Oh cool! I got a set of SoundTouch speakers years ago because they supported simultaneous Bluetooth playback as well as synced cloud service playback. This was in 2018 so options were more limited then. Since it became clear Bose was shutting them down I've moved over to Wiims[1] for managing playback (the SoundTouch app was always kind of odd and hard to manage) - but allowing local control is really nice. Currently you need to hit a button to enable playing from AUX on the soundtouches - they won't stay on the "dumb speaker" mode unless music is playing. Hopefully after this I'll be able to set them up as permanent speakers driven by the wiims.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
Sure - but as you can see here the focus on "ditching spotify" is often ethical. You can absolutely use services that have an artist pay-rate of $0 per stream, but I don't think people typically advocate for that - and indeed this author does not seem to either (otherwise they would have no collection size issues).
They will likely get the most money from the T-shirt because the percentage that the artist gets is much higher than any percentage they get from the distributors they distribute through (in case of both Spotify and digital albums they are likely to be the same distributor: Warner Music, Sony, Universal or some such)
I expect many people think: "fuck spotify" and "i dont think piracy is bad" at the same time. I don't think leaving spotify on an ethical basis implies any specific opinion on piracy.
I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
I did not find this to be the case. Someone gave me a few months trial on them recently and I found the interface to be the only one out of the streaming services to give a shit about customers that prefer listening to albums. None of the other major streaming services I've tried do. (not Apple, Spotify, nor Tidal). My only real knock on them has been their catalog seems to be the smallest of the majors.
Spotify was always trying to push some unrelated garbage when I had them like podcasts which I would never want to listen to and especially not the types they kept pushing (wasn't even popular ones like Rogan, it was stuff like male erection help and jesus podcasts lol). They also tried to weasel in audiobooks, which again isn't something I'd ever want in a music app. I think they even tried to do tv shows for a brief period of time. All these things pushed me away from it.
Besides all the other reasons Spotify is a terrible shit company it just sucks for discovering albums. No way to turn off playlist and single recommendations. It prioritizes recommending new stuff that's in genres I don't listen to. The only nice thing it does do is support last.fm (which Qobuz and plexamp also does) so I can scrobble there and get actually accurate recommendations through that.
UX is okay but the search functionality, which is definitely part of the UX, sucks fat balls on Qobuz.
But Qobuz is still king. I gladly pay their monthly subscription even though their programmers can't even be bothered to code a proper search functionality (that is: unless you enter precisely, with every single character being correct, the name of what you're looking for, Qobuz won't find it... And then weird, just plain weird non-matching matches do show up).
But I don't despair: I take it that at some point they'll find the time to figure out how to implement a better song/artist/track search functionality.
Playback is actually nice I will give them that, it’s just everything else I’m not a fan of. Although to be fair they’re pretty much the only ones that let you search by label which is nice. Just a shame the rest of the ux isn’t very good. The infinite scrolling, items being duplicated, no indication which version an album is…
That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
The situation is pretty dystopian, but as you point out I think most people upset about it are not willing to face the realities of the "80/20" (more like 99/1) split of fraud v.s. legitimate mistakes. Patrick McKenzie has a good article about the tiers of bank support[1] that makes the point that even though the experience of tiered support often sucks, it's essential to making these financial products widely available. Without the dystopian support structure you couldn't have things like widely available credit.
Most megacorps do suck - and also it's probably true that the lack of customer support is necessary to offer the products they offer at popular price points. People just don't wrap their heads around the scales involved, generally because the exact numbers are proprietary.
It is interesting to consider that disability may enable much higher academic performance as long as people get the proper accommodations. After all, wouldn't it be interesting if people we think of as disabled can - under the correct conditions - be more productive than 'able' people. An individuals' capability is generally pretty circumstantial and I think we should be open to asking questions about how optimal our current social structure is for productivity and capacity going forward. We may need to imagine new ways of living and structuring work and society to reach even higher levels of productivity.
^^This! Our current societal and cultural structure is not adequately set up to deal with, for example climate change and subsequent mass migrations, widening wealth gap, increasing authoritarianism, centrlising of control and power and a myriad of other problems, not to mention any second and third order effects; let alone improve to higher levels of productivity.
