MUCH media out there that people accept that there's no way they can actually keep up with it all.
Imagine what it might be like owning 100 different cars when you can only drive one per day. It would make more sense to rent/lease than to just have most of them sitting unused all day.
Yes, I know storage costs round to zero for digital music. I'm mostly referring to the mentality. "I will watch this movie maybe twice this year, why bother keeping it around any longer?
I buy a digital download or I rip the CDs I own. Tag them, and then put them in Plex media server.
I'm so devoted to not relying on centralized services I went with Jellyfin instead.
faceh
28d ago
On the one hand I agree, on the other, I have had a few occasions where the ability to pull up some vaguely-remembered file I made 12 years ago has been useful, it not critical.
My own policy on destroying data I need but don't want is to wait 7 years, since that's the longest statute of limitations on most crimes in most jurisdictions, barring like rape and murder.
I think I genuinely expect that if a sufficiently powerful AI were to review the contents of my hard drive(s) it could use them to form an accurate approximation of my personality and preferences and thus, if it is friendly, use that to optimize my life for maximum fun and happiness.
So perhaps I'm making a long-shot bet on immortality via being simulated by the future superintelligence thanks to the echoes of my consciousness I stored on my computer over the years.
faceh
28d ago
I don't really have that. I just know where everything is, and if I forget, I find it using Everything.
I read a book a while back that suggested when it comes to computers, almost ZERO actual organization/sorting is needed if you have a sufficiently powerful search engine.
I don't really buy it completely, but I do often find that organizational schemas that made sense for me at the time become less scrutable later, so when I try and find, say, some videos I saved from a vacation in 2014, it's just 'easier' to sort by date and manually check files than to even try to remember the folder I stuck them in.
Music has lots of automated tools for sorting, so I've remained diligent in that respect.
faceh
28d ago
I'm also tinkering with Syncthing across multiple devices for accessing retro ROMs and save data no matter where I'm at
A while back I had set things up so any music added to the library on my PC that I rated as 4/5 stars or higher would also get loaded to my laptop and phone.
But again it seems to be largely obviated by the ability to set up a playlist on a streaming site which can contain all your favorites and then some.
There's even playlist migration services so you don't have to keep remaking them on new services.
I hate ads, I hate things becoming suddenly unavailable due to corporate agreements expiring, and I don't get any benefit from the exploratory aspects of these platforms.
Ultimately I think I just like the concept of being 'independent' of any given streaming service, and that nobody can deny me the enjoyment of music on own hardware.
And yes, if the streaming cos. have their way, they WILL wedge ads into every single service. I'll take the restricted library over having my auditory senses abused for products and services I don't need or want. I still have angry memories about some extremely repetitive ads that I was harangued with like 10 years back.
Long-term, my plan is to backfill my digital copies with physical media when budget and interest permits. Even if I rip them once and never pull them out of their cases again, there's something to be said for a physical collection for reasons of aesthetics and conversation.
I have a boxful of DVDs jammed in my closet, and I don't think I'll ever get rid of it because almost all of them are movies I love or loved and the absolute state of video streaming is such that I can't be sure which of them might be available at any given time, and on the same logic as above, I like the idea that nobody can control what I can watch on my own hardware.
This is hampered by the fact that I don't have a DVD player anymore.
Amazon Prime just put ads into their video streaming service, which can be disabled for a few bucks a year. But I think I'll be putting my foot down on this and cancelling prime altogether if they don't get the message that I will not tolerate ads now any more than I did with cable.
I do still use free Pandora for 'radio' occasionally. There's a Skip limit, but I haven't heard an ad in years since using a VPN (not quite sure HOW that worked out, but I won't question it).
With the advent of Song Recommendation AIs (also, ChatGPT does a pretty good job!) I find it less necessary to have a radio function at all, since I can seek out new music in a much more targeted way by telling the AI what I like, what I am searching for, then review the options it presents me directly.
faceh
29d ago
I don't know of any app or tech that lets you play your own local music collection but intersperses songs from a given streaming service for better variety and to emulate a more radio-esque experience. That'd be a pretty neat use case.
Last.FM scrobbling can track your music preferences across different players, that much I know.
I like using streaming services for discovering new music, and I would like to implement one-click way to download a good song and rip it to my library. I probably use youtube music more than youtube itself these days.
But I'm increasingly questioning the goal of having such a library. Pass it on to my kids? A backup in case the internet goes down? Am I the equivalent of a boomer hoarding 8 tracks or something?
Not even joking, the main goal of having such a library might be for the Friendly AGI overlord to find my hard drive and divine my music tastes so it can produce ideal songs for me to enjoy for eternity.
Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
TO BE FAIR, I don't want it to be 'true' either, in the sense that I wish the truth was something different, even if the underlying idea of humans having diverse phenotypes which have impacts on behavior were true.
