I think a lot has happened since the 90's, and you rightfully point out that there was very little money in music to begin with. Labels generally always took a very large fraction of a physical CD sale, for example, so the model was rather rigged from the beginning (and recorded music doesn't have that long of a history, anyway).
In general, I'd argue that Spotify will be more toxic to the industry (or the artists' livelihood) than piracy. Streaming is even more predatory and centralized than labels in the 90's, but with an important caveat: it's legal. When people engage in piracy there is at least some awareness of, say, the pirate being at fault in the transaction — even though, as someone else already mentioned, people who pirate might contribute, or engage in other ways, with the creators. But with streaming, it got normalized to pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream (and the terms get progressively worse). I've countless times heard the argument "at least they get paid something!"
Bandcamp, for example, seems like a much fairer ideal for the industry. Luckily, the Epic buyout a few years ago did not immediately ruin the business.
As for the music in the 90's...music has changed. Naturally, one could argue that these are also exciting times: one can singlehandedly produce a record, distribute it independently, and be touring all over Europe without ever having to sign off to a major label. Is this not a good thing — or at least, a notable one? Of course, there's still great music around.
Yeah, usually, have also read that the only ones to make music on Spotify are major artists. They take a huge chunk of the the money distributed to musicians. At least for me, have never heard of any musician making a living off of their Spotify sales, not even close.
And Bandcamp does seem nice, wish it took off more.
And yes, I do completely agree with you that there are some big positives with today's music landscape. The rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create your own music was a revolution, as is youtube for getting your music to the masses. Seems like a ton of musicians got their break from this these days...
...So as we talk, am thinking, maybe piracy has become a unimportant aspect of the music industry?? Hmm... Well, one aspect is missing, the seasoned engineers, producers, marketers and managers who can get your music created, promoted and performed all without the musician's needing to learn all this themselves. It really is a lot of work!
Even well-known artists don't make meaningful amounts of money off of Spotify if they're not currently topping the charts. Year before last, I think it was, "Weird Al" Yankovic announced that he had made enough off of Spotify that year to buy "a pretty nice sandwich".
Oh my. Although I understand, and I do truly, that the em dash might be a tell for LLMs...I have been using it for years, now, and the last time this came up on HN I understood exactly when: Mac OS makes it very easy to type the em dash. You just long press the regular -.
I don't use a Mac anymore, but the first thing I'll do on a Linux build is configure my modifier key in such a way to produce — easily.
Not to deny that discourse on the internet, and reddit of all places, might be getting infested with LLM output. I just don't think focusing on the em dash is a good strategy to predict a tell.
The em dash thing is not very conclusive. I have been writing with the em dash for many years, because it looks better and is very accessible on Mac OS (long press on dash key), while carrying a different tone than the simple dash. That, and I read some Tristram Shandy.
Please don't mind my possibly simplistic question — but is this something that would bring Rust development closer to a Lisp environment? Seems like an interesting project.
This is more in line with building a REPL for your own language.
Lisp environments are just that; environments. That is to say that there is a runtime that holds your code in memory, which then enables a REPL to replace parts of the code in memory while the program is running.
This implies an interpreted language (that might or might not also be compiled further at runtime), which Rust is not. It also heavily implies a garbage collector, which Rust doesn't have. Lastly, type guarantees in these languages tend to be less strong as the system almost by definition is already very dynamic.
This looks really cool! Might do a few hours travel to join.
I did not know about c-base either. Are there similar associations throughout Europe? I'd love to join one — seems to have a very cool hacker-y spirit :)
Thanks for this. I’m planning a tour of hacker spaces, maker spaces, and any DIY-related places across Europe in April and May. Will definitely be using this for my research. If you have any other recommendations for Berlin and surrounding areas, I’d love to hear them.
Very unrelated, but: I run Linux on an older Thinkpad and I appreciate fast websites. This is a very well-designed website! It loads fast and it scrolls quite quickly.
Does anybody feel the same? I feel like nobody touched upon this, but it's always very nice to feel interfaces are responsive.
Interesting, I have the exact polar opposite perception.
I accessed this through a Qubes AppVM (no GPU, limited memory and CPU budget) and the presence of videos makes this a very slow scrolling experience for me.
In general, anything that involves JS/CSS animation/blur/effects makes sites pretty slow (up to unusable for me). The unlogged homepage for github.com for example, spins my cpu at 100%.
Demetri Martin has a great joke on digital cameras: "I like digital cameras, because they enable you to reminisce immediately. Just like, look at us. We’re so young. Standing right there, wow. Where does the minute go?"
I remember when you first posted this and it is a project I think upon very frequently! It's nice to see you have made further progress — and that there are comments with attempts at solving! Great job.
I still find some problems with the navigation of the problems, but I am not even sure where to go to fix that. It has to do with the difficulty of each problem, but also with how large each topic is: algebra encompasses both linear algebra and linear equation solving, which is a very wide bracket.
But you're making progress. That's great! Congratulations on that, and I'll be sure to keep visiting the website.
i understand that the difficulty metric right now does not do justice to the problem's representation - i will come up with a better solution for this.
on the point of topic granularity - i understand that it feels vague right now but i also wonder what the depth should be. i will do some research on how to solve this better.
In general, I'd argue that Spotify will be more toxic to the industry (or the artists' livelihood) than piracy. Streaming is even more predatory and centralized than labels in the 90's, but with an important caveat: it's legal. When people engage in piracy there is at least some awareness of, say, the pirate being at fault in the transaction — even though, as someone else already mentioned, people who pirate might contribute, or engage in other ways, with the creators. But with streaming, it got normalized to pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream (and the terms get progressively worse). I've countless times heard the argument "at least they get paid something!"
Bandcamp, for example, seems like a much fairer ideal for the industry. Luckily, the Epic buyout a few years ago did not immediately ruin the business.
As for the music in the 90's...music has changed. Naturally, one could argue that these are also exciting times: one can singlehandedly produce a record, distribute it independently, and be touring all over Europe without ever having to sign off to a major label. Is this not a good thing — or at least, a notable one? Of course, there's still great music around.