I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years’ worth of stuff now, but AI isn’t going away any time soon, so it would mean that there’d be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna’s archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn’t be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.

It seems they’ve opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna’s archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.

I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.

An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery

I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too

They’ve released torrents of the metadata, and they plan to release the music files, but they haven’t yet. They intend to start by offering the downloads as bulk torrents, but they’re open to considering implementing the ability to download single songs in the future.

So in short, yes, but you can’t download them yet

I often wonder whether Starmer has even one sincerely held political beliefs or value. I’d love to put him in a zone of Truth (D&D spell) and just ask him what he actually believes.

It’s weird, because it means that I sort of respect the Tories more. They believed many abhorrent things, such as that a cripple like me is at best, an inconvenient drain on the country’s resources, and at worst, someone who is making it all up to escape having to work — but at least they sincerely believe that.

“Content not available in your region” because Imgur has blocked the UK due to the Online Safety Act. Lmao, this is hilarious in a grim way.

My perception is that it’s gotten worse in recent years, but there’s always been a weird, socially conservative streak, especially amongst the powerful.

I went to one of the super old, prestigious universities, and one of the most valuable things I learned there is that the British aristocracy is alive and well. We may not formally have a distinct noble class like there used to be, but in a way, we’re in a worse situation because we have so much of these entrenched systems that most people don’t know the half of. I think these kinds of people aren’t what you’re talking about when you mention the rise in the conservative mortality police, but it’s worth mentioning as one of the underlying factors.

The recent wave of stuff is more linked to right wing populism. Nigel Farage is a big figure in that, and the rise of the rhetoric feels like it’s been happening in parallel to Trump’s rise.

My belief about why this has been getting bad is that we had a Tory government for over a decade, starting in 2010, and their cuts had a terrible impact on the country as a whole. People who were living in precarity were increasingly fucked over, and as wealth continued to move upwards, the previously comfortable middle class were increasingly pushed into precarity. In terms of why the Tories were in power for so long, my opinion is that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they were able to convince people that a country’s finances were analogous to household finances, and thus deficits are bad, and that you can’t invest in infrastructure unless you’re running a surplus. If anything, this hindered the UK’s economy in recovering from the crisis.

Labour didn’t provide a satisfying alternative to austerity, largely because under Blair, Labour had become increasingly neoliberal and distanced from its roots. In 2010, they campaigned on a platform of “we agree with all of the Conservative’s assumptions about how an economy should work, and that austerity is necessary, but we will do less austerity than they will”. If you believe that austerity is necessary, why on earth would you vote for that? They were Tory lite.

And so large swathes of the UK public were effectively disenfranchised, because no-one they could vote for was actually offering something different to ease their socioeconomic suffering — except, of course, for UKIP (and the Greens, but they have always struggled to appeal to the mainstream). Especially under Farage, UKIP was effective at offering desperate people something different — something to blame for their struggles. Of course, blaming everything on immigration is bullshit and will, if anything, make people’s lives worse because of how much the economy depends on immigration, but it’s a problem of desperate people with insufficient class consciousness, who feel like they have no other choice.

A longstanding cultural facet that underlies a lot of this is the idea of the “deserving poor”— an idea that we can trace right back to the Victorian poorhouse. Even when the UK has been more progressive (such as during a period known as the post-war consensus, which “tolerated or encouraged nationalisation, strong trade unions, heavy regulation, high taxes, and an extensive welfare state”^[1]. I think this is somewhat analogous to the New Deal in American politics, though it happened later), there has still been a lot of moral ickiness tied into how we think about poverty. It’s the idea that people who are poor due to poor choices do not deserve support from the welfare state, and that it is necessary to prove that you deserve help. The fact that this is an idea deeply embedded in British culture has meant that the UK has long lagged behind much of Europe in terms of reducing poverty. ^[2]

In the modern day, this means that if you want to get out-of-work benefits, you are expected to do an absurd amount of performative bullshit to show that you are searching for work. If you miss an appointment at the job centre, even due to circumstances that are not your fault (such as being hit by a car and hospitalised en route to the job centre), you can lose your benefits. You can appeal these things, but even if that’s successful, it takes an obscene amount of work. If you can’t work due to disability, then you will have to do even more work to demonstrate that this is the case, in a situation that can function like a catch-22 — too disabled to have the capacity to prove that you’re too disabled to work, so forced to do all the bullshit job hunting (which you obviously can’t do). They expect you to apply for, and work in jobs that are completely unsuited to your skill set. Like, if you have a specialised degree or skillset and your field is one where there are jobs, but it takes time for you to find openings, then fuck you, apply to be a janitor instead. There’s often been talking of policies that would involve people on out-of-work benefits being forced to do “voluntary” work in order to keep their benefits. I don’t think that’s currently in place, but it has always been disconcertingly popular a concept. The phrase “benefit scrounger” is a phrase that’s big in the British zeitgeist. Even people who rely on benefits of some sort like to think of themselves as being distinct in some way from “the bad kind of people” who get benefits. Even as those people are pushed further into precarity, they still maintain the idea that they are distinct somehow. Benefit fraud is such a tiny percentage of total welfare spending, and yet policies aimed to root out benefit fraud (which often cost more than they ever recoup, and primarily harm people who are not committing fraud of any sort) receive bipartisan support. The honest, struggling people who get caught in the crossfire of such policies are viewed as acceptable casualties.