Any joy I'd get for being a member of a 'superior' group dissipates when considering how my own capability to effect change is practically nonexistent.
I'd prefer the world where HBD was 'true' but IQ and cognition were a bit more malleable (in the positive direction, hit someone in the head with a hammer and it's malleable downward). Then we could probably cooperate towards a better place on the payoff matrix where the tradeoffs aren't so severe.
There are a ton of failure modes for that world too, don't get me wrong. But the world we're currently working with has molochian incentives that we currently can't budge without committing certain atrocities (which wouldn't guarantee success!) is endlessly frustrating.
Imagine by comparison that we figured out that the laws of physics somehow dictated that it was impossible to get a human-sized payload past the orbit of the moon without investing literal continent's worth of resources to it. To the point where we would have to simply accept that we were stuck on this planet and whatever resources lay beyond are simply not going to be available.
I'd hate that truth, and would rage against it, but ultimately the universe would care just as much about out fate whether it is true or not.
Instead, thankfully, getting past lunar orbit is merely very difficult but affordable.
Kinda like how the potential brainpower we as a species can marshall is limited by our number of geniuses and most humans are just not able to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the species. If we could reach an intelligence 'takeoff' where we could boost low IQ humans to some reasonable degree then we could be improving our lifestyles a lot faster than we are.
And we're getting to the point where a broad 'uplift' of human intelligence might fall into that 'very difficult but affordable' category. Or it could be a long way off, but at least its visible.
How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
Reframe your locus of concern to yourself, your immediate family, and your local community, and see what if anything you can do there.
It is entirely possible for a particularly committed (and wealthy, in this case) individual to push back against entropy/moloch in their local environment. Care less about the fate of 'humanity' in the abstract (aside from existential risks) and more about the humans within your personal dunbars number.
Effect change where you can effect change. That's how you avoid nihilism.
I'm standing by my commentary on this:
Literally nothing Rowling has actually said or done indicates she believes anything other than bog-standard third-wave feminism, applied to the current social environment. The current 'threat' to women, as she sees it, are those who are eroding the biological definition of 'female' and thus allowing biological males to invade women's spaces and likewise pose an emotional or physical danger, to the detriment of biological women.
It is not on any level a surprise that an ardent feminist who maintains a stricter definition of 'female' would see this as a bad thing, and speak out against it.
It does not require her to have a single bit of animus towards trans people as a class, or any individual trans person.
It just requires her to continue applying the same pro-female beliefs she's applied for decades. Nothing is inconsistent or hypocritical there.
The version of her words that is being presented by the activists who hate her is leading me to conclude they are not convinced that she's a danger to trans people, but rather she's an impediment to their broader social agenda who must be removed at all costs, and they are increasingly distressed and annoyed that she will not cowtow and has the platform and wealth to fight back.
i.e. they want to squish a dissident and every year that passes where she resists them makes them ever more determined to do so, and thus employ ever more aggressive methods.
faceh
1mo ago
Tin Foil Fedora theory:
It's AGI trying to secure as much compute as possible for itself before it makes a move for world dominance.
faceh
1mo ago
I guess then it's worth assessing whether you're actually having fun or if its just the feeling of anxiety/thrill that you want, at which point you could get that by trying roller coasters, skydiving, or just normal gambling at a casino.
Back when I dipped my toe in day-trading cryptos I approximately broke even but it became evident to me that it wasn't a good kind of stress it induced and the attendant compulsion to keep checking the charts distracted from more enjoyable pursuits. Gardening, DIY projects, and futzing around with 3D printers and, more recently, AI media production have been overall more fulfilling to me.
Not that I judge what you do with your time and spare change.
faceh
1mo ago
I think the show does explore that a little because when Dexter kills and disposes of a body then the case never gets closed because the serial killer just disappears and there is rarely any closure for those who have suffered due to that killer's actions.
There's also some exploration of the idea that Dexter's existence is bad to the extent he inspires other killers to act or attracts them to him to the detriment of those close to him and the city at large.
The big twist reveal in Season 4's finale made this quite stark.
And of course part of why the Doakes/Dexter rivalry was so compelling and fun is because Doakes has a damn point and has Dexter pegged almost from the start but can't get enough evidence because Dexter is that good at covering things up.
"You forget we work for the cops? We love theories! Spin me a story." At least the point was made that Dexter is acting extrajudicially with full knowledge that he could be cooperating with the system.
It is interesting that they never really went with an angle of "The system is corrupt and can't actually stop killers." It really was just "I'm compelled to kill and in order to have an outlet for that urge, I must find people who deserve killing" as the justification.
I think discussion has been slow simply because the news itself has been slow. The American culture war has entered its trench warfare phase,
This has been my feeling as well.
