[JM]: I recently came across two sites, both of which are both fascinating and highly frustrating.
[JM]: And now I am going to foist them upon you, dear listener.
[JM]: The first one is called Email Is Easy, and you can check it out at e-mail.wtf.
[JM]: And it is a fascinating quiz where you are asked to choose whether a provided email address is valid or invalid.
[JM]: And
[JM]: As you can expect, it starts off easy enough and it goes very much sideways from there.
[JM]: I don't know about you, Dan.
[JM]: I got like halfway through it.
[JM]: I'm like, I am out.
[JM]: This is ridiculous.
[JM]: I don't even want to know how the rest of the story goes.
[DJ]: I mean, my problem with this web-site started at the URL, which is e-mail.wtf.
[DJ]: And e-mail is a construction that no one in their right mind
[DJ]: has used since the 1990s when electronic mail was like this weird new thing so I hate it and yeah then I got like four of these things in and it's like, "What if there's a space in the email address — is that valid?" And I'm like "No" and it's like "You're right, but what if there's a space over here?" And I'm like "Yeah, that's not valid either". "Yes it is." And I'm like, "All right — I'm done with this. That's enough. I hate you, RFC 222 or whatever it is.
[JM]: I'm glad that you had a similar reaction to this site.
[JM]: The e-mail thing, it's funny.
[JM]: I wish I could go back through all of the words that I've written electronically in my lifetime and figure out when I made the transition from e-mail to no dash.
[JM]: I bet you it was considerably later than the average person because I'm me and I just was like, "No, it's always been e-mail.
[JM]: Why would I drop this dash?
[JM]: It's electronic mail."
[JM]: I specifically remember thinking that
[JM]: in some earlier chapter of my existence.
[JM]: And I have a feeling that that's something I probably gave up, not necessarily recently, but later than most people.
[DJ]: The word "the" used to be spelled Y-E.
[DJ]: So I'm curious when you made that transition.
[JM]: About seven years ago.
[DJ]: In all your illuminated manuscripts, you started changing it.
[JM]: Exactly.
[JM]: Well, for a double dose of this, if you really want to punish yourself, and you know the first thing about YAML, and if you don't, then you know what?
[JM]: Trust me, you are so much better off than the rest of us because...
[JM]: Yeah, yikes.
[JM]: You can go to Oh-YAML, O-H-YAML, which is O-H-Y-A-M-L dot WTF.
[JM]: And one of the things that you'll notice as you go through this quiz, which is equally, if not in some ways *more* frustrating than the email dot WTF quiz, is it reminded me while I'm going through it of all the things about YAML that drives me just totally insane.
[JM]: And one of them is...
[JM]: If you know anything about the Python programming language, then you probably know that PEP 20, which is the definition that Python uses when they want to make proposals for things, they do it as a PEP.
[JM]: And PEP 20 was essentially like, here's like the guiding principles of Python.
[JM]: Like this is what makes Python different, or at least these are the principles we try to keep in mind when we're developing Python.
[JM]: And one of them is:
[JM]: "There should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it."
[JM]: And let me tell you, YAML is the antithesis of this guiding principle of Python.
[JM]: Like you want a list, great.
[JM]: You can have a list with dashes or you can have it as square brackets and then comma-separated items inside the brackets.
[JM]: And that's just one of a whole bunch of other examples of YAML just having like 18 different ways to do the same things, all of which are supported.
[JM]: And one of the ones that appears in this quiz that is definitely front of mind is Booleans.
[JM]: Like valid Booleans in YAML 1.1, I think before they finally realized just how insane it is, is like, "yes", "no", "true", "false", "Y", "N". There's others.
[JM]: I don't even remember them all.
[JM]: Just total madness.
[DJ]: "I guess so" validates to true, but "maybe" validates to false.
[JM]: Like seriously, I don't know who came up with YAML, but they are... I just have no words.
[JM]: Just their mind works different than my mind works.
[DJ]: They're outside your house right now and they have some very strong words for you.
[JM]: Yes.
[JM]: Well, I have some very strong words, and that's please don't use YAML.
[JM]: If you are developing something, just don't do it.
[JM]: Just stop.
[JM]: Use TOML or XML.
[JM]: I don't care.
[JM]: Just like literally anything but YAML, please.
[JM]: I beg you.
[DJ]: Justin, I'm not going to use XML instead of YAML.
[JM]: That was a joke.
[JM]: Just, you know, to be clear, I was not serious about XML.
[JM]: TOML, fine, but...
[DJ]: TOML.
[DJ]: I haven't even looked into TOML.
[DJ]: I think I came across it the other day, and I think that name might actually stand for Tom's Markup Language or something like that.
[JM]: It does.
[DJ]: Well, that's better than YAML, which I think stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language, making it a recursive acronym, the worst kind of acronym.
[JM]: Right.
[JM]: I always think of it as Yet Another Markup Language, but you're right.
[JM]: It probably isn't that, because again, this person's mind just works very, very differently than mine.
[DJ]: Well, YAML ain't markup language, Justin.
