Technology

which I hate.... especially the "shorts"....

tween daughter has adhd, easily falls into tiktok brainrot hellholes. Has trouble with self-regulation and self-control.... I still want her to have music to listen to and do things (some lofi to study/chill to, etc)... but now, Spotify is yet another vector for distraction that consumes her.

People be like "parent's should take responsibility for their kids"... I'm like "mf, I'm trying, but every app in the world is trying to be social media" And the parental controls they offer are shiiiiiiiit. Because it's not in a companies best interest to provide parents with tools to limit features.

I switched to Qobuz. They use https://soundiiz.com/ to migrate, I think it was free transfering to them?

I think it reported a 90% success rate + a few that it picked, but got wrong. It mostly failed on my instrumental stuff, standard stuff was fine.

I've been a happy Tidal user for years fwiw. The app is great as is music availability and discovery. I went back to Spotify for a while because I was missing its discovery features like discover weekly, but Tidal has greatly improved since then, and now features a daily discovery playlist (10 tracks, which I greatly prefer to Spotify's weekly 30), plus 8 custom mixes based on genres you listen to. Track radio is also solid.

Also, it's maybe the only subscription service that instead of creating new tiers, merged the two it had before into one, keeping the upper tier's features at the lower one's cost

I am testing Deezer at the moment. To import playlists and songs, they advertise this 3rd party service, which worked for me.

But spotify is easy and fast,

So you mean it's convenient. That's a valid reason. Evil shit aside, that's literally why music streaming exploded the way it did.

Unfortunately, the evil shit is pushing me away. Why can't we just have a regular music streaming service that doesn't inevitably suffer from feature creep and enshittification? Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?

Which they can sell to ~~advertisers~~ LLM and AI companies.

It's not talked about too much, because it is not in the best interest of the stockholders. But AI as it was popularized by openAI and both images and text generators already reached a boundary of data availability. There's no more human made data. They are now resorting to synthetic data, which is to make one first generation LLM model create tons of data to train newer or more tailored weighs models. With the issue that this new models develop problems from inbreeding of the data. Training models on other genAI products poisons the models and corrupts their generative power in just a few generations. This is why genAI images are increasingly turning yellow, the same reason newer models are more fragile and hallucinate or go psychotic more easily than old models. So, the AI companies need new sources of human made data to mix in with the synthetic data.

The main problem is that we ran out, there's no more data made by humans to train AI with. Humans don't create new data fast enough to train all the new models with the new doodads and features the AI companies want to sell. So now these companies will pay anything just to get their hands on new fresh stuff. These is why any app in the planet will now pivot to do anything they can to get chats going. It's a new source of data to sell to data brokers.