The future is very dark where you get a bad charge (it can happen, systems are complex, so I don't want to judge base on that), but you can't fill a ticket or complain to anyone about this.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
oh man, I haven't heard of photobucket in years! A great place for those nostalgics of the old web, especially if you used forums. Photobucket was THE srvice to upload images to post on forums, including the "famous" signatures, gifs, etc.
To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
If they're spending 60B anually then that is bad. Obviously none of us know what their real burn rate is, but revenue is an irrelevant number if you don't have the full picture.
Agree 100% with this and I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
>I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
Artists wanted to "be heard and appreciated" since they started banging rocks together for rhythm and painting on cave walls...
Yeah. People act like it's a sin to want some notice or respect when you've worked and achieved something, like you should be some zen-like creature that is purely intrinsically motivated. It is not wrong to want some notice or respect from your peers once in a while.
Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing.
By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way.
I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depression exactly because of the mismatch between expectations and our current reality.
Because I've been there.
In my early (1999-2001) music "career", so to say, my music somewhat blew the local scene, it was big in clubs, it played on the local radio, people would repeat catchphrases from my tracks when greeting me, I watched them dance to it. I made so many friends around it.
There was an immense motivation to write a track in the morning and listen to it in the evening on a 10 kW sound system among dancing people, under stroboscopes, black light and lasers cutting through fog.
Then our local club movement died out and its remnants were squeezed into small disco-bars with shitty sound, where people came to booze some and pick up dates, not for music.
And the music itself moved to the Internet. I tried to adapt. But oh boy was that a stark contrast!
I played a live gig in a disco-bar and some drunk morons came and asked me to play "something happier".
I watched my tracks never reach more than a hundred listens on the Internet (with a single random exception).
Ok, you might say it's just my music that is not of due quality or novelty, and you might be right. But I saw so many brilliant artists' profiles with such pitiful numbers of listens over such long periods of time that it totally shatters all illusions of getting heard on the Internet.
You either drown in the ocean of low to zero effort content, or you have to market yourself and again drown in the choir of yelling voices trying to shout everyone over, or you bombard labels with your demos to never get any answer, or an answer you get, but it basically states that you're someone's business asset from now on.
Sure, you can still expect your family or friends to listen and appreciate, but you know what? They don't care either, or care in underwhelming ways. And this alone can break your heart beyond all repair.
Still, I was able to glue mine back and go on with my music. And musically and sound engineering-wise, it's now a cut better than my "popular" and "appreciated" music from my club era. But only me and literally 3 friends of mine know that.
That's what made me a zen(ish) creature and write my original comment above.
Thanks for expanding on your story, it means a lot to hear from people with experience.
I've received a lot of thoughtful responses and am a little embarrassed because I'm probably looking in all the wrong places in my search for identity or joy or meaning. My life kind of fell apart in the last few years, first the career, then the relationship, then my sense of self as I realized all I've ever done were coping mechanisms. At this point, I'm essentially looking for a reason to live, and that places a heavier burden on anything I try than is reasonable.
Just don't give up, Gecko. The night is darkest before the dawn..
Sometimes one needs to let go (sounds beaten and banal, I know). In my case, I had to let go of my image as a musician. I didn't touch music at all for a few years. Then I started writing it again, as I please, without following any dogmas, never aiming to release it. And I grew fond of it, while before I mostly cared for how others would estimate it.
Just live aimlessly for some time. Find solace in nature, biking, hiking, watching the clouds, whatever keeps you afloat! The purpose will find you.
P.S. And by all means learn a DAW or a physical instrument!
Thanks for writing this. For the record, I wasn't responding to your original comment, which I agreed with. And I agree with and empathize with what you're saying here too - it sounds like you've had an interesting relationship with creating and have a lot of perspective on it, good and bad. Although if you were advocating to get rid of human nature in a transhumanist way, I would understand that to some extent - it's at least a solution. :)
I probably should have provided more context, but it's all rather off topic.
However, I guess my life is strange enough so that people made assumptions around my original statements that don't reflect my meaning.
Quite frankly, I'm friendless and have very low self esteem and have felt "not good enough" for most of my life.
I remember building Lego starships with a friend a long time ago, and I felt that on a fundamental level, nothing I could ever make would match what he could build. It was like a law of nature that I'm flawed in that way.
Any new interest that came into life also came from friends. Nothing ever originated with me, I didn't have the confidence for that. Having others to collaborate with automatically validates what I do, in a way.
It's possible I simply never learned how to self validate activities.
My need for validation is a very childlike one, it's rooted in emotional neglect. I remember my mom praising other people but never finding praise within our family. One of many things that planted seeds of this sense of fundamental inferiority. Then life solidified that in various ways.
I resonate with a bunch of this. The idea that what I make is somehow not as good as the “real” version of whatever it is (where “real” is hard to define, but roughly just, always better than what I made).
You mention the emotional neglect and the connection to childhood, and I get the sense you’re interested in figuring it out. It made me think you might like Joe Hudson’s work on YouTube.
I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.
My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.
For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.
I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.
There is also the legitimate view that a concert is a physical, ephemeral experience shared by the people in the room on the night. That is it fleeting is part of its beauty, in the same manner as live theater.
Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I could understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for some artists.
I think it's a little more nuanced than "bands/producers don't care" and a bit more complex than "exporting the audio (that already exists!)".
Directly exporting the audio straight from the mixer would not necessarily produce quality recordings because the audio there is tuned for the purposes of sound reinforcement. To properly record a live concert requires an entirely separate setup with their own microphones and then some direct output from the mixer on a per channel basis to allow for post-production editing.
And a lot of people don't care about that! Lots of people are happy with the quality you'd get straight from a cell phone microphone.
But the people on stage and the people in the industry ... they're the ones actually involved in producing the sound, and many care very deeply about the quality that gets recorded and then shared. That's not to say that all musicians are like that, but many are!
Sorry if this is not the place to do it. I live in a city that has bat at nights, so if you live above 6th floor and you leave your windows open, there are chances some confused bats go into your apartment.
Even worse, they can go into the blind box of your rollover. After two traumatic events where I had bats going into my apartment (and it took me 5 days/nights where I didnt sleep at all to take them out alive), I put something in the opening of the blind box to avoid them getting into it.
However, I don't feel safe. I wake up in the middle of the night with any sound thinking they are trying to get into.
All this introduction is to ask if there is something that detracts bats going near my window. Maybe some kind of ultrasound (that I could play with some kind of speaker), or odor? I don't know, but I'd like to try something that could make me sleep more relaxed.
I asked about this to people who put meshes but they said the mesh goes into the window (it's mostly for mosquitoes), and the open would be outside the mesh, so it wouldn't cover it. I would be OK but I can't find anyone who would be willing to put the mesh on the outside of the window.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
Some days I think the only solution is what Bombita did in the movie Relatos Salvajes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3IwmM3XLQ
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