My context is Canada; the problem we have here is that there is a big divide between people who bought their big homes with land 10-20 years ago, and the people in the market right now who can only afford apartments. The issue it twofold; (1) negative comparison against the landowners even though apartment dwellers may have significantly higher incomes / education levels, and (2) political divides; the landowners staunchly oppose the zoning and transit changes that might make life better for apartment dwellers.

Getting used to living in an apartment is a smaller issue in my opinion.

How many musicians make their living off of recorded music anymore?

How many did before... my bet is an insignificant number. The vast majority of musicians work day jobs to support their art. The ones that do make money make it mostly from performances. Making money from recordings only was always a small niche.

The real question is how many make a living now vs when music piracy was at it's highest.

My guess is it's higher.

Implication being that piracy reduced the amount of people who could make a living off music? Another explanation is that simply more people are making music. I suspect the actual percentage of musicians who can make a living is the same as ever though.

The Napster era was the period when I bought the most CDs, by a large margin.

It was new+exciting, I was discovering lots of new music. But at that point, casual piracy over slow connections (low-bitrate often-poorly-encoded MP3s) wasn't quite good enough to replace real CDs. And back then, MP3 was still a 'nerdy computer thing' and CD players were everywhere - and by far the most convenient way to play music on a proper hi-fi, in a car, etc.

But these days, there isn't really the same upgrade path from a lower-quality pirated copy to an authentic copy. Especially with TV/movies, now tied to subscription services and encumbered by increasing levels of ads.

We need a rule on this website to ban comments like these. It’s unfalsifiable and therefore worthless.

What if you want to be a better problem solver (in the tech domain)? Where should you focus your efforts? That's what is confusing to me. There is a massive war between the LLM optimists and pessimists. Whenever I personally use LLM tools, they are disappointing albeit still useful. The optimists tell me I should be learning how to prompt better, that I should be spending time learning about agentic patterns. The pessimists tell me that I should be focusing on fundamentals.

The authors and publishers are getting paid by the library for the physical book borrowed, which endures wear and tear and must ultimately be replaced. Not sure how licensing for digital books work with libraries - all the library systems I've used have a cap on the number of digital books that can be lent out.

I have ADHD bro

> The dumbest thing a smart person can do is work on AI for a company he doesn't own

Is this not all employment? I am also creating software that I will not own or reap the continued benefits from. When I was working for a coffee shop, I was helping establish that shop’s brand to which I did not own.

Current LLMs are way better at understanding language than the old voice assistants.

Remote workers, especially if they’re in a different time zone, are likely not going to be as effective as onshore in-person workers.

My ADHD diagnosis entirely changed my life. It gave me the tools to stop blaming myself every single day.

Even if I didn’t get the chance to take meds I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.