Readit NewsGoogle was “obnoxiously open about” do no evil and the other stuff described in the blog post. It’s natural for people who bought into those lies to react accordingly. Nothing in the blog post suggests a belief that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things.
1. Segmentation is a very classical in medical image processing. 2. Everyday there are papers claiming that they beat the state of the art 3. This paper says that most of the time, the state of the art has not been beat because they actually are in the margin of error.
Sure, it is often flag-planting, but when these papers come from big corps, you cannot "just ignore them and keep on" even when there are obvious flaws/issues.
It's a race over resources, as a (former) researcher on a low-budget university, we just cannot compete. We are coerced to believe whatever figure is passed on in the literature as "benchmark", without possibility of replication.
Anyway, winter is coming, innit?
Getting back to "I don't even want virtuous algorithmic recommendation"… I like jazz rock/fusion, especially when it has a touch of bluesy/blues rock influence. There is probably a lifetime of listening time of that genre, and it takes no effort for me to appreciate anything that resemble this. Long guitar solos by a jazz-educated guitarist who happens to like Jimi Hendrix, sign me up.
But I do think there is value in getting out of my comfort zone, and listen to something drastically new, from time to time. It requires effort though. My first reflex when I hear synthetic drums or autotune, for instance, is to press "next". But it is through other humans being recommendation, that I sometimes make that effort, and actually learn to appreciate something else.
Call me an elitist prick, but I hate to think of music as a commodity for us consumers to consume. It is art. Art is not always pleasant. It sometimes becomes pleasant after overcoming an initial disgust.
A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.
You lose that.
A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.
I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are still made.
But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to what you know and already enjoy.
If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce such behavior?
Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists; discover music through your friends and other humans recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends. Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going to artists anyway. And use soulseek.
I wish the Windows XMPP client situation was a bit better, but in the Linux world we have at least 2 actively maintained and modern-looking clients with Dino and Gajim, and 2 TUI ones.
Keep up the good work!
What is old is new again (Google used XMPP for Android Push Notifications before they switched to something else).
http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
I would love to hear HN's take on this argument.