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I wish I didn't feel so disillusioned with the tech industry. I grew up in this rapidly developing world of personal computing and have watched things go from fun to sour as creative innovation became innovation to kill creativity. I love computers, I love software and programming. I love the sciences and theory. But while I was chasing that interest in school I found myself subjected to the types of people who did not share that love and instead only saw the value in startup culture, crypto and AI. In the 6-7 years of my time in and out of post-secondary education I watched things go from "We could make a really powerful web platform with a user accessible API" to "What if crypto" to "What if machine learning but instead of medical science we apply it to the humanities?" Because if it isn't marketable then it isn't worth it.

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I love how this looks but I get the distinct impression it felt terrible to use.

To its credit, this thing is almost palm sized, so you could probably 2-hand the keyboard effectively qnd support the back when tapping with the stylus, but it still seems like it's more form than function.

I am pretty in love with that UI though, and the reversible camera is amazing. I think I might need one of these.

Sony Clié PEG-UX50 // personal digital assistant (Japan, 2003)

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Moving Away From Spotify (Part 2)

The objective of this post has changed a bit since I posted Part 1 about 2 months ago. While I was originally concerned with the moral/ethical issues that plague Spotify, moving away from it has proven a more difficult task than anticipated.

Previously, I went over why Spotify has taken a turn for the worse, and how streaming/digital music royalties work. These posts were a part of a longer task of actually moving my roughly 6000 track library of saved music away from Spotify and to another platform that better aligned with practices that reward artists for their work and aim to connect them with listeners. This time, I want to talk a bit about what alternatives exist and what sets them apart.

Fair warning, this is going to feel a bit like reading that giant blurb about the baker's struggles with childhood trauma before you actually get to a recipe. But, I'm hoping that my experiences might help someone else make a decision as well.

First, I need to acknowledge that for all of Spotify's flaws, I cannot deny that they are still the best in the space for accessibility. You can publish on Spotify from anywhere, with almost no barrier to entry, and anyone can listen without paying a thing from any platform they choose. I think this strength, though eroding, is still present and the overall experience still makes for strong competition against others.

This has become especially apparent even when using services from members of the industry that have held a firm grasp on digital music sales/streaming for about as long as it's been possible. But, let's get on with the alternatives that exist and their general strengths.

This is a short-list. You can refer to Wikipedia if you want to get overwhelmed. I'm also focused on English-first services because that's what's relevant to me. These services may not be suitable for content published in countries outside of Canada/USA.

How to Choose

In order to qualify for consideration I had some basic criteria:

Pays artists a fair wage per thousand streams (I consider $10 USD the minimum for this)

Accessible between devices and platforms

Minimal use of AI (AI is not a replacement for curated recommendation algorithms)

Ease of migration (Provides a tool or third-party service to import Spotify library)

These requirements may not seem like much but the first two really narrow down the search. I also had some nice-to-haves such as:

Lossless/HQ Audio

Lyrics

Qualifying Options

That more or less left me with the following options:

Apple Music

Qobuz

Tidal

Oh...well that's not much is it. Hm. And what's a Qobuz?? We'll come back to that. Technically Amazon music also qualified for the list too, as it barely breaks the $/stream threshold but I have plenty of other moral qualms with Amazon to want to pay them for...anything really. Especially not a service I plan to use long-term.

Apple Music

Easily the biggest competitor, it feels natural that Apple would have a robust streaming platform with a massive library. They're responsible for the mass demand for MP3 players and in the wake of Napster's demise they capitalized on the demand for easy access to digital music through iTunes. So why in the hell does Apple Music suck so fucking bad?

On paper this service should be excellent. I'm actually using it right now, listening to Madde's "Non-Photo Blue" while I write this. It's got:

A massive library

Well received tools for transferring playlists

Integrates with existing iTunes media

Has similar discovery tools

Supports lossless playback

Synced lyrics

But right away I learned only iOS users get the privilege of easily migrating their music. An app called "Playlisty" is available for a one-time $4 purchase. To the app's credit, it does a great job and there were only about 300 songs that didn't make it over. Unfortunately this app isn't available for Android, nor as a web-based service. It almost certainly could be, but if the devs asked themselves "Who would bother if they're not already an Apple user?", they were probably right to do so.

