For streaming/discovery, custom cli application that scrapes Bandcamp ‘recommended’ albums to get associations between them and considers what I’ve liked and disliked for probability weights determining what to play next, playing them with mpv.

For actually downloading stuff I like enough to want to save, I have a dedicated button to take the url in my clipboard and save audio files from it to my music folder with a script that uses yt-dlp

I had some bad luck with buying a SAS harddrive on ebay, bought like 3 in a row from different sellers that turned out to be DOA. To be fair, I was going for the lowest cost I could find for the capacity I wanted and ignoring seller reputation, and I did get full refunds after returning them, it was just a pain to keep installing broken harddrives, documenting how they were broken, repacking them and making trips to the post office. The fourth I bought used from Amazon for a little more money and that one worked, I noticed it was also packaged better, in its own harddrive shaped styrofoam thing instead of crammed in a small box with a thin layer of bubble wrap. The whole elapsed process took months. If I had to do it again I’d probably try more non-Amazon sellers again and try to find one that does packaging better and doesn’t try to sell broken shit because I hate Amazon but that is how it played out.

That’s your own addition though, it isn’t entirely clear that the person you questioned was talking about issues separate from its power structure.

Company policies aside

That’s kind of by far the most important class of problem though. I could complain about the complexity of its notifications system, or how all the ‘servers’ are represented with image icons and it sucks to navigate and find the one you’re thinking of if you add a lot of them, but it’s all small potatoes compared to being run by an enshittifying company complying (often in advance) with terrible laws and moving to use their accumulated leverage against their users. By developing a reliance on their service you put them in charge of you, but they cannot be trusted with that.

Now what?

I was very disappointed that the rest of this paragraph didn’t go in a completely different direction

Recently, people have used AI to release sub mods of SFO: Grimhammer III that work with updated versions of the main, Creative Assembly-developed video game

This is not enough information, what does it even mean? The original mod does not work with newer versions of the game for some reason? What’s the motivation for the mods-of-the-mod? Seems like important context that is missing.

The cameras don’t run automatic license plate reader (ALPR) software, though.

This seems totally meaningless if they are collecting the data, they can run whatever software they want on it whenever they get around to it.

But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product

I agree with your conclusion of not watching it, but the reason that companies might observe and take a non-purchase as some kind of hypothetical market signal doesn’t seem like the strongest argument for that, especially if people are avoiding the purchase specifically to deny them money for ethical reasons, that’s not something they can resolve by making ‘the right product’.

If pirating a Harry Potter show provides support to its author, I think that support is going to be more in the form of cultural relevance and mindshare than anything directly financial. Being a fan of an IP gives other people a reason to engage with it because your interest signals things to other people, like it means that by not watching it they might be left out of the loop etc, and since the law enforces property rights over what can be done with it and who can profit, that adds to the power of its owner by influencing the choices and interests of other people in their favor.

It seems that accounts aren’t required to download models or participate in the torrent swarm and have a somewhat reasonable justification of needing a way to maintain model provenance, which afaik pirate sites also require accounts for uploads for similar reasons:

Hugging Face verification confirms that someone claiming a creator’s handle controls the matching HF account or organization. It helps prevent impersonation and preserves attribution as models spread beyond their original host.

It’s also reasonable to have a centralized API since a lot of software in the ecosystem has using the huggingface API as a default way of doing things, so that makes sense for the goal of resilience to huggingface getting locked down somehow in the future.

The gamification-ish features do seem a little contradictory with the stated “decentralized infrastructure” objective though:

Pirate Face is preparing community benefits for account holders, including free compute credits and exclusive model releases.

Also loses points with me for (as far as I can see) not publishing a code repo, and the writing on the website having a very AI generated style which combined with the goals and features being a bit all over the place makes it tough to get a read on the project’s ethos and intentions.

Cops in the employ of organized crime are not exactly the people you would want having backdoor access to everyone’s phones lol