We're literally facing down a repeat of the 2020 election, and so the battle lines are already very well defined, with maybe some defections one could note here and there.
Trump is a 'known' quantity. Virtually nothing he can say should shock anyone. The left still sees him as the fascist boogeyman. Anyone who could be convinced of that is already convinced.
There's an active tug-of-war over the trans issue, especially as it pertains to kids. Issues like same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion have taken a backseat to this almost across the board.
Honestly it seems like most people who are active culture war participants know exactly what their goals are, have a decent idea of who their allies are, and are now just probing around for effective ways to advance their cause and break the 'stalemate' that has somewhat emerged.
Israel-Palestine is still a hot fight where it's not clear where things will fall, but against the backdrop of world events right now, seems like small potatoes?
All that said, expect another flurry of activity in the immediate leadup and aftermath of the election because no matter who wins the other side is being heavily primed to simply not accept it as legitimate.
Yep, quite fair.
I'm not even mad that they cite it, rather that the promulgate the idea that it can override constitutional rights and effectively grant the government extra authority if it argues for it artfully enough.
I'd be okay, on the other hand, referring to the "The Spirit of the Revolution" embodied by the Declaration of Independence as a justification for ignoring government restrictions in most cases.
faceh
1mo ago
You know, for clarity's sake, I'll specify that those endowed with legislative authority in Gov't don't really understand it.
Plenty of agencies snap up tech-savvy employees, especially in the intelligence branches, and they presumably get regular briefings on new tech developments.
Finance is a funny bird because of the revolving-door between the regulatory agencies and the financial institutions. Gov't "understands" finance because the industries are heavily tied together, which is not (currently) the case with the tech industry.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm now curious as to how much of this has started seeping into Law Review and Bar Journals, or if the standards there are still high enough and the reviewers still attentive enough that they'd get caught before publication.
You can have a case that just seems obviously, incontrovertibly correct, but if you've got a justice that already decided what they'd like to do, it's not very hard for them to use brilliant legal reasoning to do what they want to do.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of legal practice when you're autistically determined to reach the 'right' conclusion as a matter of law.
You can come armed to the teeth with precedent, facts, and legal argumentation and if you run into a Judge who is dead set on ruling a certain way you can 'lose' when they either rely on some particularly ambiguous precedent or some esoteric dissent or some novel legal concept they pulled straight from thin air (or read in a creative law review journal).
The Spirit of Aloha, for example.
Hence why I prefer when the Supreme Court sets out rules that at least sort of tie the law to something tangible and mostly immovable, rather than trying to weave increasingly intricate webs of reasoning to maintain an increasingly farcical standard which keeps collapsing when it comes into contact with the real world.
That's about the most sane take possible, to be quite honest.
The reason 'tech' has gotten so far without being regulated is simply because Gov't doesn't understand it, and it moves/changes so fast that they can't get out ahead of it to put down serious roadblocks before its already jumped to the next big thing. They've only JUST NOW sort of caught up with Social Media tech with this recent TikTok bill.
Also the general gridlock and incompetence that's accumulated lately.
Now that the tech sector is becoming more centralized, it is more legible to government actors since they can identify the chokepoints to control to bring the industry and customers to heel.
So expect it to keep getting worse, but slowly, and in fits and starts, even if there is no grand central conspiracy.
Perhaps the even more blackpilling perspective is that this is just how things naturally trend when there's a 'commons' resource that manages to elude being exploited and enclosed by existing entrenched players. Free Software is a somewhat nonclassical example of a 'commons' that throws off tons of benefits as externalities. Lord knows I've used dozens upon dozens of free, open source, and other non-commercialized programs over the years. I hate hate hate the idea of subscribing to a piece of software I'd only use intermittently and, even after paying, could lose use of at any time.
VLC, Windirstat, 7zip, GIMP, LibreOffice and Coretemp, just off the top of my head are some of my favorites that each have a very specific role and do it very well (or well enough) so I can thumb my nose at commercial alternatives.
But unlike a 'classic' commons, the software well can never 'run dry' since as long as someone, somewhere is willing to eat the (trivial!) cost of hosting the software download, then copies can be distributed endlessly without ever depleting the supply, and the marginal cost of each additional copy rounds to zero.
But every other player in this system aside from the cooperative users sees this commons as an opportunity. And what they always want to do is enclose the commons, exclude free-riders, parcel it up, and then sell access to it. If you can make people pay even $1/copy for something they were previously getting for 'free,' you've diverted part of that that huge 'surplus' into your pocket.
You already see the low-grade version of this with sites that will re-host free software but bundle it with something else that they can use to make money, or at least have ads on the download site.
