Not only that but compiler optimizations are generally based on rigorous mathematical proofs, so that even without testing them you can be pretty sure it will generate equivalent assembly. From the little I know of LLM's, I'm pretty sure no one has figured out what mathematical principles LLM's are generating code from so you cant be sure its going to right aside from testing it.
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.
It seems FreeBSD is becoming more talked about in enthusiast communities simply because Linux is a lot more mainstream now and there’s a joy in contrarianism rather than any real changes with either of the two operating systems.
My interest has been piqued of late. I've been a Linux enthusiast since the late 90's. I don't think it's a sense of contrarianism that motivates my interest anew.
As I've aged, what I've come to value most in software stacks is composability. I do not know if [Free]BSD restores that, but Linux feels like it has grown more complicated and less composable. I'm using this term loosely, but I'm mostly thinking of how one reasons and cognates about the way the system work in this instance. I want to work in a world where each tool on the OS's bench has a single straightforward man page, not swiss army knives where the authors/maintainers just kept throwing more "it can do this too" in to attract community.
I can’t speak for whole communities but my interest in FreeBSD has been renewed over the past couple of years. It has been a very solid OS for a long time and the tight integration between the kernel and core userland has meant that it is sometimes more performant than some popular Linux distros. But its UX has not always been amazing. Seems like lately they have really improved that. Plus ZFS and root on ZFS in particular is very nice.
I would actually be interested in running it in some production environments but it seems like that is pitted against the common deploy scenarios that involve Docker and while there is work on bringing runc to FreeBSD it is alpha stage at best currently.
Still, if you just want an ssh server, a file server, a mail server, it is a great OS with sane defaults and a predictable upgrade schedule.
Dismissing the FreeBSD community as contrarians feels uncharitable. I can think of at least a few other contributing factors for the increase in popularity of late:
1) Linux's popularity has enlarged the pool of users interested in Unix-like operating systems. Some proportion of users familiar with Unix genuinely like FreeBSD and the unique features it offers.
2) The rise of docker and the implosion of VMWare has driven an increase of interest in FreeBSD Jails and the Bhyve hypervisor.
3) Running a homelab is a popular hobby. ZFS is popular for RAID, and pf is popular for networking.
For me it's all the changes in Linux. Every time I upgrade they change stuff that worked fine for me. Another issue is many distros pushing their "invented here" stuff like canonical and redhat. And the huge amount of corporate influence over Linux.
FreeBSD is largely free of those. And it leaves all the agency to the operator, rather than the distro forcing stuff down (except arch, but I don't like the community there)
Disagree. Linux has been gradually changing with the push towards systemd, snap, flatpak etc.. Today's FreeBSD resembles the Linux of 10 or 20 years ago a lot more than today's Linux does.
> Today's FreeBSD resembles the Linux of 10 or 20 years ago a lot more than today's Linux does.
I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.
Everyone hates on systemd, but honestly I really think that the complaints are extremely overblown. I've been using systemd based distros since around ~2012, and while I've had many issues with Linux in that time, I can't really say that any of them were caused by systemd. systemd is easy to use, journalctl is nice for looking at logs, and honestly most of the complaints I see about it boil down to "well what if...", what-if's that simply hasn't happened yet.
FreeBSD is cool, but when I run it I do sometimes kind of miss systemd, simply because systemd is easy. I know there was some interest in launchd in the FreeBSD world but I don't know how far that actually got or if it got any traction, but I really wish it would.
It is a bit of a bummer if you spend quite a bit of time tracking down a very weird DNS bug and it turns out to be systemd-resolved.
And I don't want to go into all of the time spend getting systemd unit files correct. There is very active community suggesting things you can add, which then of course breaks your release for users in unexpected ways. An enormous waste of time.
> I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.
For all its usability issues, Linux 10 to 20 years ago had advantages that, for a certain kind of user, were worth the cost. Frankly Linux on the desktop today is the worst of all worlds - it doesn't have the ease-of-use or compatibility of Windows or OSX, but it doesn't have the control and consistency/reliability of BSD either.
I believe this is pretty unfair. Today's Linux on desktop is pretty straightforward for any normal user, given that there are no lines anymore between local and remote software. Windows shoves ads down your throat and MacOS make you pay a premium on HW which normal people spends on phones, not laptops or desktop computers anymore.
