bpp

Rekordbox is extraordinary in that it has completely captured the DJ market and absolutely everyone hates it.

AlphaTheta (nee Pioneer DJ) makes arguably the best club DJ equipment – CDJs and mixers. Audiophiles may disagree but it's good enough that it's standard in all clubs, and artist riders (contracts) will absolutely require Pioneer CDJs if not their mixers as well. They're well made and great to perform on, and are basically advanced musical instruments at this point. If you know how to really use the equipment, you will be a better performer, and it's helpful to have a standard platform in all clubs.

But Rekordbox, which is required for those same performers to load their music onto USB drives and have them read it back with metadata etc., is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. It's clunky, it's slow to load the music, it often corrupts libraries or misplaces files. You'll load a song only to find that it inexplicably doesn't play. It'll hang for hours transferring a playlist that should be written in seconds. And they've just made it that much more complex by having a second library format, which they load in parallel, which has basically no benefit to the performer.

I have a friend who's a touring DJ who avoided updating Rekordbox for YEARS because his version was stable and he didn't want to introduce any variance into prep, because Rekordbox is so bad. If you tell a fellow DJ "Rekordbox ate my library" they will just shake their heads slowly, knowing that it's happened to them before and will happen to them again. It's a universal DJ experience.

It is completely unsurprising that this bug exists; I'd actually be surprised if their engineers put any thought into security at all. I bet Pro DJ Link just makes the drive available with no security whatsoever. The networks are typically just a few CDJs and lighting equipment, so the threat model is low. But this is obviously a real problem – just not one they probably put any thought into.

I would love to see this software replaced, but given their dominant market position I don't see how it will be.

If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?

It's not illogical to staff up an agency charged with efficiency so you can cut more staffing elsewhere. This is honestly what most SaaS does.

I work in AI product eng for a larger company. The honest answer is that with good RAG and few-shot prompting, we can consider actual incorrect output to be a serious and reproducible bug. This means that when we call LLMs in production, we get about the same wrong-answer rate as we do any other kind of product engineering bug.

Laughed out loud.

And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.

I haven't thought about that episode of "Pinky and the Brain" in years, thanks for a chuckle.

I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.

Works until you get a bug in the deletion job. I've seen exactly this happen.

When I was a student at Brown, Facebook would report which dorm you were logged in from, right there on your profile (for all to see!). If Facebook knew where you were on campus, campus IT certainly has a view into your physical location. Nothing about this surprises me.

This seems worth taking with a grain of salt. I've never heard of this source before today, and the top story on the homepage opens with "MOST MAINSTREAM MEDIA MAVENS ARE BRAZEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENTS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY." At the very least, "The National Pulse" has an agenda that they're pushing.

The explanation I saw indicated that they keep readers on the site longer, which helps with both SEO and ad revenue (if they scroll deeper).

With regard to the phone number spoofing: I recently had an actual call from American Express's security department marked by AT&T as "Fraud Risk," presumably because it's been spoofed in the past. It delayed the detection and resolution of the theft of my card number (not by much, but still...). It's criminal that we haven't better secured the Caller ID system.