There's a little pop-up quiz in the bottom right of this page. "Describe your studio setup" and my mild dyslexia kicked in. I almost clicked the first answer because I initially read it as "just one or two bedrooms full of vintage synths".
First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!
Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.
Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.
If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.
I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.
In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.
I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.
I agree with you about the bits I know anything about, and the rest sounds likely.
It just makes a significant difference when the context is a Show HN and the critical comment is at the top. If it is comment (say) #13 in a varied conversation, that comes across differently. This is more the fault of upvotes, as I mentioned, but it's hard to address those directly.
About 6-7 years ago I bought a machine that prepares single-shot cold brew with ultrasonic cavitation. I like my caffeine potent and chilled, so this has worked out extremely well for me.
When I have a guest that wants a hot coffee, I just pour the shot into a mug and top it up with hot water to their taste, which works great.
What this isn't is anything new. That doesn't make it bad, but it's not novel.
At this point, why would anyone in their right mind respond to this question and paint a target for all manner of negativity ranging from snark to harassment to malicious action?
> target for all manner of negativity ranging from snark to harassment to malicious action
We get get the Borg-esque "resistance is futile" spiel, someone asks for examples. One guy (kinda smugly tbh) points us to his (neat) online course website, claiming that it took him 1 month to rebuild with Claude, ergo GP is right and the non-AI dev is destined to extinction. As WooCommerce didn't end all web development before, he gets some good-natured ribbing.
I find the AI booster dynamic of "you are fool and will get replaced" to "I'm a smoll defenseless bean" kinda puzzling.
That is not a coherent reply to my point, which is that you guys are like school yard bullies to people naive enough to throw chum into the water.
We've seen this play out so many times. Nobody working on anything serious is going to volunteer to be a target for your BS.
I sincerely wish that people would stop falling for the "prove you're not hallucinating" trap. If winning was possible - and it's not - there would be no prize but more snark and harassment.
I didn't say Mr. Johnny was hallucinating, or that he's lying. Was finding the "Written by humans" humorous the most polite comment ever? No, but it is absurd to call it harassment. Specially considering it matched his energy.
His website is cool, and from what I could skim from the content I'm sure his clients are happy and find it worthwhile. I'm not being facetious. He said Claude saved him time, which is true. Regardless of that, I believe he wildly overestimated how much time it would've taken. A website that could be a Wordpress install with plugins isn't technically interesting. It does not validate what @halfmatthalfcat said.
LLMs are capable and impressive. I'm not doubting that, but we do this song and dance [0] each time of grandiose statements and subsequent disappointment. My wariness is not violence against you or anybody.
I specially resent being called a bully for not coaching my language in every possible way. I'm not the avatar of your every forum trauma.
To be clear, you took something that I said generally - and is not just easily defended but obvious - and made it all about you and your comment.
The pattern I'm talking about is easily repeatable. Someone says that they used LLMs to do something, people demand to see proof, and no matter what it is a sockpuppet army arrives on cue to insult and snipe. It doesn't matter if it's total shit or really impressive, it's the kneejerk aspect that makes it unsane to actually take the bait.
Meanwhile, everyone in this thread seems to assume that the website Mr. Johnny was talking about having used LLMs to build quickly was the one linked in his profile. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but the river of snark was flowing before anyone had any confirmation of what they were actually supposed to be shitty about.
That's the tip off that you are a member of a pack of bullies, whether you're consciously aware of it or not. If you were actually offering opinions in good faith, you'd clarify the subject before jumping to snark.
Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.)
The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff.
What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.
They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply.
There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.
Go to a lot of smaller shows, been using DICE for a long time - I think they dominate the smaller venues (in the UK at least). They've made tickets as easy as Amazon made ecom.
Alerts when for when tickets go on sale, (almost one click!) buy for friends and share, bans if you sell over face value, and (for a lot of places) you can return tickets to the pool to resell if you can't go (so there's often last minute waitlist tickets). It's all super smooth and a genuinely delightful experience.
DICE is a great experience, but I hate that they have no option to buy tickets without installing and using their app. It should at least be possible from a website, come on...
Having seen shows with super-premium prices at the front, with half the place being non-reactive to the show because people paying extra are not actually huge fans but huge wallets, yeah you need to put down prices and get those front tickets to fans if you want to have nice shows
> Having seen shows with super-premium prices at the front, with half the place being non-reactive to the show because people paying extra are not actually huge fans but huge wallets, yeah you need to put down prices and get those front tickets to fans if you want to have nice shows
Probably depends on the band. An older "legacy" band like Oasis may not (my speculation) be affected by that, because it will have a lot of wealthy, older fans that both like the band and can pay super-premium prices.
What you talk about probably applies more to newer, hotter bands where the enthusiasm is with younger and/or poorer people.
Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.
And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?
> but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.
Tickets price landscape radically changed in the last 30 years. They incremented between 3x to 5x (or even more) in that lapse of time, depending on the artist and venue, and accrued inflation doesn't explain it (quick search says that in the last 30 years in the Eurozone inflation grew ~85% and in the US ~110%)
Mea culpa: upon waking up and being challenged, I realized that I had conflated the Shannon Hoon story and the [very real] Oasis "piss bomb" story into one.