Most Ubuntu based distros let you just double click on the deb and just install the deb file. I don’t see how that’s appreciably different than Windows.
This page presupposes that the graphics tool to install .deb packages is not preinstalled, which isn't true for either Ubuntu nor Mint. If it is preinstalled the steps are really just "double click on it and then click install".
Same thing for RPM distros. So the only real catch is knowing which package to download.
It's possible the image could autodetect the OS (or even autodetect the presence of a package manager) and present a single option to download or launch the package manager into the right screen, which would then put Linux at parity with MacOS or Windows, but currently it can't.
It's definitely harder than those things, and lots of regular people struggle even with them.
I mean, it's either "App Store" or downlaod from vendor, no?
Btw I just went to Zoom as well with my work Mac and I got TWO buttons: "Download for Apple Silicon" and "Download for Intel". I guess that a normal user will panic here, no?
The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact.
Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really prefer transparency in my system, I don't want abstraction layers that I have no purpose for. I don't take it as a coincidence at all that since I moved away from systemd distributions, my system has become quite a bit more reliable. When I got my Steamdeck, the first systemd setup I've used in years, one of the first things I noticed is that the jank I used to experience has showed its face once again. It might not be directly tied to poetteringware, but it's very possible that this is a simple 2nd or 3rd order effect from having a more complex system.
Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually, so finding an example of this really doesn’t change anything. I am sure FreeBSD has had security issues in the past.
I am hardly a super genius and I really didn’t find systemd very hard at all to do most of the stuff I wanted. Everyone complains about it being complicated but an idiot like me has been able to figure out how to make my own services and timers and set the order of boot priorities and all that fun stuff. I really think people are exaggerating about the difficulty of it.
I think you misunderstand the issue being raised, hence your confusion. The "difficulty" isn't the individual facets of the system, but piercing the opaqueness of the entire picture without wholly specializing into it. On the very basis of using a configuration DSL loaded with strange quirks, the init system part of systemd alone is already asking to take up more space in your head than an init system reasonably should. Having to memorize a completely different set of string expansion behaviors, for example, and all the edge-cases that introduces at the boundary of shell scripts. One small example, and only of the tiny slice that is the init part of systemd. We can talk all day about the problems with resolved, udevd, logind, and so on.
None of these issues are "difficult" and perhaps that is why you think people are "exaggerating" and engaging in bad faith. I would challenge you on this and suggest you haven't seriously interrogated the idea that the standpoint against systemd has a firm basis in reality. Have you ever asked the question "Why?" and sought to produce an answer that frames the position in a reasonable light? Until you find that foundation, you won't understand the position.
systemd solves problems that are not easily solvable in the old SysV init way. If you need resources to load in a specific order, for example, it’s trivial to do this with systemd, but you have to muck with weird symlink stuff to get the same effect with SysV. There are lots of things like that. You can hand wave this away and act like it’s not important, but it absolutely can be important to correctly make sure services load in the right order, and being abke to designate dependencies if services.
Of course I have run non-systemd distros, like Ubuntu (back when it used upstart), Gentoo, and of course FreeBSD (yes I know it’s not a Linux distro but close enough for this particular point), so it’s not like non-systemd stuff is foreign to me, and I am just not convinced it is actually causing more headaches than other systems.
Desktop Linux kind of peaked 20-25 years ago with Debian. Ubuntu was a win for a few years after that, but it’s been a long slow slide since.
FWIW, Devuan is good enough to keep me from switching to a BSD, but I guess the vandals that work at the big corporate distros are starting to delete X11 support from applications even though Wayland still hasn’t hit feature parity.
On the bright side, the last time I tried it, steam ran OK in a FreeBSD vm, except the VM had no video accelerator. That’s the main application keeping me on Linux.
FreeBSD users definitely seem to have taken over the mantle of OS evangelicals from Linux users.
I tried using FreeBSD for two different projects (NAS and router) and it turned out to be unsuitable for both, for each one switching to Linux solved the problem. Despite having solved my problems, the FreeBSD faithful seemed to think that using FreeBSD in itself was supposed to be the goal, not to solve the task at hand.
FreeBSD is also extremely conservative by comparison to Linux. It's not just systemd; things change less in general, and it's closer to old school Unix. Some people like it for nostalgia reasons, some just got tired of having rug constantly being pulled from under them (seems to be a common thing when people get older).
