I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.
This is a great point. As companies get bigger you can find HR actually codifies the behavior as part of their efforts to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process. So you end up with developers, who know this is a flawed system, perpetuating it because the rules require it.
Hazing is exactly what it is. It's a club and if you want to join the club you're going to have to go through the rituals. I hate participating in the charade but I do it with as much humanity and compassion as I can muster.
Music as an art form is simply not that important to a lot of people. It's more a mood drug. And you're right about the algorithms. In general, the algorithms are judged by the amount of listening that occurs because of them. It's a poor metric for user happiness, but it's what gets used. And in an A/B test, the one that plays familiar tunes is going to win over one that plays challenging tunes.
I'm pretty sure you encounter in in science fiction as well, where some bug like alien has a carapace or a soldier has some armored exo-skeleton described by the word. Though I cannot think of any specific examples.
While there's certainly darkness here it clearly shows Frost was not all doom and gloom. Even a very cynical reading would be hard pressed to discount the positivity of the small act and the feelings of connection it engendered.
I suspect FAANGs got infected by these idea by hiring from more conservative institutions driven by their financial bottom-line. I've never worked at FAANGs but I've seen that arc at other companies as they scale. Practices that foster speed and innovation are supplanted by ones that favor predictability and safety.
Not to be a downer, but one perspective is that there is no meaning to be found and any purpose is yours to define. Both Stoic and Absurdist thinkers have written from this angle. I'm not an expert, but realizing there have been smart folks dealing with the same issue since ...forever, has helped me power through.
Exercise is a good choice, spending time with my dog and experiencing life through their eyes, being out in nature and connecting with the geology and biology, the physics and chemistry of existence fills some gap for me. YMMV
Correct, two people: the victim and the criminal. Going back to your example, a victim who gets mugged after choosing to walk down a dark alley is still the victim. They do not share responsibility or fault for the crime. They share responsibility for being in the same place at the same time. The victim making a choice that puts them in the wrong place at the wrong time is not at fault for that crime. I believe you are using the word blame in a broad sense that encompasses both the criminal action and the poor choice. But by using the word in the two senses and then equating them, you end up equating the actions, intentionally or not.
And I'm pointing out that responsibility and blame are not the same things and that conflating the terms leads to positions that are hard to defend. A person may be responsible for their own actions but not to blame for someone else's.
I prefer to think of art as anything made by man. Using this definition I can cherish a poorly crafted thing made by a friend, a child's scribble, a well crafted gear or an antique bronze from thousands of years ago as art. And that means we all are artists. All artistic categories are just groupings around an idea. Imagine a taxonomy tree where each branch has proponents screaming 'here is where art starts'
Sparkey is simple and super fast. If you use them like Spotify frequently does, where a pipeline creates a new daily copy, hydrating them to the nodes that need access becomes the bigger issue for using them.
Not contradicting you, just adding the context that there was BASIC compilers that could speed things up significantly. Not sure of the cost or the the relative performance, but it was fast enough to build commercial products with.
I think mourning is more than just tragedy. It's recognition of loss. And the tradition of black things around death has seemed more a sign or respect than as indication of some tragic underpinnings. But I actually don't know the history of the tradition, so I am happy to be corrected.
> does NOT remotely justify the additional cost...
The recommendation system is amazing and totally worth an additional cost to me.
> You paid $10-20 one time and the music was durably yours forever.
I'm old enough to have re purchased my music on three platforms: vinyl, CD, mp3. If you buy physical media you have the added cost of needing space for the stuff and needing to move it around with you. As for Mp3, they are the great but they made sharing so easy stealing music became a real problem.
Questionable ethics by the author as well. It's fine to believe Kissinger is a war criminal and to call him such, but to omit that he never actually was convicted as such and to draw direct comparison to someone who was legally convicted of murder is akin to kicking the corpse. It's fine to seethe at someone you hate but at least be upfront about it.
Listen deeper, listen more and you will help artists more than cancelling your subscription. I don't know what artists at the new cutoff were making but its not a living wage, and I doubt it's even beer money. The unknown artists will never get paid if you don't listen and find them. That's what Spotify is great at. Once you find the small artist, seek them out, buy some merch, see a show. Drive an hour further than you normally would. That's what supporting an artist looks like, not cancelling your Spotify subscription.
Contrary to what many have said I think Ruby's popularity started to rise a bit before Rails. It got an earlier bump from being talked about in the 1999 Andrew Hunt and David Thomas book The Pragmatic Programmer.
As for why it beat our Ruby; in those early days Python tended to win the performance comparisons. That led to people using it for more demanding data tasks, which in turn led to more libraries for those sorts of domains. The parallel growth of jobs demanding those capabilities (data analytic and AI), cemented its supremacy.
That all said, if I need to hack a script together to automate some development task - in the vein of what Hunt and Thomas described back in 1999, I still reach for Ruby.