I really felt like all the good stuff was only on private trackers the last few years. A few of the biggest public trackers also went down, that certainly didn’t help, but even before that I had a hard time finding some older, rarer things. If piracy gets bigger, I hope to see more reliable public trackers again with bigger catalogues.

You know that’s not how people are filling their servers, right? Plex is a way to manage and stream your pirated media collection, though Plex will never admit that.

I don’t know what the difference is between downloading and sharing libraries, but check out Soulseek. It’s a little file-sharing program that lets others download directly from your music folder and vice versa. When I couldn’t find an album on any torrent tracker, some hero on Soulseek had it. The main drawback compared to torrents is that you’re limited to the upload speed of this one person, you can’t connect to a dozen people with the same files and combine their power.

Spotify is providing a much better service than radio and it needs the internet to function, but it also isn’t as cheap as a radio broadcast. Don’t judge the entire service by the free plan, which probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But that’s how most services attract their users these days, just burn money until you lock in enough people to start monetizing.

I’m on a family plan with a few others and it costs a few euros a month for each of us. Lets you download music too, so cell service isn’t even required. I’ve never had an ad; people complain about sponsored recommendations, but Spotify is “pushing” tiny Japanese indie bands with less than 500 monthly listeners on me. All my Daily Mixes are similar deep cuts. I find it hard to believe anyone is sponsoring those and no way radio would ever have played any of these, unless it’s a short-distance pirate broadcaster in the home town of these indie bands.

I’ve read the whole thing, but all the interesting bits were definitely in the first chapter. I didn’t know anything about the political situation in Nicaragua in the 80s, so it didn’t make much sense to me as an example. Was reading more Wikipedia than Chomsky at one point.
All his examples also seemed like very local problems? Like, the New York Times’ reporting on the Nicaraguan situation may have been biased, but international NGOs were reporting the truth (which is how Chomsky himself got his information) and newspapers all over the world were reporting that information. I checked the newspaper archives from my own country and when they reported on the cases from the book (which wasn’t that often, because South America is pretty far away), they had the same narrative as Chomsky.

So the interesting mechanical bits were definitely in the first chapter and the rest of it was only relevant to 1980s Americans who got all their information from national media.

4channel’s Technology board
https://boards.4channel.org/g/

That’s obviously way better than any TTS before it, but I still wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than a few minutes. In these two sentences I can already hear some of the “AI quirks” and the longer you listen, the more you start to notice them.
I listen to a lot of AI celeb impersonations and they all sound like the same machine with different voice synthesizers. There’s something about the prosody that gives it away, every sentence has the same generic pattern.
Humans are generally more creative, or more monotonous, but AI is in a weird inbetween space where it’s never interested and never bored, always soulless.

And with “this decade” you mean within the last 10 years or since 2020? Either way, I’m scared… Just kidding, if this is a bank we’re talking about, they’re actually ahead of the curve.