I read their comment as a simple “oh ok I understand now” type of clarification, not a complaint.

My mind immediately went to the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly! Is this where we’re headed?

Oh wow, did Randall Munroe inadvertently predict the employee workload in the show Severance? :)

I can relate to the cynicism, but it's also a general tool in the effort to combat bot abuse on public facing post forms that are trying to do something for real people. Many everyday devs reach for tools like this because of the deluge of garbage they get in its absence.

My take is that it's a very hard problem, so hard that even captchas by the biggest internet company can't get it right. I strongly hesitate to roll my own bot friction strategy when other tools are available. But I recognize I may have a lack of imagination here, would absolutely love to hear alternate ideas especially for small projects that may not need the heft of corporate captchas.

I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.

Growing up several decades ago it seemed like the news was more focused on reporting the facts of current events. Now I know this is naive and there have always biases, but I do miss the way it was delivered in an almost boring way without all of the additional commentary and sensationalism. But you know rose colored glasses and all that.

NPR/PBS are still there and basically the same.

I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?

Blendle, Scroll, Flattr and several others have attempted this. It turns out no consumer actually wants to do this, it’s primarily an idea that’s invoked on HackerNews to defend not subscribing to journalism while using ad blockers, it’s not a real business model.

How much do they charge per article? If it's above 10 cents or so, I can't imagine it being a reasonable price.

In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.

Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.

I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.

Are they Flock cameras or bog standard CCTV?

The Lowes cameras are definitely Flock. The look is unmistakable. See

https://deflock.org/identify

I like the author's idea:

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled.

The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so much sense as a first step.

I'm no expert here and there are probably unintended consequences or other ways to game that system for profit, but even if so wouldn't that still be a better starting point?

I think that's also a good proposal, and I don't think it conflicts with the "prestigious departments stop publishing in $journal" idea at all. Probably we want both.

Only difference is that the author is writing for a wide audience and his best angle to change the world is probably to influence the thinking of future policymakers. While I am just an annoying "why don't you just" guy, my "audience" is just the friends I happen to have in prestigious research groups.

Adam M also probably has lots of friends in prestigious research groups (IIUC although he complains a lot about academia he was quite successful within it, at least on its own terms). And the fact that he instead chooses to advocate government policy changes instead of what I'm proposing, is probably a good indication that he knows something I don't about the motivatioms of influential academics.

Imagine being a scientist and reading “if you take this grant, you cannot publish your results in any of the most prominent journals in your field.” Sounds good?

But IIUC there are entire fields where basically the whole US ecosystem is funded by federal grants. So if this policy gets enacted those journals are no longer prominent.

(Maybe you'd need an exception for fields where the centre of mass for funding is well outside of the US, though).

The result is that open access journals would very rapidly, perhaps instantly, become prominent.

> I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list

Of all the controversial things out there we've become afraid to even google in order to learn more about the world around us, this one strikes me as not all that controversial.

But you're not wrong, just making a comment about how sad the world has become.