There was always some truth to that, and there are worse reasons to find joy in actual competition. How do you discover the truth about differences in quality without fuel for curiosity?
Well said! I used to administer both FreeBSD and Linux (Debian) servers at the same time. I found them different, but couldn't say either was better or worse.
That's fine. The thing is: I am different with Linux too. So I don't quite understand that FreeBSD focus.
From the BSDs, I think only OpenBSD has a really unique selling point with its focus on security. People ask "why pick FreeBSD rather than Linux" and most will not find compelling arguments in favour of FreeBSD there.
First of all, FreeBSD has plenty of selling points compared to your typical Linux distro:
Small, well integrated base system, with excellent documentation. Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother, which differs from linux where sure there's docker, btrfs, iptables, bpftrace and several different hypervisors to choose from, but they all come from different sources and so they don't play together as neatly.
The ports tree is very nice for when you need to build things with custom options.
The system is simple and easy to understand if you're a seasoned unix-like user. Linux distros keep changing, and I don't have the time to keep up. I have more than 2 decades of experience daily driving linux at this point, and about 3 years total daily driving FreeBSD. And yet, the last time I had a distro install shit itself(pop os), I had no idea how to fix it, due to the rube-goldberg machine of systemd, dbus, polkit, wayland AND X, etc etc that sits underneath the easy to use GUI(which was not working). On boot I was dropped into a root shell with some confusing systemd error message. The boot log was full of crazy messages from daemons I hadn't even heard of before. I was completely lost. On modern Linux distros, my significant experience is effectively useless. On FreeBSD, it remains useful.
Second, when it comes to OpenBSD, I don't actually agree that security is its main selling point. For me, the main selling point of OpenBSD is as a batteries included server/router OS, again extremely well documented in manpages, and it has all the basic network daemons installed, you just enable them. They have very simple configuration files where often all you need is a single digit number of lines, and the config files have their own manpages explaining everything. For use cases like "I just want an HTTP server to serve some static content", "I just want a router with dhcpd and a firewall", etc, OpenBSD is golden.
Out of the box ZFS is a big selling point for me. Jails are just lovely. The rc system is very easy to reason with. I've had systems that were only stable on freebsd that would crash using windows or various Linux.
ZFS is amazing and while there are many would be clones there is only one ZFS.
I used (and pushed) it everywhere I could and first encountered on Solaris before FBSD. Even had it on my Mac workstation almost 18 years ago (unsupported) -- aside I will never forgive that asshole Larry Ellison for killing OpenSolaris. NEVER.
Systemd is the worst PoS every written. RCs are effective and elegant. Systemd is reason enough to avoid Linux but I still hold my nose and use it because I have to.
I can't speak for others, but I find it poorly documented and only rarely improves on the systems it replaced, and it invalidates decades of high quality documentation that you can easily find on the internet. It's possible the transition will pay off one day with eg a usable graphic interfaces for system configuration that might compete with that of mac os, but as of yet, no such thing has materialized.
This is especially true compared to how beautifully well and consistently the BSDs tend to document their init and configuration systems. Or Mac OS, again—launchd is still way easier to use and far more of a "fire and forget" system without adding complicated interfaces for unrelated stuff like network interfaces and logging. But that has always been true as well.
It is unnecessarily complex to begin with. On top of that, the maintainers are historically not the most open to criticism and try to aggressively push the adoption. So much so that Gnome for example now has very strong dependecies on systemd which makes it very difficult to adopt Gnome on non-systemd systems unless you wanna throw a bunch of patches at it. This hard coupling alone is something that I wouldn't want to rely on, ever.
THIS. Also what problem does it solve that RC scripts can't accomplish? They are much more readable and less complex. What is the benefit of all that added complexity? Even more to the point the business case for it in a professional setting? I've been wondering that for a long time.
Barging in as a Linux guy interested to learn more about the BSDs, so please bear with me.
Something I love with systemd is how I can get very useful stats about a running process, e.g. uptime, cumulated disk & network IOs, current & peak mem usage, etc.
Also the process management (e.g. restart rules & dependency chain) is pretty nice as well.
Is that doable with RC (or other BSD-specific tooling) as well?
It's up to you to say check in your init script if you need to start another service before you.
In terms of uptime or IO and stuff, those metrics are already available. Be that via SNMP or other means. Say you start an nginx in systems, which network and disk usage does it report? Just the main process or all its forks? Same problem in RC.