[DJ]: It's some other thing.
[DJ]: I mean, I guess it's not markup language.
[DJ]: It's a text-based representation of an object notation.
[DJ]: I mean, it's a strict superset of JSON.
[DJ]: That's one thing you should know.
[DJ]: I can't believe I'm talking about this, but I like YAML.
[DJ]: I use it a lot.
[DJ]: So I guess I feel a need to defend it for some reason.
[JM]: I've spent so much of my life using YAML in an Ansible context, which is an orchestration framework for configuring servers.
[JM]: And yeah, I don't have good things to say about YAML.
[JM]: It's fine.
[JM]: Like, look, I'm bashing on it in part because it's fun and it's fine and it does the job.
[JM]: And I'm sure there are times that I have used TOML, for example,
[JM]: and thought like, okay, this is also a little clunky.
[JM]: I'm not sure that this particular thing that I'm trying to do, like nested lists, for example, I'm not sure that this is better than the way YAML does it.
[JM]: But then there's just like so many other foot-guns and other things in YAML that just don't exist in TOML because it's just a saner, simplified,
[JM]: there is really only one or two ways of doing the same thing instead of 19.
[DJ]: That's interesting, that principle, that there should only be one ideally obvious way of doing any given thing.
[DJ]: Or I guess in the case of a language like this, of representing a given type of data, right, is what we're talking about.
[DJ]: Because I'm not sure I've ever classified any of the problems I've had with something like YAML
[DJ]: as a problem of there are too many different ways to represent a list, and that's screwing me up because dot, dot, dot.
[DJ]: I don't know.
[DJ]: I mean, ironically, for the purposes of us discussing it, I think the biggest things that have screwed me up with YAML are probably how it treats whitespace, which is exactly the same problem that I have with Python.
[DJ]: So, I mean, it's interesting to be like, "Python's great, I love it, but also, YAML's terrible."
[DJ]: It's like, "Well, from where I'm standing, they look pretty much the same, buddy."
[JM]: Hmm.
[JM]: Yeah.
[JM]: I don't know about that one.
[DJ]: There's an interesting discussion to be had here, but we're probably going to need to do like a special series of ten episodes for us to argue thoroughly about the merits or demerits of Python as a programming language.
[JM]: For sure.
[JM]: Moving on to a quick bit of follow-up, I updated my article on how to use llama.cpp to run large language models locally on your own workstation.
[JM]: And the very small change that I made to it was to point out something that I neglected to point out in the original version, which is that you actually don't need Open WebUI, which I mentioned in the second half, to have a web interface.
[JM]: llama-server, the command that you run to invoke this little server inside of the llama.cpp binary, comes with its own embedded web application.
[JM]: So if you just go to localhost, colon, whatever port is the default one, or whatever port you've set, and then you will see a web interface where you can enter in your prompts and see responses.
[JM]: And I think it's really cool that this is built-in, and I neglected to
[JM]: mention that in my original version of this article.
[JM]: So I have amended that.
[JM]: And this is also a good time to mention it because the author of llama.cpp has also posted a rather detailed write-up of how to run the recently released GPT-OSS model from OpenAI.
[JM]: Which in my experience works pretty well and is on par with lots of the other recent open-ish models that have been released for running on your local workstation.
[JM]: And like I said, it's a good write-up.
[JM]: And I suggest if you are interested in this sort of thing that you check it out.
[JM]: There will be a link in the show notes as usual.
[JM]: And by all means, reach out and let us know how it works for you.
[JM]: In other news, it seems that AOL is discontinuing dial-up Internet access.
[JM]: And in other news, AOL has been apparently providing dial-up Internet access, which was definitely news to me.
[JM]: And I think most people who came across this particular headline, like, oh my God, I can't even believe this is something that was still happening.
[JM]: But if you are a dial-up customer of AOL, (1) I really want to meet you. By all means, please reach out.
[JM]: I want to find out who you are.
[JM]: And I want to hear your story, but also... Why.
[JM]: And also, your dial-up is going away apparently.
[JM]: And you know, by the time this probably airs, so... Sorry.
[DJ]: I mean, I'm not just doing a bit when I say today I learned AOL still exists, let alone is providing dial-up Internet access.
[DJ]: What I really want to know in 2025 is how do you use dial-up Internet access?
[DJ]: Because
[DJ]: computers don't have modems anymore, do they?
[DJ]: Can you still get modems?
[DJ]: Can you get like a USB-C to telephone wire adapter?
[DJ]: How do you actually use dial-up Internet now?
[JM]: Oh, that's easy.
[JM]: You just fire up your 1995 Gateway PC running Windows 3.1 and you connect to the Internet the way you've been doing for the last 30 years.
[DJ]: you press the power button, a cloud of dust like puffs out of the side and you insert a floppy disk.
[DJ]: Is that how it works?
[DJ]: Maybe you use one of those acoustic couplers that I think are from the 1980s where before modems existed, you had to actually take the receiver portion of your telephone.
[DJ]: By the way, telephones used to have receiver portions and you would put it down on a thing that would actually like
[DJ]: absorb the vibrations of the sound waves coming through it and that's how it would interpret.
