Who taught you sex is a drug? As long as words mean their definitions, it's categorically not. Plus it's probably kinda harmful to pile on the stigma already surrounding sex by conflating it with drugs and all the stigma that comes with that.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but it's kinda giving a nofap pseudoscience red flag to me.

Parents definitely should be teaching their kids about this stuff at the appropriate time, but they should stick to the facts.

It's super trustworthy bro I swear

Credit cards should roughly do the same, but both of those aren't "great" for privacy and really exists to make profiles of adults while pretending to negate the need for parents to parent (the only real way to reduce/prevent harms of kids witnessing age inappropriate media). Your ability to do financial transactions shouldn't be tied to your speech or content you view.

The thing is, UK has had age restrictions for years on its mobile platforms. So if you want to look at porn on your phone, you have to unlock it on your subscription. And to do this, they use youre credit card. The thing that they already have. Its easy and swift. And more to the point, only one company has your data. As it stands now, you are supposed to give your personal details to every single company in the world.

Over the past 20 years, how many massive hacks have we seen that leak email addresses and passwords? Are how about all those woman that get their iclouds hacked and their nude photos uploaded? I can think of at least 10 instances in the past 10 years. And now its going to be all of our driving licences, passports, other photo IDs? And the law also requires that they scan ALL private messages. Thats end to end encryption fucked. And god forbid your girlfriend calls you "Daddy" in a sext, you get the cops knocking on your door treating you like Jimmy Saville.

The shit is insane, and people arent anywhere near outraged enough. Its coming to Europe next, if reports are to be believed. So you lot should ALL start kicking up fuck about it now.

not yet, but the wikimedia foundation has been fighting against it expecting that it would be a class 1 site and require it.

I saw a post saying /r/period required an age check.

They're gonna censor as much as they can with this.

That makes no sense, surely everyone has invested in green energy through workplace retirement plans, no?

"Keep circulating the tapes!"

I initially perceived piracy similarly to how or perceive reading about archaeology and such, so the fact that someone is sincere in hating p2p copying and calling it immoral just felt preposterous.

Yet now it seems plenty of normies will agree. Then go listen to something they didn't pay for on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, because "everybody uses that". What "everybody uses" is fine, see. What they condemn me the pirate for is using ed2k, torrents and such other technologies. Even when I'm literally downloading public domain stuff or abandonware.

It doesn't take much for media though to parade out the "lil guy and change the opinion of people about how your basically attacking small indie creators"

Don't forget trying to kill e2e encryption like what the EU wants to do, both to "catch criminals" and "protect the children"

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/the-end-of-encryption-as-we-know-it

Protect from what? I mean seriously. Most of us (guys at least) probably saw porn way before we were old enough and most of us probably didn't end up as rapists or pedophiles. It's not a good thing by any means, but it really feels like we're trying harder to keep sexual material from entering their brains than we are trying to keep them fed, clothed, educated, housed, healthy, loved, and physically safe. Of all the things I mentioned the last seven have a monumentally greater affect on their success and well-being as an adult.

This is it. Theyve been going after encrypted messaging apps for a long time, ig they realized theyre not getting anywhere and figured to just hit it head on.

The internet has always circumvented this kind of shit, just look at TPB. The ones who are getting really beaten up by this is the older generations and the ones lacking technical know-how.

I feel like I'm standing between two really stupid positions here.

On the one hand, just let parents teach their kids is basically a state's rights argument. A lot of parents won't teach their kids, so... do we care? Does this matter? We should probably mount a stronger effort then.

On the other hand, we don't need the government to get involved to stop 9 year olds from seeing titties—we just don't! Websites the world over have implemented 2-factor-authentication more or less by themselves (and probably because they want to spy on you). And, no one says the word r----- anymore because if you ever do, a bunch of anti-bullying PSAs will be really annoying about it in your replies.

Not every social problem needs to be solved by swinging around Thor's hammer. We do have other means.

given that governments are now starting to make certain protests illegal, definitely not as bad as having your face in a database and your behaviour being mapped for suspicious illegal activity like criticising genocide.

You're right and I'd go a bit further: It's none of their business what your age even is, they need to know only one bit for their legal duties, over or under age of majority.

Basically what is really needed is a certificate of majority digitally signed by the government bound to some identifier, email address or full name. All this uploading faces or ID card scans is ridiculous.

How do you suggest people pay for Spotify?

