I believe the sample I used is short enough to avoid litigation
Hate to break it to you, but you could use a fraction of a second from another copyrighted work and if the owner can prove it, they can start legal action. There is no "short enough" that makes an uncleared sample legal to use, just increasingly plausible deniability (e.g. I didn't sample that snare hit from you, I made it from scratch). If the sample is distinguishable enough, you can't really make that case.
If you're serious about making money from music, you're gonna want to start clearing your samples (or using royalty free ones) before it blows up in your face.
FWIW though, unless you make something that gets particularly popular though, first action will probably just be a takedown request rather than a lawsuit. If you happen to make a track with an uncleared sample that goes on to become reasonably popular though, that's when they'll come for a big sum of money.
The ultra rich are getting richer and that makes everyone else poorer.
Once they have accumulated enough wealth to price normal people out of being able to buy anything, society will be forced to reconfigure to serve only the ultra wealthy.
Then we're all in slums with relatively few options to ever fix the situation.
We need to tax the billionaires out of existence before their simple existence breaks everything.
A stylophone is more of a toy than an instrument, really
If you want a small synth that you'll actually be able to use to make music and learn, I'd say look into the Korg Volca series. They're only around twice the price of the stylophone, and are much more powerful in terms of what they're capable of.
There's about 10 of them now and are very affordable for what they are, which is a combination sequencer and synth. They can also be connected together to sync up, so you could have one doing drums and another doing a bassline or something.
Look into YouTube videos about them and decide which you think would best help you make the kind of music you're looking to make.
I mean if you want to make good products you have to be in touch with how other people go about their lives
So it's truly baffling that the guy who has isolated himself on practically his own island, hours from civilization, isn't hitting home run after home run
Boomers are still a massively oversized voting demographic, so vast quantities of political energy are still spent on them.
They're also typically more susceptible to modern propaganda techniques than any subsequent demographic.
The bulk of modern propaganda is trying to stop people from seeing and tackling the issues causing the problems. If people get angry at immigrants, they'll not point their fingers at the ultra-wealthy who are actually causing all the issues pricing them out of living their lives.
The people in power are predominantly boomers and gen-Xers with views that align with boomers. There're practically no millennials in any position of meaningful power across most of the world's politics. The more radical gen-Xers were never let into the establishment parties, so they languished in the political cold unable to get enough votes under FPTP based systems.
No one can really change shit until the generations go back to being roughly the same size as each other. Hopefully it's not too late to fix things by that point.
Not necessary preppers as that is someone who's motivation is to mitigate some hypothetical future bad thing happening
I think most self-hosters are doing it out of a combination of technical exploration and mitigating real issues that exist today, e.g. cloud service outages or market exits causing something previously bought to be useful to become a temporary brick or permanent e-waste. Well, and cost in some cases, no one particularly enjoys having an extra bill for hosting.
I miss the keyboard screen series of Logitech stuff, I held onto my G510 a lot longer than I probably should have and only really retired it for something much nicer to type on around 2020.
If Logitech had released something like their G915 but with the screen, I'd have got it in a heartbeat. Even though game support had long dwindled, it was still good for media player feedback, system stats and IIRC there was a third party way of getting notifications from some sites to show up.
I guess smartphones kinda do most of that better these days... Well excluding the system stats, but that was always the fallback if nothing else was worth showing
Practically everyone's job is going to be automated away before long, the important thing is that production is socialised before practically 1 guy owns everything and has to pay no one.
At that point things end up pretty concrete.
These opinion pieces that pop up saying "ha-HA! Behold the petard they're hoisting themselves with!" Kinda miss the importance of preparation.
They falsely expect an easing to an exponential curve.
The cat leapt out of the bag decades ago, we all need to make sure we've got something left at the end of it all
Hate to break it to you, but you could use a fraction of a second from another copyrighted work and if the owner can prove it, they can start legal action. There is no "short enough" that makes an uncleared sample legal to use, just increasingly plausible deniability (e.g. I didn't sample that snare hit from you, I made it from scratch). If the sample is distinguishable enough, you can't really make that case.
If you're serious about making money from music, you're gonna want to start clearing your samples (or using royalty free ones) before it blows up in your face.
FWIW though, unless you make something that gets particularly popular though, first action will probably just be a takedown request rather than a lawsuit. If you happen to make a track with an uncleared sample that goes on to become reasonably popular though, that's when they'll come for a big sum of money.