The Android app is decent, but the web player is abysmal. The native app for Windows sucks, so you pretty much have to use iTunes, except be sure to uninstall Apple Music or Apple TV first otherwise you're not going to be able to use the music features of iTunes. Why? Because Apple says so. Even then, you need to make sure iTunes is set to "Direct Sound" for its output otherwise any kind of lossless playback skips like a DiscMan out for a jog.

With that out of the way, I still have my problem of Linux playback. I'm only able to use the web version of Apple Music here, and Apple hasn't put any time into making lossless audio work, so one of its strongest features falls off a cliff. The web app also lags like hell on first play, and none of the available applications support casting. As a bonus, there's no synced playback, so you're not going to be able to pause from your phone if you have something playing on a computer or TV that isn't a Mac or AirPlay enabled. Spotify put a lot of time into making things seamless in a way that feels like it should be Apple's bread and butter but instead they've taken the 8 years of development time Apple Music has had to improve and not thought to address this.

Did I mention the Apple Music app for my TV also isn't available in Canada but I had to go through the trouble of downloading it and signing in twice before it wanted to tell me that? What an absolute mess. AirPlay works fine though.

Okay, so maybe Apple Music isn't for me.

Qobuz

Pronounced "Ko-buzz", this is a French streaming app you probably haven't heard of. It's also a pretty massive music store offering DRM-free, lossless quality music through what feels like nearly every label under the sun. Their library might not be as big, but they're certainly a compelling option if it works even slightly better than Apple Music.

Qobuz has a few selling points:

Averages $18 per 1000 streams

Uses Soundiiz to facilitate the transfer of playlists for free

Lossless audio works in-browser

Easy to access "Buy" option next to every album/track

Request system for missing music

No lyrics

Immediately, there are some downsides. Soundiiz only caught about 4/5 of my music library. On the upside, they provide an export of the whole transfer and you can pretty easily figure out what didn't match. It also got a bit confused about some tracks and seems to have substituted in tracks I never had saved. This hasn't been a major issue though.

Qobuz playback is snappy, it sounds good and there's no reliance on an app to handle DRM. Similar to Apple Music though, there's no real way to cast to my TV without an iOS device to provide AirPlay options, as Roku doesn't support Google Cast. It also doesn't support synced playback between the web player and local devices, but it does seem to know when you're using it on another device so I have to think that's in the pipeline. For now though, unless you're casting, there's no way to pause from another device.

I will say that Qobuz at least feels like the people developing are people who love music, and want to share it with others. This platform doesn't have a free tier, it's entirely driven by subscriptions and as a result maybe there just isn't that same kind of monetization culture that relies on ads. It also features some more unique features like the ability to explore entire catalogues from labels, solving a long-standing issue I've had with Spotify and trying to listen to Monstercat releases.

Overall, this has been a pretty pleasant experience and has had the least friction. Things I can and can't do are clearly communicated, and the open ability to report music that isn't available is something I'll certainly exercise. There is a lack of discovery tools outside of basic "Here's songs for people who have never heard music before" type exploration playlists.

Tidal

Tidal's an odd one. It's been around for more than a decade, but has seen some pretty slow growth. Originally an "Audiophile" grade streaming service, it was a small library and far more expensive, facing scrutiny for some rocky decisions. Now, prices have come down and they seem to be leveraging label partnerships to market to DJs and pop-heads.

I actually had some help from a friend for this one. I had more or less already ruled this one out for myself since it couldn't capture even half of my music library, but Tidal's always generally had a greater focus on pop/r&b, which aren't my typical listening categories. The following is his experience.

Tidal's selling points:

HiRes/FLAC audio (Lossless)

Average $12 per 1000 streams

Partnered with TuneMyMusic for playlist transfer

And that's about it.

My friend's library is about 1200 songs, most fitting into the library of music Tidal offers, so there weren't many missed tracks. There was some fiddling about, because apparently TuneMyMusic does also like to add duplicates when it's unsure about song versions. It may also add entire albums if the song name matches an album name. A clean and re-import did seem to fix this though. Overall, it seems like a similar experience to Qobuz, with lossless available in app or browser.

