Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
It's still technically illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a tacit Don't Ask, Don't Tell understanding in the community between artists and recorders. Even when individual recorders are known by the community and artists, keeping the pretense of anonymity might be important to preserving and protecting the scene.
It's really up to the artists. Many are surprisingly cool with it, though there are a few notable exceptions (i.e. Prince). Sounds like the artist in this particlar case gave their blessing.
Many bands (like GD and Phish) specifically note in their rider that venues must allow and provide space for tapers to bring their rigs in.
A sibling comment in this thread pointed out my project Relisten[0], which now has over 4,000 bands who have given explicit permission for people to tape, record, and share their concerts non-commercially. We've been operating our FOSS platform for 12 years, and most of the audio is hosted by Archive.org. I can't tell you how many bands have begged us to add them to our platform.
Prince had intense business instincts, not just for becoming a vertically integrated multi-instrumental composer manager, bandleader and of course prodigious artist. Its rumored that to ruin the market demand for his bootleggers, Prince started his own sockpuppet bootleg label, that eventually released over four hundred CDs of content. Concerts, studio alternate cuts, and of course After-Shows. That label is curiously named Sabotage.
Whether the rumor is true or not, I can't confirm. What I can tell you is it's an amazing soundboard quality collection of his work product that I'm still not all the way through exploring after it briefly circulated among fans for a brief moment shortly after his death.
> though there are a few notable exceptions (i.e. Prince)
There was an episode of "What's Happening" when Rerun gets in trouble for bootlegging a Doobie Brothers concert, does anyone remember? It aired when I was a kid and now I somehow still feel guilty when I listen to bootlegs.
Yup, just remembered around ’99 I bumped into “Rerun” in full costume dancin’ for a small crowd in the parking lot of a Sugar Hill Gang concert in Santa Monica. Didn’t carry a camera in those days, as they weren’t allowed inside anyway. :-P
> The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin
Daft Punk doesn't have a singer and unless it was a very early show they wouldn't have seen them smile. Most big beat shows wouldn't have a dedicated vocalist. I'd guess Underworld or Prodigy, but lean toward Underworld.
If you've built an agent that can act even vaguely close to a paperclip maximizer, you've already solved 99.999% or more of the alignment problem. The hard part of alignment so far is getting the AI to do something useful in pursuit of the right goal, and not just waste energy. We still have no idea how to do this with any effectiveness: even modern "RL from verified feedback" systems are effectively toys, the equivalent of playing video games, not really of doing something useful in the real world.
Huh? Modern RLVR systems are toys that can’t do anything useful in the real world?
We must be living in completely different worlds. Claude and other agents have completely upended work for me and every single other software engineer I know.
Right now the skills you describe are definitely relevant. At work I'm regularly reviewing smelly changes, both from my own agents and others'. I'm wonder if this smell will always be present or if it will go away entirely, leaving the smell detector skills irrelevant.
Hey thanks! I do wonder that. I think that even if specifically for code smell the things would be subtler, for other forms of AI driven averageness (especially in areas where we can't RLVR the models to perfection) it might still be present. But yeah I wonder how those thoughts will age (and how we'll update our priors accordingly).
> you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating
Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.
There is no "scrolling down past the first 3 results" because everything after that is recommended garbage that's unrelated to the search query. And as they already said, "refining the search query" doesn't work because it wouldn't find the video even if they searched its exact title.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
> Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is
I have about as much say in YouTube as you do. In the org tree, the lowest common ancestor between me and YouTube is Sundar.
My original comment was a joke about the fact that someone felt as if they were "forced" to watch something. It was more of a comment on consumer attitude than YouTube itself. I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.
> I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.
The point of a company is what it does: The money in your paycheck comes from anti-competitive behavior, denying accountability and customer support to your users, and yes, even the enshittification of Youtube.
Deny it all you want, but you have every opportunity to walk away and do something better for society with your life if you so choose.
It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).
before:2024-08 after:2023-06 to the rescue? manual but works, even though on queries for "trending" keywords results will still be flooded with hits that should be filtered..
Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.
The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.
Yeah that was pretty much my thought throughout the piece.
It felt like the author was punching down, too. This Cluely founder seems largely unsuccessful and, as the boat guy says at the end, just a kid. A chud of a kid, but a kid nonetheless.
Agreed, but not because it agrees with the logic of Roko's Basilisk. If it actually did agree with it, it would be too stupid to be a super-intelligence.
Interesting comment. I haven't heard this problem phrased this way nor have I heard of these schools, do you have a recommendation for learning more about this?
> At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them.
She puts it all together relatively succinctly if dense. You can just read Dewey too if you want to be closer to the source. He's a bit more interesting because it is more of the road not taken out of the progressive era.
Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
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