neilobremski

Any shuffle algorithm is fine but the problem is Spotify's brainlessness: it routinely plays songs it just played. If you are any long-term user then you have playlists of hundreds of songs and my guess is that you haven't heard some of those songs in ages which means ... the FEATURE IS BROKEN.

I'd prefer a weighted shuffle based on the staleness of a song in a playlist. That way you eventually get through all of the music but in a pseudo-random order.

I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.

Programming is now more opaque configuration than it is traceable logic paths. This makes paper debugging impossible.

This article may as well have been about writing to file streams does not block until a read occurs. Maybe the documentation (on sockets?!) could be more clear but at some point more words don't help with conceptual understanding.

We tell our daughter what the acceptable limits are. Sometimes she pushes or breaks those limits. We talk to her about it, take away privileges for a bit, and then resume. She is 8 and addicted to her Kindle 3 but so far so good.

Reminds me of Xitami on Windows 95 ... I wonder if that project is still around

I'm 42 and just getting started in ML and "the math" myself. I never got beyond algebra in High School but I have made a successful career in programming. I'm taking it day by day, I dedicate an hour each morning to plugging away. It'll happen eventually...

I'm not sure I ever considered the iPod Touch a music player; Apple hasn't made a decent MUSIC PLAYER in years. They've made a lot of very capable portable computers that sit on your wrist or rest in your pocket but there's a lot more noise than signal coming from them ...

Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or any small/startup company.

I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:

"The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."

Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).

The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

Something I'm trying to do on my own team is to make the wiki more of a browsable "table of contents", a glorified list of all the salient things. Searching to find the answers on Slack/Email/Jira/etc is fine and dandy when you KNOW what to look for but otherwise a gateway glossary gives the visibility necessary for a starting point.

For longer prose and procedures (particularly troubleshooting a very specific problem) I am encouraging blog posts with tags that link back to the parent page. These degrade more obviously due to their chronological nature and feel less jarring to prune (which can be done simply by changing the tags).

Didn't everyone do this at some point? Sort of like everyone that started C++ in the 90's rolled their own string class. I remember doing this before "JSON" hadn't yet found its acronym (shaking rake ... get off my lawn!)

And I suppose writers must have a Moleskine notebook and use clear penmanship? Hmm ...

It's harder to have conversations in an open office because they disturb non-participants. I find myself wasting time booking conference rooms when I could have simply popped into so-and-so's office.

I remember a long long time ago when the company I worked for did a big move and went from offices to cubes. I was young and naive and willing to try the experiment but within a month or two I regretted the change and things haven't gone back since.

I'd prefer sharing an office rather than an entire floor.