chefandy

It sounds dramatic because it’s dramatic. You’re combining two things — whether something is, in fact, completely lost, and if it is something that should be kept. Something that should not be kept is still completely lost if it’s destroyed. It’s difficult to imagine they’d digitize it if it was worthless.

> But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before,

No, it’s not. Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost, which is a fucking tragedy because they don’t have to be. Even if you’re not willing to take the time to scan every page in a cradle scanner, as rare books should be, (and don’t tell me they don’t have the money to get a handful of library interns to do this,) you can disbind the books and store them as they did in the Caselaw Access Project at Harvard Law. They removed the pages from the binding, scanned them on a high speed conveyor belt scanner which yielded full color 600 DPI jp2 images, placed the pages back in the binding like a folio that could be re-bound if needed, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in a salt mine. It’s not like it was slow, either — we did 40k in 18 months and we did take the time to scan the rare ones with a cradle scanner. And we did it all in less than open AI probably spends in a day on inference.

> So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of.

That’s a false dichotomy. Libraries exist for this exact reason, and their not already having a copy does not make “you snooze you lose” a morally acceptable strategy.

I’ve been pretty cool on the direction of SV for the past decade at least, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by the unbridled hubris of these companies over the past 5 years.

I’m talking about problems a lot more broad than music, hobby artists are a completely different entity than commercial artists and conflating them is targeted willful ignorance. And frankly, developers comprise the most coddled, overprivileged, out-of-touch professional sector south of the c-suite in any industry: your musings about income for anyone outside of the software business are meaningless.

Enjoy your mass layoffs because they aren’t stopping in my sector. Oh, are you one of the special ones too talented to be affected? That’s good news because all developers are according to them. Good luck.

I get it, but the anguish of people who were paid dramatically less and treated dramatically worse than software developers whose livelihoods are being deliberately harpooned by the software business is not "sour grapes." I'd expect the software culture to be tolerant of the upper class being being indifferent to that anguish, but I see people around here all but dancing on their graves with no real push back. I think y'all generally do a good job with this place but frankly, the utter lack of consideration for the people most affected while being quick to make sure they don't get too touchy about it says everything there is to know about SV culture: all the talk of ethics and fairness get thrown right out the window the second they start to conflict with the bottom line. Fortunately American culture on a whole seems to be following suit so at least it won't seem weird. I don't think I can even passively participate in this culture anymore. I bid you well.

I’ll get right on that

You don’t understand how the ‘bonkers’ cost of creative worker relates to businesses that make creative products?

Sorry no. Here on HN, your having a vested interest in some market makes your opinion entirely invalid. That is, enless you're interested in one of the correct markets such as software or AI services.

That's why corporations that have made creative products have traditionally never gone anywhere. They all just went out of business. And all the artists got rich.

Yeah-- in a professional workflow, at best, these tools are for getting ideas rather than creating output that will be used directly. Lots of folks use them for actual creation because they're just so enamored with the ability to create vaguely technically competent output from text, but they're all pretty much a bee-line to mediocre, and overcoming mediocrity is absolutely the most difficult part of working with AI output. The same is true with text, as you mentioned, and image generators. As Charles Eames said, "The details are not the details. They make the design." Well, these tools suck with details, and details convey character, perspective, message, meaning, etc. Surely the tooling will improve this in years to come, but it certainly hasn't yet.

It's incredibly elitist to gatekeep people having their plans, actions, opinions, and philosophical ideas taken seriously just because they haven't trudged through the onerous process of considering what humanity has already learned about those things. Do these people expect everybody that wants to profit must try to predict the damage that their actions could cause among people that will obviously be affected? Some people just don't like ethics that much, and expecting them to be beholden to their boundaries is pretty old fashioned.

Yes, there are a TON of free tools and endless instruction on using them. If you move your budget up to making one-time payments for things that cost less than one month using a subscription service, you get an astonishing breadth of new options. Beyond that, so many of the more expensive music making tools are one-time payments rather than subscription services. Buy Ableton once? You own it. You can get the latest version at a discount, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using the version you bought, in perpetuity.

People that never considered the value of artistic process until it was the topic du jour unilaterally decided that it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible to those that hadn't put any sustained effort into developing theirs. If you didn't understand what they don't, you'd realize that companies spending billions of dollars to create tools that make cheap simulacra of artists' work to sell them at a loss to crush them in their own markets was merely the natural progression of artistic praxis. Despite it being economically unsustainable and clearly only cheap until it craters the value of artistic skill, these tools have democratized creativity. Instead of creation only being available to those with the interest and willingness to practice and develop their artistic sense, process, and skill, they're now broadly available to anyone willing to pay money for a subscription service that will obviously soon be a hell of a lot more expensive, or shell out a few thousands dollars for a top-tier video card that you almost certainly already have in your gaming rig, anyway. This is silicon valley progress and if you don't like it, you're a communist.

The selection definitely changed. As soon as "Slashdot Video" started happening-- obviously a bunch of advertisements presented as news-- I was done.

Initially, the aggregation was only part of it-- the discussion was the best part. By the time Slashdot Video started happening, the comments had already gotten a bit 4chan-esque. I consistently saw comments rated "3: Troll" or similar because people were just using upvotes (without any specific descriptors) to counter what others had downvoted as obvious troll comments. Last time I went back, I looked into the comments to see pages-upon-pages of ascii art swastikas and just thought... why the hell would I bother with this?

The lack of moderation over there probably started as a philosophical stance that, at that early, naive juncture in the internet, I sympathize with. I'm guessing that after that, it just became a cash cow that they didn't want to bother creating an FTE to manage, and now most of the remaining users are there solely because it's a community that rewards being an obnoxious edge lord spewing out content-free insults as long as they resonate with the obnoxious majority in the comments.