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TL;DR: I think I've settled on Qobuz. While it missed a good chunk of my library, it'd be hard to match everything. A lot of it was also content self-published, or isn't available regionally anymore either. Sometimes it is Spotify exclusive, but it's usually available on Bandcamp too if I was interested in buying it. It has enough features and is broadly compatible enough with all the things I use. My TV is the only shortfall, but I was due to get a receiver for that anyways.

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I think this is why I like the old Windows loading bars too, pre Aero theme. These block-style loads are far more satisfying to watch

Vista and 7 onwards just aren't as tactile

you ever suddenly start going insane about some completely innocuous shit

ok so these little radial loading animations right. you know these

theyre called throbbers or whatever. it sounds like some penis shit but thats besides the point. its charming right? each blip on it lights up in order so it gives the appearance of a shape going around. its fun! it gets the feeling of loading across in a fun way

but NOWADAYS people keep using THESE ones

sorry its not perfectly looping i stole this from mtg arena cause thats the one that got me so annoyed. but like you see the difference right. theres no individual notches lighting up in sequence to make a cool effect. its just a png that they set to rotate and thats it. and that SUCKS right? its trying to capture the same feeling but in a lazy and way less charming way. its dumb. look at it. no swag at all. yall get me????? i cant be the only one annoyed by this trend

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This is a good chunk of everything that gets reported as phishing from our AP/AR inboxes. Sometimes it's impressive, other times it's lazy as hell.

The best defence is diligence. Check the trail, look for specifics. Usually these invoices are nonsense bills for services another department would typically handle.

* Are the services labelled generically? Good chance it's just a "consulting" fee

* Is anyone else included in the email chain from within the company? C-Level expenses are usually subject to multiple approvals/oversight.

Good chance the thread will also be missing internal email signatures, links or styles that would typically be present to avoid setting off spam/malware filters.

Are you allowed to talk ab the $50k thing? That sounds v interesting actually

Sure! One thing I learned in accounting school is there's a million ways to commit fraud. The $50K from today used a classic fraud technique. They submitted an invoice to our accounts payable department. We asked them to provide banking and tax documents as a new vendor. They gave us bogus documents (with real bank accounts) and we passed their invoice on for approval. The approver, the CEO in this case, doesn't approve the invoice because he has no idea what it is. This is when we notice that the email string contains several fake emails between the CEO and the scammer. We can tell they're fake by the formatting and incorrect email addresses. So this nut job submits a $54K invoice out of nowhere with a fake email string and bullshits his way to the brink of payment before anyone caught on. Happened at my last job right before I started working there and the guy got away with $6,000,000. Like the FBI was involved it was crazy.

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Man, what even is the Dreamcast? This thing is practically a home computer, but it was only ever marketed that way in Japan. It's actually incredible what it's capable of.

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How do streaming royalties work?

I've probably re-written this a few times now, because writing this post has been a pretty deep dive into streaming royalties and how platforms handle them. Anyways, in this way too fucking long subsection of a 3 part series, here's that. Original post here: https://gregrambles.tumblr.com/774783005911891968/

Before diving into what services pay artists best, it's a good idea to take a look at how royalties work in general. Spotify prides itself on being an easy place to self-publish, but not all artists choose to do that, and there's a lot of different ways royalties get paid out when streaming/buying music. This is important because pay per stream isn't the only thing that matters.

There's more or less three methods:

Direct to artist

Direct to label

Subscriptions

I'd like to acknowledge that the last one is more a sum of the first two parts, but I think it has its own problems as a result that should be discussed.

Direct to Artist

This is the most straightforward option. Whether streaming or buying, the idea is simple. You're paying the artist directly. Typically, payment processors and streaming services will charge a fee (15-30%) of the price or stream value, and the rest goes to the artist.

Direct to Label

For artists who don't self publish, or are signed with a label for distribution/marketing of their work, the money goes to the label instead. The service takes their cut, and this may be non-standard depending on how the label has negotiated their catalogue's availability. The label then takes their contractually agreed upon portion, and the artists gets the remaining revenue.

Subscriptions

The previous payment methods dealt with percentages, which make more sense when there's a general standard cost you can compare that percentage to. $12 for an album is an easy calculation. $12 a month for however many songs is not. Those percentages remain the same, but the value of your subscription doesn't.

