>> I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play.
Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?
Any game from Ubisoft/Activision/EA. A little while back for example I wanted to fire up my steam copy of Battlefield 4 and couldn't do it, game wouldn't launch.
My copy of Mirror's Edge from EA is unusable due to DRM. It's still listed on my EA account as belonging to me and I can download the game from them, but it can only be installed five times and I have reached that limit.
The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates offered a far better service.
They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it.
Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.
Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is.
I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).
I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
In person exams are useless too. I was at a UK university as a mature student about 8 years ago. When exams came around a significant number of people went to the bathroom repeatedly during the 2-3 hour exam clearly to check notes on their phones. There isn't really anything that can be done to stop this other than doing some sort of spot check/search for phones on people mid-exam which would obviously be horribly disruptive.
Interesting. I don't recall this happening during my studies. You didn't have the time in my exams to cheat, leaving for the toilet was strongly discouraged and if you did leave, you would have an invigilator standing behind you at the urinal or outside the cubicle.
Or you make the tasks smaller and ban bathroom breaks, or replace the task with an equivalently challenging one if break is given. Or you check for phones before the exam. There are a lot of things that can be done.
>> On the other hand that's not enough for a business
It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers.
Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are
- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else
- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value
In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.
(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
>> The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising.
This just isn't true. There was a time when we had a chronological feed, only containing content from friends and family, and no advertising. The business model end goal was always advertising but social media doesn't necessarily need to be for that purpose (e.g. the fediverse).
I think in 12 months we're not going to know the difference unless we put in some serious effort. I use AI quite a lot and it's great, but don't like it for 'media' in general. Personally, I don't want to support AI generated audio, video, or text content. This past week I came across an Instagram account, found it interesting and followed it. Admittedly it was some high-level cookie cutter self-help stuff. Easy to catch your attention. Eventually I dug into it a bit more and it was 100% AI generated. I'd missed it completely and there were no comments suggesting it was AI content either despite over 1m followers. If you want to be sure the media you are viewing is actually created by real people, algorithmic feeds are no longer an option. It will be interesting to see over the next year or two whether there is a large backlash and people start seeking out content they are positive is created by real people, or if that becomes a subculture and the masses are happy with their circus.
Maybe. I am saying this not to be contrarian, but I am seeing a rather specific pattern in some areas. Chatgpt used to be pretty decent in cross thread musings, but those got capped hard to the point that even wide recall invocation does not always work as intended. And that change wasn't just about resources. Similar stuff seems to be happening with various lawsuits on the 'creative' side.
All this makes me thing that while the capability may be there for those who want it, openly accessible stuff will be heavily nerfed. You know, just like now.
I assume this is the same spatial scenes feature that was on visionOS prior to OS 26. In my experience that was really incredible. You could take a standard 2D photo of someone and suddenly you were back in the room with them.
I'm glad you said it. Incredible tech and the top comment is debating licensing. The demos I've seen of this are incredible and it'll be great taking old photos (that weren't shot with a 'spatial' camera) and experiencing them in VR. I think it sums up the Apple approach to this stuff (actually impacting peoples lives in a positive way) vs the typically techie attitude.
>> But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researchers working on things like music classification and generation. The only thing is, you can't really publicly admit exactly what dataset you trained/tested on...?
Didn't Meta already publicly admit they trained their current models on pirated content? They're too big to fail. I look forward to my music Slop.
They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook annual revenue is about it twice that of the entire global recording industry. The strategy these companies took was probably correct but that calculation included the high risk of ultimately having to pay out down the line. Don’t mistake their current resistance to paying for an internal belief they never will have to.
> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...]
I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.
First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.
Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
Monopoly is not a nice thing. Maybe it is convenient, but not nice.
People that gives money to artists are the ones going to concerts and buying music directly to artists. Spotify gives cents to artists, incetivizing awful behaviour (AI music, aggressive marketing, low effort art...).
Some people's urges to destroy all traces of human civilisation astonish me. What do you think Spotify is going to do with all its music when it ceases to exist in however many years? No, we must collectively feed Daniel Ek the Hungry.
Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?
reply