I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.
Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.
There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.
> suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.
However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.
On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.
I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".
> However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit.
cf YouTube when you watch one video on X that's outside of your normal viewing and RIP your homepage for the next few days until you've clicked "do not recommend" on enough videos to stop the flood of X and X-adjacent content.
This! I recently ditched Spotify and rediscovered radio in the past few weeks. There are so many great songs I've come across from bands I enjoy that I had never heard of because, as someone else said, Spotify's algorithm is way overfit.
It's also great sometimes to discover great music from genre you usually don't like, or... just be exposed to songs you don't like. This is what helps building a musical culture.
Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a classic here but there's no such thing as recommending too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
FIP and NTS are my goto's. The discovery features for shows on NTS and the "in focus" specials are great, so many good opportunities there for serendipitous listening. Will def check out radio paradise
FIP is broadcasting in FM in France, so no big news on that one, for me.
But i will investigate NTS. I knew their radios streams, but it seems they also have some pretty niche podcasts !
And remember you can always get the audio steam through HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others with better quality.
There are many Android apps like Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open these, in order to avoid using a web browser.
Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms that craft my music experience.
I respectfully disagree. If you're into classic rock those stations are pivoting around here to 90s and 2000s rock since that's "classic" now. Then you're left with ButtRock stations that play mostly the same thing every day at the same times in the same order. The best radio we had in our area was a college station that has an hour or two of stuff I'm interested in or as close to a legal pirate radio you can get (100w tower) that shut down - THAT was amazing. Had a ton of DJs who played things they liked.
Outside of rock you're left with automated pop and country stations who have computerized playlists.
Community radio DJ. Community being the important part.
Most of the radio stations here in Columbus, Ohio are what you described, the clearchannel / IHeartMedia stations.
However, there is an independent radio station and it's so great. They play Democracy Now! during the daytime and they have a rotating list of shows for the evening. I've heard some really great music during the evening shows.
Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)
Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.
The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.
Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.
Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.
Yeah I have no idea why music recommendation algorithms have gotten so bad. Rdio had the pinnacle of music recommendations in 2013. I wonder what happened to that tech after they shut down in 2015, and why no one has been able to reproduce it.
I wonder if it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For example, if you only ever listen to new music that Spotify gives you then at a certain point, the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted. If you don't give it any new external signal then it doesn't have a good way to find new songs.
> As of today, daylist is available to both Free and Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.
Do you mean daily mix playlists? From the first 20 songs 17 are something which I added to my library, or listen them regularly. The rest of the 3 songs? 2 of them are from artists whom I listen to regularly. 1 clearly new song.
I have very similar rate with “daytime mix”.
So which one do you mean? “Discover weekly” and ”release radar” have new songs, yeah. But “radios” are like the previously mentioned playlists.
It has a very similar rate for me, a little bit better. Btw, there are new songs in every playlist. The problem isn’t that there is none, the problem is priorities, especially with radios.
My experience with YouTube is that I start with an obscure song/artist and it will gradually bring me to the mainstream. Maybe that is just me... I feel like ideal algorithms died with last.fm era.
My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.
He gave up his US citizenship years ago but he explains some of the reasons why he left. I'll also say that the AI research coming out of Canada is pretty great as well so I think it makes sense to do research there.
Paul Graham is delusional. Sure Jeff worked hard and didn't become rich through inheritance alone but the nearly 250k investment from his parents that sure helped. This sort of ignores that a lot of these founders came from families that had money to begin with. Most people aren't starting a company unless they had enough money that they didn't need to worry if their company failed. Jeff Bezos didn't need to worry if he was going to be able to pay his mortgage.
In my personal life I know of an engineer who started a pretty successful tech company. They started three or four different ones before the last one took off and was wildly successful. They were only able to do that because they didn't need income from a 9-5 job like most do. I'm not saying they didn't work hard for it or didn't deserve that success. They're both smart and talented. I'm saying that most people don't have the resources to start companies that will make them wealthy like many of the people listed here.
There is a saying we all know but often ignore. One needs money to make money. Large volumes of money/wealth can magnify one’s chances of success(or careless failure) faster than any other apporoach.
it's worse than that .. certain nexus points (social,financial,legal) like Palo Alto California, are exactly the fertile grounds for rampant valuation escalation. When "guy with some financial safety" starts a business selling lawn mowers with a new motor.. or perhaps builds them to sell.. no way at all is that going to experience the exponential growth seen in the past 20 years in Silicon Valley valuations. There are thousands of easy examples of solving real world problems, in real ways, that will not scale financially in the ways seen around Silicon Valley.
I worked with a founder who tried probably a dozen ideas before the one that made it, and each time, he had his relatively wealthy family to backstop the effort and provide a sofa to sleep on when it failed. Eventually, one of those businesses made him very well off, and he became an insufferable libertarian. Whenever he had a company pep talk for the employees, he would go on and on about how he started the company all by himself with nothing, and built it into this big thing that employs all of you, blah, blah, blah. No acknowledgment of the incredible fortune needed to weather all the previous failures.
I just added this as a feature. You can launch the game with custom WADs at the site's landing page (https://doompdf.pages.dev/). It'll open a new PDF file as a blob URL (and you can even save and redistribute the PDF it generates).
A disclaimer though - I don't have any experience with Doom modding. I don't know if the behavior of this feature is correct. All it does is it loads the PWAD by passing the "-file" argument to the game's main function.
Is it playable.... eh? that's another matter. I think I'd need to modify it a bunch. Right now the doors don't seem to open when playing the PDF. I could just remove them all though.
Unless there's a zero day in Xen in which case the entire security model falls apart. With all these cloud providers using Xen, I have no doubt that there's already one out there.
This is true. But the code base of Xen is significantly smaller than that of a full operating system running bare metal, so the likeliness of a zero-day comprising Qubes is less likely (but possible).
We have kind of already moved where it grows, it's indigenous to south America but most of it is grown in Africa. My assumption is that we'd see indoor / vertical farms for many temperamental plants if it becomes more cost effective, but that might be impossible for cacao which is a tree. Or perhaps someone will find a way to cross breed it with something that will help it grow elsewhere.
