Ben_H

I've been a musician on and off for almost 20 years. I play guitar and bass mostly now, though I also can play keys and have a synth I hook up and use both a synth and midi interface. I also have been a tinkerer of sorts for just about as long. I first started tinkering with guitars, then computers, and now pretty much anything I can get my hands on. My latest thing has been rebuilding old iPods. I also do programming stuff from time to time though what I actually enjoy doing from that area is scripting and automation. I also like weird math stuff. I have an actual degree in math that I am not currently using but I love math so I try to keep up to date and sharp on the topic.

The last 10 years or so I've developed the attention span of a goldfish so I don't really watch TV or movies anymore since I have a hard time making it through them without getting distracted. If I have a Youtube video or whatever on it's usually mostly as background noise. My media form of choice is mostly music and podcasts, which is partly why I got into using an iPod again (the other part being Fuck Spotify and subscription services in general). Now I can listen to podcasts or music for hours a day without risking getting distracted by my phone every time I go to change song (I've been taking a bunch of steps to be on my phone way less and it has been great. Definitely recommend that).

Oh yeah and I guess in summer I do running and cycling but that's not exciting. Winters where I live super duper suck so I try to get out every day in summer to do some form of exercise both because it's good for my health/mental health and because I don't want to take the nice weather for granted.

It's an extremely complicated topic but a lot of it comes down to licensing, attribution, and the potential for harm to living, working artists. A great example is Getty Images. It was found that one of the largest image generators had scraped Getty's various thousands upon thousands of photos from their website to use as training data without permission from Getty or any acknowledgement that they had done it (this was found out because the image generator was putting in broken, janky looking versions of the Getty watermark on generated images). Getty paid photographers for all of those photos and licensed them such that they should not have been used as training data. So we end up with a case of both Getty having the thing they sell being stolen and the work of thousands of photographers being used in a tool that could put some of these photographers out of work (why pay Getty for generic photos when you can just generate photos that accomplish the same thing for articles). It should be obvious that this is harmful to working photographers. It's no different for any other form of art.

I don't know why computers getting ideas from existing content is any worse than humans doing it.

Humans don't get a free pass on this so why should computers? If an artist blatantly copies the work of another without attribution and gets found out, they have an extremely short window of time to fix the problem before it often becomes a career-ending thing for them. A good recent example of this is Olivia Rodrigo. She had to retroactively give several other artists songwriting credits on her debut album because several of her songs were found to be suspiciously similar to those already existing (the most obvious example being "good 4 u", which took the entire song structure, various chord sequences, and other bits from Paramore's "Misery Business". It was extremely blatant to the point that you could play the two songs side by side and they matched up almost perfectly at times). She said that these artists were huge inspirations for her and was doing homages to them, etc. etc., but the reality was that had she not given them credit she would have been in heaps of trouble and probably had her career ended.

Taking inspiration from and copying are two entirely different things. Current generative AI is doing mostly the latter, not the former. Taking someone else's work and shuffling around things a tiny bit doesn't make what you are doing not plagiarism. For example, if I take the idea of Nile Rodgers-style jangly disco guitar and put it in my own distinct disco song, that's generally fine. If I completely rip off the song "We Are Family" but change the lyrics and shift a couple chords, chances are Nile's not gonna be happy with me unless I get his permission and give him the accreditation that will allow him to be paid for his work that I'm copying. If you asked a generative AI to write a song in the style of Nile Rodgers, it would probably do something similar to the latter example because that's how these models work. They can't create original work because everything they make is inherently derivative.

Remember, when thinking about this stuff you have to give no benefit of the doubt to the people pushing it because they are catering to the shittiest, most cynical business people who would happily fire a bunch of artists to make a number go up slightly. They don't care about art or quality, all they care about is number going up. We've already seen what's happened to creative jobs in the game industry the last year (and this was without generative AI). We don't need to see that happen in every other creative industry too because some suits think they can save a bit of money by using a bunch of shitty generic generative AI assets.

Yeah this is something Patrick has talked about at Remap. They aren't Vice anymore so they don't have the resources to keep a team of lawyers around to protect them and give them advice when doing stories that are likely to piss off some megacorp or make some rich people uncomfortable. It's one of the main flaws of the model and is something they're working on finding a solution to.

I sure hope so. But yeah, I've felt like traditional news and modern media in general has been broken for a while now and it now I'm starting to see a lot of other folks say things with the same sentiment. Social media essentially destroyed modern media and modern business practices ruined whatever was left. Once the internet's current race-to-the-bottom ad market inevitably collapses in on itself (it's already starting to look like it will, especially if LLM-generated ad-filled websites continue to flood the web for the next year or two) we'll hopefully end up in a much healthier place for media where content isn't purely created in hopes of siphoning as many clicks as possible to collect a few more fractions of cents from ads.

