It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"
The one I found most devious was the ATMs in Stansted that offers to pay out Euro. I was going to Spain and knew I would need some cash on arrival, so I thought I could save a bit of time. They had cleverly swapped the exchange rate so in big letters they showed a reasonable figure, like 0.85 and then in smaller type in the corner showed that actually it was in favour of Euros, so you would pay over 350 pounds for 300 euros. I luckily realised in time, but I expect a lot of people don't. Also it's drilled in from the bad old days that you need to take out cash before going on holiday to avoid being scammed. A whole exploitive service industry seems to exist solely on that misconception.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
Interesting, I think for the older generation me included at the age of 45, it can be jarring to miss the visual marker of the capital letter in the beginning of a sentence. I have been online for 30 years and have certainly written my fair share of poor grammar, missing punctuation and probably missing capitalisation as well. I think the surprise comes from this being an article on the internet and seems like a design choice.
To me, writing in full, formally correct sentences, being careful to always use correct punctuation, starts to feel a little pretentious or tryhard in some contexts.
It doesn't feel too much like that here on HN. But on reddit, I use less formal structure most of the time, and that feels natural to me.
15 years ago, it was incredibly common to see folks texting things like "c u ltr". It made its way into instant messaging (where folks had a keyboard), but slowly disappeared once everyone had smartphones that autocorrected everything. I don't think it's strange to see that people prefer it stylistically. Text has very little in the way of showing emotions or intentions, so everything you can do to alter that is something to be used. People want to be less formal sometimes.
Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?
They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.
That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.
Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.
And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.
Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.
As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.
(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.
(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)
(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).
That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not
No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".
The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.
After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.
Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.
> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.
Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.
The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.
Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.
They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
According to the article, there is a defence invoking that exact sentiment if a merger is about to be blocked, bu iRobot decided not to invoke it (likely because it would have caused the price to be lower).
Why the price would be lower? Presumably the price was already agreed upon. Having a provision in the contract that the price is reduced if this argument is made to the antitrust authorities makes no sense.
I now realized that I recently saw some old tweets from this guy where he first opposed this merger and then celebrated the cancellation of the deal. So it seems he's just grasping at straws to look less like an idiot.
If the buyer is publicly listed, they have to consider their own share price,that is - the perception of their shareholders. The buyer will be punished for overpaying for a company circling the drain, they will also be punished from waling away from purchasing a seemingly healthy company at a good price.
The buyer and purchaser have to agree on which of the 2 options they publicly present to their shareholders and regulators - Amazon wouldn't be fooled because they had access to the financials and had its own judgement on viability (which may not be material Amazon's plans). However, the approach would decide the corresponding offer, and typically wouldn't be a retrospective decision, but would lock-in the higher or lower from the start.
Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
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