I mentioned above that I consider 2010 to be the start of a rise in the current trend of right wing populism, but another key “watershed” moment in my opinion was Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. Much like with Reagan, the political order that she was at the head of was ideological as much as it was economic or political. With her conservative government, she popularised the idea of “personal responsibility”, and severely exacerbated this notion of “the deserving poor”. Thatcher’s government is seen as the end of the post war consensus (which means a start to the withering of the welfare state)

You know how earlier, I mentioned that Labour shot themselves in the foot in 2010 by yielding to the Tories and letting them define the parameters of politics wrt austerity? Well that comes on the back of Tony Blair’s Labour starting that whole ball rolling with a heckton of privatisation and deregulation in the 2000s. Margaret Thatcher once said that Tony Blair’s New Labour was her greatest achievement, and I wouldn’t disagree there. It’s honestly funny how often I delve into the history of a particular fucked up thing in the UK and find that a lot of it can be traced back to Thatcher. For example, recently I was learning about the history of fibre internet in the UK, and I learned that this was yet another area in which Thatcher’s government fucked things up. It’s always fucking Reagan and Thatcher.

(Fun fact: when Thatcher died, the song “Ding dong the witch is dead” reached number 2 on the UK music charts)

It’s sad to see it happen. I come from a poor area up North. Many of my ancestors were coal miners who lived and died in the mines. The retail park I used to hang out at as a teenager used to be a colliery — the colliery where the miners first began striking in 1984. This area is now has a high proportion of votes going to Reform (i.e. Nigel Farage’s party, basically post-Brexit UKIP). I used to regard people who voted like that with disdain, because I subconsciously blamed them for their lack of class consciousness. Nowadays, I’m more able to feel compassion for them, and their desperation. I think modern society makes it very hard to build class consciousness and solidarity, and so right wing reactionary politics ends up feeling like the only option they have. After all, the miner’s strike failed. Entire communities fell into destitution and it felt like no-one with any power cared. In a sense, the current political situation feels inevitable.

This is why people like Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn give me hope. Sanders and Corbyn weren’t successful in their respective bids for power to enact their policies, but I remember how hopeful people felt during Corbyn’s rise. People who previously had completely disengaged from politics were suddenly getting involved, and it felt like there was hope. Of course, establishment politicians went and fucked it all up, but it still stands out to me as an example of how desperate people are for an alternative to the current status quo. People are sick of being told that the economy is going great, even as their lives and their communities are falling apart.

[1]: Source for quote: Wikipedia page on the Post-war consensus

[2]: further reading on how the myth of the deserving poor has caused the UK to lag behind Europe

What makes it worse is that the legislators are technologically illiterate. I don’t expect politicians to be experts in everything, but I do expect them to listen to experts.

Take chat control, for instance. Experts said that it would end up being harmful because the more legit sites would implement age controls, and that this would drive traffic to the less legit sites that aren’t implementing such controls — sites where there’s a much higher likelihood of harmful content like revenge porn, non-consensual porn, etc…

And then when the completely predictable consequences of chat control arise, then the legislators have the audacity to be like shocked-pikachu.jpeg. And then they continue to ignore the experts and ask stupid questions like “how do we ban VPNs?”

Voters care what they say. Them being bots doesn’t diminish the influence they have on politics

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

Any noun’s a verb if you noun hard enough

I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it’s rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel’s actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important if we want to understand what’s happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the “ethno-” part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).

It’s somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that’s more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren’t doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.

The Swiss literally collaborated with the literal Nazis.

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla

I am filled with rage whenever I hear stuff talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists. At least articles like this call it like it is. My view is that a ceasefire can only be broken once, and then there would need to be a new ceasefire arranged. Israel broke the ceasefire not long after it was put in place, so it’s utterly absurd we’re still talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists.

If I punched you, that would be assault.

If I hit you with a hammer, that would be assault with a weapon.

If I stood beside you with a hammer and did not harm you at all, then I have not committed any crime.

No-one is going to be charged with crimes they didn’t commit because of this. Classifying them as a weapon is only relevant for cases in which they were actively used to commit sexual assault, much the same way that a hammer only counts as a weapon if I assault you with it.

Though I understand why you came away with the impression you did — I am often exasperated at weird drug laws that are overly prohibitive and often unscientific in how they criminalise relatively low risk drugs, which meant that I also initially had the same reading of this news as you did. Fortunately, it seems that this is not an example of one of those silly drug laws, but an actually sensible measure.

Man, this is fucked up.