But that is part of the point. Why in the ever-loving existence should an INIT system provide stats like disk usage? That is NOT what an init system is for.
If you need memory usage or IO usage or uptime, there are so many other tools already integrated into the system that the init system doesn't need to bother.
Init systems should only care about starting, stopping and restarting services. Period. The moment they do more than that, they failed at their core job.
This might came across stronger than meant to, but still holds true.
BSDs are about "keep it simple, keep it single purpose" to a "I can live with that degree". What you get though is outstanding documentation and every component is easily understandable. Prime examples are OpenBSD/FreeBSD PF. That firewall config is just easy to grok, easy to read up on and does 99.999% of what you ever need out of a firewall.
> which network and disk usage does it report? Just the main process or all its forks? Same problem in RC.
Well, the main process and its whole hierarchy, that's what you would expect of an init system monitoring its services, right? And what's nice with systemd is that I can get that from a simple `systemctl status my-service` – of course I could deploy a whole observability stack, but better if I can avoid it.
But there is no need to be defensive, it RC can that's nice, if it can't, then well, too bad.
> there are so many other tools already integrated into the system that the init system doesn't need to bother.
That's what I'd love to hear about, what are the equivalent in the BSDs world.
Best practice would be to pack the service into a jail and then use `ractl` to monitor I/O. Could also then monitor the VNET socket of the jail for network stats.
Or you just grab the PID and get it through that. A bit more manual, but composable.
Spin up a VM, may that be locally or a cloud VM, throw an OpenBSD or a FreeBSD. If you are into mail servers, static http etc then OpenBSD might be your jam. Or try FreeBSD and Jails. Jails are absolutely fantastic.
Ditch the LLMs (not insinuating that you use them, but just in case), try to use the Handbooks and the man pages.
If you ever feel the need that you have so many interdependent services that you need something more complex than RC, then you might have an actual architectural problem to be honest.
>If you ever feel the need that you have so many interdependent services that you need something more complex than RC, then you might have an actual architectural problem to be honest.
It autodiscovers the dependency chain or shit like that? If you got 500+ services that need to be orchestrated you honestly have a very different problem.
I love the simplicity of RC scripts. Easy to understand, easy to debug, it just fucking works.
Simplicity is king, because it's understandable. A behemoth like systemd feels like it requires a PhD.
Systemd also runs 100% against the Unix/Linux philosophy of composability and single purpose.
If you need to make sure that the network stack starts after the usb stack and that starts after the pcie stack and that starts after the … then systemd is considerably easier than SysV init.
You’re handwaving away something that is pretty important. You can say that having 500 services is its own problem but it’s also a reality, even on desktop operating systems.
Count how many services you have that are not already defined by the system itself in its order? So, remove core system services. System itself should already make sure that USB starts after PCIE and all that.
So go and count all the services that are not base install and tell me how many you have.
Addendum to my other reply: it comes down to the "not invented here" problem which always invites weirdly complex solutions to problems that don't exist.
Linux is "just" the kernel and every distro invites new solutions to perceived core problems whereas the BSDs have a whole base system that comes from one source, reducing the chance of a systemd popping up there. Both approaches have their ups and downs.
I don’t see how they can be considered “one program to so many things” when it’s 69 different binaries. Yes they’re under the same project, but the same can be said about FreeBSD itself.
They’re designed to work together but as far as I am aware there’s no reason you couldn’t replace individual binaries with different ones, though admittedly I have never done that.
I completely agree with you. It is very baffling to me too. But that is literally the reason parroted the most.
Linux is a monolith that includes a bunch of drivers for things you will never need (on a typical distro, not when you compile your own kernel). It does way more than I need it to, and it most definitely does more than one thing. But of course that's ok in that case
The systemd privacy issue of DNS fallback to cloudflare is something that comes to mind. No shade on cloudflare, I love them despite the privacy implications their business entails.
Yes. Over the years I've used just about every linux distro from Slackware and RH up to nix + arch, as well programming on Solaris, IRIX, SCO, OS/400 and even Tandem --look it up it's pretty obscure! But I just use FreeBSD mostly now.
There's pretty much nothing I can't do on FreeBSD that I would get with one Linux or another. Not much of a gamer so maybe that factors in..
I've played with most of them, I'm primarily a nixos user. I haven't yet had an experience as smooth as the FreeBSD installer for ZFS. looking at the debian wiki it still looks like dkms and manual partitioning are in order.
