Sure but if the purpose of the dump is musical archive, then the music should be stored in an archival format, not a lossy one.

What use is the metadata? Or is that stuff like the album covers etc?

I’m also a bit concerned about this:

Second, there’s an obsession with audiophile-grade quality (lossless FLAC, etc.) that inflates file sizes, making it impossible to maintain a complete archive of all music ever produced.

Does that mean that this spotify dump is a bunch of 64kbs mp3s, or worse some kind of lossy spotify transcode?

It’s something to be aware of if you are trying to record/send images in secret. But it’s not a problem if you are passing on an image you found somewhere else. You leave no trace if you are just passing the image, so the image itself is of no concern privacy-wise.

Depends on who your initial investors are and the contract you signed with them. They can and will force a sale if their RoI isn’t met in a specific time-frame, or if the buyout price reaches a certain valuation.

International Politics is “might makes right,” so good luck to Venezuela.

Saudi Arabia is absolutely bad. I’d go so far as to call them the EA of Countries.

Ultimately your concerns stem from the philosophy of privacy, but you are weak on what practical privacy means. You have to give up a certain amount of privacy to participate in society at all. This is the case regardless of any technology. Once you decide you need a cell phone, you now have a tracking device on your person that can be used by anyone that wants to track you, specifically. You cannot prevent this regardless of what you do. Assuming you are not a person of interest for a nation-state, this exchange of privacy for convenience is rational.

There are things you can do in-order to increase your privacy in any un-trusted network though. For example: MAC-address randomization. DNS Proxies, VPNs, Privacy focused Browsers block-lists no-script etc etc.

Not all of these are relevant in all situations, and all of them can be made moot as soon as you login to some place. i.e. logging into a lemmy instance means that you now are uniquely identifiable and information can start being collected about you.

Now the question of “trust.” i.e. you don’t “trust” your friends network? Why not? Any argument that you can make about not knowing their network applies 10-fold to the cell network that you have absolutely chosen to trust. So the measures that you take with your own device to protect it from the public phone network, are equally effective on any wireless network. And that is where privacy advocates start getting squirrely.

tl;dr, if you have already taken the above steps, all untrusted networks should be treated the same according to your personal privacy envelope.

This is a great example of someone who has a lot of fear in their life that stems from ignorance, but tries to pass it off as something else. But make no mistake, you have a large gap in knowledge, and that knowledge gap combined with the paranoia of what you read from “privacy advocates” means your life is much harder and more insecure then you realize.

It’s a systemic issue with Waymo and any all the taxi “disruptors.” Choices are made to put people in danger in order to extract profit by using cars AT ALL that is the problem, not who or what is operating them. Technology jesus isn’t going to save grandma.

As a senior Network engineer, Macbook Pro is my goto. Jack Black Label is good, but I still prefer Lagavulin 16yr or founders All Day IPA.

“Beat China” at what?

Can you give an example of one of those websites?

Cloudflare is in an interesting space. They are a service provider (ddos protection, scalable edge caching, SSL termination, etc) that allows the highly centralized internet to function. However they aren’t a gatekeeper at all. You only need cloudflare if you are in the top 5% of internet websites by volume. So when cloudflare has a problem, Lemmy isn’t affected, but Reddit is. My blog isn’t affected, but someone like https://blog.ipspace.net/ is affected.

My personal browsing habbits meant I didn’t even realize there was a cloudflare problem until I read an article about it on Lemmy. Anyway, just a tangent, but as a network engineer I’m sure i’ll be interested in the RCA.

Even in a full-communism-now utopia, the idea of compensating people for their creative endeavers and labor is still going to happen, that compensation will be indistinguishable from “money” as it is currently used.

Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.

You’ll never be able to find it or hear it though. The barrier to entry for AI music is so low, even lower then the “low-effort” artist you are deriding, that typical streaming sites will be inundated by it and nothing else will be found. The algorithm™ already prefers low-royalty music, and AI music will certainly have the lowest costs to play.

Cars are the problem. I am agnostic to whether the car is powered by steam, diesel, gasoline, or electricity. Tail-pipe emissions are a very small part of the overall pollution from a car.

Sounds like they finally have a solution to the palestinian prisoner problem.

I don’t believe in imaginary property.

Rather then launching millions of tons of satellites, maybe the government could try regulating emissions? You know, remove cars, fossil fuel usage, create passenger rail etc? Improve society instead of doing literally the opposite?

I can’t believe the NYC Mayor Elect hasn’t single-handedly dueled all 40,000 NYPD officers in honorable mortal combat. Some leftist he is.