The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.
It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.
I find Plexamps Radio features, and DJ's to work great against my library. It also helps if you, as an individual, have a diverse and large music library to supply for the sonic analysis.
But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm.
Even most haters will end up using it.
I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too.
I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
To be fair, it's not doing anything to the job market, it's just being used as an excuse. Very few tech jobs have truly been replaced AI, it's just an easy excuse for layoffs due to recession/mismanagement etc.
It has affected graphic design and copy writing jobs quite a lot. Software engineering is still a high-barrier-entry job, so it'll take some time. But pressure is already here.
I know of an ISP that wrote a custom CRM/ERP solution in order to harass the less well behaved telecom company in town into doing their jobs when they said they would do them. So it would do things like send you a reminder to see if the approval or the hookup they promised you Wednesday was done so you could meet you customer’s expectation of having their Internet turned on by Friday.
That’s probably the best you can do. Make it obvious to everyone including the bureaucracy what their externalities are doing, and either nudge them to go faster or divest some responsibilities to someone else.
1. Short term: nothing major because it can't at the moment.
2. Long term: build up a military that is a credible military deterrent to the US, probably abandon NATO if the US doesn't, and form alliances with Canada and the UK.
It used to be that you had to mingle with people, and if you had a particularly crazy take on reality there was a dynamic where 80% of people around you IRL would not really take you seriously because respected people didn’t—especially if you were otherwise not appearing to be a socially well-integrated and productive person. This had a chilling effect on extreme views and helped somewhat bring the outliers in, so to speak. Now, even if you never leave your house, cannot hold a job or a relationship, you can find any number of people who share your extreme views, and the more extreme the views the tighter the community (due to justified exclusion IRL).
Naturally, it did not take too long for other people exploit that newly found dynamic in context of democracy and use tech to manipulate such people with fringe views for own short-term gains.
Hot take: it's a failure of democratic competition. The US doesn't have proportional representation, and it's long maintained a duopoly of two electable parties, and a first-past-the-post system that makes any vote for a 3rd party a waste. This, coupled with the Democrats not fronting up a reformist candidate when they could have (Sanders shot down twice), permitted the only anti-establishment candidate to win, and that happened to be a callous individual that aligns with minds as cruel as his own. (By his own admission, 'the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them'.) It's hard to believe that even die-hard Republican politicians are totally on-board with this reformist agenda that's going to completely decimate the economy, but most certainly, if anyone is winning by the end of it, it will be them.
That said, if there's ever another free and fair US election, the Democrats have a real opportunity to put a candidate that can actually deliver remaking the country, but in a way that lifts all boats, and without throwing out hard-won democratic freedoms. But I'm pretty certain they'll just front up another establishment candidate with a progressive face.
Makes sense to me. I've been thinking: The US was doomed from the start? Because of the laws that makes it a two party country? It was just a matter of time, and for mass manipulation tools to appear?
Are there any more doomed two party countries waiting to go authoritarian / fascist?
I think, though, that the US won't go full top-down authoritarian, because a large enough portion of the population is armed. Should some kind of coup ever be attempted, it could well spark a civil war – which is still doom, but not a subjugating kind of doom.
Numbers matter. Only a small amount of insurgents are needed to occupy the military, but if even 2% of the civilian population took up arms, the situation would become untenable. All the armed forces together constitute not much more than one million troops. And there would be also conscientious resistance within the armed forces to executive orders to shoot civilians.
Actually Steve Jobs, in an interview, strongly argued against a wild west internet and called for "authoritative news organs" iirc. It was on YT a few years ago, may still be there.
The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.
It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.
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