I once upgraded a FreeBSD system from 8 to 12 with a single command. I don’t recall having to reboot — might have needed to.
Can you give that shot for me on Linux? Could you spin up a Ubuntu 14 VM and do a full system update to 24.04 without problems? Let me know how you go.
I once needed help with a userland utility and the handbook answered the question directly. More impressive was the conversation I had with a kernel developer, who also maintains the userland tools — not because they choose too but because the architecture dictates that the whole system is maintained as a whole.
Can you say the same for Linux? You literally cannot. Only Arch and RedHat (if you can get passed the paywall) have anything that comes close to the FreeBSD Handbook.
FreeBSD has a lot going for it. It just sits there and works forever. Linux can do the same, if you maintain it. You barely need to maintain a FreeBSD system outside of updating packages.
Most people who use containers a lot won’t find a home in FreeBSD, and that’s fine. I hope containers never come to the BSD family. Most public images are gross and massive security concerns.
But then, most people who use FreeBSD know you don’t need containers to run multiple software stacks on the same OS, regardless of needing multiple runtimes or library versions. This is a lost art because today you just go “docker compose up” and walk away because everything is taken care of for you… right? Guys? Everything is secure now, right?
> I once upgraded a FreeBSD system from 8 to 12 with a single command.
The command you most likely used is freebsd-update[0]. There are other ways to update FreeBSD versions, but this is a well documented and commonly used one.
> I don’t recall having to reboot — might have needed to.
Updating across major versions requires a reboot. Nothing wrong with that, just clarifying is all.
> Most people who use containers a lot won’t find a home in FreeBSD, and that’s fine. I hope containers never come to the BSD family.
Strictly speaking, Linux containers are not needed in FreeBSD as jails provide similar functionality (better IMHO, but I am very biased towards FreeBSD). My preferred way to manage jails is with ezjail[1] FWIW.
> But then, most people who use FreeBSD know you don’t need containers to run multiple software stacks on the same OS, regardless of needing multiple runtimes or library versions.
You do realize that there are ways to avoid nuclear proliferation without war? The US had a deal with Iran and multiple other countries that made them limit their nuclear capabilities, but the US withdrew from it in 2018.
Iran needing to be babysat is their choice. Numerous states are capable of building nuclear weapons or enriching weapon-grade uranium. And they don't, because they aren't bad actors.
Iran is an objectively bad actor when it comes to nuclear weapons. They created the problem voluntarily, of their own volition. What comes after is not up to them.
Iran, by the way, broke the IAEA agreement. Fordo was built illegally, without disclosure to the IAEA.
It's just culture. I'm glad the National Archives are able to preserve it for future generations, as nobody really knows when all our unofficial archives, all the FTP servers that have been running in a basement since 1994, finally quit.
Yes, "Spotify Alternative" does seem to miss that Spotify / Apple Music+ / etc are legal and somewhat ethical ways to get access to a huge amount of music that would be expensive to purchase and a huge pain to torrent.
E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.
On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")
If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have it in the first place.
Spotify prices are quite reasonable, especially when you consider what has happened to video streaming services like Netflix. Plus Spotify has a large portion of all music ever, and mostly has close to 100% of new music that is being released.
Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).
I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.
Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.
Streaming services could price themselves out of the market in an attempt to generate the income needed to pay artists fairly. (Google/Apple could temporarily draw money from coffers and outcompete Spotify temporarily)
Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts
Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income
Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people
I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want, either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I want. It refuses to stream the music.
None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.
Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
Nothing. It's pretty cheap, and saves all the hassle these people are going through to self host. I'd guess for most people here paying for music streaming service isn't really a problem. Buying all the music would likely be more costly, though seems a bunch just want to pirate music and make out that they are "saving money". Music discovery would be more problematic.
For $15 a month I get access to (as far as my tastes are concerned) all the music ever recorded, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world on any device I own.
