AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well | Ars Technica

A few weeks after our conversation, Apple released version 10.8 of Logic Pro, its flagship digital audio workstation (DAW) and the big sibling to GarageBand. Stuffed inside the update was Mastering Assistant, Apple’s own take on AI-powered mastering. If you were a Logic user, you suddenly got this capability for free—and you could run it right inside your laptop, desktop, or iPad.

Source: AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well | Ars Technica

Keep in mind, they’re not talking about mixing, but mastering, which are two very different things. I’ve tried a service that did this a few years ago, and, it did really well, even back then. If you’re not semi-knowledgable about this space, it might scare you, but there have been hardware versions of this sort of thing for decades. It’s more science than art. There’s just no amount of listening on various speakers and in different rooms that can dial in whole-mix EQ so that it sounds right on everything these days. The process is, in fact, very mathematical, and can be automated. In short, “nothing to see here; move along.” This is just the next logical step.

Surveyed drivers prefer low-tech cars over data-sharing ones • The Register

Despite all the buzz around internet-connected smart cars at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, most folks don’t want vehicle manufacturers sharing their personal data with third parties – and even say they’d consider buying an older or dumber car to protect their privacy and security.

Source: Surveyed drivers prefer low-tech cars over data-sharing ones • The Register

It doesn’t matter. Like with TV’s and appliances, going forward, you simply won’t be able to buy a product without privacy-invading spyware pre-installed. Eventually, it will be in them all. So we’ll wind up with things like this, in everything:

I guess the machine was hashing bitcoin? I don’t know.

In this vein, there was another post/comment that I read about how the guy blocked a device from getting to the internet in the wifi router, and the manufacturer actually noticed, contacted him, and told him that he had voided his warranty! Stupid and scary.

How Can Sharing a Screenshot from the PS5 Be this Frustrating?

I’m GenX. I’ve been programming since I was 10. I’ve been programming professionally for 30 years now. I live with computers and software all day, every day. I am comfortable in macOS, Windows, and Linux. I want to share a couple of screenshots from my PS5 to Reddit. Seems simple, right? So how do I get them off the console, and onto a computer?

  • I see that I no longer have the option to upload to Twitter, which I had done before. (Has Sony officially joined the ranks of the He-Man Musk Haters Club? Or did Musk kill the API that Sony was using? Both possibilities seem equally likely.)
  • I also have YouTube, Discord, and Twitch accounts linked on the console. I have no options for sharing to any of these services either. What is the point of even having the option of linking them!? What is this doing other than just giving Sony permission to go fishing through those accounts?
  • I use the only option I see to upload them to the PS “app.” What is this doing for me? They don’t seem to be available anywhere on the Playstation website.
  • I install the PS+ app on Windows. It sticks for some time, so I kill it, only to see that Windows has hidden the UAE thing, so I never saw it. I try to install it again. It works.
  • I “sign in” to the PS+ app. I answer a stupid catcha, despite having 2FA on my account. Nothing happens.
  • I log in again. NOW I see my account. But I don’t see any way to access my screenshots. It’s just an ad page for a bunch of games that Sony should understand by now that I’m not interested in.
  • Grasping at straws, I install “Share Factory.” I shouldn’t need another application, but the name suggests possibilities… Aaand it’s a basic editor. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get this media off the console. The only “sharing” option I see is to friend groups on the console. For this, it’s titled “‘Share’ Factory?” Are they serious?
  • I finally notice that the mobile PS app has the ability to look at my screenshots, and download them, but I don’t want to download them to the mobile device’s photo bank. I don’t want to allow the PS app access to my photos. I want to pull them to the PC, where I can more easily post them to Reddit.
  • At the end of all of this, the only option seems to be to put a USB memory stick in the console, and transfer media via sneakernet to my PC, like it was the 90’s all over again. The bottom line is that this seems — incredibly — to be the least amount of hassle to do what I want.

A rant on Reddit — before it was removed — surprise, surprise — confirms I’m not missing anything. I’m 54 years old. I live with bad apps and software and services like this every day, and I get sick of it. I have no idea how regular people are dealing with all of this “technology.” It makes no sense to me, and I’ve literally grown up with it. How can this be the best “we” can do here? Why aren’t we living in the future yet?

Concerns over Cryptocurrency Mining and the Environment

When BitCoin prices were spiking a year ago, people concerned with such things started pointing out that the energy required to perform all the mining could power a small country, and lamented the implied acceleration of the destruction of the environment due to the CO2-producing energy sources that were running overtime because of it.

It occurs to me that a massive portion of the US economy now relies on digital advertising, which is unquestionably one of the least efficient investments in the world. Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs per dollar of ad revenue is? I mean, it must be profitable, or they wouldn’t do it, but it surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. So, sure, complain about cryptocurrency “setting the earth on fire” to make some investors billions, but Google gets a free pass on miles and miles of private server farms cranking away 24×7 running their ad services and the auction house to make their trillions?

And that’s just Google, the poster child of this kind of thing. Where’s the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? I can’t remember anyone ever bringing this up. I think it should make people wonder why this isn’t seen anywhere. Could it be that the very companies making the most money from this activity are actively suppressing this kind of criticism?

Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband | Techdirt

On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.

