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I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.

Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.

While VAC is indeed far from competent at detecting all but the most rudimentary cheats, it is so by design. When the first third party CSGO matchmaking/league services decided to use kernel level AC, Valve publically said they would personally not do such a thing. I can't remember if any exact reasons were named at the time, but I do think it's a fair take on their end. It's not like they're locking developers into using VAC anyway.

Furthermore, more recently they have debuted VACNet, which uses machine learning, most likely to recognize certain patterns and behaviors associated with cheating. Probably still avoidable if one were to use subtle settings and knows how to act properly. But it shows they haven't given up and are trying to explore alternative methods at least. I'm admittedly not familiar with how successful it has been as I have not been playing or even following the game for a long time.

I don't know what sort of artists you know, but of all the artists I know, nobody is "completely fine" with tracing. It is okay but still frowned upon when people do it for "practice" without publishing the result, but anything that even looks remotely like it is traced gets called out and further investigated incredibly quickly.

And as for fan art, a lot of companies explicitly allow art based on their IP, as long as it's used/published by the artists themselves and the commercial rights to the work aren't sold to some other company. In Japan, there is a whole industry based around derivative works, Doujin - self-published works, that works off of what is essentially a code of honor. Companies don't go against the artists, as long as said artists adhere to certain guidelines on what they're allowed to depict (eg. no NSFW content.) Many franchises have become a lot more popular due to fan art/derivative works alone (ie. Touhou Project, Fate Series.)

As a hobbyist musician even I notice Live's flaws. And while it does indeed get out of your way most of the time, when it doesn't you can't change it and it becomes frustrating. While other larger players in the industry are farther ahead, just how far behind Live really is becomes especially apparent when you look at Reaper. They're fundamentally different in their approaches, yes. But Reaper's pace for adding new features and how up-to-date they are in terms of the changing landscape of the industry (CLAP plugins, ARA2 support, etc.) is impressive considering their small team. But Ableton's focus with Live seems to be more towards adding content rather than features or large overhauls. At least that's my impression.

I genuinely love Live's workflow. It feels the most natural to me. But the ever growing list of annoyances and shortcomings make me look into other DAWs fairly frequently. Though sadly no other one has really stuck with me so far.

"Radios" in Spotify are a shadow of their former self anyway. They used to be a theoretically infinite list of songs that you could up and down vote, which would then influence the next songs to be added. Now it's just a playlist of stuff Spotify deems similar and you essentially just have to deal with it.

Discovery via their radio used to be great. Whenever I tried it more recently it was kind of awful. I've switched off of Spotify many times over the past few years, only to regrettably come back and be disappointed again.

I wish Apple would just make a proper cross platform Apple Music client, then I could switch in peace. All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly. And while I try to purchase as much as I can, not everything is available digitally and I don't really want to import CDs from the other side of the world.

To offer an additional perspective:

A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).

But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.

This is not the default behaviour and it has to be enabled per client/platform. The first unlock after a reboot still requires the master password as well.

Maybe a short, abstract svg animation of how a certain feature would look like and behave? Probably a little more work to implement (well) and keep up to date but I've liked that sort of thing on the few sites I've seen it on in the past. Sadly can't think of any right now though.

I also remember algolia having some sort of movie search demo as their top banner a few years ago. Including their completion and such. Always struck me as a good way to introduce their service in particular.

The big question on my mind when reading and considering this is, who is this aimed at? Is it aimed at casual players? Is this aimed at those who want to improve or that play competitively? If it's the latter I can't imagine it being of much help in the long term. It's better to understand why things are a certain way than to have an AI tell you to just do a thing. And unless you're playing at a high enough level already, things such as synergy or composition don't matter nearly as much as comfort with a character and their abilities. And as someone who has played games competitively in the past, I never wanted something to help me with things like awareness, along the lines of what the Valorant functionality displays. Keeping one's eyes on what's generally going on in the game has become much easier over the years anyway, to be completely honest.

I think for general strategy or builds in games like League of Legends or Dota 2, written guides and/or thinking for yourself will still easily trump an AI and will further one's actual understanding of the game and it's balance a lot as well. At the last Dota 2 International tournament a team won by their player picking up a rather unusual item that surprised even the fairly knowledgeable commentators. I think these sorts of AI or data based things just end up being a crutch for the players in the middle of the skill bracket but will fall off in effectiveness once they reach the higher levels where enemies will actually think for themselves and come up with counter strategies along the way.

Also has support for CS:GO actually been approved by Valve yet? I know they did some AI showcases at their events in the past but I feel like this sort of thing, unless very limited in functionality, will go against their stance on cheating.

I would in all honesty give them even bigger props, as someone who used to be but isn't a fan anymore. They tried to add a game store a la steam into it but realized it didn't get the engagement they'd hoped for so they stopped putting time and effort into it and shut it down.

My first impression when they first added it was that they'd just shove it down people's throats and keep trying to make it work.

I hope I'm not wrong about them getting rid of it again and I've just gotten used to tuning all that out when using discord.

Why are they trying to do this sort of thing when their usual "recommendations" through their radio are just pre-generated playlists that one has no influence on anyway. I remember years ago the radio was generated as you went and you could up- and down vote songs as you listened, slowly tuning said radio to your personal liking. Nowadays any electronic music radio just turns into a generic EDM playlist in my experience, even if I stared with something fairly niche.

That and the fact that their queue after years and years still sucks compared to competitors made me move in recently. It feels like Spotify has declined over recent years. I still miss their addons as well.

As someone who's in their mid twenties right now, I do somewhat relate to that. I used to hang around a lot more gaming community subreddits but I think somewhere along the lines the content shifted towards more crappy karma farming memes and other shit posts as opposed to more discussion based posts.

I barely visit /r/all anymore because most things you find there are just not enjoyable or good. There are still some smaller and sometimes even larger communities on there that are good at managing a nice balance between posts but they become more and more rare to find.