Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.

To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.

Not all problems have to be solved. We just fell back to using older, more proven technology, started with the simplest implementation and iterated as needed, and the result was great.

I think this turned out to be one of those lessons about premature optimization. It didn't need to be as complex as what people initially assumed. Perhaps with older models it would have been a different story.

They look a lot like daemons to me, they're a program that you want hanging around ready to respond, and maybe act autonomously through cron jobs are similar. You want to assign any number of permissions to them, you don't want them to have access to root or necessarily any of your personal files.

It seems like the permissions model broadly aligns with how we already handle a lot of server software (and potentially malicious people) on unix-based OSes. It is a battle-tested approach that the agent is unlikely to be able to "hack" its way out of. I mean we're not really seeing them go out onto the Internet and research new Linux CVEs.

Have them clone their own repos in their own home directory too, and let them party.

Openclaw almost gets there! It exposes a "gateway" which sure looks like a daemon to me. But then for some reason they want it to live under your user account with all your privileges and in a subfolder of your $HOME.

A business exists because its shareholders invest capital with the expectation of a return. As a result, nearly all businesses go through similar lifecycles. The stages are launch, growth, maturity, decline, and sometimes renewal. There is a lot of capital injected in the early stages and to capture market share the firm often produces the best product it can.

Once the market share is acquired, the business puts up moats if it's able, and then it enters the MATURITY phase. That's where the Windows business is. In the maturity phase a business focuses on TAKING PROFITS wherever it can find them. This includes but is not limited to cutting back on its investment in product, as much as it can. If it can cut budgets and quality and give that money to the shareholders it will. If it can inject ads into the product or resell your data it will.

The very purpose of a business is to reach maturity and then take profits.

That's capitalism. The investors provided the capital. In the end, they gets what they wants.

Now if a company leans into this dynamic as hard as Microsoft has, you should know what's coming. No one should be surprised - maybe they're scared of the Neo right now and there'll be a few years of reprieve, but they're a mature firm, they're in profit taking mode, and the goal in this phase is not to make Windows as great as possible, it's to squeeze as much money out of it as they can.

The next stage is decline -- where the squeeze gets so hard that the business actually collapses. All businesses fail sooner or later. Everything becomes lawyers and accountants slicing it up, selling it off, and sometimes it gets restructured and reborn, sometimes it doesn't. This can take years or it can take decades but it's basically a bumpy downhill road from maturity to that point. If you stick around at this point and keep using Windows, keep in mind that's what you opted into. There isn't really any other way. It's just business.

Intriguingly, free software in its more elemental forms doesn't appear to follow this lifecycle. It's not for profit and there are no investors to satisfy. Contributors who build the software do it mainly out of self-interest: they build what they want to use, and as a result they may come and go at any time. But the software remains there, and you are welcome to tinker with it, too.

The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.

His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:

1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.

2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.

None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.

HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.

If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!

But I'm OK because one of my banking apps has some method of reading my contract number from the disabled electricity company app, and telling me how much I should pay and then it fires off a payment to them. Even though I can no longer use the electricity app directly because I enabled USB debugging once, the banking app is somehow still able to pick up this info from it.

Of course, said banking app refuses to run on Graphene or any of these other Google Play-less OSes, and the bank doesn't respond to inquiries about that issue, multiple people have tried.

The other bank I use does respond, and says they'll never run on "alternative OSes" because "alternative OSes are too insecure." They don't respond to followups.

I'm just saying man. A lot of people think this stuff is trivially solved because there is an option available to them in their home country. You don't know how big and nuts this world of 8 billion people and 200 countries is. This stuff varies beyond imagination, sometimes for the much worse.

It's a big and hairy world out there. Having lived on three continents and traveled to some pretty wild places, I always get a kick out of seeing which rights people have and assume that the rest of the world also has.

A lot of people don't think this way because they haven't had any problems. But then one day it happens to you and you realize, ok, this is the one thing that matters - you're in a cashless store and the only way you can pay for your meal is to use Approved Apple or Approved Google operating systems.

Where I live, the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).

To their credit Graphene maintains a global database of which of these apps work and don't. They're the only ones I know of so a thousand upvotes to Graphene OS.

But for my banks, the records in that database are grim. They won't run on Graphene, and they don't respond to reports about it.

One of my banks just discontinued its web UI because "people don't use it anymore, they use the app only."

This is how they're going to get us, folks. This is how we're going to lose it all. Writing code alone will not solve this. It will require some kind of collective action to defend our liberties. Some parts of the world are already lost. So this situation will likely come to a jurisdiction near you eventually: to make a transaction you will need permission from Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, or it won't happen. Then that four company list will start to shrink.

Look, Anthropic is not going to be designated a supply chain risk. 80% of the Fortune 500 have contracts with them. Probably a similar percentage of defense contractors. Amazon is a defense contractor for example. They'd have to remove Claude from their AWS offerings. Everyone running Claude on AWS, boom gone. The level of disruption to the US economy would be off the charts, and for what? Why? Because Hegseth had a bad day? Because he's a sore loser?

If he's decided he doesn't like the DoW's contract then he can cancel it, fine. To try and exact revenge on the best American frontier model along with 80% of the Fortune 500 in the process, to go out of his way to harm hundreds or perhaps thousands of American firms, defies all reason. This is behavior you would expect any adult would understand as petty and foolish, let alone one who's made it to the highest ranks of government.