[JM]: Right, and that worked because the physical form of the phone receiver that you put up to your head was the same no matter where you lived or where you got it all from one company, Bell Labs, AT&T, whatever the heck they were called.
[JM]: And yeah, so that's why it actually worked.
[JM]: Hilarious.
[JM]: I also want to know, as you pointed out, it is news to me that AOL still exists.
[JM]: But then, follow-up question: They're going to discontinue their dial-up service.
[JM]: But then what else do they do?
[JM]: Okay.
[JM]: So we know that they were doing that and that's news to us.
[JM]: We know that they're not going to be doing that.
[JM]: So like what's left, what are they actually going to do?
[JM]: Do they provide like the little folksy walled garden that is not the Internet?
[JM]: Like that can't still exist.
[DJ]: I don't think so.
[DJ]: I'm actually, I'm looking at the Internet now while recording, which you're never supposed to do, but yeah.
[DJ]: So they're owned by like Yahoo.
[DJ]: I guess Yahoo still exists as well, which is weird.
[DJ]: They were acquired by Verizon.
[DJ]: I don't know.
[DJ]: I mean, I feel like this is one of those things where they're now just a brand of some other entity.
[DJ]: I would be very curious, like, what kinds of services or systems does the thing that is known as AOL still bring to the table in this day and age?
[DJ]: I guess it was dial-up service of some kind.
[DJ]: Although, again, I still have a lot of questions, but...
[JM]: This is where I would normally say, "Okay, future follow-up: We'll dig into what AOL actually is and provides."
[JM]: And then I'm like, "I actually don't know that I care enough to do that."
[DJ]: You're like, I'm not going to promise to do that, though.
[DJ]: I really am serious, though.
[DJ]: If anyone out there still uses this or is familiar or is actually like a systems engineer working at AOL even today, well, you might want to get a resume together.
[DJ]: But we really would like to hear what's the deal with AOL?
[DJ]: Because it's a remnant of...
[DJ]: when I was like first learning about the Internet and it was just like, wow, there's this Internet thing.
[DJ]: It's amazing.
[DJ]: And you used to use a modem hooked up to your telephone line to connect to it.
[DJ]: And it was very slow.
[DJ]: We used to get these like floppy disks and then CDs from AOL, even though I'm in Canada, I guess there was an AOL Canada that also merits investigation that would always promise like 3,000 free minutes or whatever.
[DJ]: Like this is what the Internet used to be like, but it hasn't been like that in a long time.
[DJ]: As far as I know.
[JM]: It is a mystery.
[JM]: One that I imagine is going to continue to go unsolved because neither of us are going to care enough to look into it more.
[JM]: But yeah, who knows?
[JM]: Okay, moving on and turning our attention from the past of the Internet to the present and future of the Internet.
[JM]: There is this increasing...
[JM]: push for legislators across the world to introduce legislation that requires people to verify their age when accessing certain parts of the Internet.
[JM]: The one that is in the news recently is the UK Online Safety Act.
[JM]: And the general idea is that this is supposed to protect minors from accessing things on the web that are deemed unsavory.
[JM]: And as usual, you will find links to more information about this in the show notes, but I'm not going to go into too much detail regarding how this legislation works.
[JM]: But I think you get the general idea.
[JM]: The general idea is that companies are going to be required to verify users' identities when accessing certain content.
[JM]: For example, Spotify
[JM]: in the UK will have to verify your age in order to listen to music that has explicit lyrics in it.
[JM]: And I don't know about you, Dan... I have thoughts.
[JM]: My thoughts really amount to I
[JM]: have children in my life that I love and who I would love to protect and who I think are worthy of protection along with all of the other children on the planet.
[JM]: And yet this is not how to do it.
[JM]: And that is my take on this.
[JM]: I think that these things are deeply harmful, don't really result in meaningful protection,
[JM]: and every time anyone who really understands
[JM]: this kind of technological policy — because the policy makers themselves do not, and I don't blame them for that, but it's incumbent upon them to take in information from people who do understand this stuff and to make their policy decisions based on their expertise instead of their own fields.
[JM]: And every time there is legitimate opposition to these deeply flawed pieces of legislation, their answer usually is like, "You're all really smart.
[JM]: We know you can do it.
[JM]: You have all these PhDs on your staff. Just nerd harder!"
[JM]: And the reality is, it's just like the argument with encryption backdoors.
[JM]: You cannot legislate math away.
[JM]: You just can't.
[JM]: And this is a very similar topic.
[JM]: Cory Doctorow wrote a great article called "Privacy Preserving Age Verification is BS", which you should absolutely read.
[JM]: And
[JM]: the conclusion reached in this article is very much in line with my take on it, which is age verification is an impossibility.
[JM]: And it's an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web.
[JM]: And that's not my quote.
[JM]: That's someone that he quoted in the article.
[JM]: And I think people don't really understand just how badly this is going to end up going, right?
[JM]: I mentioned Spotify before.
