thesmokingman

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.

Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?

I’ve seen some misinformation that doesn’t address the question and no answers.

First the misinformation: if you live in the US and work in an at-will state, your employee handbook will dictate what company can or cannot do. In most cases, especially for larger companies, there will be explicit language allowing the company to do whatever they on anything that uses their software or tech they’ve provided (eg your phone you use for company email). Two-party consent doesn’t apply in these cases because you signed the employee handbook or were informed it was a condition of your employment. Since it’s at-will too bad. However, even with these power, most companies aren’t doing shit unless you’re fucking up. Give someone a reason to throw IT or security at you and it could happen. Chances of this are higher at either larger companies or small companies with power-hungry idiots running the show. I have worked at all kinds and see all sides. If you are not in the US or live in a state with employment contracts (not at-will), this might not apply unless you signed away those rights and there is nothing getting them back. It’s always a good idea to be friendly with IT and security to learn what they do and do not do.

As to your question, do companies fingerprint employee voices, most likely not. In the US I’m at-will states you don’t need to go through all the trouble of tracking voices for termination or legal action. In the private world, this is a very secrecy-oriented problem (eg Apple trying to keep the lid on surprise and delight) so it wouldn’t happen except for very large scale. In the public sector, you genuinely should be afraid of this because government agencies are sucking down all the data they can. This is true around the world. More importantly, they’re all incompetent as fuck and being sold shitty software that doesn’t work so they’re misusing data like this for incorrect identifications.

In general, if you want to be anonymous, practice good operational security. Changing your voice never hurts. It’s not a bad idea to be safer (unless you’ve chosen a tool that can be easily reversed). You should also use phone numbers and hardware that can’t be traced back, which is a bit harder.

And if you didn’t know it was for “Howard E Butt” now you know and can enjoy them even more.

I fucking miss HEB.

You missed the market saturation. Again. You addressed everything except the last part of the sentence there. Music is a lottery, like most jobs, because there are too many people trying to do music. Streaming, radio, labels, exposure, these aren’t the problems at all. The number of people who are good at a thing and enjoy it are.

I follow maybe 30 artists fairly closely. I regularly listen to maybe 200. Across the genres I hit each month (way down from my music heyday), there’s probably 500 in regular rotation. I work in tech and make decent money. I can’t afford to support all of these amazing people. Sharing their music gets them more exposure which might lead to merch sales which is how they actually make money. If I had to sell their music every time I shared it, that would go away. Samplers, mix tapes, music videos, all of that is to drive merch sales. I buy on Bandcamp and still stream, meaning artists are getting more money from my consumption than back in the day when me buying a cassette was the final sale.

Unless you’re going to put some sort of barrier to entry in front of music, this problem does not go away. You’re advocating for the shitty cover band making the same amount of money as the original artist putting blood, sweat, and tears into a long career. That just doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, there are too many killer artists out there for all of them to earn a living doing music. Even if I could support all the artists I love in my country, there are that many or more in other countries.

Not everyone gets to do their dream job. Decent analysis if a bit scathing. My dream as a kid was writing. Turns out that dream was held by a ton of kids like me and none of can survive on that.

I said multiple times “lots of folks do music for fun.” You said “you’re undervaluing their labor.” That’s why everyone thinks you think money is the point.

You also seem to not understand market saturation. If a fair value for a recording is $20 (just pretend for a minute), consumers are happy to pay $20, and artists sell for $20, why aren’t musicians getting rich? It’s because there are more musicians producing an incredible volume of work than the consumers can completely support. Nowhere in that statement is an attack on the value of that labor just an acknowledgment that there’s too much to consume.

In addition, you seem to fail to understand the difference between value to the artist and value to the consumer. Physical and digital radio provide incredible value to the consumer. They don’t really provide value to the artist unless you have an incredible amount of fame. A very good question to ask is “how do we create a solution that’s good for the consumer and the artist?” I have no idea. Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).