The stories around how music is made is a very under-considered aspect of the listening experience. Oftentimes those stories are not strictly true, but contain a kernel of truth, and it's the most compelling version of the story that ends up sticking.
How often do you listen to a song and think of these stories in your head? When you listen to the Beatles are you seeing Paul McCartney singing? I think for many people the answer is yes. These things (the story and the music itself) become connected and the story provides the context within which many people enjoy the music.
I'll admit this is a bit disappointing. I'd like to think that any piece could stand up on its on merits without some lore being required to appreciate it. But I have relented to the idea that this is just a very human thing. We do it with everything as it's just the way most of us are wired.
Your take does not reflect the reality on the ground. The Chinese models are censored on a narrow range of political topics which have nothing to do with my work. The weights are open and they can be uncensored/abliterated with little effort.
I have 0 sympathy for Anthropic. Their latest models are extremely censored. The Fable rollout was horrible. Their Cyber Access program criteria denies doxxed Americans doing legitimate security work. Anthropic is hostile to their users and hostile to their own country. OpenAI is considerably better on all of these fronts, but still not perfect.
I'm happy to use and support Chinese model developers if it means less censorship and gatekeeping. I have absolutely no dog in this fight, and neither do most American developers. We will use whatever is cheaper and better. Game on.
I understand the problem you're trying to solve. Have you looked into configuring permissions for harnesses like Claude Code? I believe achieving what you want is possible with something like `.claude/settings.json` via something like:
This looks interesting. I thought I would leave this feedback incase it's helpful. There is not enough information about what the experience is like to convince me to sign up. You might consider letting players play around a bit without signing up first.
One thing that occurs to me about music which makes it different from software or film is that it's a very impulsive art form. A human with semi-modern equipment can write, produce, mix, and master a song in less than a day. They can do this in a way that gives them full creative control over the thousands of tiny conscious and unconscious decisions that ultimately feed into what it is you like (but are probably unable to accurately articulate with words) about a song.
In this case, it's difficult for me to see what exactly is gained by offloading all of those decisions to a mean regression algorithm. I agree it's a fun toy, but I can't imagine actually listening to or deeply enjoying any song made with these music models.
I could imagine it being used successfully in some targeted part of the process. For example, manipulating drums or changing the timbre of some previously recorded instrument. In that case it's not much different than traditional music creation tools like sampling.
I guess Opus makes it impossible to do anything vaguely resembling security research. By chance I stumbled into an ACE for some software I had installed on my local machine after observing a strange crash. I figured I would take the time to investigate (so as to actually deeply understand what was happening myself and avoid throwing yet another hallucinated slop disclosure over the fence if it came to that), but I was completely locked out by Opus. I tried applying to their "Cyber Verification Program", but was effectively instantly denied in a way that was probably automated.
While I understand the risks that Anthropic is dealing with here, I really question whether shutting down any and all security questions in such a paranoid fashion is the right solution. At the end of the day this was a detour for me. Maybe someone special enough to have Anthropic's permission will find and disclose the vuln responsibly. Security Research is not my full-time focus. But this left a nasty taste in my mouth. Not just as a customer who's been paying for Max since launch, but there's something very odd about a model telling me that I'm not allowed to be curious about something. Even if that something is a process running on my own computer.
To add more context to what I believe the parent commenter was referring to, the vast majority of USD stablecoins are custodial, meaning the funds can be frozen arbitrarily at any time by the custodian (i.e. Circle).
This is why when cyberthreat actors steal millions in USD stablecoins by hacking a protocol or a large wallet, the very first thing they do is convert those stablecoins to something else.
I do this too. It's not for everyone. At this point it's easily been positive ROI for me, but that's after about two years now of maintaining my configs through multiple machines and MacOS upgrades.
I would recommend it only if this type of thing naturally interests you. I can't imagine powering through the initial learning curve if it felt like a frustrating chore.
That said, if having (most of) your machine defined declaratively in a git repository sounds exciting/useful/comfy, then I would encourage you to give it a try. You can start small by just configuring a few programs or options and see how you like it.
This is a great list. Even the first line item would be amazing. I'm really feeling this pain presently as I am moving my setup to a new dedicated machine.
Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.
Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.
If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.
I agree that "the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other". The question is will they be able to successfully find each other, and how can they be sure they have?
The author recommends using "Do Not Track", but this has been deprecated for some time. Safari and Firefox have both removed the option completely. Perhaps the author meant GPC?
For all of the security suggestions in this article I was also surprised to see the author recommending ungoogle-chromium, which has a number of security issues. See: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
The primary issue I take with the article is the chosen tone. I think there are ways that these points could have been made without being overly cynical and negative. I think speaking authoritatively throughout the article has the effect of equating the importance of subjective preferences (like the choice of which terminal emulator to include), with legitimate security concerns (bash shortcomings, migrations, firewall misconfiguration, piping curl | sh to install software).
I wouldn't use Omarchy, but I am glad it exists. It's bringing more people into the desktop Linux ecosystem, which should be positive sum. Omarchy comes off to me as a little hacky and immature, but at this stage that seems.. mostly fine? Perhaps they should be more clear about that in their marketing, but I understand the goals and I admire the enthusiasm from DHH.
I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.
Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.
I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.