[JM]: Well, they're going to force users to undergo face scanning.
[JM]: They're gonna force users to validate or verify their age by having a face scan as part of this verification in order to listen to music that has explicit lyrics in it.
[JM]: All of this data, these face scans... We're being told
[JM]: that you need to grab your government ID and take a photo of it as well as your face to prove that it's you, right?
[JM]: That the photo and the ID is the same as the person holding the ID.
[JM]: All of this stuff is at extremely high risk of breach and theft and misuse.
[JM]: We've seen it happen over and over again.
[JM]: I mean, a week doesn't go by without reading about some high profile breach.
[JM]: The most infamous example of which recently is this app called Tea, which was, and I imagine still is, promoted as a way for women to safely date online.
[JM]: And these very kinds of ID verification selfie photos are among the treasure trove
[JM]: of highly personal and private data that was recently breached in some hack of their systems.
[JM]: In addition to very private discussions and DMs of things that I'm not even going to mention because they're just so private and horrific to hear that this is now out there in the world.
[JM]: And people who study this stuff, people who are in the information security realm know that the best way to prevent a data breach is to not collect the information.
[JM]: And that is precisely what this legislation is doing.
[JM]: It's saying you must collect all this stuff, facial recognition scans, uploading government issued IDs.
[JM]: This is all just going to end really, really badly and makes me sad.
[JM]: It makes me angry.
[DJ]: Yeah, I meet you on both of those points.
[DJ]: It makes me sad and it makes me angry.
[DJ]: I want to touch on the philosophical, the rhetorical stuff going on here because, you know, you've already spoken to the technical side and there's great links to a lot of good commentary on this.
[DJ]: I would just be repeating it.
[DJ]: I want to point out one thing.
[DJ]: I care about children too.
[DJ]: Keeping people safe: good idea.
[DJ]: Trying to prevent harm: good idea.
[DJ]: Especially people who have a hard time preventing themselves from being harmed.
[DJ]: Vulnerable groups of people, like minors.
[DJ]: All right, cool.
[DJ]: But the problem is, there is a rhetorical technique...
[DJ]: I don't know exactly what the name for it is, where you devalue or kind of shut down valid critiques of something by using an emotionally charged kind of simplistic counterattack.
[DJ]: The thing that happens in these sorts of debates about online age verification or backdoors to end-to-end encryption, et cetera,
[DJ]: is that "protect children" is such a powerful, visceral desire that you can use it to just trample over any objections to what you want to do.
[DJ]: So a lot of the objections that we and others are raising about these age verification schemes are...
[DJ]: among other things, like it creates the sort of so-called technological dystopia with giant potential for harm that exists when you surveil everybody's activity and prevent people from having any sort of private or anonymous access to the Internet, which, you know, is a large part of people's behavior.
[DJ]: To the extent that people's behavior is on the Internet, it can be surveilled.
[DJ]: And this sort of scheme makes it easier to surveil.
[DJ]: So a lot of arguments about protecting people come down to, "Well, the way you protect people is by inhibiting bad behavior."
[DJ]: And one way to do that is watch everyone all the time. To take this sort of argument to a maybe semi-straw-man, but maybe not, kind of ridiculous conclusion.
[DJ]: Like the way to keep children safe is to lock all people in cages at all times.
[DJ]: Because then we couldn't harm children.
[DJ]: It has a side effect of almost literally everyone who would be innocent of harming children would have their freedom severely restricted, but the children would be safe.
[DJ]: So should we do that?
[DJ]: I'm sure there are some people who think we should, but no, generally people don't think that.
[DJ]: But this is the same kind of argument being used in this case where it's like, look, there are lots of really important reasons that we should not harm.
[DJ]: Have Spotify force users to have their face scanned so that they can listen to music with explicit lyrics.
[DJ]: "But think of the children."
[DJ]: That's the rhetorical technique that I have the real problem with.
[DJ]: Because we can make so many bad decisions on a societal scale that are driven by that kind of visceral fear.
[DJ]: That's real dangerous.
[JM]: And it's a smokescreen, right?
[JM]: This whole concept of "Do it for the children" is almost always just a smokescreen and excuse for state surveillance.
[JM]: Because what it accomplishes is the state doesn't have to do the surveillance anymore.
[JM]: They're essentially just outsourcing it to corporations where they can just access it.
[JM]: Because once corporations have it, the government asks for it, corporations can be like, "Here you go."
[DJ]: Having it benefits the corporations too, generally.
[DJ]: Like in a lot of these use cases, having more data about your users is a net good.
[DJ]: A lot of the time, the reason you don't have that data about your users is because the government forced you not to look at things, like the GDPR.
[DJ]: And so now instead you have exactly the reverse where corporations are like, "It's too bad we can't scan everyone's face before they listen to music."
[DJ]: That would be great for, I don't know, nebulous marketing related reasons probably.
[DJ]: And now the government's going like, "Yo, you got to scan faces."
[DJ]: You know, the really cynical part of me says that like this is this is the outcome of like tech companies whispering in the ears of politicians about like, "You know, wouldn't children be safer if we scanned everyone's faces?"