This is a weird response to a weird article. The original article doesn't define its terms and, as Robby points out, that makes it hard to critique. If a language is only "serious" if it can scale infinitely for all use cases then sure Ruby isn't serious - most languages aren't.
That said - this response and the critique seem to basically agree. The critique can be summed up as "Ruby doesn't work forever" (and so it should never be used) and this is saying "Ruby doesn't work forever" (which is fine). I could almost understand this post as saying: 'Ruby isn't serious and that's not a problem for anyone who uses it.'
I will say that I found it funny that the original article attacked Ruby for being all the way down at "18th place" (This is inaccurate - it's 14th in 2024) on the SO dev survey - while talking up Scala which is 9 places further down on the survey[1].
> critics love the Twitter example. But look closer. Ruby carried them further than most companies will ever reach. They outgrew their shoes. That’s not an indictment… that’s success.
> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision.
> GitHub held the world’s source code together for years using Ruby.
There are many examples of companies that used Ruby at one point very successfully but moved on from it once it no longer fit their situation. This isn't a critique of Ruby! But it is agreeing that Ruby can be outgrown and that, if you are looking to start with a language your usecase probably won't ever outgrow, Ruby might not be the best choice.
Neat. How is offlineasm used? (Without going into the details about the background of LLInt, that is—what I mean is, how is the compiler invoked?) Is it just the reference compiler, corresponding to some other machinery inside JSC?
That’s how the interpreter in JavaScriptCore gets compiled. The interpreter is written in a macro assembly dialect I invented and this is the compiler for it.
(I say compiled, not assembled, because it’s higher level than normal assembly. There’s an actual pipeline of transformations that happens. Plus a Turing complete macro language)
Email has been updated many times in the last 20 years. All of the major sender authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) were created and deployed over the last 20 years. Email is also famously insecure and lacking a standard way of managing encryption - so the reason you never see updates is because the features signal is changing do not exist in email at all.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all about server reputation. They don't count as any sort of update to email and don't affect the protocol. These days regular non E2EE email is as secure as any other messaging protocol that relies on trusted servers. Since it is federated over multiple servers it is better than systems with just one server. You can choose who to trust and can even host it yourself.
Compare with Signal where there is only one allowed server entity and hardly anyone verifies identities making man in the middle attacks trivial.
Some of the details might of changed since publication. My current understanding is that Signal doesn't even bring up the idea of identity verification if a user has not previously done it. So if anything, things have gotten worse.
Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service? Even if they do pay OpenAI they would certainly be competing with their own service and keeping prices down via that. OpenAI needs Amazon (or some other fulfillment company) to deliver products. Amazon does not need OpenAI - they can build their own recommendation engine or work with another.
> Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service?
That's the whole point here. People use web search as a product recommendation service, even though Amazon has one natively. What makes you think people won't (and they already are, in massive numbers) use chatbots for product recommendations and web search?
But OpenAI has the attention. It's where people ask for product recommendations, and it has context about the user. Surely Amazon doesn't need OpenAI, but OpenAI will be another valuable distribution channel for them - unless some other LLM takes the crown.
> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces.
I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public
People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.
Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
> People have the right to take in what is in public
You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree. I could imagine this could be treated differently in different cultures. As an example, Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info (including faces). Another common issue that is handled very differently in different cultures: How to control video recording in public places.
> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info
I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.
Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?
I think we're agreeing but our frequencies are mixed. I was just saying "you can't stop people from using their eyes in public".photography and recording laws are very different.
for more context, the chain started with this:
>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.
I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.
My jaded AF crystal ball called history says that these things never change until the petite-bourgeoise (I'm no Marx fan, but I think he did a good job with that part of his social class classification system) are seriously harmed by it. The rulers don't care. The poor have real problems. This sorts of crap happens or doesn't happen at the behest of the materially comfortable people in the middle. And it seems like they never learn except the hard way.
It's not something I am excited about, but it is something I want my IDE to do well if I must engage with it. Other remote pair programming experiences are even worse and I appreciate Zed's capability in the area even if it's not what I prefer.
A lot of my IDE choices are about extensibility and flexibility more than perfection for my preferred coding approach. After all, until I only work for myself I need to be ready to accommodate the needs of others as part of my job.
[1] https://www.wiimhome.com/
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