Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 4

“The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed”

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally

> In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels.

“The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly”

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

> Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform.

Interim note 3: text-based media in the age of showmanship: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2024/interim-3/

I've been keeping an eye on job notices over the past few years, despite not actively looking, and my impression is that there are actually fewer remote jobs available these days than before COVID?

(Also, no web dev jobs in Iceland that don't require React, but that was a given, TBH.)

And speaking as somebody who had a go once at trying to figure out docx from specs, docs, and existing code examples for a work project before going “nuh huh”, what these projects—like mammoth—do is bloody hard work.

Is it petty to be annoyed at all of the “Microsoft released a docx to markdown tool” statements when the tool itself is mostly a wrapper for pre-existing tools they had nothing to do with—many of which had to put in a lot of effort to figure out Microsoft’s garbage office formats with all too little documentation and help?

Asking, uh, for a friend.

Though I have to say that the likely reason for why they don’t just say “just use pandoc” which has highly capable docx to markdown conversion features is that they wanted a python tool because the “AI” ecosystem is largely python.

That is, they aren’t embracing open formats. They’re embracing “convert everything to text so it can be shoved into an LLM”.

That feeling when you weed through 260 photos and only find six or so you like. The walk was nice though.

@dalias @emma Apologies for not stepping in earlier but time zones

It's important to note here that culture is not a democracy. Culture is defined by what gets made and that's mediated by capital. Mainstream culture is made and controlled by a set of systems controlled by the ruling classes who have always involved themselves in what gets made. E.g. there's genuine demand for things like more female leads or diverse casts, but those movies have always been the exception

@dalias @emma So, what any given group of voters want doesn't really matter except that they're sizeable enough of a group to provide cover that lets the ruling class do what it wants. There is a shift in the ruling classes in the US, but there is also a shift in what the existing ruling class (like studio CEOs) would like to see.

I used "cultural shift" because it describes what's happening without getting into the "why" because that's a much longer and more involved conversation.

Then you have the library book bans which seem to be ongoing in the US. This affects those of us in the West whose media is increasingly dominated by US-based streamers and social media.

The size of this shift becomes a little bit more obvious once you consider that, if you're looking for series made in 2023-4 with LGBTQ leads (not supporting cast), centred on queer themes, iQIYI – the streamer run from mainland China – probably has more series for you than Netflix and Disney Plus combined

One of the points I've been harping on lately is how LGBTQ media is being pushed out of the mainstream and back into counterculture in the states. #SaveQueerStories (https://savequeerstories.carrd.co/) highlights some of the issues when it comes to series – it's starting to look like an outright purge. This post on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/novaecaelum.bsky.social/post/3ldamqzaunf2c) shows how Facebook policies are having a chilling effect on books. There are rumours this is making publishers more hesitant as well.

Looking at all of this, I can't help but worry about the effect this US-oriented cultural shift might have on non-US Western media that is increasingly dependent on American platforms. 😐

And it isn't because iQIYI is a particularly progressive force in the world.

Much of what's tagged LGBTQ on Netflix, for example, is either old, a couple of token series too popular to plausibly cancel (Heartstopper) or made outside of the US, often outside of Netflix's usual production system, even though their funding means they get labelled "Netflix Originals".

And, yeah, building on their APIs explicitly makes them your business partner, albeit one with no guarantees or assurances.

“Rogue Amoeba - Under the Microscope » Blog Archive » The Developers Who Came in From the Cold”

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2024/12/13/the-developers-who-came-in-from-the-cold/

My takeaway from this is that relying on a big tech co like Apple as a business partner is inherently unsafe for a small- to medium-sized software company

Getting spam from Paddle – a payment provider who repeatedly rejected me from their platform because they thought my ebooks looked like scams – about their "groundbreaking" AI Launchpad and inviting me to watch them live-stream AI-oriented "captivating startup pitches" is a special kind of annoying

And if you ever find a manager who is an outright fan of these people: run, don't walk, in the other direction. Do not work for them if you value your mental health.

So, between the Mullenweg/Wordpress, DHH/37 Signals, and Sam Altman/OpenAI dramas, we now have pretty reliable ways for gauging the judgement and critical thinking skills of pretty any given commentator in tech.

Any podcaster or writer who defends these dudes and organisations is almost certain to not be, well, fully using what little capacity for reason nature gave them (to put it politely).

IME, if they show poor judgement on this, they almost always have poor judgement in general

iPad updated to a new OS version and, among so so so many new issues this seems to have introduced, the hardware keyboard can no longer be switched from English to Icelandic.

Apple’s software quality continues its downward spiral. Ugh.