Something is going to have to replace what we've lost because news and media organizations are essential to how the modern world works and there are too many people with a lot of money invested in keeping the system at least sort of working to allow it to fully fail. The business models of these new media groups will likely be quite different than what we've seen over the last decade or so since it's become clear that those models never worked in the first place and were built on the various lies social media companies told media organizations that a bunch of gullible business people hooked onto too easily (see a bunch of media companies pivoting to video for Facebook only for it to be revealed that Facebook's video viewership numbers were potentially fabricated and at the very least highly suspect. A lot of folks lost their media jobs because of this).

We're already starting to see a big change in games media with groups like Remap (former Vice. They have a big focus on written content as well as streaming and podcasts), Second Wind Group (the former Escapist people), and a bunch of others. They all work on a hybrid ad-supplemented subscriber model that is designed to be sustainable with modest goals rather than growth at all costs. These types of models are believed to be the future of media and the web. We're already starting to see them showing up in other media spaces too and it seems like they're catching on so there is some hope at least and something to be optimistic about.

I saw they're from the mid-aughts so they're in the era of weird band names designed to get attention on Myspace and blogs. I listened to a bit of this album and was like "Oh this is one of those" for bands with attention-grabbing names but just meh-to-decent output. If they're gonna commit to the "this name is stupid and we know it's stupid" bit then they need to commit to it properly like the band Does It Offend You, Yeah? and their album "You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into" (please note this band pre-dates right wing shitheads on the internet using offending/triggering as a thing so they're not one of those. They're a British band from like 2006-2008ish). That band fully commits to having everything on that album have weird/dumb names and be appropriately weird as songs themselves. They have everything from Justice/Digitalism-ish electronic songs to indie rock but with prominent steel drums(???) and an instrumental surf rock song.

Another band from this era of British music that commits the crime of having a dumb/good name but not living up to it is Shitdisco, a fantastic band name but an extremely boring band to listen to. Their output is the most bare bones boring indie rock possible. It's kind of a crime that they were able to claim that name.

It's a bummer but I think we all saw this coming eventually. I do hope those new instruments they put out end up being Rock Band compatible. I'd buy Rock Band 4 in a heartbeat if they do.

I think the more frustrating thing about all this is that everyone who played Fuser was like "this idea rules" but nobody played it so it tanked. They literally took the song pitch-shift/speed change and remixing stuff from Fuser and duct taped it into Fortnite in the form of those band get-together thingies and now that prints money. I guess you could say they failed at marketing Fuser but still it's always frustrating to see people ignore cool things unless it's shoved in their faces and they're forced to pay attention to it so they can see why it's good.

But yeah, if you want to play a Rock Band-like, now it's easier than ever. Clone Hero is literally plug and play if you have Rock Band instruments. If you want to play Rock Band but only have Rock Band 1 instruments that don't work with Rock Band 4 and don't have a functioning 360 or PS3 anymore, you can play Rock Band 3 on a PS3 emulator and it works with Xbox or PS3 instruments. The added bonus now is if you have a newer monitor with a fast refresh and response time, you don't have to worry about sync. I have a 240hz Dell monitor and it feels almost as responsive as playing on a CRT. I didn't have to do any calibration to play guitar or drums using it. It's like playing on a plasma TV back in the day.

Haha you did the exact same thing I did with BOTW/TOTK. I also replayed BOTW like a month before TOTK came out. It turns out playing that kind of Zelda that much in that short of an amount of time might be a bit excessive.

I'm glad you were brought on for GB. You're doing a great job! You fit in perfectly here.

It's not sustained viewership we're referring to but growth. Twitch, alongside a whole pile of other tech companies, assumed the explosive growth they saw in 2020 would continue in perpetuity rather than being a one-off thing. The numbers you provide even agree with our point. There is a one-time large amount of growth in viewership from March 2020 until around January of 2021 then things level off and growth stops. Between March 2020 and around a year later, a bunch of tech companies went on colossal hiring sprees because they were under the assumption they would need all of these extra people to handle the increase in demand over the next few years. Microsoft hired a massive number of people. Google did the same as did basically every other tech company. Then about a year and a bit after all of this hiring ended, they all started doing massive layoffs because the stupid gambles their executives made that the growth they saw in 2020 would continue forever didn't happen.

Twitch is actually late to the party for layoffs when compared to the other tech companies. Microsoft laid off some ridiculous number of more than 10000 people earlier last year as did Google. For the last year or so, getting a job in tech has been a nightmare because all of the new grads from the last couple years are competing with tens of thousands of laid off folks with experience in the same sector so not only are all of the people directly laid off by these companies affected, but so are the next generation of workers. All of this because tech executives have no semblance of foresight.

