I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.
That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.
I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.
I feel like Ek receives a disproportional amount of hate for this. You have all these American CEO's pouring their investments in the American war machine (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc) and no one bats an eye.
Is it because this time it's going to a European company?
No, it's because Spotify is a consumer facing brand that people interact with daily and are aware of even if they don't use it. Also they're notorious for not paying artists well.
Practically nobody "likes" war. However, when facing adversaries like Putin who don't care for democracy, human life, human rights, agreements and contracts, who have no conviction beyond "might makes right", not ensuring clearly superior military capabilities ultimately means submitting to their plans of domination. Reflexively rejecting any kind of military investment is naïve and plays into the hands of the likes of Putin. It is no surprise that in the west, political parties and actors with proven ties to the Russian regime predominantly promote this faux-pacifist narrative, effectively inviting the fox into the chicken pen.
I'd rather download music and buy LP's, especially from smaller artists, than having a Spotify subscription. They get a much bigger cut and I get something tangible, if unpractical. The only ironic part is that a lot of small artists only print an extremely limited number of LP's, I don't understand why they don't let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it's for the "limited feeling", but that just feels dumb as fuck.
I'm paying for youtube music, but on the side I started buying records in bandcamp directly from artists and putting them in my jellyfin library. I do use lidarr for some older tracks. I think the ecosystem is starting to look good enough, where you can have your own personal spotify.
While I like a Karl Pilkington quote as much as the next guy, I really do want this. I have one specific use case for this layout that's always felt a little bit painful to reach into js for. I can't wait for the day I can simplify that further into native CSS.
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.
If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.
So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.
My experience with Pulumi is you can write bad pulumi code and good pulumi code and just like everything else, it's easy to end up in a codebase where one poor soul was tasked with writing it all and they didn't do the best job with it.
I feel like there's kind of a cycle of unsafety with motorcycles on the social level in the U.S.
There's a societal understanding in the U.S. that motorcycles are unsafe, which results in an increased number of people purchasing motorcycles with the intention of showing off how unsafe (dangerous) they can be. And the cycle perpetuates.
Obviously, motorcycles are inherently less safe in certain ways, like your body is going to fly if you get into a high-speed collision, and that's pretty much unavoidable. But when I visit European countries, it seems motorcycle culture is _so_ much healthier. They are mostly seen as simple transportation tools, a far cry from what I regularly see in the U.S.
I suspect at least part of this has to do with the fact that, relative to four wheeled vehicles, you can buy "impressive" motorcycles for relatively little cash compared to say, buying a truly performant sports car. Combine this low cost with an unrelentingly social pressure to show off, mix in one part social media and two parts a belief that you are invincible and I believe you'll have your cocktail of poor outcomes on fast two-wheeled vehicles.
But also, car drivers have this unfortunate tendency "to not see" motorcycles. Technical means like headlight interrupters can improve noticeability but are prohibited in some jurisdictions.
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
So we just blatantly lie now because "Israel=bad"? You can't donate directly to the IDF. US funding isn’t paying Oracle through some back door. If you’ve got a real source, show it—otherwise it’s just nonsense.
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.
“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”
Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
That’s misleading. You can’t directly donate to the IDF—people give to NGOs that support soldiers’ welfare, not combat operations or weapons. And while Ellison has given millions to FIDF, there’s no evidence he’s “the largest donor,” and no public ranking shows that. You can dislike Israel without inventing facts.
Why do you have such an issue with the donation to the IDF? I understand disputing that he's the largest donor, but I doubt he has ever written a big cheque directly to Trump (or in fact anyone except his family) either, is it also unclear whether he's a Trump donor?
Even if there were no mechanism for donating to the IDF available to the general public, do you believe someone like Ellison couldn't easily give money to whomever he wanted?
It’s something I recently learned and has informed the way I think about him and his family. Seems others have appreciated the knowledge too.
As a Jew myself, I think the actions of Israel over the past 2 years are clearly ethnic cleansing and I believe anyone who supports that effort should be exposed for doing so.
I remember when I was a kid having an old iPod touch that didn’t support Siri and having to jailbreak it, find some weird poorly documented package in Cydia, and download that suspect package on my device while entering some (in hindsight) equally suspect servers into some really hard to find text field in settings that somehow™ enabled that old iPod touch use Siri.
All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.
I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”
As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.
Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.
