In short: we'll have the machines tell the creators what to create.
> You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.
Valid point / not a bad idea. One flaw might be that (successful and high quality) content creators are accustomed outsized rewards for their work. Ads pay very, very well for people creating content viewed by a lot of people.
Would AI companies be willing to match that (even 50% match)? If not, we might just end up with low paid copyrighters / ghost writers churning out large amounts of content for LLMs in subject areas where they don't necessarily have expertise.
I think Patreon-style backing has been proving out the viability of payment based creators. Technology Connections is largely funded by Patreon but puts out free content all the time. My guess is that once x402 becomes more standardized that Youtube, Substack, and other SaaS can add in paywall functionality which can help fund the free content for creators.
Creating something on demand instead of growing it autonomously already made everything non-authentic for the most part. Automating this would make everything totally fake and homogenized, and also devalue the data in the process. "Regularization" and filling gaps is a mistake, they should reward the originality instead.
Outside of the tech community those see little use. Listings for my local music and arts scenes are on Instagram and Facebook. Underground community events are planned using proprietary group chats.
Free culture and open internet activists lost this battle
I refuse to read any creative analysis of Moby-Dick that doesn't take a serious stand as to WTF was going on in Melville's head when he wrote Chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand. Or is it just meant to be a hidden treat for the freaks whose eyes didn't glaze over during the whale-facts portion?
While it's funny to think of people reading this completely out of context, I'm obliged to mention that "spermaceti" is a waxy oil found in the heads of sperm whales, and the industry bent on harvesting this substance was basically the entire point of hunting the species nearly to extinction.
If that gives you pause, the very next chapter is literally all about the whale’s penis (and I don’t want to hear any Moby-Dick puns unless they’re exceptionally clever)
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Muting the percussion on a track allows the melodies to be more easily sampled in other songs and mixes. I imagine that this is a way to help their music be plugged into future songs.
RAM stems are already out there ... I think the drumless release, especially on vinyl, is more useful for DJs who want to mix in samples "live" in the room to a dancing crowd. RAM is all about marrying a Disco and DJ aesthetic with the best of everything Dance that happened between the 70s and the 2010s. Daft Punk even switched out specific period microphones for different parts of recording. Encouraging old-school vinyl scratch mixing is right in the wheelhouse.
I suspect they Daft Punk also enjoy how deep the pocket groove on the work is. When you have Nile Rodgers and Nathan East playing on tracks it's just incredible. And because they recorded to Omar Hakim's drums originally, his groove sticks even when you can't hear him. I hope he still gets credit!
If this is why… why not just release all the individual layers?
I’ve always wondered how remixes come to be. Some sound muddy and obviously full of muted layers. But others sound like they had access to the individual tracks.
"All the individual layers" are called "stems" and artists that want to explicitly encourage remixes of their work will release stems. (Of course, you still pay royalties if you use them.)
You can also create your own stems, typically of usable but not perfect quality, using AI track separation software like demucs. ("Demux," get it?) I've used them to censor a track, or to isolate just percussion and piano, for example.
Royalties aside, in this Creative Commons, remix/mashup heavy inline world, why aren’t bass releasing multi tracks? A decade ago remix.nin.com provided multitracks and Garage Band and Ableton projects to remix and upload. Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D and Ghosts had the same on CD-ROM (Ghosts was Creative Commons which led to 34 Ghosts IV being sampled and later included in Old Town Road). The Slip stems were released publicly under CC as well. People went further and pulled tracks from Rock Band.
Are there other big bands that have done this? While not getting down to raw assets, home movies have had special features describing filmmaking techniques since the 80s. I’d guess at least 10% of current home video releases come with some type of commentary, featurette, or the like. Why is this so much less common in the music industry?
It's a common thing in the electronic music industry to release stems as a part of a remix contest. Dozens of remixes get uploaded to Soundcloud, the authors of the original track cherrypick a couple of them, package them into a "(Remixes)" EP and release it on their label.
