Hot take: It's about to become a lot more common and as strange as it may sound, I don't blame governments nor corporations - the people are to blame. Everyone with a functioning brain saw that coming decades ago: If the long haired 12 year old punk, that I was in the early 2000s, could see a problem, chances are, you don't need to have 20 PhDs to figure it out either. But most people ignored it and carried on sharing every single thing about them 24/7. I have a friend who is furious about it now and when I call him out, being constantly on facebook/instagram/whatever, he still refuses to accept that it's his fault. His argument is that he needs it cause he has a music band. Here's the kicker: he's had multiple over the nearly 2 decades that we've known each other. And the reality is, he's never made any living or money out of it and acknowledges that he never will and he's only doing it for fun while investing his own money into what is effectively a hobby. He's made a couple of hundred bucks at most and much of those have been from close friends of his as a form of support and personally in my case purely out of support since the music he makes is not my cup of tea. And yet, every time he farts, he posts it on some social media. "I'm sure we are not far being tracked on the roads and if we exceed the speed limit by 2km, we get a fine instantly". I'm genuinely starting to think that people are not capable of making the connection between cause and effect. Best case scenario, they see those as a coincidence. A few weeks ago I logged into linkedin from an anonymous account and I was horrified: random posts from people I've never heard of: "We created the best performing AI that can do {something}. Comment on this post and we will give you an early access to our product."

And dozens of comments underneath, as you might have thought. The company - one 19 year old kid running a node frontend on vercel. First comment - from a marketing manager at some FAANG. If this is not a sign that we are cooked, I don't know what is.

People keep sharing everything they do online, rely on cloud based llms which clearly collect their information. And everyone and their dog understands that AI companies operate at huge losses and promises they will never be able to fulfill. Sooner or later the investors will start asking questions. Governments are in this bizarre place where they are part of this on two fronts. At large because governments are lead by people in their 60's and 70's and have no goddamn clue what AI is beyond magic that can do anything (or so they are made to believe). So they are pouring money into AI companies to do some ridiculous tasks for them, while also pouring money into collecting data. To their minds, it's probably "we have the data and we have access to the all-seeing and all-knowing ai". And while that is happening, sloppers ask that same AI to write their code, where to buy dinner, use it as a therapist, relationship consultant and all that, adding more highly personal data into the bag of data that should remain personal. Forget how bad corporations have been at preventing data leaks. When the investors start knocking on the door, asking for their money and a government asking for a JSON containing your medical records, private information and whatnot, guess who won't think twice about it and happily take the briefcase full of cash.

Ultimately, Idiocracy was supposed to be a comedy, not a documentary but here we are.

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Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

These social media platforms have some public information which can be within easier database access to be sold for the highest bidder but the context of this article is about all the other data like geographical data, Ip location and which phone etc tracking which is also tracked by these social medias and sold to the highest bidder in this case the govt

Now There is point saying that we should use better alternative forms of social medias like mastodon etc. perhaps hackernews and that can be a worthy discussion but I have thought about it and I do feel like your musician friend is right in the sense that it might require some presence in social medias for some purposes.

Thinking about it, one of the largest pieces of advice I feel like is getting converged is that the best place to become entrepreneur is being in the space where you might sell your product. So if I wish to sell tech related products, I am fine with only using hackernews for the most part.

In a similar fashion to that, to gain visibility, These musician go to these platforms and many do hit and many don't and sometimes its a matter of both hard work and luck.

Now that being said, every message that you wrote about your friend feels a bit bad-mouthed.

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axegon_ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Most musicians barely make money from music. Most artists don't make money from art - and I should know, being the son of two. You are either the top seller/musician or you are everyone else and in 99.99% of all cases, you are everyone else. Here's another example: a friend of my mom spent the last decade pushing her paintings on etsy. Then trump added all his tariffs and she went from making a minimum wage or there abouts to a literal 0. Meanwhile my mom never bothered with any of those and simply gave her paintings to two local art galleries - no websites, no social media, just tourists walking about and even if this isn't her main revenue income, she outsells her friend easily. And that is far more common than you think.

Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

As for my friend - I've said it to his face multiple times but as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

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Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

I do sort of agree with that, I mean I literally saw within another thread related to music (Misfits) where this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hustleracer is clearly using AI and just joined

I am seeing lots of people use AI within hackernews now. I have flagged them for what its worth but yes, I do sort of agree with that hackernews has decreased a little bit in value.

But I used to hear the same thing a year ago as well, I would still be considered relatively new to the forum but I heard stories of how one day PG would just decide about elixir and have front page all about elixir/erlang and people sometime ago reminisced that, which happened many years ago.

But even with all of this, I feel like hackernews is a place where sanity is still intact for the most part and there is still some authenticity more than other places but that's just my 2 cents.

I do agree that musicians struggle with making money sometimes. Its definitely a winner takes all market from my viewpoint and median musician doesn't make much but the mean is skewed because of the billions racked in by famous people.

I am not exactly sure how to preserve Music,Art though. One of my closest friend said to me that her sister wasn't studying well and now my friend is 99 percentile kind of fellow, but to me that moment, Man it felt like that poor girl was put into expectation by her brother and her family and sometimes feeling too. So I said to him that hey if she wants to pursue music/art/anything, then let her do that and my friend basically told me again about the struggling economy of that.

I am not sure what can be done with all of this. Universal Basic Income seems to be the solution. I think Ireland passed UBI for artists sometime ago, maybe that might help preserving music/art.

An answer I feel like is happening is that atleast for my generation, it feels like a lack of culture. I am not quite satisfied by how the social algorithms can promote brain rot but not show music and just, like, I feel like our generation and next generations to come have lost something more meaningful for these algorithms to catch the money trail and the people to make such brain-rot.

My point is, Music/Art has some incredible contribution to the society but society doesn't reward them enough or fairly and then we have the other part of society turning attention into a commodity and churning out content like a factory. All in all, feels like a cultural degradation as time passes from one generation to another.

	▲	axegon_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm with you here as well. Not so much on the UBI side though. I only believe in social measures to a certain degree because it is a slippery slope. At the moment, my job is very demanding and sucks up a lot of my energy. In addition the last decade was an absolute bombardment with family problems and it all fell on my shoulders and I was not betting on myself to sort things out at all(even though I managed against all odds and at the cost of a lot of compromises with myself). And 10 years is a long time, especially in the 25-6 to 35-6 range. Now I don't have all that much on my shoulders anymore or rather it's very much under control but once everything is truly sorted, I have thought about it many times: I am truly exhausted and on a personal level a less demanding and less busy job does sound appealing in a way even for less money. And this is the catch: not everyone is greedy and many people are capable of saying "you know what, I have enough, let's take it easy". Which would become a huge problem on a large scale when the balance shifts. You have over 3 generations now (alpha, z, millenials and x to a very large degree) who have been bombarded for decades by social media and feel no desire to try or learn something new as opposed to just relying on slop. And it was bad enough as it was even before that - I haven't seen nor do I wish to see a large chunk of my family but to give you an idea, my cousin(at the time around 10 years old) did not know how to eat with a fork and knife or tie his shoes or button up his shirt. Not because of a mental disability but because his parents had a child instead of getting a small dog to take for a walk two times a day. Imagine when you have tens of millions of those that would gladly scroll through tiktok all day long and rely on UBI without batting an eyelash. I genuinely don't have a solution but UBI does not sound like it. I agree that for most of history, humanity has been pushed by a very small fraction of individuals but currently I don't see people that are doing it, given that we are currently living in a bullshitter economy: "within the next year we will have {x}". I don't know of a single instance in humanity where someone has made a big leap, granted that all the basics are provided to them in the same way no one has gotten out of poverty through charity. If I had to base everything off of my own experience(and those around me), my view is that a certain critical mass of unfortunate circumstances are required in order to get someone to reach their potential.