Basically my experience too. I've gradually come to the view that meetings are best as a place to communicate decisions/rubber stamp. If I need a particular outcome I will pre meet with the key people to get their input / socialise the decision / etc. And then the meeting just serves as formal approval.
> As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”.
Are you sure it's not that you're just bad at leading meetings?
I ask that tongue in cheek, but my thesis is the same. How are you measuring the positive criteria for a meeting? How would you know if some variable has a meaningful impact on said metrics? Are the metrics you're tracking the same metrics others are using, and if not how do you translate them?
Most meetings lack a clearly defined success criteria. Most attendees couldn't describe this criteria, even if pressed. Given my experience, that's the root problem.
People who are trying, often use "this meeting has an agenda" as criteria for if a meeting is likely to be useful. But this is a heuristic detached from what is actually important. Meetings are about, obtaining consensus, or uncovering some truth*. If your success criteria doesn't reflect either of these. It's much more accurately described as a waste of time, rather than a meeting.
Pretend meetings aren't a thing, you're requesting a significant amount of time from a number of people. Now, on top of that, add in the cost of context switching. You're proposing a completely novel approach to solving a specific problem. Define that problem.
Most of the meetings I've attended evaporate under that criteria.
Meetings without a doubt, solve real problems. But most meetings aren't solving any problems. They're checking boxes, because that's what people expect. Which results in the pattern you describe. it's either a waste of time, or a waste of time, in the other direction.
> The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.
It still sounds like to me, you're gauging the quality of a meeting, based mostly on the time cost. That shouldn't be considered*. Instead, assume you have infinite time. In this magical world, every sits in this room until you've arrived at [objective]. Pretend that amount of time might as well be infinite. Is the objective worth infinite time? Or can you still not describe the objective outside of the time cost?
> Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.
There's a nugget of truth, or more accurately reality behind this observation. Meetings that are rated positively, correlate strongly with context alignment. What concrete meaning have you taken from this critical observation?
If you have already have clear alignment, what impact should that have on the next meeting?
Imagine "next meeting" sounded like an absolutely ridiculous question, why would you ever consider having a "next meeting"? What a stupid question for some rando on the Internet to ask?!
Once you shift your thinking into being able to answer, why on earth, there would be a follow up meeting... You'll understand how to extract value from meetings.
Also, do note... sometimes meetings are just to hang out and shoot the shit. This might be more important than [average meeting] so don't undervalue the real benefits of spending time with coworkers! I've lost count of the number of difficult problems I've solved by casually ranting to a friend who asks smart questions. (which I take to mean, don't step on important conversations, for the sake of some bullshit agenda... try asking people if they felt like the conversations in a meeting were friendly and welcoming, see what that question does for your success criteria long term)
I ran a team for an entire year with basically only shooting the shit meetings and occasional consensus building meetings and it was the most productive and happy the team had ever been.
I’ve worked in an org where our CEO had the same sentiment. He preferred the term “work life satisfaction” . Worst thing was, if you really prodded him on it it became clear the definition was basically the same. He just didn’t like the negativity some people had when talking about work life balance.
We all had to quietly nod in agreement in those meetings and then literally everyone else openly talked about work life balance regularly. Being on the hiring team in that company quite, quite often the phrase comes up in interviews. Even our head of HR, thankfully, wouldn’t regurgitate the weird language around that to potential hires asking about work life balance.
Ultimately, executives are just humans. Humans have flaws and sometimes those flaws materialize in pedantic phraseology. People hope their execs are these perfect all-knowing individuals and that’s just never the case. It’s a combination of _some_ amount of competency and a whole lot of luck that put them there in all cases.
No. Execs are not "just humans." They are enormously privileged, often not due to skill but due to proximity / birth, and there is no excuse for this kind of behavior.
You want to make buckets loads of money and tell other people what to do? Then you need some empathy for workers who aren't stakeholders making peanuts compared to you. That is the most basic of basic requirement to be in such a position of privilege.
It isn't "just human" to be a slave driver. It is criminally inhumane. I can only hope these people will face some kind of karmic justice for their gross inhumane negligence.
Same at Amazon. Bezos often talked about "work life harmony" which he liked to say instead of "balance." His reasoning was that balance implies a zero-sum tradeoff in which more dedication to one takes away from the other (a characterization he didn't like).
But simply calling it "harmony" doesn't magically make those tradeoffs go away.
That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.
I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.