I'm rereading the Lord of the Rings after about ~15 years since my last one. For this read through I've been thoroughly delighted by the interlude of poems and songs whereas before I'd just gloss over them. I wonder if this is an effect of getting older.
This time I read LotR in original for the first time and this was quite an effort for me as non-native English speaker. And yes - poems and songs have much more sens and much more beautiful in original if compared with translated ones.
For anyone interested, the musical artist Cosmo Sheldrake has an album entitled Wild Wet World [0] where he samples sounds from the ocean. He often incorporates a lot from nature in his music and is a real treat to see live.
This sounds like the Roborock S series. I went with lidar over camera because it can run in any lighting condition and I don’t have a need for poop detection.
Many years ago, I was writing Clojure for a job and took to finally learning emacs beyond just saving a file and closing the editor.
It took about a week to finally get used to paredit-mode (and rainbow-parens, because…) but once I did it is the most productive I have ever felt, I keep trying to find that experience again.
Unfortunately the dynamic types and slow build system (lein) made the build step quite tedious (this was 11-12 years ago) - but in terms of expressing ideas, man - paredit + lisp style was amazing!
I also see close and almost unbreakable relation between clojurians and Emacs. I always tell them to snap out of it and stop wasting precious company time on configuration and writing + as the first character when doing an addition. When I get serious they always see the light as they convert to python + vim.
…let's say, your TV, or your iOS device will just do 10 network calls to these different microservices. It will just not scale at all. You would have a very bad customer experience. It would feel like using the Disney app. It's just not ideal.
What I find funny is that with that kind of money you could staff 10 app teams, develop the app 10 times in different ways and just pick the best one in the end.
I've worked in streaming before and something many don't realize is there are 10-15 different app platforms you need to build for (web, ios, android, roku, android tv, tvos, fire tv, xbox, playstation, etc, etc). So 10 app teams only get you ONE app across all of the platforms.
I don't think the experience is that much different between the different services, honestly. I vaguely have some recollection of Max being a bit bad, but don't remember the details. They are all fine.
Except for YouTube, that's just leagues ahead of everything else.
YouTube is the only thing I've ever interacted with where I can hear the audio of videos that I shouldn't be able to hear. And I've had times where two were playing at once overlapping eachother.
It only happens a few times per year for me, but I've never had it happen on another service.
Small price to pay for videos that load almost instantly. It's certainly faster than my Jellyfin setup despite Jellyfin's massive home field advantage (SSDs and 0ms LAN latency)
For example, Disney is actually pretty terrible compared to Netflix + Prime. Worst part of the service is when it frequently loses where you were in a program. They also made it really hard to get to 'continue watching' for a long time.
Another one that has annoying UX issues is BBC iPlayer. If you click on the latest episode of a show that you're watching in 'popular', it won't resume where you were in the episodes, it will play that episode. Very frustrating. While technically correct, that's not what most people want to happen.
Nah the Disney app is really poor, it crashes / refuses to load way more than the other ones in my experience. On multiple different devices / networks.
One of my peeves on Disney+ on Roku, is scrolling down to ~third row for Continue Watching, takes another 3 seconds to load that list while I stare at the silhouette thumbnails or whatever. I can (barely) understand that they want to advertise their new content prominently above, but it’s just sloppy to make such a common flow (continue watching) feel so slow and irritating.
My peeve with Roku is that the Roku Express' processor is too slow for a smooth UI experience. It's always a few button presses behind.
You shouldn't have to buy the more expensive Roku 4K just to have a device powerful enough to run its own interface smoothly. Granted it's only $10 more but had I known the UI was sluggish I would have paid it from the start even though I don't need 4K. But now I've bought both.
I don't consider making many network calls necessarily bad for experience. My https://hackerer.news page load makes more requests than I care to count and it runs for 70 seconds (looking at the 'date:'s in the network tab). But the page renders very quickly. It might be bad if you're in AU/NZ idk, but all the requests are cached via CloudFlare and being individual units is highly cacheable which probably offsets a lot of other downsides.
There is a bug in the Roku app where if you close it and then re-open quickly it will hang on the profile login screen every, single time. Have to go back to Home again and re-open the app.
Seems dumb, but I have 2 little kids and they both like to "pause" whatever show when it's time to turn the tv off. So after the first one does it, I have to do this dumb little dance to get the app to load again so the second one can do it.
I have sometimes opened YouTube on my Roku to find it skipped part of a video I was watching, maybe because the Roku took time to close down after I turned off the TV by IR.
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