Source: Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband | Techdirt

For 25 years, I’ve been saying that every house needs to have a fiber drop, owned by the city, just like electricity, water, and sewer, through which the resident can contract with service providers to get whatever digital services they want. Looks like this may be exactly what’s happening in Cleveland. Finally.

iOS 17 Includes ‘Grid Forecast’ Feature to Let You Know When ‘Cleaner’ Energy is Available

Source: iOS 17 Includes ‘Grid Forecast’ Feature to Let You Know When ‘Cleaner’ Energy is Available

This makes about as much sense as Microsoft automatically setting all the power options in Windows to be the most conservative and least performant, including — in an absolutely baffling move — to automatically turn off Bluetooth after a minute. Say what!? Yeah, my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard would suddenly stop working after about a minute. I searched for and found updated drivers. I upgraded Windows. I reset things. I rebooted. And rebooted.

There was a lot of hair pulled before I figured out the power saving setting was the problem, because there isn’t any scenario in the entire world where I would think this would even have been an option that someone was told to take the time to code, make a UI for, and merge into Windows. The only possible reason would be to save literally one penny of electricity, over the course of a year, at the expense of making Bluetooth… COMPLETELY USELESS. Well done, guys.

Now I see the insanity is spreading. It’s not enough that we have to go over every device with a fine-toothed comb for security, opting out of spying, and blocking ads. Now we have to go through the options to make sure that they’re not “helpfully” being invisibly and silently hobbled against their intended, normal usage by companies who want to report to their investors that they’ve saved a collective X number of kilowatt hours by their pernicious power settings.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

If you have a corporate- or school-issued computer, you have no control over it. Unless you wipe it and reinstall the OS, and even then, of course, they could leave things in the BIOS, and probably do. Then again, you barely “own” devices you buy, but that’s another rant. Here’s the task list for my corporate laptop.

Sigh

So let’s see…

  • Seven different reports about what I’m uploading to OneDrive.
  • Five jobs to keep Chrome and Edge up to date. Firefox and IE are also installed.
  • A job to make sure you keep Zoom around.
  • A [REDACTED] hourly job to make sure you haven’t elevated your privileges.
  • A job to make sure you haven’t (apparently) installed the npcap library. I mean, God forbid you should try to use this at a corporate site, which has probably used switching since… 1996 or so.
  • Three other [REDACTED] jobs to make sure you don’t do other things “they” don’t want you to do.
  • At least 5 jobs to make sure you don’t change… anything about the way they’ve installed Office, apparently.

Thirty one jobs. Only one of these is mine, to do the one thing I need this (secondary) computer to do.

This machine bypasses my carefully-curated and ad-blocked local DNS. I don’t know what it uses for DNS, but I see that it doesn’t operate over port 53, and I don’t care to know any more.

It also won’t print to a printer in your house. I think I tried to print to a printer at the office once, and give up after one try, because I knew it was going to be futile. Basically, no one prints anything. They must save a TON on printer costs as a company. Most printouts are a waste of resources anyway, so this might actually be genious.

Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block.

Source: Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Internally, every powerful person at Google is committed to ensuring that their rival-peers don’t stake out fresh territory as their own. The one thing every top exec can agree on is that the one guy who’s trying to expand the company into an adjacent line of business must not succeed.

What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get.

Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible.

That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits.

I don’t know if I’ve read a clearer description of the things I’ve seen in 30 years of (mostly) Fortune 250 corporations. Over the course of my career, about a half dozen of my successful software projects — with many happy users — have been sabotaged because they made someone else look bad, or just had the unacceptable side-effect of making me look like I knew what I was doing. Seriously. I could write a book.

Hey, I got paid, and have had a comfy ride along the way. What could I expect as a developer toiling away in the bowels of some faceless blue chip corporation? The only thing the kind of companies I have worked for could offer would be a role with more responsibility but no more pay. Uh… pass.

What really frustrates me in all of this is the tireless effort and work to make sure that software never actually improves workflows or processes for the company, so that eternal middle managers can preserve their tiny little fiefdoms. Sure, we’ll make some software to do something, but by the time the managers “manage,” the people who don’t do the job write the specs, the outsourced programmers who don’t understand anything about the process write the application, the years go by, and the poor schmucks who have to use the thing sign off on the acceptance testing, just to move on, everyone is left with a piece of crap they can’t stand to use, and they wonder why anyone bothered. They’d have been better served just continuing to use horrific, shared Excel spreadsheets.

Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.

I never want to hear another word about what else Elon Musk could have done to supposedly improve the world with the money he spent buying Twitter.

Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

Since the 80’s, American corporations have learned to toe the precise line that will allow them to point fingers at their “competitors” in court to wriggle out of the en vogue legal definition of monopoly, but it’s all such a naked joke. The app stores are the same way. It is a certainty that very-high level execs at Apple and Google have concluded to keep their fees the same, so that the market for app development doesn’t actually work, and is anything but “free.”

Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge.

Source: Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. “You know, ‘Uranus?'” Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing on the bus. Nope. Nothing. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.

This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.

Technical people like me “govern” our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping them from happening again. Even after 30 years of “being on the internet,” I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one show up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.

The people who use Windows because it’s the cheap, default choice are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn’t be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.

It doesn’t matter that we get upset about this. It’s already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The incentives just don’t align between users of Windows and Microsoft’s management. You’d expect that they would care about what “power users” like developers would think, so I guess it’s telling how small that community of users is compared to the rest of the people who use Windows.

The real surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.

X marks the motivated reasoning

 

So forgive me if I can’t even get marginally excited for this latest kerfuffle over the new X branding. Primarily because of just how utterly removed the discourse around it is from a good-faith assessment of the merits of the particulars. It’s all turned into an endless proxy war, and every argument is wielded only in service of yet another petty ideological skirmish.

Source: X marks the motivated reasoning