My advice is to walk away, use the alternatives like FreeTube, Invidious, etc.
They don't work quite as well in my experience, but you don't have Daddy Google breathing down your neck.
Google doesn't care about you and will never scale their customer service solutions to address this issue, they won't even help people who lost access to their email accounts in any meaningful way.
I will say they have made it increasingly difficult to do that.
Behind VPN? "Log in to confirm you're not a bot."
Someone says the f-word or talks about a no-no topic? (oh no!) "Age restricted video, log in to prove your age."
I find the second one especially hilarious, given that I see borderline porn in the shorts section when I'm not logged in with no browser data for it to drum content up from, and that same screen displays to kids when they pull up YouTube.
"For the children" is always a lie, but it's so funny when it's that obvious.
All that said, I don't quite trust it for some reason, but I've been sandboxing FreeTube and using that, seems to work well generally.
That's the trouble isn't it? If we can't even agree on the meaning.
I didn't read it that way specifically because of the use of "you", which to me feels like an invocation of the audience or the royal "you" so to speak, to refer to musicians themselves, rather than the concept of digital streaming and distribution.
"Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster...you still needed a band...or a mate that could actually play something..."
Does the streaming/digital industry no longer have a need for a mate that plays drums? I guess you can read it that way.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I read it as almost like a lamenting of the emergence of the "one man band" and cheap throwaway music production by the ease of creating digital recordings at home, and even replacing musicians in the broader music industry with digital replacements, which I also kind of disagree with as being necessarily a negative thing. Toro y Moi, Washed Out, etc., would not be possible without such technology, but the metal music production industry itself has largely replaced drummers with drum machines, not streaming and digital distribution companies.
BTW those of us on the internet earlier were downloading mp3s as soon as 1997 or 1998.
I was specifically talking about end-to-end digital music production being used to "clean up" recordings per the article. Not whatever "scene" you are conjuring.
> Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster.
For people with limited resources (i.e. indie musicians without huge budgets), digital multi-track recording was not democratized until the introduction of low-cost hard disk storage at sufficient capacity to allow digital multi-track recording at home, roughly around 2002~2003.
Of course I'm aware of synthesizers, etc. I was an electronic musician myself during this period, and I lived it. I had the gear racks, ADAT machines, etc.
We did not have the resources as independent musicians to use non-linear digital editing software broadly until storage became cheaper.
Again, a lot of that music was typically done with looping and sample hits arranged on a midi sequencer, similar to trackers, but with distributed infrastructure.
Listen to older KMFDM, for example, the looping really stands out due to the limited storage they had when arranging, they would arrange sample hits and loops as I was talking about above.
Musicians with studio backing and infinite money could afford giant digital productions suites and were using crude versions of Pro Tools by the early '90s, am well aware.
I was hoping this would be more fleshed out as an article, but the sentiment is understandable.
Want to throw some of my knowledge of digital music, as you called it out specifically.
In the late 90s most digitally arranged music production was relegated to trackers (think Amiga trackers) and sequencing samples and loops, because the storage simply didn't exist.
Then that would be committed to tape, sometimes on a 4-track, sometimes on studio-quality tape, sometimes on ADAT.
Fully digital music production like we have now was out of reach for most people until roughly the early-to-mid 2000s, when you see an explosion of people, even in local music scenes, quantizing drum parts and using virtual instruments (usually VST) that would normally require tens or even hundreds of thousands in hardware.
Still having some issues that match my previous comment, I'll try to follow your blog and give more feedback as you work on it.
Will comment that the shorter phrases (2-4 characters long) were generally accurate at normal speed, but the longer sentences have issues.
Maybe focusing on the accuracy of the smaller phrases and then scaling that might be a good way to go, since those smaller phrases are returning better accuracy.
Again, really think this is a great initiative, want to see how it grows. :)
This matches my experience so hard that I wrote a novel below, have seen this pattern a lot, wanted to expand so people can understand the cycle/pattern.
Let's propose a generic scenario that shows why being able to engineer and read code is still important, and is a story we've all heard or seen a thousand times since the great LLMing of 2025.
"Just deliver the feature/product, we expect `ridiculousMetric` increase in productivity due to LLM" screeching from management and product/business.
A junior engineer will find someone who is willing to rubber stamp their LLM PRs so seniors or designated product experts don't even get a chance to check.
The LLM modifies existing tests to game everything to pass, the junior doesn't know any better, and so it quietly makes it to prod.
Because management is thinking in sprints, the way they see it, the ticket is closed, it's a win.
Then the broken production code, which junior will eventually be promoted for because the ticket is closed on paper, breaks prod, causes a huge outage costing `hugeNumber` dollars to the organization, and senior engineers have to clean it up. To boot, the spend metric is trash because of the LLM not knowing how to scale infra.
Since juniors can't meaningfully debug due to the toxic cycle, seniors spend too much time cleaning things up and it blocks their deliverables, and seniors look bad to leadership. Then they get managed out for not delivering, while the juniors lacking engineering experience due to the toxic cycle continue to rise through the ranks for delivering, even though their deliverables are trash.
I don't blame the juniors, they are under immense pressure and genuinely don't know better.
I blame short-sighted leadership.
I've heard this story from contacts at any of the big names you can think of.
It seems US tech industry is flying head-first into having giant teams of mid and senior level engineers who don't know how to debug or deliver efficiency within the next five years.
We're failing our juniors, and punishing seniors for having standards.
This does not match my experience, have been working with LLM since 2023. We presently use the latest models, I assure you. We can definitely afford it.
I am not saying LLM is worthless, but being able to check its outputs is still necessary at this stage, because as you said, it is non-deterministic.
We have had multiple customer impacting events from code juniors committed without understanding it. Please read my top level comment in this post for context.
I genuinely hope you do not encounter issues due to your confidence in LLM, but again, my experience does not match yours.
Edit: Would also add that LLM is not good at determining line numbers in a code file, another flaw that causes a lot of confusion.
When juniors use LLM, because they don't have experience, it becomes a nightmare for tenured engineers, and we just end up "mopping the slop", as I tend to say.
If you don't understand code, you're asking for a whole heap of trouble.
Why? You can't validate the LLM outputs properly, and commit bugs and maybe even blatantly non-functional code.
My company is pressuring juniors to use LLM when coding, and I'm finding none of them fully understand the LLM outputs because they don't have enough engineering experience to find code smells, bugs, regressions, and antipatterns.
In particular, none of them have developed strong unit testing skills, and they let the LLM mock everything because they don't know any better, when they should generally only mock API dependencies. Sometimes LLM will even mock integration tests, which to me isn't generally a super good idea.
So the tests that are supposed to validate the code are completely worthless.
It has led to multiple customer impacting issues, and we spend more time mopping the slop than we do engineering as tenured engineers.
I feel like it's the nature of these social media companies anymore. They use automated enforcement and the appeals process is impossible. :/
Will keep an eye out, this is very cool.