April 20th, 1969? Anyone?

There's a wide gap between "travelling to another country" and "listening to music."

I'm not trying to go on holiday to Spotify

fair point but given the direction US and UK are headed, something legal you do online can be illegal in a couple years with a face attached to that activity. What you mention is also bad (your face being in a face recognition database) but not as bad as that being attached to tons of behavioural data collected about you.

Well.... ...gestures to apple fans...

Yes! Navidrome!

used CDs

I get them dirt cheap or completely for free. It's actually reverse piracy (no I'm not serious) since no doubt the previous owners ripped everything.

That is of course even better. Just wish any band I'm interested in would ever come to play this quiet corner *sigh*

abcde for Linux. It's in your repositories. Set it up once the way you want, then it's just: insert CD, enter abcde, repeat ad nauseam. You could even tell your system to auto-trigger it on every CD insert.

I want to leave Windows behind... abcde seems the way to go for Linux.

On Windows I use EAC, it's great but requires a little work to set up. There are a lot of tutorials for it if course.

Don't know if it's still what's recommended, but I use foobar2000 for ripping CDs to FLAC.

I would suggest Qobuz (if available) or Tidal. Deezer's CEO is a hard-core religious nutjob who finances anti-trans orgs and sexual conversion "therapies".

Remember to donate to them tough - and btw. they are actually running their services for radical left activists, not filesharing... so I guess it would be cool to please not strain their servers too much.

they just cannot live without an algorithm to recommend new music to them

They might want to try LMS and its https://github.com/epoupon/lms?tab=readme-ov-file#music-discovery

I think they just cannot live without an algorithm to recommend new music to them

Oh, piss off. I just want to financially support artists for making something beautiful I enjoy. Streaming is the easiest because of space constraints. I still buy the CDs of my most favourite albums, but I cannot stress enough how great it is to NOT have to rip the MP3s every time, make sure the tags are good, etc.

It's convenient.

If you don't like Spotify's new ID check, kill your Spotify account and use an alternative - Tidal and Qobuz are both excellent.

me basically

An algorithm for them:

set rand [clock microseconds]
set len [mpc_pl_len]
set to [expr {$rand%$len}]
mpc_pl_jmp $to

Usually when someone still use mp3s it's for the ubiquity of the format. Every device that has a USB port handle mp3s. I personally use opus and it's not common at all.

That a porn ban does not work and people will find a way around it.

When I was a kid there weren't all this free porn sites and most of them were paid.

So you would go to some shady site where people shared passwords. This might make a comeback

It moreso relates to what's in hand

The age control of pointless when it comes to protecting the children.

But also this

The internet is based on this underlying trust. You are a true custodian!

There's more out there that would never admit it because of that. Which is silly when you think about it.

Spotify recommends based on your listening habits. You base your listening habits on Spotify recommendations. Ergo, Spotify recommends based on its own recommendation. Ourobouros achieved.

Yeah, that was what finally pished me over the edge a few years back. Switched to Tidal and have been very content with with it. They pay artists better, the sound quality is better, and the dily discovery playlist throws some serious curve balls. I have wide ranging tastes so it blends a few genres for a few weeks before moving onto something else, and it has introduced me to some AWESOME music that i would have never encountered otherwise.

Why would you use the Ai dj to feed you songs, when the normal daily mixes, daylist, etc are giving you the same songs without the fake personality injected between them? I literally do not understand. I'm open to your thoughts - it's just that it seems like an alien perspective.

There are online test you can do to see if you can successfully identify the FLAC from the MP3. I did one and failed miserably.

They say that if you have a very good DAC, amplifier and speaker / headphone system (as well as a good ear for audio), that you can hear it. But I would do the test first to see if it applies to your situation.

It could be the quality of your headphones.

I'm not an audiophile, but back-in-the-day I bought some analog "sennheiser studio monitors" as opposed to "just headphones".

I actually returned the first one and exchanged them, because when I listened to a live recorded CD, I kept hearing loud "pops" that I didn't hear with my "regular headphones". I assumed they were defective.

The exchanged sennheiser had the same "pop" in this CD. It turns out, most "regular headphones" didn't have the same depth in sound frequency as studio monitors and the "pops" were accidental artifacts that were mixed into the CD.

For other CD's, I'd hear telephones ringing and sirens in the background.

