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I basically completely disagree with your analysis. I am already taking into account the "understanding vs doing" distinction in my assessment. I think it takes ~an undergraduate math education to have the background to work through this post, but there's no way that most people with that background would be able to produce it.

If, like the vast majority of people, you have never studied math past a college calculus sequence and perhaps a (practically-oriented) linear algebra class, then you are missing some pretty fundamental ways of viewing and thinking about math. The basic mechanisms of algebra, for one: spaces and operations, morphisms, products and quotients... You don't know what a group is, never mind the idea of a group action. You don't have any familiarity with some basics of geometry: the Riemann sphere, Mobius transformations... And you certainly don't know anything about algebraic geometry: what an affine variety is, what birational equivalence is, what a fiber is.

All of these are concepts required to understand this blog post. And it's not just a matter of understanding the definitions of the terms, but having at least some intuition of what they really mean and how they work. Most people cannot go from zero to understanding all of this in a few days or a couple weeks, at least not for any reasonable definition of "understanding". There's too much basic mathematical background that's missing.

I certainly do not think that the average HN reader "could probably understand this post in a matter of days or weeks". I think the level of background information you need is something like an undergraduate degree in mathematics and at many universities that's probably not enough either.

To be clear, this is not the kind of thing where a Lean formalization provides any value at all. It's like formalizing the answer to a high school algebra problem. The counterexample is obviously correct.

They are certainly much less accessible than they used to be. Not only has torrenting lost a lot of mindshare and general cultural awareness from 15-20 years ago, but the sites are generally harder to get into. If you're starting from scratch, it takes several years of waiting and uploading hundreds of torrents in order to get access to the best TV and film trackers. People are stingier than ever with inviting others too.

I'm not sure why people keep bringing up Netflix. Last I checked, they weren't a music streaming service.

There's a huge difference in Spotify for music vs Netflix for TV and movies. Netflix's catalog is absolutely tiny. Spotify's is not.

I also continue to disagree with the idea that Spotify's catalog is only for people with basic or mainstream tastes. This is far too reductive. Like I said above, the vast majority of newly released music is released onto Spotify. For many new or small artists, streaming is the only way their music is released. There is no "somewhere else" to go.

Personally, I listen to a lot of contemporary French indie pop, including a lot of pretty obscure stuff. This stuff is most available through streaming services. To the extent it is available via pirate channels, it's because someone bothered to take the time to rip it from a streaming service. There is nothing which music piracy offers in this domain, and there is a lot that it lacks (both in availability and in all the service factors that make streaming appealing, as I've said--convenience, sharing, discoverability). A further factor I haven't brought up yet is that it just feels shitty and pointless to pirate this kind of stuff when listening to it on Spotify at least provides some benefits to the artists themselves: royalties (tiny as they may be), increased play counts, exposure via recommendation algorithms.

A large fraction of what is uploaded to music piracy sites currently is sourced from music streaming platforms. Not all of it, certainly. A large fraction of the CD- and vinyl-sourced uploads are also available on music streaming platforms too though. As I've mentioned a few times previously, Spotify has a bigger catalog than RED does (even if you ignore all the 0 play AI slop spam that's been flooding Spotify lately).

I would say that the median user of private music torrent sites now is one of two things: either they are there because they want to join other communities for things beside music (TV, movies, video games, anime, porn, whatever), or they are someone who has been pirating music for a long time, probably Gen X, listens to mainly music from 30+ years ago, and has made music piracy a part of their identity and self-perception on some level (you can see a certain sense of smug superiority about it even in this HN thread).

All of this is to say that I think that the comparison to McDonalds or Olive Garden is just way, way off base. Spotify and Netflix do not belong in the same conversation either. Is there some stuff that's not available on music streaming platforms? Sure, it exists. If people find that streaming is not meeting their needs, of course they should look elsewhere. But the picture that is being painted in this thread is simply far off from reality.

Yeah, that's all part of what I meant by "a kind of retro nostalgia". People enjoy the experience of buying vinyl and of putting on vinyl records. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, for what it's worth. I'm just claiming that this is what's driving vinyl's popularity right now, rather than because people are turning to it due to music availability issues (which is much more of a factor for DVDs/Blu-rays right now).

This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake!

I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.

Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.

Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).

I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.

If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.

I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.

First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.

If you take issue with the claim that everyone streams music these days than the only way I can understand your comment is by assuming we live in vastly different cultures.

Certainly in the US everyone uses streaming to listen to music. This random article claimed that 90% of American adults regularly stream music online, for example: https://cybernews.com/news/us-internet-users-music-streaming...

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.

P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.

It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy

Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.

The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.

It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.

It still makes absolutely no sense. First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat. Second of all, in the event that somebody does make a threat, the existence of a Bluetooth device named "Bomb" doesn't make the threat any more credible or serious.

You're normally not allowed to trade derivatives during the IPO lockup period. Otherwise it would defeat the whole point.

I personally think B5 is a better show than The Expanse, but I don't mind the dated visuals or the occasional bit of campy acting or whatever. The storytelling is absolutely first-rate.

You gave two statements which are different from what I quoted.

The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.

The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.

Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:

I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.

Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software?

And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?

Yes, looking at their profile it does look that way for all their contributions on HN. Ctrl+F "real" and Ctrl+F "genuine" as one quick indicator--AI absolutely loves these adjectives and their forms right now.

Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.

At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).

Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.

I'm all for people who aren't native English speakers publishing their thoughts and opinions. But I would much prefer they still wrote down their own thoughts in their own words in their native language and machine translated it. It would be much more authentic and much more interesting--and much more worth reading.

I agree completely. I know everyone is tired of AI accusations but this article has all of the telltale signs of LLM writing over and over again.

I mean, I'm more worried about the AI writing itself than people calling it out.

The AI articles on HN are an absolute disease. Just write your own damn articles if you're asking the rest of us to read them.

And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

I don't think it's clear at all why people do this. I suspect a large amount of it, at least on a site like HN, is just hapless morons who think it's "cool".

I find the whole thing pretty depressing. They went to all that effort with the organization and setup of the company at the beginning to try to bake this "good for humanity" stuff into its DNA and legal structure and it all completely evaporated once they struck gold with ChatGPT. Time and time again we see noble intentions being completely destroyed by the pressures and powers of capitalism.

Really wish the board had held the line on firing sama.

Don’t assume something you cannot prove.

Well it's an inherently unprovable accusation, so assumption will have to do. It reeks of LLM-ese in certain word choices, phrases, and structure, though. I thought it was quite clear.

It was great writing

Err... no accounting for taste, I suppose.

Setting aside...the LLM writing style

I don't want to set that aside either. Why is AI generated slop getting voted to the top of HN? If you can't be bothered to spend the time writing a blog post, why should I be bothered spending my time reading it? It's frankly a little bit insulting.

We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.

Tesla's self-driving technology is a joke compared to Waymo's and the Tesla brand is extremely toxic now. I see from your other comments that you're big on Tesla (own several and have a son who works there) but as an unbiased observer I cannot fathom them winning this market.

They do, don't they? I think OpenAI uses libgen.

Meta managed to get into a private ebook torrent tracker called Bibliotik a few years ago to use for training Llama and the resulting publicity essentially killed the tracker.