[DJ]: And they're like, "Oh, you're right.
[DJ]: Children would be safer if you scanned everyone's faces.
[DJ]: All right.
[DJ]: You have to start scanning faces."
[DJ]: And meanwhile, you know.
[DJ]: The tech companies are like, "That's terrible.
[DJ]: We would hate to introduce this intrusive…
[DJ]: Actually, we already developed this.
[DJ]: It's in a feature branch.
[DJ]: We're just going to roll this into prod tomorrow."
[DJ]: Thanks, guys.
[JM]: That's absolutely not funny.
[JM]: I am trying to find the humor in it because I feel like that's just incumbent upon us when delving into topics that are this painful to delve into.
[JM]: Have to find the humor in it.
[DJ]: Well, yes.
[DJ]: The other place we could go that I usually want to go in cases like this is like, but what can we do?
[DJ]: Because it doesn't really suit me to simply scream at the heavens when I feel like I can't do anything and I hate what's happening.
[DJ]: Well, I think in cases like this, things that we, citizens is what I mean, not just me and Justin, can do about stuff like this.
[DJ]: One of them is
[DJ]: to the extent you can, advocate to your legislators.
[DJ]: I mean, that's what you got in a democracy, and that's something.
[DJ]: So there's that.
[DJ]: And then in terms of what we can do personally, this is much more in our bailiwick, Justin, is look for alternatives to some of these services, right?
[DJ]: Like if big tech is gonna scan your face, what are other ways you can listen to music, for example?
[JM]: Precisely.
[JM]: And if you are a company that is being told that you have to implement these kinds of age verification checks, try to come up with creative ways for doing that.
[JM]: There's one small organization that came up with a rather novel way and saying like, "Okay, well, you're telling us we have to verify the age, but you didn't say we have to scan faces.
[JM]: You just said we have to verify their age."
[JM]: And the plan they came up with is that they went through a couple of
[JM]: criteria and said, "Okay, well, if your account is more than 10 years old, we are going to assume that you are currently over 18.
[JM]: If your account ever bought supporter status with a credit card, and we can confirm that with a payment processor, we will also assume that you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.
[JM]: If you ever bought supporter status more than two years ago, we will assume you're over 18 because you need to be at least 16 to have a PayPal or debit card in the UK.
[JM]: And then if none of these things applies, you will have the opportunity to pay a small one-time fee via credit card, which again, you can't have unless you are over 18 as confirmation of your age."
[JM]: And I love that this outfit is saying we are not going to
[JM]: implement ID checks or facial recognition, in part because that requires them to pay a third party to confirm each and every person.
[JM]: And this is a small company, and they run at a loss, apparently, and they don't monetize their users very well.
[JM]: And so it's not really an option for them to pay a third party to do that kind of age verification.
[JM]: And they go on to point out something that I don't think a lot of folks really realize, which is with age verification schemes, big tech is the only winner because smaller companies simply cannot afford to keep up with this kind of regulation.
[JM]: And that drag on innovation and that government-mandated calcification of our competitive environment is something we should be fighting against tooth and nail.
[DJ]: That is a great point.
[DJ]: And I heard that brought up around other regulatory schemes, including, I think, GDPR, which has been around for a long time now.
[DJ]: That one of the criticisms of regulation like that are that a lot of the time it's implemented to attack the stronghold of the biggest and most powerful companies.
[DJ]: There was a lot of at least discourse about how GDPR was essentially trying to attack Facebook in particular.
[DJ]: But the problem with that is the regulation imposes requirements on everybody.
[DJ]: And it turns out that the company that has $125 trillion bajillion quadrillion dollars — I just checked their market cap —
[DJ]: ... is the best placed to comply with the regulation because they can just hire a hundred lawyers to do it.
[DJ]: But like all of the little tiny businesses that actually we — and the regulators themselves, I presume — would like to have exist are now burdened by the weight of having to the threat of like, well, you might get sued for a quarter million dollars if you collect cookies the wrong way or something.
[DJ]: That's not great.
[DJ]: And yeah, to your point, likewise with this.
[DJ]: I think what that website is doing is really smart because it reminds me a lot of basically how e-commerce has gone down over the last couple of decades, which is there are so many constraints and requirements around how you have to securely store payment information like credit card info
[DJ]: that effectively any business, any company that does business online with credit cards doesn't do that themselves.
[DJ]: They outsource it to some well-established other parties, right, that handle all of that compliance for them.
[DJ]: And so generally when you use your credit card to pay for something on JRandom website, I don't think their servers ever even see your credit card number, let alone store it anywhere.
[DJ]: That all happens through some other payment processor.
[DJ]: Establishing choke points and gateways like that has its own set of downsides.
[DJ]: But in a case like this, it's still much better than suddenly saying every website has to like scan your driver's license because a lot of them are going to screw it up or do it badly.
[DJ]: Or you have to question what are the true incentives of the companies that appear that say, "Yeah, we'll handle this for everybody."
