> I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.
The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.
Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.
The camera did not kill painting. There are tons and tons of painters still, lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.
Painting (portraits for example) as a profession largely disappeared, while art based on painting evolved (impressionism, cubism, etc) due to the camera.
My point is that photography is essentially a simulacra of reality, yet it unexpectedly created its own art form and influenced existing ones. So will the use of LLMs for generation
LLMs will not do what the camera did. LLMs have no anchor to reality like the camera, they simply optimize for the average. A camera is a whole new medium, an LLM is a statistical construction. Sorry to burst your AI bubble. LLMs will not be the new camera, they won't be a new programming language, and they won't be the new compiler.
I am not sure I agree, a camera on the surface of things is the most boring machine. It shows you what was already there. It is still can be the basis of several interesting art forms
I don't see why this can't happen with AI, or at least I am not certain like you it can't happen
Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it
could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.
By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.
Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.
AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music
Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].
It killed realist art and it greatly reduced the "market" of available paintings, which back then was really a market, art was usually commissioned for the same reasons you take a photograph today
You could have just said "no" or maybe admitted that "killing" painting was overblown, or maybe that it was not an accurate descriptor at all if you're argument is that it just "changed" painting.
I don't do semantics arguments because they don't help anyone learn anything
It largely killed an industry which was everywhere, sure there are still paintings and it's a primer art form. The number of paintings commissioned and number of painters fell drastically since the 19th century to the point I am willing to guess you have never had your portrait taken, something that was common place in the equivalent pay grades of today tech workers.
We can continue discussing whether the word kill is a metaphor or must be used only for a zero or one situation but I don't think that's interesting enough compared to the actual topic
How many people are actually going to download a torrent client, navigate through some massive torrent file collection to check the files of the artists they want to download so they can upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?
A sufficiently seeded torrent is a high latency static CDN.
You just need a client that can make use of it.
I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.
Most people won't listen to 10tb of unique tracks in their entire lives, let alone 30tb or 300tb... 1tb of music is about a full year of 24/7 unique tracks
> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.
Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.
> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm
I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.
He's a former Spotify employee now, but he was a Spotify employee when he made it. I think it hasn't been updated since he lost his data access.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.
True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.
Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.
Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
And also being the successor to Napster, the irony is thick with this quote:
"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"
Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.
This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.
And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)
Anti scraping measures are making it more difficult to use the web. I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.
> I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.
The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.
Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.
[dead]
Probably a net positive for future open source music generation LLM models
Which means a net negative for humanity.
Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion
It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)
The camera did not kill painting. There are tons and tons of painters still, lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.
> lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.
Yes, because art evolves over time.
As it very likely will with generative art.
And even with that evolution, people still use paint, and people will still use instruments and make music the same ways we always have...
The camera did not kill painting. And how does comparing a camera to an LLM even make sense?
Painting (portraits for example) as a profession largely disappeared, while art based on painting evolved (impressionism, cubism, etc) due to the camera.
My point is that photography is essentially a simulacra of reality, yet it unexpectedly created its own art form and influenced existing ones. So will the use of LLMs for generation
LLMs will not do what the camera did. LLMs have no anchor to reality like the camera, they simply optimize for the average. A camera is a whole new medium, an LLM is a statistical construction. Sorry to burst your AI bubble. LLMs will not be the new camera, they won't be a new programming language, and they won't be the new compiler.
I am not sure I agree, a camera on the surface of things is the most boring machine. It shows you what was already there. It is still can be the basis of several interesting art forms
I don't see why this can't happen with AI, or at least I am not certain like you it can't happen
They're conflating the LLM to advancement by comparing LLM:Camera, when really cameras and paintings are two different things
Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.
By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.
Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.
AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music
Do you have any evidence of all these "killings" of the profession or are you just vibing?
Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].
Much more here: https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html
https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography
> It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences
It's very obvious that it's polluting and/or killing everything it touched so far though
it's an automatic bullshit machine so essentially it creates cliches as an automatic process
this doesn't mean this can't be controlled by someone talented
>Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion
Have you been to a contemporary art museum?
It killed realist art and it greatly reduced the "market" of available paintings, which back then was really a market, art was usually commissioned for the same reasons you take a photograph today
You could have just said "no" or maybe admitted that "killing" painting was overblown, or maybe that it was not an accurate descriptor at all if you're argument is that it just "changed" painting.
I don't do semantics arguments because they don't help anyone learn anything
It largely killed an industry which was everywhere, sure there are still paintings and it's a primer art form. The number of paintings commissioned and number of painters fell drastically since the 19th century to the point I am willing to guess you have never had your portrait taken, something that was common place in the equivalent pay grades of today tech workers.
We can continue discussing whether the word kill is a metaphor or must be used only for a zero or one situation but I don't think that's interesting enough compared to the actual topic
Convenience won.
How many people are actually going to download a torrent client, navigate through some massive torrent file collection to check the files of the artists they want to download so they can upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?
A sufficiently seeded torrent is a high latency static CDN.
You just need a client that can make use of it.
I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.
Wasn't popcorn-time basically video streaming backed by torrent ? Why can't it be the same for audio ?
The metadata is 200 GB which can be easily indexed and could be made searchable, then you download only what you need
And specifically, not everybody owns a NAS with 300 TB capacity. At 30TB drive for almost 1000€, we are talking about 10-15000€.
As mentioned in other stories, this is really welcomed by other big corps or LLM related companies
Most people won't listen to 10tb of unique tracks in their entire lives, let alone 30tb or 300tb... 1tb of music is about a full year of 24/7 unique tracks
Great, so the copyright conglomerates have nothing to complain about if it's useless then.
[dead]
I'm hoping that this metadata leak can revive projects like https://everynoise.com
Spotify (and netflix etc..) have become very hostile to exposing their catalogue over API, so i'm glad they've gotten open sourced :)
I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives. Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.
Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.
> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
I doubt such a tool would be allowed in the major mobile app stores. The library of music isn't the product.
Stremio is on the App Store and can be used with a debrid service.
Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm
I am flabbergasted by the comments here, Spotify started with pirated music and now invests in the military.
https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...
And
https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...
It is actually a good thing to invest in blowing up fascists, especially in the context of an ongoing land invasion.
If the fascists don't blow up the anti-fascists first.
An eye for an eye, leaves us all blind.
It's probably up to the publishers, not them.
I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.
I don't think music producer would agree to that. Spotify would likely lose contracts even if they simply opted for silence.
Simply sharing metadata, related artists, genres, etc would create a pretty interesting ecosystem[1].
[1]: https://everynoise.com/
Every Noise was created by a former Spotify employee.
He's a former Spotify employee now, but he was a Spotify employee when he made it. I think it hasn't been updated since he lost his data access.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
Not even in the “providing a way to get music” way?
A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.
True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.
Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.
Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
They can't, their overlords would be very unhappy with it. Record industries are heavy in on DRM.
Are they really? Nearly every song is uploaded by it's creator to YouTube which has no DRM at all...
wasn't spotify started out as a collection of pirated songs? somethings go in full circle I guess.
And also being the successor to Napster, the irony is thick with this quote:
"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"
Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.
For an independent artist, exposure matters more than album sales as it leads to ticket sales.
For large labels, exposure is a solved problem and album sales are all that matters.
They are all trying to maximize revenue, they just have different ways of going about it.
Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339
Oooh, scary. "Investigations!"
This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.
And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)