Fascinating, thanks for sharing! After spending a semester there during the Catalonia vote for independence (the one with riot police forcibly storming ballot locations on TV) and reading a bit of history, it seems to me that Spain has to be one of the most fractured developed states in the world.

Well, quasi-fractured I suppose: all the regionalism has lead to an also-strong federalist countermovemnt! See if you notice anything weird about the map of Spain's high-speed rail routes, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain#/medi...

(BTW, Spain has the second best HSR network in the world, just after China. Congrats, Spain!)

What's weird about the high speed rail network? Is it that all lines go through Madrid? Some people like to bring that up when talking about how Madrid gets everything. But the alternative to that is building the line through the middle of nowhere. If you are going North-South or East-West, it makes economical sense to stop in Madrid

The fact that Valencia and Barcelona are still not connected, for example

I think that's already in the works. The normal train is around 3 hours (1 hour less than driving). So it's understandable that it wasn't a top priority

Poor soul — they missed `wlroots` in their googling! You’re not supposed to be solving these issues yourself.

He's writing a client, and wlroots is a library for writing servers. It would not have helped at all.

Poor sould -- they should have googled `wlroots` before their commenting.

Surely some firms choose to hold referendums already, but I could see that being a good law! As Better Call Saul explored in its early seasons, the interests of the large law firm can easily diverge significantly from the interests of the plaintiffs.

…if tomorrow python ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.

  Set up a website — and while you’re at it, start a mailing list, because email is basically the only means of reaching your contacts that can’t easily be taken away from you.

I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!

Well put, totally agree! The key word here is “affirms”.

Here, watch; I hereby affirm that I am god incarnate, that I have no flaws, and that every unit test I’ve ever written has passed on the first try. It cannot be denied that I affirmed that!

Sure, it’s not the same as a human suggesting music. But sometimes people consume art for the art, not for the curator! Both are worthwhile.

Sure, and a simple random number generator will use significantly fewer resources for the same desired result.

Surely you’d agree on second thought that Spotify’s recommendation algorithms are more reliable than pure chance?

I’ve always found Spotify’s recommendations to be aggressively bad, to the point that complete randomness would probably be preferable.

Spotify has spent 5 years pushing podcasts and audio booms at me, despite me never clicking one and showing interest. Spotify has very little idea what I want, it seems.

not so sure actually

The article isn’t about the DJ feature at all, despite claiming to be. It is very clearly and openly about Spotify not catering to classical music in general. It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!

>It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!

It does not. The only reference to literacy is the following:

"The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate."

That is entirely reasonable and correct.

There’s a reason there’s no deterministic recommendation engines. How would that even work?

Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.

Don't try to deflect with pedantry.

The system is clearly resolving the users query.

Mixing that with the deterministic “play the songs requested instead of random crap” or even “play related classical music instead of random crap” is clearly not an impossibility.

It actually almost did the right thing. …but no, rather than handling the difficult edges cases like this, just do whatever for edges cases.

It is lazy.

Handling complex difficult edge cases is what differentiates good products from lazy ones.

You don’t use a DJ feature(/any recommendation feature) to play specific songs, you use the search bar. Again, a recommendation system that gave you just exactly what you asked for wouldn’t be a recommendation system!

Re:”play related music”, yeah clearly Spotify isn’t built for classical music. Maybe it should be — I certainly would vote for it to be a priority for a state-operated alternative! But calling a specific feature lazy because of a high-level corporate priority concerning content isn’t valid, IMHO.