I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
i was cool with it for a long time, id buy annual memberships every year(non renewing). price hikes came, that annual is a lot more daunting as a one time purchase (especially at that particular moment in time for me). i was spending a lot of time in the car attempting to use the app. it quite literally felt like a short trip was 1 song sandwiched between equal parts ads. so a trip to the grocery was kinda like 2 mins ads, song(dont you dare try to skip that song or youll get an ad, or be out of next songs as its shuffle only), maybe another song, then 2 more minutes of ads.
ive now been in a place where that membership isnt that daunting. but im good, im not gonna have my music library held prisoner from me unless i cough up a monthly fee. its quite literally unusable if you arent paying. it also seems like they intentionally make their browser based version kinda trash... to make using it to block ads a less viable option(its been a while, not sure how true this currently is).
the jellyfin option is actually what ive settled on as well, ive been a bit lazy about setting up more functionality than just for my LAN, but i will get around to it. for now i just kinda plop junk on my phone and play it through vlc, which is certainly a lazy solution but its still feels freeing.
Was happy for a time, then I realized I only listen to the same playlists (generated playlists don't work for me as I need some time to appreciate new music). Now I use YouTube/SoundCloud to check out artists' releases, and then get the whole album if it's interesting.
I have a decently sized library with my favorite albums and that's been sufficient for some time now. Every once in a while, I track new releases and explore new genres, then add the few that picked my interest to my library.
Intentionally is great for enjoying art (and YouTube is more than enough for mood music)
Yes it is. If it's not available for you then blame the fucktard lawyers who made the call that it should not be available wherever you are for some dumbfuck reason. Spotify is not responsible for this, they just comply with the aforementioned fucktard lawyers.
Their point is at a higher level than a single artist's inclusion. What you're advocating is for artists to give up their rights (whether primarily or indirectly negotiated). "Just do what the lawyers say."
I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
I fully support artists to decide what they want to do with their music, but artists who sign contracts with labels and music companies do give up their rights, like it or not, that's how it works. And yes, Spotify enforces contracts and geographical licensing deals that dumbfuck lawyers invent because reasons. What would you want them to do, break IP laws?
There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can legally have immediate access to tens of millions of titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning" part but I understand some people would prefer it.
ive often thought about a happy middle ground product that would make me consider coming back to spotify... a version of the subscription model, somewhat similar to ebook stuff, where if you are subscribed you can choose X amount of songs that month to "own" forever.
so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
I use bandcamp intermittently and have often wished that they offered a "subscription" feature like this, whereby they take a certain amount of money from me a month to put into my "bandcamp wallet" or whatever, that I can then use to buy music. I mean to spend a certain amount on music in bandcamp per month but life gets in the way and it falls off the radar. A model like this would definitely keep me more engaged
I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.
I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.
It's not conspiratorial. It's an accurate and widely broadcasted business model by several companies. Why do you feel something that is present and real should be denigrated as conspiratorial?
Is it considered part of it? From my understanding, the culture has changed significantly and post get auto deleted eventually, so it’s not a good archive either. The only thing old about it is it’s web design
Posting on 4chan just kept becoming increasingly user hostile, especially for casual users, you had to be really determined to post something: posts started requiring 24 hour email verification, and after that you had to wait ~10 minutes before being allowed to post, and finally you had to complete a nearly impossible captcha which could lock you out from posting for an undetermined amount of time just for failing. It became apparent that the owners were pushing the gold pass pretty damn hard, and it's advertised on literally every board page.
Not sure what this random unknown website has to do with 4chan. It's similar only insofar as both things let you post. Soj requires a sign-up so no anon posting at all, and the community structure is a pretty clear rip-off of Reddit with /p/[sub] instead of /r/[sub]
every board had it's own independent archiving service after a while, so board culture ended up stickier than the original design. there's some interesting stuff in there
And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together.
None of the permissive licenses have this problem.
The number of significant software projects which are licensed as GPLv2-only, and which are therefore incompatible with GPLv3, can probably be counted on one hand. Normal GPLv2 projects are licensed – as instructed by the text in the license itself – as “GPLv2 or later”. Which means that any normal GPLv2-licensed software can be relicensed to GPLv3, and can therefore be combined with any other GPLv3-licensed program without any issue whatsoever.
For GPL v2 only, let's start the list with Linux and Git...
The "or later" has been used in creative ways, like relicencing all the Wikipedia content, or the Affero to AGPL transition. Nothing shady, but unexpected.
Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF.
Do you trust the current members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I don't know them.
Do you trust the future members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence???
Section 14 of the GPL says "The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns." Given that the preamble to the GPL explicitly says "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users", I don't think that a judge would find that a hypothetical GPLv4 that was basically MIT or something is "similar in spirit" to the present version.