[DJ]: To the extent that we've all already agreed that we are willing to accept the implicit surveillance, among other things, of using credit cards, which is a whole other conversation.
[DJ]: But as a society, we've broadly said, all right, credit cards.
[DJ]: I like the idea of saying, "Oh, there's this other burdensome surveillance-oriented mechanism that governments want.
[DJ]: All right, we'll just piggyback on the thing we're already doing as opposed to adding a whole new horrible layer."
[JM]: Like you said before, I really have this sneaking suspicion that a decent amount of this is fueled by regulatory capture where big tech, as you mentioned, could very well be playing both sides of this whole thing and pretending like, "Oh, these onerous requirements that we have to comply with..." while all the while knowing that it just entrenches their position that much more firmly and staves off competition.
[DJ]: Yes, and thank you for reminding me of the phrase "regulatory capture", which I had in my brain but could not remember if it was the right phrase to describe this situation.
[DJ]: I remember in the past year reading similar things about the large language model companies that like some of the most strenuous arguments for like, oh, I mean, AI, if left unchecked, could destroy everything and level the entire planet to a nuclear wasteland.
[DJ]: You guys all saw Terminator 2, right?
[DJ]: The most strident arguments for that are coming from like you know OpenAI and Anthropic, like the people who have the most to gain from a headwind being placed against all of their competition.
[JM]: As you said, use your voice and reach out to your elected representatives and make your opinions known.
[JM]: That's the best thing that we can do as individuals for sure.
[JM]: Okay, moving on.
[JM]: And speaking of Spotify, they're also in the news as of late for having published "AI generated songs from dead artists without permission".
[JM]: Which is in some ways kind of funny.
[JM]: And I will start this by relaying a little story.
[JM]: It was probably three or four years ago.
[JM]: This was, I think, before the advent of ChatGPT, et cetera.
[JM]: I remember having a conversation with a friend who was working in the music business and I said, "I think it's going to be kind of interesting."
[JM]: And I really did mean this like in a positive way.
[JM]: I said, "I think it's going to be kind of interesting that we are about to arrive into a near future in which you will be able to say, 'Okay, this artist that I really like is no longer with us.
[JM]: I have listened to all of these albums endlessly.
[JM]: I really wish there was more music from this person.'
[JM]: And you will be able to, say, run a program on your own computer against your collection of their music and have it generate a new album of their music that sounds like the kind of music that they would create."
[JM]: And I mentioned this to a friend, maybe not necessarily like in a positive way, but maybe just like in a neutral way.
[JM]: Like, oh, this is interesting, right?
[JM]: Like this could be...
[JM]: actually kind of cool if someone shuffled off their mortal coil before producing the amount of work that you would have liked to have heard from them.
[JM]: And I could actually see like, that would be kind of nice.
[JM]: Like just to pick a random example, Tom Petty is an artist that I really like, and I would love to hear more of his music.
[JM]: And I think that was probably front-of-mind when I had this conversation with this friend.
[JM]: And when I mentioned it, the friend just paused for a second and turns to me and says, "I hate this so much.
[JM]: I hate this idea."
[JM]: He was just horrified, horrified that this thing that I was describing as, again, neutral really, and maybe for at least for me personally, slightly positive...
[JM]: ... was something that he just found really horrifying.
[JM]: And I understand why this news, however, is something very different, right?
[JM]: Like the way I envisioned it was this was something that you could do for yourself.
[JM]: And here is an example of someone who just a few years after I thought of this as a concept is doing it and then publishing it to Spotify under the name of this dead artist, which is categorically horrifying and something that shouldn't happen.
[JM]: And I think what's even worse is the way that Spotify really handles this kind of thing.
[JM]: Because in the end, yes, they removed the content, but they don't seem particularly concerned about it.
[JM]: And a person who I think was the manager of the deceased artist went on to say, "I don't even think this should be possible.
[JM]: There should be some step
[JM]: where the artist or the artist's estate has to approve new music."
[JM]: Like, how did this even get submitted as music from this artist that wasn't from the actual artist who, as a reminder, is no longer with us?
[JM]: And that's a very legitimate question, and...
[JM]: Again, I think that this just underscores to me that Spotify does not care about this kind of thing.
[JM]: I mean, they are already generating music by way of other companies that no human actually composed.
[JM]: And they're trying to find every shortcut they can to produce content that costs them nothing, at a minimum, and preferably generates money instead of having to pay royalties to people for that content.
[JM]: So who's surprised when they don't care that someone is submitting essentially fake music attributed to this artist because it makes them money.
[JM]: They don't care.
[JM]: Like, why would they care?
[JM]: *I* know why they would care.
[JM]: I know why they *should* care.
[JM]: But it just underscores for me how little interest I have in contributing money to companies that operate in this way.
[DJ]: I heard an analogy that I'm going to apply to Spotify, although I don't remember if that was its original use case, but I think it applies.
[DJ]: The relationship of Spotify to musicians is like the relationship of a stockyard to cows.
[DJ]: Like superficially, a stockyard is like, well, "Don't worry, cows.
[DJ]: Come in here and we'll keep you healthy.
