> Now, it’s completely different. The moment some obscure demo drops, it’s everywhere, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, whatever. Everyone knows about it instantly. That sense of discovery, of finding a truly underground gem, just isn’t the same anymore. It’s too easy now.
I don't agree. I want to be clear that I think youtube is terrible in many, many ways, but one thing I _do_ love about youtube is music discovery. Finding label channels and tracing through their artists, seeing what else pops up in my feed as a result and following those threads...finding random weird stuff with four listens posted two days ago, which then leads you to more weirdness...etc. is all very fun to me and I've discovered a ton of great music that way. There's also tons of random channels that have DJs or mixes they put out that is also a great and relatively organic way to discover new stuff (I'm always thrilled when a new Kieran Hebden set drops on The Lot Radio for one).
Maybe spotify is different, I've actually never used it, but I don't think the "Thrill of the Hunt" is dead in a general sense. And I'm kinda old, I was a music major in the 90s and at that time I was all about finding weird bootlegs and going to shows with <10 people showing up, subscribed to The Wire for a long time, and etc. There is still a ton of great new music out there and fun avenues for discovery! If anything there is more than I ever could have imagined when I was younger. People keep making great stuff.
Seriously. Ran into this with Tincan's support text line when I failed to receive the account initialization email to my provider...was immediately launched into LLM nonsense which I bailed out of until a few hours later when a real human finally texted me back. To add insult to injury, it turned out they couldn't figure out how to send emails to my small, obscure email provider, called 'fastmail' (/s) and insisted I use a different account. One failure after another with them.
In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over.
(It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)
Strong agreement with this! I managed somehow to jam a drill bit in my Makita cordless drill a few years back. It was just enough of a pain that I didn't feel comfortable trying to fix it myself, so I requested a repair through Makita. I remember calling them and getting it all set up via a real customer service person who seemed pretty obviously based in the U.S. (ironically). His name was Mark and he was great and made it all super smooth for me.
I got the drill back a little while later entirely repaired, the bent drill bit included in the return package, and I was charged absolutely nothing for any of it because I guess I was still under warranty and I didn't realize it. It was a fantastic customer service interaction and absolutely increased my loyalty to the company.
...and that's leaving aside the quality of their tools. In my experience they are incredibly rugged--among other things, for a week-long landscaping project I used that same drill with a gigantic bit to dig holes in frozen dirt, and it powered through it without issues. Great tools and a solid company.
That said, I've never really understood the enthusiasm the industry has for introducing Monads outside of Haskell. As I understand it, at the time Philip Wadler wrote his paper, Haskell was pretty painful to use due to its adherence to purity. Monads were presented as a way to maintain purity while providing a principled way to support all kinds of effectful computations. But without some of the features Haskell provides (I'm thinking of typeclasses and HKTs in particular), and given that almost any language you'll be introduced to outside of Haskell already has ways to do e.g. IO or whatnot, it almost always ends up feeling like bolting something on with not a lot of benefit.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's value in stuff like https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land --I find organizing how I think about computations around these algebraic concepts helps me a lot, personally. But that's distinct from introducing these concepts into day-to-day work in a non-Haskell language, especially on a team, which is often more trouble than it's worth unless everyone has already bought into it and is willing to deal with the meaningful friction introducing this stuff produces.
I assume the overabundance of Monad tutorials and libraries has to do with the cachet of knowing this relatively obscure, intellectual thing and being able to explain it to your peers, or to be more charitable, perhaps it's a byproduct of getting excited about learning this new, distinct way to approach computation and wanting to share it with everyone. But the end result is that now we have tons of ridiculous tutorials and useless Monad libraries in tons of languages.
This is a pretty simplified and inverted way to look at it in my opinion.
In many ways atonality was the inevitable direction that late 19th century Romanticism was moving in, with increasingly ambiguous tonality expressed by composers like Wagner and Mahler. In the early 20th century there was an explosion of new approaches and techniques which started from this basis and pushed tonal approaches to the breaking point and beyond. Composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were all trying new things within the realm of atonality and while we tend to look back and map history into narrow movements and philosophies to suit our current thinking, I don't think there was necessarily such a "serialism period" so much as there was the Second Viennese school along with a bunch of other composers trying things out at the same time. And even within the Second Viennese school the approaches were distinct; Berg is known for being a bit more "loose" and romantic in his usage of 12-tone technique vs. the rigid formalist Webern.
Leaving aside the dubious assertions of what is or is not listenable, the reality is that art music in the 20th century became more and more fragmented as the entire music scene changed around the world. Minimalism was just one thing that happened after serialism. Even if we exclusively focus on music labeled "European Art Music" the 20th century was a period of incredible experimentation and exploration with many different approaches to tonality (and atonality) introduced.
Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed.
I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."
> The basis of Erlang/Elixir/Clojure is that structs are just inflexible maps.
I mean the difference is that Erlang and Elixir have high-quality pattern matching baked in, not to mention stuff like dialyzer and set-theoretic types.
Clojure has multi-methods I guess, and stuff like defrecord that no one uses...and the turd that is spec. In my experience every Clojure codebase turns into map soup at some point without a tremendous amount of manual labor.
...so it's not as black and white as you're saying, I guess is my point. And for example, I'd always take Haskell over Erlang or Elixir even though Haskell's records are widely and justifiably derided, because the language taken as a whole is that much nicer to use, and stuff like lens smooths some of the rough edges over pretty well.
Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion added by someone not really familiar with common practices for presenting Japanese on the web.
As an American, Red Dwarf along with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy created a deep appreciation both for British humor and funny sci-fi in my adolescent self. I now own the box set on DVD and even have a random Red Dwarf novel I got at a yard sale (I forget which one of them wrote it though).
RIP Rob! Will be having a vindaloo, lager, and maybe some fish (Fish! Fish! Fish!) later in your honor
(EDIT: 100% talking about the UK version here, had no idea or forgot there _was_ an American version)
I attended a talk of his at Papers We Love at Strange Loop in 2018, I didn't really read the description and I was vaguely expecting something Haskell related, and instead got this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=766obijdpuU
I could barely understand it, but was impressed by what I could grasp. Dan Piponi's range is amazing, dude is brilliant
Welp not much I can say to that or to RandallBrown's response, seems obvious our experience and way of thinking is pretty different on this matter.
(EDIT: Also fwiw I often use a spoon or whatever to scoop things into the bowl, vs. pouring, which means I have more control but can still offload the measuring part to the scale...)
Whatever gets the delicious baked goods in your mouth I guess
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