If you're worried about the other direction (i.e. a hypothetical GPLv4 that had some bizarre restriction like "all users must donate to the FSF"), the "or any later version" means that as long as you don't decide to update the license you use yourself, people can continue to use it under the GPLv2 or v3 indefinitely.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
...
> But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Humanity had hatred and insular bubbles a millennia ago just fine without advertisements. There was genocides and wars before the current form of ads ever emerged. It's a shame that so many people think that changing a financial policy is all that is needed to change an ingrained human behavior.
In the last 40 years how many millions of man years have been put into manipulating people/breaking down their internal barriers by the ad agencies? By social media companies? By media companies? In the hundreds of thousands of man years at least (but more likely in the millions to tens of millions). There have been around 80 billion human years of output in that time and sales are a huge part of civilization so easily in the 10s of millions of human years of energy put into how to better manipulate/break down/re-train people.
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, your above argument makes sense.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 man years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
Edit: The amount of focused research, science, practice, experience in manipulation humans is unprecedented. Never before have millions to tens of millions of human years been dedicated to things in such a continuous, scientifically approached way. Yet we act as if the world is basically the same as 1980 except we have smart phones/the internet.
I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a possible lawsuit considering how strongly that style is tied to him, and that the model surely used his films as data.
If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.
> After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature
Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years ago, and ended up using its head as a leg
It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them
Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
If you continue the quote, he says: "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
He was pretty clearly talking about AI, at least to me.
Not at all - he was talking about a CG demo he'd just seen of a wriggling 3D model, which didn't bear any technical or visual resemblance to generative AI.
I mean, the quote might very well reflect his actual views about generative AI, but that's definitely not what he was talking about.
The purpose of that demo was to create a machine that can draw like humans can, as the creators explained. His objection was that whatever produced this had no concept of pain, and that’s what makes it grotesque. He called out that he had no objection to creating horror if that’s what the authors wanted to do.
That complaint is just as applicable to current Gen AI models. He wasn’t simply reacting with his gut to a gross looking video but to the concept of a thing with no concept of pain creating and animating artwork of living things. He understood the technology was about Gen AI, as “deep learning” is written on the whiteboard. He deserves some credit.
> The purpose of that demo was to create a machine that can draw like humans can, as the creators explained
Watch the video - the purpose of the demo, as the creators explained it, was to train a creature to move quickly. Since the AI model didn't simulate pain it used its head like a foot, and since the result was creepy they thought it could be used for a zombie game. That's what they presented to Miyazaki, and that's what he commented on. Then Suzuki asked where they eventually wanted to end up, and a different presenter said the thing about machines that can draw.
> That complaint is just as applicable to current Gen AI models
If you like, but that's not what Miyazaki applied it to.
> Watch the video until the end where they say this explicitly
1. The person who says that wasn't describing the purpose of the demo
2. He says it after Miyazaki's comments, ergo Miyazaki was not commenting on it
> - "Here, Mr. Miyazaki -- we have made a fast-moving zombie!"
Please don't sarcastically put words in the mouth of the person you're replying to - it's rude and it's never useful. All my previous comment did was summarize what was said, in the order it was said. I didn't suggest it was anything more or less than the words in the transcript.
It is really depressing to see how people universally don't even understand what he's talking about, and stick to non-explanations.
Art is humane. It tells humans how to be humans. A thought about an ill person in pain is worthy of being told as a story. Not only that animation automation thing is of no use to someone trying to express those thoughts, its authors — just like many, many others — have no idea what humans do with their lives, and which tools artists may need to show it. They've made a toy, and were told that it's just useless wanking, together with the whole genres of pointless amusement that introduced such images into pop culture.
“An insult to life itself” is not just a phrase. There is life, and there are people who deliberately ignore it, and enjoy the sights painted on cardboards.
"After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature, Miyazaki pauses and says that it reminds him of a friend of his with a disability so severe he can’t even high five. “Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
He's disgusted by the creature, not the computer based technique. While he's on record as disapproving of CGI, Earwig and the Witch, directed by his son, used CGI so his disapproval isn't absolute.
"Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever."
I think it's clear that he is specifically responding to the the overall soullessness of the technique - to animate without a human understanding of what is being animated. But as others have pointed out this is well before modern AI image gen and I have been corrected in that aspect.
Presenters: "This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements [...] It's moving by using its head. It doesn't feel any pain, and has no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to zombie video games. An artificial intelligence could present us grotesque movements which we humans can't imagine."