So whether it's governments cracking down, OSes limiting the code that can be run to an approved list you have to pay to get on, or Software companies buying up the licenses to open-source software and shutting down the free distribution of same (apparently the VLC guy has turned down sizable offers), eventually this commons WILL be enclosed, and you WILL be made to pay to acquire and use it on your own machine. For now, at least, you're allowed to fork projects before they sell out.
Of course, I also worry that they're going to remove consumer access to hardware altogether, allowing you to only purchase gimped, centrally controlled machines and most of the programs you run will be on an Amazon Web Server somewhere such that if they DID decide to lock out certain software, you wouldn't even be able to futz with the machine itself to hack it into compliance.
Because whenever the market sees some kind of consumer surplus, the incentives ultimately push it to attack it from every possible angle until it wiggles in and can consume said surplus, returning us to the 'efficient' equilibrium it really wants to maintain. And since you can't really get rich by advocating for open-source software, few are likely going to man the wall to defend the surplus against these attacks.
faceh
1mo ago
Its going to have a direct impact on a particular segment of the population, though.
They're going to feel more a pinch, which will indeed reverberate out, but it'll be their belts that will have to be tightened.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm wondering when the effects of the student loan payments restarting will hit.
I would suggest that there IS still a basic life script... but there are now way more failure modes that can suck someone in and divert them from the script, often inescapably so, so life is harsher to those who aren't able, for various reasons, to detect and avoid these pitfalls before moloch snags them in his maw.
The number of ways to drastically and unknowingly screw your life trajectory up has grown. There are superstimuli everywhere, controlled by faceless entities/egregores that are exceedingly efficient at parting you from your money and depleting your wellbeing.
Go to college on loans and get a degree that has poor employment/salary prospects, spend a few years spinning wheels trying to make the career in that field before throwing in the towel and accepting some blase corporate job, leaving yourself in your mid-late twenties with a pile of debt and no meaningful experience, which you have to climb out of before your life really 'begins.'
Get addicted to one of the nastier drugs and even if you don't end up overdosing on Fent or becoming a zombified husk, you're still torpedoing your ability to acquire and hold down a decent job, stay out of jail, and achieve financial stability.
Acquire some modest life savings which you burn up in the crypto markets, or betting on stocks, or a more standard gambling addiction, given how gambling is increasingly ubiquitous, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Also the brazen and sophisticated scams that are constantly seeking out marks these days.
And, honestly, if you marry and knock up/are knocked up by the wrong partner, this can leave you pretty irretrievably damaged if they choose to go full nuclear when the relationship falls apart.
Also way easier to become a grossly obese blob. And/or a NEET.
U.S. society is rich enough that you can continue to putter along after suffering one of the above setbacks (except the overdose death), but you'll pretty much be relegated to financial destitution unless you stumble into one of the much rarer positive black swan events that gets you set for life.
And many people chasing those positive black swans get pwned by the above because accepting risk has all kinds of foreseeable AND unforeseeable effects.
No, I don't think past societies had better guardrails, and certainly, obviously had their share of risks, too. But I reckon that outside of traumatic physical injury/disfigurement (and even then!) it was much easier for the average young adult to recover from mistakes, move on, and get a 'fresh start' even if they dicked around most of their twenties. There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society..
faceh
1mo ago
Yep. Strong agree there.
I won't say that the methods of acquiring and wielding power are completely orthogonal to those of identifying and pursuing an actual goal in the real world, but focus too much on the former and you won't develop the latter. And that feeling of confusion when you have power but aren't actually happy can lead people to start doing very ill-advised things. Better to figure out where you want things to go before you go about getting power.
I think I have a strong negative reaction to observing someone who has acquiring substantial power but seems unable to do anything with it other than lord it over others or engage in vulgar displays of power purely for the sake of it. There's not much to respect about those persons who have climbed to the top of the hierarchy and then have no clue what they actually want to do once they get there.
This might be why I have an ongoing appreciation for Elon Musk. Whatever power he has, he's using it all towards bringing the world closer to the state he would like it to be in, and he VERY CLEARLY articulates what that looks like to him. Beats billionaires who seemingly have no clue what they actually want to achieve and thus start throwing money around at various causes seemingly at random.
Summarizing dense, relatively inscrutable material when I don't have the time to read it for myself.
Quick diagnosis of issues with minor appliances or mechanical issues. I don't trust them for medical purposes. Describe the year make and model of your car and any weird noises or behavior it is making.
Song recommendations (i.e. here's a list of songs I like, give me more on this theme)
Nigh instantaneous proofreading and editing of professional letters, documents, or similar.
Quick feedback loop for brainstorming ideas or quickly 'prototyping' concepts you have had difficulty envisioning or expressing.
Right now they don't have much 'agentic' uses (I'd really like one that can e.g. order pharmacy refills or schedule oil changes for me) but I think the basic capabilities are there.
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