Eventually, I got use to it. Then after a few years, I replaced my CD collection with mp3's... and I could tell a different in songs/albums I was really familiar with. The base wasn't as deep, the high sounds weren't as high, I didn't hear telephones ringing in the background.

I had the same sennheiser, it was just that the nature of mp3's "flattened" the music.

Now, with Bluetooth and the disappearance of 3.5 mm jacks, there are too many layers of digital conversion happening. I've given up... and now just have some cheap ear buds I listen to.

It is better, but it depends on the audio for the difference. Also, it would probably be hard to hear the difference playing over a phones speakers. The weakest link in the chain is always the problem you notice the most. Having a good setup for amp/speakers and you can hear the difference. Using Bluetooth earbuds to mow the lawn, it doesn’t matter. Sitting in my living room on my nice stereo, I notice.

The space it takes up is negligible in the modern era of cheap SSDs (and even cheaper hard drives).

The main benefit is not in being able to hear a difference from 320Kbps mp3 (I know I sure can't), but knowing that you can re-encode the file as many times as you want, without any quality loss (assuming you're going from lossless to lossless, of course). Or create an mp3 from the flac file at any time, with the same quality as a ripped CD.

So basically FLAC is great if you produce/edit/re-encode your music files often. If you don't do any of that (and have no plans to future-proof your music collection), then 320Kbps MP3 is more than adequate for your needs.

Flac files contain orders of magnitude more data. As for the listening experience it's only ever going to be as good as the speakers at the other end. You'll also need a wired connection to said speakers in order to avoid some compression over Bluetooth. (Unless there's some newfangled lossless BT protocol that I'm unaware of.)

I'd say it's definitely worth it.

Our brains shouldn't have to work harder to listen to lossy music, which is what happens even if you can't reliably perceive it.

Listening to music on acid (a lot) has really shaped my views of it and how even the most minor things can have a major impact on the final experience.

I'm not an audiophile though and can enjoy music in a wide range of formats and quality; I just prefer FLAC almost anywhere.*

*some songs sound 'better,' or at least more iconic in a lower quality

Go to Opus 128 kbps. About the same as MP3 320 or better.

yeh

most people

Many people are ok with hearing music out of a phone speaker. Audiophiles don't necessarily care about how "most people" perceive sound quality.

Idk man. Show someone some cymbals on a 128kbps track and it sounds like someone crumpling a plastic bag via a tin can connected to a string. In contrast flac is going to sound much more natural.

I'd agree with you regarding 320 and flac - most people are gonna have a hard time differentiating.

i didn't care about just grabbing the 720p 600mb video file back when i was watching on a little laptop screen.

it does not hold up on the big stuff.

kinda same applies to audio?

crap sounds like crap on a phone speaker, but so does hi quality stuff.

noise and low dynamics are more noticeable on more powerful, louder gear.

just spitballing here, not an expert!

Can't confirm, I can't tell.

How about 48 kbit MP3? And more than that, for plenty of recordings that's sufficient.

Just a web-based downloader, I’m patient and simple:p

Zotify

They won't give a shit, but they're also lazy and won't bother setting up an account that requires ID and photo verification. Too much work. Maybe we'll even see somewhat of a recurrence of brick and mortar stores that sells music, movies, porn, etc.

Every company has learned that any friction to using your site is a bleed of customers. There are a lot of people who will just not use your site if it requires a lengthy validation process. If there was some kind of identity system that sites would integrate with like login.gov, then people would ignore this, but I don't think the UK has such a thing that every site can use, so a lot of people will not use the site and over time fall to piracy or illegitimate sites.

People underestimate that most "regular" people are a product and exist for something other than humanity.

CDs still do that to some extent, especially with indie releases, and also higher-end physical formats like SACD and DVD-Audio tend to have a lot of extras packed in with them as they're typically considered to be special editions of a given album, but both SACD and DVD-Audio are DRM-encumbered unlike normal CDs and of course analog formats where DRM doesn't apply, so trying to get them on a PC will be harder if not impossible especially as the DSD codec that SACD uses has particularly nasty DRM shipped with it IIRC.

There's also true novelty formats like MD, DCC, or even in the case of Jeremy Heiden's Blue Wicked, Elcaset of all things, and Blue Wicked was legit the first album to ever be released on that format, 40+ years after it faded from public consciousness.

Thanks, this did it. Opodsync (since I don't have nextcloud) and antennapod.

For now yt music is what new Spotify was , but when one goes down the other cums and dominate