The screen shows some Silent Hill looking vaguely humanoid, crawling blob. As the presenters say, it's pretty creepy looking.
Miyazaki: "I am utterly disgusted [...] I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all"
IMHO saying Miyazaki outright hates AI is putting words into his mouth. All the clip shows is that a dude that doesn't make zombie horror films doesn't need a zombie horror generator thank you very much.
So yeah, he clearly rejects the product pitch. But judging from Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro I don't see why you'd pitch him that product.
"Well, we would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do"
"Would you?"
"Yes"
Awkward silence
From this I don't think it's difficult to extrapolate his feelings about modern AI image gen. But you are correct in that this is not a direct assessment. Appreciate the correction, thanks.
>I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art.
Supposedly, you have a working internet connection. In no time, you can check the name of Hayao Miyazaki. You can see how he draws his manga, in a style which would be really hard to animate. You can see how he designs his characters. Well, maybe the colour palette can be attributed to “his style” in some works. Still, you can learn that Ghibli had famous background artists and art directors like Nizo Yamamoto and Kazuo Oga. You can compare characters drawn by Yoshifumi Kondou and Katsuya Kondou with Miyazaki's, and guess who was responsible for what in different works. You can learn how in the era when everyone waited for computers to make economical marvel of “three dee” real, Isao Takahata used computers to transfer pen and brush strokes to animation in “The Yamadas” and “Princess Mononoke”.
But you don't want any of that. You want to have a familiar pop cultural label (“Miyazaki”) that produces a familiar reaction (“Oooh!”). Purely decorative, symbolic objects. Stories, ideas, hard work? Eh, don't bother me with that nonsense.
There is nothing new or “cutting edge” in ignorance. And AI companies know perfectly well that they work for exactly that audience. Despite all the talk, they don't create the next genius artist, they want to be a next “enhancement filter” in TVs, something that no one uses, but everyone has to add to impress the public. That's just parasitism on lack of ability to discern.
While I don't doubt it's true, this could be challenging to prove, because Studio Ponoc (ex-Ghibli) has produced work that uh, hews rather closely to Miyazaki's style. Were the models trained on Ghibli, Ponoc, both, something else, etc?
I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!
Ponoc is made of former Ghibli employees who founded a new home when Ghibli's future was uncertain. I am sure they are on friendly terms, if not family, with Ghibli: they worked together for years. People like them can have a gentleman's agreement.
What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain without ever asking for permission?
I don't disagree with anything you said, but it doesn't seem to follow from what I wrote.
I pointed out a reason why litigation could be difficult. I'm quite sure nothing I wrote could have been seen as defending OpenAI. Just that I felt litigation would be tricky.
Truly, every artist hopes their distinctive style will be taken by a multi-billion-dollar corporation and used by the White House to make a jeering depiction of crying deportees. It's the ultimate compliment.
The USSR had some absolutely incredible art used on their propaganda posters. But if you use that for anything outside of ironic Russian themes (e.g. a goofy game set in that era, some silly snack that claims to be Russian-inspired), people will think you're an unironic communist and you instantly turn away loads of people.
When a dominant political force uses AI "art" for everything they do and the style becomes apparent, anything that looks similar to that instantly disgusts loads of people. You can argue "well that's their fault for being disgusted", but pattern recognition and being conditioned to associate certain images with "bad" goes far deeper than the conscious and it's a base instinct in animals.
If you think Ghibli is now tainted by association with Trump based on this image, I don't know what to tell you. That sounds preposterous in the extreme.
More like "AI art in the style of ____" will be tainted by association. I can almost hear the complaints to the editor to every boutique indie blog post and company listicle with AI filler at the top. For me at least it cheapens the feeling of the blog post itself - "if the author couldn't be arsed to get any real art/pay for a stock image, what about the rest of the content?"
People know the "NFT style", and when people see any sort of image like that, they instantly think "annoying crypto scammer."
There's now the "AI image" style, which people are becoming more aware of. And people associate that with scammers, very confused old people, weird porn, and the right.
Most of the ghiblified stuff is from AI/cryptobros and right wing movements (with heavy overlap on those groups). People possess pattern recognition and will become aware of the pattern each time they see these images.
If it was me, I would feel great that my work has been extended to give joy at such a large scale. (Not that it’s invalid if he has a different opinion.)