Against the Storm rules so much. I think the thing that makes it work so well is the knowledge that your town is gonna get destroyed so most of the neurotic tendencies one would have with city builders not only aren't necessary, but are actively harmful to do since your time is better spent figuring out how to achieve the queen's orders. My towns always are complete messes but as long as the supply chain keeps working and the folks stay happy, that's all the game cares about.

I also think the way they have handled difficulty and unlocks in the game is incredibly clever. For people reading this who don't know, they basically lock different aspects of the game behind different difficulty levels and unlocks so as to not overwhelm the player when they're first starting (because this game definitely is A LOT once you get past the Pioneer). The beginner Settler difficulty, for instance, is primarily used to learn the economy. The second step up, Pioneer, makes the concept of Resolve, which is the game's worker morale system, matter a lot more (On Settler you can almost ignore Resolve entirely) and they give you a soft introduction to the Rainpunk systems, which are economic output boosters (you can turbocharge your production buildings using steam engines basically). The third difficulty difficulty level, Veteran, plays more into the Rainpunk systems but provides negative consequences for using them too much in the form of this blight that looks like Petey Piranha can basically destroy your town if you don't take mitigating steps. It's all risk-reward with the higher difficulties giving you a lot more of the rogue-lite permanent upgrade resources.I've just moved up past Pioneer difficulty and the game is now kicking my butt. I only failed one town before and now, well, that's not the case.

Also, I love how good it is on Steam Deck. The Steam Deck controller layout provided by the devs isn't that great but the top community layout makes the game control almost as good as with mouse and keyboard. I've spent half my time with the game on Steam Deck. If you are clever with graphics settings and downclock your CPU a bit, you can run the game without any fan noise and get like 4-5 hours of battery life. It's great.

Oh, and yeah it was a December surprise for me too. I first played it on New Year's Eve. I played the demo for about a half hour and then immediately bought it because of how much of a me game it was. Now it's like 5 or 6 on my top 10.

Twitch is in a tough place. Several years of bizarre choices coming from senior management combined with the aforementioned gamble on a temporary growth rate jump somehow becoming permanent (a gamble many tech companies made that I still can't wrap my head around since it was so obvious even at the time that the level of growth they were seeing in March-June of 2020 wasn't going to sustain forever) not working have all hurt the company a fair amount. Many of these were own-goals that could have been prevented had their senior management had literally anything resembling foresight (most recently, their attempt at allowing nudity on the platform blowing up in their faces followed by the CEO saying "Who could have seen this coming?". I mean... come on). As with all of the other cases recently, it seems the only people who suffer consequences from dumb gambles and mismanagement of the upper suites of companies are the rank-and-file workers doing the actual work who had nothing to do with these decisions.

Then there's the YouTube-shaped elephant in the room staring Twitch down right now (I know TikTok also has streaming but that's a completely different beast than the market Twitch and YouTube are going after). YouTube has been branching out into streaming the last couple years but especially the last year in a way they hadn't previously (Streaming on YouTube has technically existed for years now but it hasn't been pushed like it is now. Now there are the equivalent of Twitch subs along with other means of paying channels money). Twitch's decision to relax their restreaming rules coinciding with these pushes has made these efforts work even better than expected. A lot of folks I follow either already are or are considering restreaming to YouTube and in general the number of people watching streams on YouTube is increasing dramatically. For GB, a lot of their YouTube streams are starting to get viewership numbers just slightly lower Twitch whereas when they first started also streaming to YouTube they only got a small fraction of the number of viewers on Twitch. Other streams I watch have larger viewership on YouTube than Twitch now because they have a much larger follower base on YouTube. YouTube's stream player is also generally much better than Twitch's and allows users to rewind so they can catch things they missed which is a feature people have been begging Twitch to implement for probably a decade or more now.

edit:

Yeah, same with the Korean Starcraft 2 streamers I follow. Twitch's decision to leave Korea is basically ending their careers as SC2 players since their paying subscriber base is largely non-Korean and the most popular Twitch-like streaming platform in Korea, AfreecaTV, isn't really designed to be used by non-Koreans (The website is only in Korean so it's tough to browse for people who don't speak the language and the streams in general don't work well in other countries since they don't have the server infrastructure in other countries most services have). The few I know who are continuing are either pivoting to YouTube streaming or trying to make it so they can stream to other servers in other countries on Twitch, which isn't guaranteed to work. The fact that they just announced this out of nowhere with no heads up and only a couple months of notice really sucks too. People had no idea this was potentially happening.