Using AI seems extremely excessive compared to a regular interface or human.

Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.

Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.

First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.

Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.

Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.

I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.

The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.

I know pre 1.x.x is kind of a wild west for versioning but uh is there any logic to the version numbers here? I’d think a new feature would be a minor version bump, not patch

I’m out of the loop. What?

People need to stop using Instagram.

I forgot last.fm existed. I sort of used them years ago.

They did not handle separate artists with the same name gracefully at all. The page for a riot-grrl adjacent band and an Australian rapper (?) got merged and the fans were going at it on the page.

Looks like it’s still kind of a problem

Still happily buying music on Bandcamp. Their discovery stuff is pretty good, too.

There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as “digital natives” who “get computers”, don’t understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.

Which makes sense if you’ve only ever really used modern UIs. You don’t have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don’t even know they exist in any meaningful way.

Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.

I worked at a place where all the DB column names were like id_user, id_project. I hated it.

It’s strangely satisfying when the “this will probably never happen” test case finds a problem during development.

I had tests for deleting that were like

• create item a
• create item b
• delete item a via the code under test
• assert item a is gone
• assert item b is still there

I thought maybe the whole bit with item b was excessive, but sure enough one day I accidentally fucked something up and deleted all the items, and the test pointed it out before the bad code left my local machine.

In real life? I’m not sure. Years of struggle to change government to enforce regulations, break up consolidation of power, blah blah blah.

In a like ttrpg or movie? Murder. Murder the board and other management and anyone they replace until the greed stops.

It’s frustrating because it’s all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can’t really get mad at it. It’s just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.

I already commented somewhere else in this thread, but I’ve been just buying music via bandcamp and I feel pretty good about it. If I buy about one new album a month for $8, it’s cheaper than spotify and after a couple years I have a large library of music I own outright.

This works with my listening habits, which are something like “I have like one new (-to me) album on heavy rotation every couple of weeks”. Someone who’s more of a “i never listen to the same song twice” extreme wouldn’t have as good a time.

I like bandcamp a lot more than spotify for finding new music. A lot of it feels less soulless because it is (presumably) written by real people.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/essential-releases/essential-releases-may-10-2024 - timely https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/japanese-acid-folk-list - genre deep dive

Plus on a given album page, like https://castleratband.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-realm-2 , it has links to “Other people liked this”, and the genre tags. It’s pretty good for discoverability, though maybe not as smooth as the soulless algorithms of spotify.

Bandcamp sold to epic and then got sold to some other vultures so they might turn to shit, but until that happens it’s a good, profitable, seemingly equitable platform. Artists got a big cut, you got drm-free music. The idea seems solid, if you can avoid the “infinite growth at all costs” and “i’m gonna sell out, fuck you” traps.

I think people who care about music make some false assumptions about people that kind of don’t. It’s like the xkcd about quartz: https://xkcd.com/2501/

i never tried it, but i like the idea of https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck for fixing mistakes in the terminal

Yeah pretty much. There are behaviors that are profitable but not good for the community.