It's like an initiation step for bedroom producers. You build up your reputation by having a couple of remixes released by an actual label, your remix gets played by DJs associated with that label, you start to develop relationships with the industry people in the process... It's an entire ecosystem based around free stems.
This on the other hand is aimed at DJs who use vinyls to layer on top of different drums, but it's the same principle. They want their tracks to be sampleable to other artists.
Some artists do. Moby used to do this. You can see it on this old CD single where he included a track with all the "parts" on it which was just the individual samples:
Trurl is the name of a character in the science fiction short story collection "The Cyberiad" by Polish author Stanisław Lem. Trurl is a highly intelligent robot and inventor who, along with his friend Klapaucius, goes on various adventures throughout the universe.
— via CGPT
A great book that prefigured the kinds of interactions people are now having with ChatGPT. For example:
“Have it compose a poem — a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!!”
Stanisław Lem’s "Cyberiad" is a great book that predicted machine learning and various modern technologies, although credit for this particular poem should probably go to Michael Kandel for his brilliant English translation. It's very different in other languages:
In terms of influence, it's disappointing that the author neglected to mention the considerable online fandom around the show during its original run. A television show with a genuine series-long narrative arc screamed out for debate over cryptic hints and plot twists, which all found their home within a handful of usenet groups.
And the definitive online reference to the show, The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, is still there, unchanged since the mid 90s: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/
Steve Grimm was a coworker of mine during the heady days of B5. I found myself invited to his home for a few viewing parties of the show during its original run. My girlfriend ruthlessly mocked the show, but she realized how near and dear it was to my heart. I was an unmitigated fanatic for it since that fateful Comic-Con in the early 90s when my classmate professed his devotion to it before the pilot aired.
In fact at this very moment, I am viewing "The Gambler III" with Kenny Rogers and Bruce Boxleitner (special appearance by Colm Meaney).
In a way, my life in those years sort of paralleled B5, with wild roller coasters of drama and enigmatic encounters in strange lands. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing!
I felt old the other day when I was telling my son that when I was a kid, if it was blue and underlined, you can click it! Now everything is polished and fancy and you never know what you can click on anymore. Something beautiful and utilitarian about the HTML of old.
To be honest, this sounds like bloody red meat to any black or grey hats out there interested in having some infiltration fun. Why not show up at Twitter’s hq with a mouth full of smart sounding engineering babble and a backpack full of spycraft toys?
Yep, Elon's paranoid about his current employees sabotaging him, but he should be just as paranoid about new job applicants looking to gain access and capitalize on the internal chaos.
Not gonna lie, if my current contract was ending id take a stint at twitter for a while just to be a fly on the wall for the insanity even knowing id get the arse at any time.
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody bypassed the internal systems to tweet stuff using Musk's account. (Or maybe somebody has and we just can't distinguish?)
I'm curious if this is any more consistent than the webcam software that Canon provided for Windows and Mac. I tried the Mac implementation briefly, but found it to be _extremely_ glitchy (even with hard-wired power).
Not a Canon EOS user, but typically there are accessories called "dummy batteries" that take the shape of a standard battery, but is actually used by connecting to the AC socket. This way, the camera can be powered on constantly so long as the venue with the AC doesn't have a power outage.
I actually came across an Eos “webcam kit” at Walmart in-store that came with a USB cable and the AC adapter. Pricey at ~$90, but they did sell it like that.
Since all EOS R series camera's can charge their battery perfectly fine when connected to a USB-C PD charger the only thing that adapter 'fixes' is the software lock Canon placed on the camera which causes it to stop charging from USB when turned on. Smells like a software-defined business model to me...
Regarding Cloudflare donating their service fees to an LGBTQ support org, that's some genuine D-grade advocacy. I feel bad for the ERG members who were put in the position of choosing that charity.
If someone keeps starting fires on my property, I don't want you to donate to the local fireman's fund, I want you to stop giving that person matches.
It's carbon offsets for hate. And just like carbon credits, it's not really solving any problems. It's the minimum they could do that was literally not zero.
> You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.