soundworlds

This is literally what happened with DMCA and digital trade agreements in the 90s/2000s. The US "suggested" other countries create their own equal laws (by threatening them with tariffs if they didn't).

The threats worked up until current Big Boss decided to tariff everyone anyway, on Liberation Day.

Not only is there now no incentive for other countries to follow suite - there is now strong incentive for other countries to distance themselves from US trade. Recent history has made that abundantly clear.

It is the abrupt cancellation of such enormous funds and projects that caused the most damage. If DOGE / Trump had taken his 4 years to "slowly" cancel, far fewer people would have died.

(though still far too many)

The most interesting and creative projects I have worked on required little code, but novel combinations of ideas.

Hah, I was just deep diving into Serial Experiments Lain. Cool site!

Neocities is one of the few websites I go to restore my faith in the future of the internet - it's the healthiest online creative community I've come across!

How the hell does Anthropic continue to make such hypocritical complaints without deeply cringing?

It's becoming embarrassing to watch

I work in IT, part of which is AI training - so I see how widespread these tools are. But surveys have shown there is a stark difference in how many people use it and how many people trust it. In Australia, 4% of people say they trust AI companies with data [1]

This is also one of the first "new technologies" that the older generations are far more optimistic about than younger generations. In the US, only 22% of Gen Z are optimistic about the technology, and that number is dropping [2]

[1] https://www.oaic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/264362/A...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...

Glad to hear you're also enjoying it!

Just for anyone else reading, I would say it is inaccurate to say it is a different front-end over Google. They pull from a range of search engines, but also run their own web crawlers and indices. It's the closest thing to a fully new search engine we've had so far.

I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.

I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.

Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/

I've been using Kagi for the last year, and it is like an actually helpful business partner.

Even if you use another one, we need to break the myth that Google is the only option out there.

Allen AI do not get enough love. They are doing GenAI how it should have always been done.

In fact, if the frontier companies had taken their approach, it would have started much slower, but I think we would be far more advanced by 2035. Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.

Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment.

The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.

I do think the last 100 years' assumption of "it's physical material or it doesn't exist" should not be so easily accepted as fact.

It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.

If I understand this correctly, Anthropic's argument is now "yes this will blow up some of your infrastructure, but it will be worth it"

The problem is that no one has been able to prove that it is actually worth the cost. That is a very fragile assumption.

This is the same argument I hear about too-fast AI rollouts. "If we don't adopt AI, then we will lose to the business that does."

It is so obvious how competition dynamics naturally ends up as a fight to the bottom, and yet so many people are happy enough clocking in to this grind, then trying to forget about it the moment they clock off.

I totally understand this from a survival standpoint - but choosing to work at Meta is likely not "the only job you could get"

This is likely more to do with data security than feature set. M365 Copilot is the only provider that offers some level of confidence that data will stay within tenancy bounds.

For a lot of businesses outside of the US, using other cloud models is considered a serious data risk.

I wonder if Ezra is aware of the "open" model scene, i.e. HuggingFace, etc

This seems a bit like he's calling for something many people are already working very hard towards.

https://neocities.org/ is exactly what you are asking for!

And cool creations like this is why we get excited about technology

I am praying for valuation to reflect real value.

But the US stock market of the last 4 years has shown it is grounded in hype far more than real value..

Looks very interesting! I stumbled across your webpage a few months ago while looking into the state of peer-to-peer. Glad to see p2p projects are still active.

One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.

Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..

Small businesses would become hyperspecialized, and industries would be spread across networks of small businesses - not all internal to a single big one.

It can seem inefficient at first, but would like be much more resilient to supply chain and other disruptions.

In the short term, probably.

In the long term, probably not.

Totally. As I've commented elsewhere, they thought it would be a great time screwing over artists and other culture works to make quick bucks and outrun the law.

Turns out that culture workers are a big chunk of who sets the narrative for the mainstream, and especially younger generations.

As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies":

1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption

2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation

I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.

Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.

Unless it was "Waifu-SFX-AutoComplete"

That kind of thing might be a case to not publicly disclose..

It is incredibly important for people to be aware that this is one of the few new technologies where older generations are far more optimistic than younger generations. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about it, and the number is falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...

To me this signals something very fragile about the current frontier AI Org's strategies.

I am becoming more convinced that it is not Capitalism itself that is toxic, but Big Business.

If (in some hypothetical way) businesses were capped at e.g. 15 staff - innovation would be slower, but it would be:

- More sustainable

- More locally adapted

- The supply chain ecosystem as a whole would be more resilient

- Damaging decisions by a few huge businesses would not outweigh good decisions from the other 99% of businesses, as happens today.

Totally. They are the only ones who said no to letting their tech being used for illegal use cases.

This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.