Depending on who you are, what you're paying for and how you're paying, your subscription may be worth more or less than someone else's. If you're a student, on a reduced plan, listen with ads, bundle in audiobooks, stream white noise, etc. then the value of your listen may be controlled somewhat arbitrarily by the service you're paying. It's more likely your stream earns an artist in the realm of half a cent, potentially less.

Additionally, whether it's 1000 streams or $40, many services may attempt to prevent direct and immediate payouts of royalties or payments due to high regional bank fees or a cost to the service itself, effectively requiring them to pay more than the value of the stream in overhead for getting that royalty to an artist.

Wait why does this matter?

I think there's a lot of disinformation about how these services work, and a lot of obfuscation about where your money actually goes when you pay a service for the ability to listen to a seemingly endless number of songs. It's one of the reasons I'll always be an advocate for paying for music you like in a way that pays the artist as directly as possible.

Author's Note: I usually like to link sources for my posts like this. The reality is, I've grossly simplified an industry that's spent decades making its payment to artists as unfair as possible. As a result, this is more a summary than any kind of academic representation of the common payment models. I haven't even touched on master rights, MCLs, copywright holders and how labels can continue to earn on songs while an artist doesn't. I am also primarily focusing on North American distribution, because that's the information I readily have access to. I don't claim to be an authority, but I do want to help provide clarity for other people like me who are hoping to demystify some of this stuff. For deeper reading, I recommend Billboard's article here: https://archive.is/HO5Ma And this has been a broadly informative article too, that really set me on the path to digging deeper: https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-explained

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Outline has since perished. But archive.is is your friend.

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Sorry I was going to follow up pretty quick with that second part of the post, but wow I'm deep in the weeds of how royalties work for streaming music. I'm not even sure what's real anymore.

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Moving away from Spotify

Be aware, this is a three part post. The first is about my own frustrations, how I think Spotify can do better, and why they probably won't. Two and three focus on alternatives, legal and otherwise.

Generally speaking. I like Spotify - the service, not the company - but the company is unfortunately bundled into that experience. Their business practices since 2023 have been disheartening to say the least. I'm sure that there has been sooner signs than mass layoffs, including the layoffs of the team that helped designed the API and algorithms that made their service so much better for taste recommendations, but that was where I started to see things turn sour for my music listening habits.

You could probably track this back to Joe Rogan's insanely expensive exclusive contract for moving his podcast to Spotify when they were starting to expand into the podcast space, or the writing on the wall when they introduced that god-awful AI DJ hosted radio station that says the same three things every 6 songs and somehow manages to be less engaging than your hometown's Ryan Seacrest clone. But for me, I started paying attention when the passionate creator of Everynoise.com, Glenn McDonald, was let go.

If you're not familiar with Glenn's work, I highly recommend popping over to the website linked above and clicking around while Spotify still allows it to function. It's a fantastic display of what Glenn and the team he worked with built during their time at Spotify that forms this beautiful gradient of genres, most you've definitely never heard of. You can also read his blog where he posts insightful anti-corporate tech articles about music, your data and more.

Since then, they've been actively working against artists and customers on the platform, relying on AI generated playlists to fill what used to be a good discovery system for new music, alongside 2024 changes that split royalty payouts between audiobooks and musicians, resulting in a reduction in overall $/per stream. Most recently, Spotify has turned to withholding royalties from artists who receive less than 1000 streams in a 12-month period.

This last change affects more than 80% of all music on the platform.

Now, on the last topic, I'd like to acknowledge there's a very real reason for this change even if I don't think it's the right direction. As beneficial as streaming has been for self-published artists that would have previously had no means to get their music out on a world stage, there are those who would abuse the system for their own gain. In Spotify's blog post discussing the threshold changes, they discuss this.

You might not feel like you have much reason to trust the company who benefits by reducing how much they need to pay out, but artificial streaming, AI generated music and noise playlists have been a large problem as less ethical individuals have realised that simply uploading a large volume of songs or generating looping playlists of 30 second tracks can be an easy way to farm payouts in a way that directly harms real artists on the platform. You can lump this kind of fraud in with ad fraud, generating falsified listens or clicks on tracks so as to simulate large numbers of real accounts, or just capitalizing off of someone's sleep playlist. There's even botting services that you can pay for to boost streams.