[DJ]: We'll keep you safe.
[DJ]: Wolves aren't going to eat you or whatever.
[DJ]: Like we'll keep you safe from the wolves so we can turn you into delicious steak and hamburgers."
[DJ]: Had a really good burger yesterday.
[DJ]: That might be why I'm thinking about this.
[DJ]: The problem with Spotify, like so many of what people have started to just pejoratively refer to as big tech companies,
[DJ]: is that they have these kind of exploitative extractive relationships with especially the people who produce things, who produce art arguably the M.O. of spotify was, "Look, we're going to make it so much easier for everyone to easily and affordably access music.
[DJ]: The music they love, wherever they are, we'll help them discover new music." And all of those things have been true, but also the incentives of Spotify the company are not, "How do we create an artistic utopia in which musicians and music lovers all hold hands and thrive together," which sounds great although I guess it's hard to play music if you're holding the hands of your audience so
[DJ]: maybe leave that part out.
[DJ]: But everything else I just said is awesome.
[DJ]: But instead, the incentives for a company like Spotify are to maximize returns to their shareholders, I presume.
[DJ]: So when you reach the point where you find yourself going, "All right, cool.
[DJ]: So our customers are paying us $13.99 a month or whatever.
[DJ]: But our expenses are X because we have to pay royalties to musicians.
[DJ]: How do we get those expenses to go down so that people just pay us $13.99 and our investment in like large language model hardware that can generate music is, you know, a depreciating asset on our tax return or whatever.
[DJ]: So that's good.
[DJ]: And now we're maximizing revenue."
[DJ]: And the whole notion of musicians people who make art in the medium of music is being excised from this entire story from this entire relationship. Like, it is I'm sure there are lots of people who work for Spotify who would take offense to me saying this, but like if Spotify could wave a magic wand and make it so musicians don't exist, they'd do it at least from a business perspective if not literally — that's what this is doing.
[DJ]: The thing where you go, well, "I can just write a prompt and say, 'Generate me an album of songs in the style of artist X'. All right, great.
[DJ]: Now we don't have to pay artist X anymore."
[DJ]: That's horrible, but it makes total business sense.
[DJ]: So now that we live in this world, especially of...
[DJ]: large language models being able to generate what human beings have typically referred to as artistic creations.
[DJ]: There are a lot of questions that don't have easy answers.
[DJ]: I think there are a lot of questions for artists about, like, do I use these tools or not?
[DJ]: What's the outcome if I do?
[DJ]: But certainly the question of, does some giant company who's trying to replace artists with the tools derived from artistic works, to me that seems like a much more straightforward, "No, this is bad."
[DJ]: And we will probably cover this more in another topic.
[DJ]: I'm done with Spotify, dude.
[DJ]: Like I'm actively seeking alternatives because ugh, they… Look, Spotify.
[DJ]: No, you failed the sniff test.
[DJ]: Like I just hear about too many things that this company does that rub me the wrong way ethically.
[DJ]: So forget it.
[JM]: The idea of where there's smoke, there's fire.
[JM]: I mean, there's just nothing but flames here.
[JM]: I mean, it's just one series of terrible news reports coming out related to Spotify.
[JM]: And we talk about a lot of things on the show that are
[JM]: not necessarily positive developments, right?
[JM]: Because sometimes that's just how the world works.
[JM]: And that's just the timeline that we happen to be on.
[JM]: And we try to bring up the topic of like, "Okay, what can we do about it?"
[JM]: And this one is pretty simple to me, right?
[JM]: Like, I can understand why someone might say, "Yeah, but I have all these playlists.
[JM]: And because of my usage history over time, like they really know
[JM]: what stuff I like.
[JM]: And so their recommendation algorithm is really well suited for me."
[JM]: And I completely understand all that.
[JM]: And yet, I still think the answer to the question of "What can we do?" is to stop giving them money, because the best thing we can really do here is to vote with our wallets, like we've talked about in the past, vote with your wallets, vote with your feet, be the change you want to see in the world by not supporting them and finding another vendor
[JM]: to meet that need.
[JM]: I haven't really used Apple Music, but I have family members and friends who do, and they say it's great.
[JM]: I don't see the same level of negative news reports coming out about Apple Music.
[JM]: I'm not saying it's perfect.
[JM]: Maybe their recommendation algorithms aren't as good.
[JM]: I wouldn't know.
[JM]: I don't use either of these services.
[JM]: But I know enough people that use Apple Music, for example, and they think it's great.
[JM]: So maybe that's an alternative.
[JM]: And there are others, as I think you have been looking into.
[DJ]: Yes and before I mention the strangely named service that I've been playing with, I will address the data lock-in portion which is like, "Oh man, I have all these playlists and all these albums that I've added to my collection," because that's one thing with a streaming service where you know in the past when we would buy compact discs or what-have-you, which you can still do, and I've heard are is getting popular again which is interesting.
[DJ]: I'm really curious how, like the dial-up Internet thing...
[DJ]: How are people playing compact discs at this moment in history?
[DJ]: Because where do you get a CD player?
