The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
In China you don't criticise the dictatorship and don't be a Muslim and your quality of life improves every year and you get many cool products and services. In the USA they are disappearing people at random and they are banning the import of products and services from the places that are producing them (mostly China).
I would wager some VP at YouTube in charge of shorts has their performance evaluations tied to how many hours of shorts are watched. So that's one incentive. Another is customer retention. Make current paying users addicted to shorts, and maybe they'll be more likely to keep paying.
I think you're basically right, but the comment I replied to was saying they'll somehow get more of that specific user's money. While the shorts may improve retention in aggregate, this particular paying customer doesn't want them.
It's possible that particular user, despite not wanting the shorts, will keep paying for YouTube for longer because they enjoy shorts. It's also possible that they genuinely don't like them and are less likely to keep paying because of them. People are different. What keeps some customers engaged can turn off others.
> if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that?
Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.
To stop the same two companies from owning everything? YouTube Music and Apple Music are shameless anticompetitive moves, leveraging market dominance to move into other existing markets. (I'll afford more lenience to Apple Music, since iTunes was already huge, being the undisputed king of music sales before streaming subscriptions took off.)
I've also been using Spotify for longer than YouTube Music, or its predecessor that Google killed (as they do periodically) even exited.
It's quite funny to me to frame Spotify as an underdog, though I suppose there's truth to that, because of the sheer size of Apple and Google. I've never thought of it that way.
I mostly listen to albums, the Spotify “library” is a reasonable way to browse my saved albums.
Spotify (now) supports lossless.
Spotify connects to Sonos, wiim, etc. devices
Spotify supports marking albums and playlists for offline sync, including to my Garmin watch.
I participate in a number of collaborative Spotify playlists (e.g. on group trips, at parties, etc.). I’ve never seen anyone make a collaborative playlist on another platform, much less missed out on participating in one.
Shazam results have an “Open in Spotify” button and Shazam adds everything it identifies to a Spotify playlist.
When I’ve used it, the YouTube Music UI has felt like it’s not really designed for people who listen to music the way I do at all.
I’m not willing to go without YouTube just to spite Google but I’d rather not give them money or attention/usage if I can avoid it.
I don’t know how many of these would also be ok with YouTube Music, but it’s clearly not all of them and I suspect it’s close to zero. I’m fortunate that the cost of Spotify is not a burden for me, and I’d much rather pay it to get closer to the experience I want than try to get by with YouTube Music.
Pro Spotify: existing playlists and history, better artists info, better UI.
YouTube Music is both better and worse: UI has some usability issues and unfortunately it shares likes and playlists with the normal YouTube account, as a library it has lots of crap uploaded by YouTube users, often wrong metadata, but thanks to that it also has some niche artists and recordings which are not available on other platforms.
But did you really make it? Or was it the AI? If someone commissions a piece of art from an artist, I don't think the commissioner would be able to truthfully say they made it, even if they had a specific vision for what the piece of art should look like. But if you've edited or changed the track enough yourself, maybe it would be fair to call yourself a co-author...
I'm not going to defend against that position generally. Your point is well taken, I don't know if I put enough into it to consider it real to you. I think about the lyrics, I write the MVP of them by hand, and then I have 4.5 give me variations of them, I write all my instrumental prompts by hand I don't use any LLM for that because I typically know exactly what I want and I tend to be quite precise with my instructions there. Suno allows you a lot of fine grain control, and you can also create personas from tracks and then use those personas in new tracks so as you can imagine you can spend a long time trying to get exactly what you want... last night I gen'd over 60 songs before I got it dialed in how I wanted it and I'm still not totally happy with it. I understand the position though, I was on original team that took deviantart from zero to millions of artists through the early 2000s and have a few Emmy awards from the film to digital transition days, I'm no stranger to these conversations.
Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.
Hardly anyone in the "west" gets pulled over by police for seat belt checks (unlike say, India, China), yet nearly everyone still wears them, because they understand if they don't, they'll probably become a stain on the asphalt. I imagine if tomorrow, a law passed that seat belts no longer had to be worn, most people would still use them. Perhaps the regulation and enforcement are only needed initially when not everyone is educated on the long term risks.
To be fair, belts and phones aren’t the same things. Belts are popular now because wearing them is barely an inconvenience compared to the improvement in safety - abstaining from phones is way harder for the average person.
The manga scanlation world is pretty big, but that's not been my experience and understanding at all.
1. For truly popular mangas, no serious group is going to wait for a chapter to be released in China or Taiwan[0]. Someone that lives in Japan will go out and buy it. Or wait a few days for the it to posted online for sale by the publisher (though sometimes most recent chapter will be free for a few days). It's all illegal so why would it matter if the raws were obtained in China/Taiwan vs. Japan/online anyways?
3-5. For many of the popular series, more "groups" than you would expect are really just one person. And perhaps irregularly a cleaner and/or a typesetter (eg KireiCake[1]). Some more "professional"/commercial groups have much larger teams, and even paid translators, but they tend to do porn (especially erotic BL), because that's where the money is at. I've never heard of pre-teens being part of these groups, but I guess no one would really advertise that they are a pre-teen. Shitty translations (or shitty MTLs) discouraging others is a real problem, especially for more niche series.
[0] Unless the Chinese language release is at the same time of the Japanese one? At least for moderately popular manga, I know the English release is usually months (or more commonly, years) behind.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/1e1bkw9/a_statement_...
Yeah the manga scanslation world is really big so I have no doubt there are differences in each of the points, except:
> I've never heard of pre-teens being part of these groups, but I guess no one would really advertise that they are a pre-teen
I was a pre-teen when I started scanslating. I did this for ages and did all the roles that were available back then. I started editing/managing and head TLing multiple projects as a teen. I "retired" in college. I don't want to dox myself too much but the pipeline from scanslater to low-pay intro commercial translation work was very common back when I did it, since it's easy to hit N2 if you were TLing from Japanese and many of the better TLs were N1 or better. While this isn't the case for me, many of the TLs were heritage speakers. From the Discords I'm in these days I'd say the age distribution remains very similar, with a mean around 16. I mean it makes sense, who wants to do this much work with no pay?
reticulum.network perhaps? It certainly fits the "replace the IP layer" requirement, and I believe in theory it can be very large scale, though unsure how it would do in reality.
Well, it's a lot easier to automatically scan and store emails than postcards (eg, flagging all emails with certain keywords or in certain languages)... I guess nowadays they can use OCR to scan postcards, but that would be of doubtful value to any of the 3 letter agencies.
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