It just so happened to be a win-win for Spotify in that they could chop back payouts to real artists while also making it much harder for fraudsters and grifters to create an easy paycheque for themselves. This also came with a reclassification of the more problematic, long-play categories of music like ambience and noise. Overall, I'd be willing to bet that alone solved most of the problems.

Instead, an artist could release an album, have a hit but then maybe the rest of the album doesn't get picked up by the algorithm and some songs don't cross that 1000 listen threshold, and as such nothing is earned from them. And they really do mean, nothing is earned. Those 1000 plays earn nothing. Even if you cross the threshold, it doesn't start generating royalties until then (per Spotify's own language in their blog post).

Overall, I am an advocate for paying for music. I think musicians deserve their due. Even if those 1000 streams only add up to roughly $3 USD in lost royalties, that's still $3 people paid to listen to that music that the artists never see. That's money the artists deserve to receive. Even something like Apple's payout threshold is a better option here, because at least the money still comes in.

The music industry has shifted substantially, with concerts becoming inaccessible, expensive and predatory (*cough* ticketmaster *cough*). Streaming is part of why this has become the biggest avenue for artists to get paid. It's also why I buy albums, I buy merchandise and why (when I can afford it) I do go to concerts. I almost always have music playing, and the people who make that music should be paid for their place in my life. So who's actually paying artists best then?

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Windows 7

Windows 7 is the next release of Microsoft Windows, an operating system produced by Microsoft.

Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade with the goal of being fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware

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It's important to add that DeepSeek, while still an impressive development in terms of training time, has been heavily misrepresented in terms of their "underdog" performance. The repeated claim is that they spent only $6M and a couple thousand GPUs to get it there. The reality is

1. These GPUs are Nvidia's "Hopper" cards and they cost the price of a car.

2. They haven't performed less research or development time either. Recent reports estimate that DeepSeek has a fleet of 50,000 of these GPUs and has spent more than $1.6B in establishing that development alone.

Maybe the model is better, maybe it uses less power overall. Disruption and competition is good, but something fishy is going on here in terms of a marketing campaign. This bubble hasn't popped. No business is going bust because of this, as at the end of the day Nvidia is still experiencing immense demand for their hardware. If anything, a model like DeepSeek allows for private organizations to more effectively establish their own datacenters built off their own data.

ChatGPT's bubble has burst a bit. Not AI's.

this webbed site is full of AI haters and i have STILL heard nothing about deepseek popping the AI bubble over here

where are yall? i wanna see the excitement

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When I was little I had an irrational fear of when you tried to turn off your Windows XP and the screen would gradually turn Grey as you choose which power option to enter

That shit was SCARY!!!

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What are you talking about? That's clearly a professional piece of software. A company paid good money to a project manager to bend their development team over backwards to meet the exact requirements, security and sensibility be damned.

just encountered a java webstart application which downloads the main application. the catch is that every downloaded version is unique to each user because of baked-in credentials

so fucked up

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Do you one better:

Running the command

> winget install Mozilla.Firefox

Will auto download and install Firefox via the winget package manager included in Windows 10 and 11. No need for curl at all.

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Would love to know more about this company and other products produced. These were apparently equipped with an Intel 80186 and 256KB of RAM. The concept is neat, since it's a fairly basic server-client model with those space-age looking terminals connecting to the server directly by serial connections.

It would have been amazing to be able to sit down at a bank of these things and ponder the orb. Those keyboards also look wild.

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Why is there still so much email spam?

Over the last few months, I’ve received an absurd amount of spam through an email account I’ve maintained since I was a child. I’m sure this is just the result of my email being recycled into the hottest new credential dump on that dark web, but it doesn’t stop the fact that this has been a pain for me to sift through for emails that do actually matter.

Now, this an old Hotmail account, so it is what it is and I don’t expect any particularly special spam protection, but I am somewhat dumbfounded by how little protection there actually is. This spam isn’t clever, it’s not even good. It’s mostly random offers for “free gifts” targeted towards Americans who shop at large American businesses like Costco, Walmart, Marriott Hotels, etc. What it does do though, is make hard to discern emails of actual concern from ones that don’t matter. It could make it difficult for me to see a real alert about an account breach, purchases made to some kind of credit card, or some other malicious activity related to an internet service I use.

