I'm not a musician, but I did a few comedy tracks on an ensemble album. My tracks are available on Spotify, and have also been played on Sirius XM.

I've received north of $1000 in royalties from Sirius XM.

I've yet to break the $5 minimum withdrawal amount from streaming services (including Spotify) for more plays than I've had on Sirius XM.

So yes, Spotify and the other streaming services are rapaciously exploitative and deserve to be boycotted. Go on, boycott them... not gonna cost me very much!

Yes, of course. We all know that AI BS is snake-oil and there's no plausible profitable business model for generative AI... so of course they have to fall back on the shitty-but-proven advertising model.

Haggling and charging people what they're willing to pay is not illegal. It's just that you have to disclose that's what you're doing.

If you speak Dutch, you'll enjoy Arjen Lubach's very funny take on this. Even if you don't speak Dutch, the auto-translated subtitles are not too bad.

Wrong Korea.

The closest Whole Foods to where I live is much further away from me than my two closest local grocery stores, so I don't bother to make the trip.

Correct, I do not use Claude code or any other Anthropic products or any sort of AI for that matter. I don't feel like I'm losing anything. FWIW, while I did have a 33-year career in software development, I'm now retired and maintain a few open-source hobby projects. I will not let AI within 100m of my projects. I hate gen-AI but that's a topic for a different thread...

So, it's hard to avoid using anything Amazon without losing some benefits yourself.

So far, I don't miss Amazon. And indeed, I am saving money because even though some things are cheaper than Amazon, I found myself buying crap I didn't really need from Amazon. Now I can't do that any more.

I do not ever go to Whole Foods, correct.

I do not pay for any SaaS products, correct.

It's possible some of the services I use for free are hosted by AWS, but that's a very distant relationship compared to actually sending Amazon money. I also have extensive ad-blocking so those SaaS services that attempt to monetize me via ads are not able to. This is all part of my anti-enshittification defences.

I deleted my Amazon account about a year ago. I now use Amazon as a catalog... I search for approximately what I want, and then when I find the exact brand and model number, I search for that and purchase it from a different online store that also delivers, or else I go to a physical store and get it.

It's a bit less convenient than Amazon, but not markedly so, and I'll be damned if I give that company another dime of my money.

Sorry, this story is not good enough for The Onion. Let's fix the headline:

"Florida Man Fires Bullet that Crashes the Internet in Texas. ChatGPT Sends Thoughts and Prayers."

You must be a riot at parties.

Oh hey, but if she'd been Charlie Kirk and you'd badmouthed her, you'd be out of a job because freedumb or something...

So the relentless demonizing and attacking from the far-Right is swaying public opinion. Color me shocked.

Though, there has always been a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in the USA that isn't found to the same extent in most other developed countries.

Now that Windows 11 has been one of the most effective tools for marketing Linux, Microsoft turns to helping to market LibreOffice. Well done, Redmond!

FB Purity is fantastic. It made Facebook bearable for me when I was on it. And the developer is super-responsive when FB makes changes that break FB Purity.

I've since ditched Facebook... even with FB Purity, it became far too annoying.

Remember feudalism? A very few lords, a few vassals and a huge number of serfs?

Seems like Schmidt wants to bring it back. Only problem is that feudalism is a hugely unproductive economic system, so Schmidt is full of shit.

The one in Toronto was very nice. Huh.