[JM]: They just rip them.
[DJ]: I guess they do just rip them, which is fine.
[DJ]: There are apps you can use that will transfer things like playlists and your album editions from one service to another.
[DJ]: I guess the various streaming services have either not yet attempted or have not been successful at so locking down their APIs
[DJ]: that they make this impossible.
[DJ]: But last time I checked, I use an app on iOS called SongShift.
[DJ]: And there are other ones for other platforms that let you connect, let's say your Spotify account, and let's say your new account on Apple Music or Tidal, or I'm going to come to the really strangely named one that I've been playing with...
[DJ]: that you can connect these things up and you can say, "Oh, okay, here's your playlist on Spotify, transfer it."
[DJ]: And then it'll go to Apple Music and try to find the same, it'll match the tracks to the best of its ability.
[DJ]: And it doesn't always work perfectly, but I'll be honest with you, you gotta ask yourself, how much do you care?
[DJ]: Like if you have some Spotify playlist with 150 tracks and you migrate 148 of them, is that good enough?
[DJ]: Because like your point about the recommendation engine...
[DJ]: If you're listening and compelled by what we're saying at all, I guess my question for you is how much are your ethics worth to you?
[DJ]: Is the optimization of streaming music recommendations worth it to you to stay with a company that sucks so bad or seems to do so much bad stuff?
[DJ]: I've decided no.
[DJ]: Music recommendation is great, but to me, it's very much a nice-to-have recommendation.
[DJ]: And thinking about what I want from music, I want artists to be compensated more fairly. I want a sense of ownership one of the things I don't like about streaming and about our overall technological tendency towards renting content instead of purchasing it. Because this is the same with software, it's the same with movies, it's the same with books, it's the same with everything now.
[DJ]: I don't like that.
[DJ]: Like, I would rather pay $10 and then have some files on my computer, and it doesn't matter how badly Sony Records doesn't want me to have them anymore.
[DJ]: They can't do anything about it.
[DJ]: But a thing that constantly annoys me about every streaming service I've used, because they all use the same underlying catalogs of music, is that I'll add some album to my library, and two years later I'll have a hankering to listen to it, and it's just not available anymore.
[DJ]: Which, you know, has never happened to one of the CDs in my collection.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: That it just, oh, it's not there anymore.
[DJ]: "Sorry, you don't get to listen."
[DJ]: So I would encourage people to explore alternatives to Spotify.
[DJ]: The one that I've been looking at is a service whose name is spelled Q-O-B-U-Z, which I pronounce Qobuz.
[JM]: Qobuz.
[JM]: I give up.
[JM]: I don't know.
[DJ]: Quoo-bers.
[JM]: I'm not even going to give them the naming is hard out on this one because no, sorry, you don't get that.
[JM]: You're just, you're terrible at your job.
[DJ]: I'm sorry, QuoBuzz.
[DJ]: You failed the naming test.
[DJ]: However, it seems like a pretty good streaming service.
[DJ]: They have a music store attached to it.
[DJ]: So does Apple Music, by the way.
[DJ]: The iTunes store is still a thing.
[DJ]: And that appeals to me because I've decided I want to buy more of the music I like instead of just having it on a streaming service.
[DJ]: And from the small amount of research I did, it seems like Qobuz compensates artists for streams at a higher rate than a lot of competing services.
[DJ]: And that matters to me for my dollar.
[DJ]: Bottom line, obviously, for some people, affordability is a real concern, and that's completely fair.
[DJ]: I am privileged to be in a position where paying a couple of extra dollars a month for a music streaming service doesn't really affect my bottom line that much, and so I'll do it.
[DJ]: So, you know, they're three or four bucks a month more expensive than Spotify or Apple Music.
[DJ]: So what?
[DJ]: I've decided this is, to your point about voting with your wallet, I've decided this is how my wallet and I are voting on this one.
[JM]: Migrating from one place to another is indeed harder than it should be.
[JM]: To the point of what can you do about that, in the past I have come across tools that can help to a degree.
[JM]: There are two command-line tools that I've come across in the past.
[JM]: One of them is called Spotify Downloader and the other one is called Spotify-DL.
[JM]: Both of them, incidentally, written in Python.
[JM]: And both tools essentially do the same thing.
[JM]: They use the Spotify API.
[JM]: They will access your playlist and then they will find these tracks on the interwebs and they will proceed to download them.
[JM]: So if, for example, as you said, if you have 150 items on your playlist and only 148 of them are in Apple Music or Qobuz or whatever this thing is pronounced...
[DJ]: Qobuz.
[JM]: ... you can use tools like this perhaps to fill in those gaps. Which is just testament to the amazing ingenuity of humans in terms of, "Here is this problem, it annoys me, I'm going to solve it, I'm going to fire up my text editor and I'm going to write a tool that allows me to solve this problem." And I love this, and of course links to these projects will be in the show notes.
[JM]: All right, everyone, thank you for listening.
[JM]: That's all for this episode.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com.
[JM]: And you can find Dan on the web at danj.ca.
[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.