> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.
Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.
> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.
I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
I really despise Spotify's payout algorithm too, since you mention it.
For the longest time I was a big Tidal fan. Still am. But I feel their financials show writing on the wall for their future. But one of the reasons for that appreciation on my part was that they 1) paid a lot more, per stream, to artists (sometimes, 8-10x more than Spotify's nominal purported royalties), and 2) they didn't have an algorithm for payout that heavily favored the 800lb artists in the room over the smaller, struggling acts.
Fuck those licensing terms. They are the exact reason I cant make a Soundcloud notification bot for discord that is within the rules of the ToS. I sent them an email asking for an API key and basically got told no, license holders rule our world.
I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.
Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm
Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.
Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
I don't know whether Spotify could agree to provide its entire library of music to an archive for Torrenting by anyone.
Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.
For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.
He's a former Spotify employee now, but he was a Spotify employee when he made it. I think it hasn't been updated since he lost his data access.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.
True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.
Maybe I was too hyperbolic, but when I read the original Anna's Archive announcement post, I appreciated their dedication to archiving content that may be lost one day. They called the effort "Backing up Spotify" and emphasized the good that opening the data could do. It's not about enabling piracy.
Following Anna's logic, I was calling on Spotify to stop "investigating" archivists. Spotify could instead be engaging constructively here, with Anna's Archive, Internet Archive, or other groups.
I was looking for a song recently and can't find it. The artist was banned from YouTube and looks like they took their album off Spotify. An archive like this is good for preserving stuff from smaller artists like that
Supermaven said the same thing when they were acquired by Cursor and then EOLed a year later. Honestly, it makes sense to me that Cursor would shut down products it acquires - I just dislike pretending that something else is happening.
we are a 70 person team, bringing in significant revenue through our product, have widespread usage at massive companies like shopify robinhood etc, this is a MUCH MUCH MUCH different story than supermaven (which I used myself and was sad to see go) which was a tiny team with a super-early product when they got acquired.
everyone is staying on to keep making the graphite product great. we're all excited to have these resources behind us!
The biggest challenge is that an acquisition like this makes relying on the acquired product a giant risk for us, so our general policy is to stop relying on something once it gets acquired and try to migrate to something else, because it's just way too disruptive to find out a year later it's getting sunsetted and then have a shorter timeline to migrate off.
It's happened so many times that it's just part of how we do business, unfortunately.
Obviously what you need to say but the reality is that you’re not in control anymore. That’s what an acquisition is.
If Cursor wants to re-allocate resources or merge Graphite into to editor or stagnate development and use it as a marketing/lead gen channel, it will for the business.
Anything said at time of acquisition isn’t trustworthy. Not because people are lying at the time (I don’t think you are!) but because these deals give up leverage and control explicitly. If they only wanted tighter integration, they could fund that via equity investment or staffing engineers (+/- paying Graphite to do the same.) Companies acquire for a reason and it isn’t to let the team + product stay independent
We're aligning our product catalogue to do what we've found is the best fit for what our customers want. We're also excited to announce a migration plan to our new service, PencilLead, and want to offer existing customers preferential pricing to our Professional Services team to assist with the migration.
We know this isn't what all of you want to hear, and we've spent the last year really evaluating this deeply. At the same time, we're glad you're part of our journey to the future of agentic AI and we think you'll find it's the best alignment and fit for you, too, long-term.
I've actually been working on porting the tab completion from Cursor to Zed, and eventually IntelliJ, for fun
It shows exactly why their tab completion is so much better than everyone else's though: it's practically a state machine that's getting updated with diffs on every change and every file you're working with.
(also a bit of a privacy nightmare if you care about that though)
++ had the same reaction as you. When I was picking up Swift, the interpreter was invaluable to check my understanding (although I nearly always needed to begin with `import Foundation` to have my code actually work).
You're being downmodded for not providing any supporting arguments, but there's some compelling protection for malicious modules in these other JS implementations.
That's... weird. And kind of hypocritical, given the quality of your own comment which (a) mentioned downvotes and (b) used a few more words that boil down to "module protection". At this point I'm not exactly elevating the conversation either, for which I apologize. But I do think brief comments like mine and the one I replied to are perfectly fine.
nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.
It’s a bit amusing to me that this sounds like another, different anti-trust issue. Apple’s browser having this feature, which other browser vendors (presumably) can’t add, to open another app would also look bad to an EU judge.
I believe this is a way to use their own apple news subscription to access the article instead of using the archive version: It only redirects if you're not logged in to apple news.
So it's spam in the eyes of everyone who doesn't happen to subscribe to their service of choice? If they want to read an article through their news app they are of course free to do so, but why spam that link?
What if they were offered $160mm and Tailscale countered with 4X the valuation, lowering the number of shares by 75%? Similarly, what if they wanted $40mm but the only deal on the table was $160mm due to ownership targets of funds that can actually write $40mm+ checks? It's hard to play these armchair games, even less so when the terms aren't known.
You're right that we don't know all the terms, but $160M raised is not small and it is very reasonable to worry about what level of control will be given up long term because of it.
409a valuations are made up by independent appraisals, but it’d be quite strange for an investor to agree a share is worth 4 times the appraised value.