If I'm really and truly honest, I still remember this happening quite clearly so consider this my own personal Mandela Effect moment.
However, there's an unforgiveable gap between fans throwing urine bottles around and my claim [that I very clearly remember Liam as the brother who pissed on an audience at Molson Park but can't prove it and now look like a dumbass] so I do sincerely apologize.
The em-dash has a fairly specific use. It's just that some people have decided that it indicates AI and can't resist trumpeting that supposed insight at every opportunity.
Not sure why you're downvoted. People have literally been using literally both ways for at at least 25 years by my own observational record.
You know, "I could literally eat a horse." in which it is clearly understood that the speaker is not claiming that they could physically fit a horse inside their stomache.
Except in this case e.g. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon actually did literally piss on the audience, so using the word literally to mean "not literally" is confusing because it's not obviously some exaggeration (and considering the timelines, the original comment may have been referring to a literal event but confusing who did it).
Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.
Why does Hacker News hate us old people so much? Of course, I usually only see old acts (the B52s / Devo show was great!) and most of the audiences for those are 60+ years old, like me. Next week, I'm seeing Steve Forbert!
Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.
Then it was an informal, local, criminal enterprise. Local promoters, would get tickets from management, to drop to local re-sellers (scalpers, and brokers) and make money on the back side (for management).
With the death of album sales, concerts became the main revenue driver for making money... Formalizing the old system, centralizing it, turning it into a business was just "cleaning up" the mess that used to be there. Look at the Altimont stabbing, and the Rolling Stones role in that (demanding even MORE money and upfront).
Live Nation / TicketMaster is "Bill Graham Presents"... it was his dream and he is a product of that era (go read up on how his partner got stabbed).
Is Live Nation awful... sure. But breaking them up wont change the economics or the system (sadly). Artists are just as much a part of the problem as any fan.
Ticketmaster uses their monopoly power to unfairly squeeze the venues and the artists too. They're using their monopoly power to squeeze all sides of the live music marketplace - fans, artists, venues, and promoters. So the bad guys are really Ticketmaster, not the artists.
They own the venues. And the artists are to blame because without them ticketmaster would have no product. Pearl Jam took a huge career hit trying to fight them.
Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.
They also buy rivals. I worked for a small, out of the way company that added a really good ticketing app for some niche scenarios.
They basically bought us for the tech and integrated the rest of the company into various other companies that were spun off. I ended up with stock in several of them.
No idea about the specifics in this case. But, unfortunately, it's an increasingly common trend. Especially when going on vacation I like to have backup paper printouts of tickets but, these days, it's not uncommon to have a "We'll email you or the ticket will be available in this app 48 hours before."
I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back.
However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.
in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.
That isn't discussed much because it's not true. Artists get paid a fixed amount for each performance and only get a share of ticket revenue if the # of tickets sold exceeds a contractual threshold. Artists don't get a portion of the fees; those are entirely TM's revenue regardless of the number of tickets sold.
Ticketmaster gets crap for its business practices because they are crap business practices.
" leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties."
Isn't this giving Ticketmaster too much credit, for helping artist profit.
When part of the problem is the artist also does not get as much from the high ticket price. Since Ticketmaster owns the venues, and the entire supply chain, the artist is also enthralled and must take whatever 'lower payout' that Ticketmaster feels like giving.
So, tickets might be high, the artist also gets a fraction.
The ticket buyer only has one option, the artist only has one option. Both sides of the equation are losing while the grifter in the middle is taking a mad fat cut.
This is such a well documented clear cut case of monopoly, it makes me really sad that nobody is breaking it up. Just generally, that the system is failing.
If monopoly laws were applied to Live Nation, who would pay the lobbyists? And if the lobbyists weren't paid, who would pay the politicians?
Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement.
Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now.
And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations?
It wouldn’t be HackerNews without the top comment explaining how the real fault lies with labor and not the rent seekers who showed up afterwards and sucked up all the excess value from consumer and supplier.
The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023
And the parent said,
>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze
And your response was,
>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".
Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.
Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.
In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.
My point is that regardless of who got rich, the web 3.0 pitches themselves did not pass even the most casual review.
I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.
Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".
This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".
Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".
Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"
Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong.
And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.
NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.
It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
That is complete nonsense, indicative of your lack of knowledge, and utterly typical of crypto hype: mendacious or ignorant or both.
The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:
* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f (Dolev Strong 1983)
* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)
* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)
* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if f<n/3 (late 1990s), stochastic if f<n/2, impossible otherwise.
The theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT (Castro Liskov 1999), byzantine Paxos, etc.)
So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.
What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)
> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
There were solutions before blockchain, especially in the field of Byzantine fault tolerance. The original Byzantine Generals paper was from 1982, and practical algorithms existed before Bitcoin. For example: PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - published in 1999.
Blockchain solved a different version of the problem: how can a large, open, permissionless network reach agreement when anyone can join and nobody has a fixed identity?
Classic BFT is like a committee of known people voting, where the system survives some liars.
Blockchain is like letting strangers on the internet vote, but making votes costly enough that cheating becomes economically difficult.
> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
reply