So I think it's just not going to happen, Trump's statement on the matter notably didn't mention a supply chain risk designation. This suggests to me that Hegseth went off half cocked. The guy is a liability for Trump at this point, I'm guessing he won't last much longer.

* The signal has to be made available to both apps and websites

* So if you dutifully input valid ages for your computer users, now any groomer with a website or an app can find out who's a kid and who isn't. You just put a target on your kid's back.

* A fair share of parents will realize this, and in order to protect their children, will willfully noncomply. So now we'll have a bunch of kids surfing the net with a flag saying they're an adult and it's okay to show them adult content.

* Some apps/websites will end up relying on this signal instead of some real age verification, which means that in places like porn sites where there's a decent argument for blocking access from kids, it'll get harder. Or your kid will get random porn ads on websites or something.

So basically unless this thing is thrown out by the courts, California lawmakers have just increased the number of kids who get groomed and the number of kids who get shown porn.

Mind boggling that something this bad passed.

The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve.

But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical).

Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.

Ergo if you start to moderate speech which is offensive from one point of view, it will inevitably be inoffensive to others, and you've now established that you're a publisher, not a platform, because you're making opinionated decisions about which content to publish and to whom. At that point the remedy lies in reclassifying said platform as a publisher, and revisiting how we regulate publishers.

They can be publishers. They can censor material they object to. That's fine. But they don't need special exemptions from the rules other publishers follow.

I think it's good to have publishers in the world who are opinionated. There are opinions I don't like and don't want to see very often. Where we get into trouble is when these publishers get classified as platforms by the law, claim to be politically neutral entities, and enjoy the various legal privileges assigned to platforms by Section 230 of the CDA. The purpose of that section was to encourage a nascent tech industry by assigning special privileges to the companies in it. That purpose is now obsolete, those companies are now behaving like publishers, and reform of our laws is necessary.

Give me a stack of email drafts first thing every morning that I can read, approve and send myself. It takes 30 seconds to actually send the email. The lion's share of the value is figuring out what to write and doing a good job at it. Which the LLMs are facilitating with research and suggestions, but have not been amazing at doing autonomously so far

That argument is of course nonsense. If the platform is aware of apparent violations including enticement, grooming etc. they are obligated to report this under federal statute, specifically 18 USC 2258A. Now if you think that statute doesn't go far enough then the right thing to do is amend it, or more broadly, establish stronger obligations on platforms to report evidence of criminal behavior to the authorities. Either way Section 230 is not needed for this purpose and deterring crime is not a justification for how it currently exists.

The final proof of how nonsensical this argument is, is that even if the intent you claim was true, it failed. Facebook and Instagram are the largest platforms for groomers online. Nazi and white supremacy content are everywhere on these websites as well. So clearly Section 230 didn't work for this purpose. Zuck was happy to open the Nazi floodgates on his platforms the moment a conservative President got elected. That was all it took.

The actual problem is that Meta is a lawless criminal entity. The mergers which created the modern Meta should have been blocked in the first place. When they weren't, Zuck figured he could go ahead and open the floodgates and become the largest enabler of CSAM, smut and fraud on earth. He was right. The United States government has become weak. It doesn't protect its people. It allows criminal perverts like the board of Meta and the rest of the Epstein class to prey on its people.

I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.

* There are literally thousands of IG profiles that are essentially softcore porn which serves as a lead gen device for an OnlyFans account. Meta promotes these profiles to its users heavily because sex sells. Meta profits from the engagement with the profile, OnlyFans profits from signups sent to it by Meta.

* This is one of the primary ways OnlyFans has grown its pornography business to $8B a year

* Once users sign up for OnlyFans a common mode of engagement is that a managerial company lies and pretends to be the porn actress, and texts with the user under fraudulent pretense as the user consumes porn

Now... what was the world like 30 years ago?

* You couldn't buy porn mags without showing ID, Internet porn not really a thing for most people yet

* Even softcore stuff was mostly relegated to late night Cinemax

* Far fewer women had body image disorders and mental health disorders

* Far fewer young men had ED

This stuff is evil, when you connect the dots, it's crime, evil, lies and perversion all lined up to make a small number of companies a staggering amount of money. Somehow government and industry are OK with this, I guess this is the world the Epstein class built for us so no surprise. I am not a religious guy, and I would hardly call myself a prude, but this all exists and is widespread because it enables profit and fraud and exploitation, and I find that disgusting. Zuck's a porn baron. He knows what's going on. The fucker's on the take.

If anything should be in the dictionary next to the word evil, it's the 2026 state of affairs

The libertarian concerns around privacy, freedom of expression and surveillance are all valid, but they're downstream. We have hard evidence that porn damages sexual health and relationships, and it has basically zero value to society; it's like digital cigarettes in this sense. We can't allow ourselves to be paralyzed on this issues because of a theoretical slippery slope. Whether Discord is going about this the right way is open for debate, and whether legislation solves the porn problem without introducing surveillance risks is also a good discussion to have. But the porn as well as the fraud and exploitation which always seem to accompany that industry need to go. Libertarians would be wise not to conflate the endorsement of privacy with an endorsement of porn -- most people support the former to some degree, but when people come forward with enthusiastic support for the latter, more often than not their motivation is addiction or profit, not a crowd the defenders of privacy want to be lumped in with.