This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
Even if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future, you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached for earnestly.
Why is it that criticism of people's insatiable greed for wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-terminating cliche about utopias?
Desire to live in a society that's less greedy, that rewards compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We should be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on wealth and power that they would rather drive our entire species off a cliff than sacrifice even 10% of their effectively bottomless wealth.
But instead of criticizing our current philosophy that's actively being taken too far and threatens to destroy us, you criticize people who express their frustration with this state of affairs.
The criticism is not of the idea that the world has problems, and that we should look at those problems with the aim of fixing them.
The criticism is of the assumption that a world without problems theoretically could exist.
You may disagree, but you will not find a definition of such a world that everyone can agree on.
Regardless, of whether you agree (that such a definition doesn't exist) or not, if you do plan on bringing about such a utopia, and you begin to meet resistance, the question you will inevitably need to answer is: How do those who resist fit into this utopia?
The historical answer for this question, which by all appearances seems like an inevitable answer, is the reason why people criticise utopian thinking.
Not just the greed. The whole AI is so dangerous that we must be the ones to build it to save humanity, and then gaslighting yourself and everyone around you into believing that your language model is AGI. This is some weird detached from reality cult behavior.
Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.
The AI CEOS and most of their employees are in the same place as that guy. They're just in a more professional context and will be careful not to let their delusions of grandeur look too insane.
I remember watching the fitness function improve while my neural net learned to recognize characters for a project I did in school, and there was something about it that felt powerful. I guess we've always had that with the machines we imbue that have any sort of decision making "intelligence", but mix that with taking psychedelics and you have an interesting cocktail.
I think the dynamic pricing algo is on to us - I see $13.99 at Amazon and clicked on a Google Play Books link for $1.99 that then became $13.99 magically, same for Apple Books.
Please don't 'buy' digital items from Amazon, because you won't actually own them. Pay extra, support your local bookshop and get a physical copy which you will actually own.
I really appreciate that sentiment, but on the other hand 98% of the books I buy I won’t read a second time (because reading a new book will almost always trump rereading an old one), so I’m actually fine with not owning most of them, especially at $1.99 prices. The few that I deeply care about I buy a physical copy of.
It's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access.
I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
I use a kindle but I have never bought a book on the kindle store ever (been using it for 10 years). Totally doable and not hard to avoid... especially since the smaller stores not only have better sales but the author typically gets more money too.
They used to allow downloads of all books, which you could then rip the DRM from, but they got rid of that last year. Huge disappointment, and is why I don't buy books on Kindle anymore.
It's an enjoyable read, hopefully it's the start of a whole new arc in the series with more to come. My only real complaint is it's short and I want more. If you never read his other Interdependency series, it's also great.
Alternatively[1], for those of us who have enough clutter: Buying it digitally means you've paid for it. The author gets their cut, and you can now seek out unencumbered formats that best serve your usage with a clear conscience.
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