I don’t believe that anything was in active danger, but it did leave me thinking about how annoyed I generally am by the structure of email, and how lackluster the tools are to prevent this sort of attack. In my case, most of these emails had no actual sending address. This meant I could use a somewhat hacky workaround via Outlook’s limited rule creation tools to deny emails without content in that field from actually landing in my inbox. But why did it require my intervention to do this? Why doesn’t Outlook automatically deny emails that have incomplete sender information by default?

A brief look at SMTP

SMTP was developed as a close analogue to real mail. As a result, there’s two main requirements: a letter, and an envelope. The “letter” in this context is just the information displayed to you by your email client. Generally, it consists of the following:

A “From” field

A “To” address

The “Subject” line

The content of the email itself

That sounds sensible, right? Well, it would if there weren’t a couple of oversights. See, the “From” field, doesn’t actually need to be a valid email address. That can be whatever you want. Seeing as it’s an analogue to real mail, it’s the envelope that contains all the real information the server uses to direct the mail to its recipient. Its contents look more like this:

Sending address (and return-path)

Receiving address

This is what actually determines the sending address. It’s placed on the envelope and doesn’t have a defined format, nor does it need to match the “From” field, so providing nothing is perfectly acceptable. A return path is required, but it’s more akin to providing the address of the post office that sent the mail rather than exactly who to send it back to.

In traditional snail mail, this works fine because it’s quite difficult to mass-mail letters without some kind of industrial printing press and the cost to send each letter is generally prohibitive. On a computer however…well, there’s no cost, and you only need to write your letter once to send it to a million people as many times as you like. That said, there are legitimate reasons not to have a sending address. If sending on behalf of someone else, the sending address may not necessarily match the “From” field, or a system/service may need to send emails somewhere despite not being able to reply. Even so, I don’t believe there’s a reason to leave that field blank when dealing with internet mailing addresses, even if nothing can be received at it.

Why isn’t this a solved problem?

It is! Sort of. We can’t change SMTP itself as there’s simply too much infrastructure that relies on it and overall, it’s not actually a bad protocol for its intended purpose. Instead, much like an ogre, modern email has layers. These layers add security without disrupting the functionality of the original design, still allowing for SMTP to operate as it did more than 40 years ago.

Spam prevention is a core element of much of this design and the following security layers have been added over the last decade:

SPF Records - A way to check that the envelope was sent by the server in the return path

DKIM - A signature added to the email to verify that it was sent by the address in the “from” field

DMARC - The set of rules on how to handle emails that fail one or both of the prior checks

SPF is a bit like a postage stamp. You know it was sent via an actual postal service rather than someone just stuffing it in your mailbox. Unfortunately SPF easily faked (see here) but still provides a good baseline when used in conjunction with DKIM. The trouble is that without DMARC, SPF and DKIM are just additional information.

DMARC is a co-operative check between the recipient email server and the owner of the sending address that allows receiving mail servers to check back with the supposed “sender” domain on how to handle emails that fail either DKIM or SPF checks.

Of course none of this helps when your email provider simply doesn’t care about DMARC at all. When I said it was “co-operative”, I meant it. A system can do all the work it wants setting up records to instruct recipients on how to tackle unapproved senders, but it all goes to waste if the receiver doesn’t perform the checks it needs to, or simply passes along emails from domains with no configured DMARC records.

I like email. It’s one of those bastions of the internet that make it possible to connect with people no matter where or when they are. It’s worth protecting the ease of use it provides, while bolstering the infrastructure around it to make it more difficult for malicious actors to do with as they please. Your email address is important, and it should be treated as such. As someone who works in a technical field, I get a very direct look at how things like DMARC and DKIM are effective when applied properly. Yet these tools are just not accessible to regular users of email services the same way as they’re accessible to businesses and large organizations and I think that’s inexcusable when so much of our life revolves around it.

If you’re a domain owner, make a DMARC record, even if you don’t serve email through it. Make sure the rule is strict. It’ll help prevent anyone from impersonating your domain for those email providers that perform checks. If you’re an email host, please obey those DMARC records. It helps keep your users happy, and it keeps them safe from malicious actors. Maybe I’ll throw together a follow-up in which I test some basic email providers and see what their free services do and don’t validate against for fun, so stay tuned for that.