irotsoma

joined 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah it sucks that the Spotify algorithm for both automated playlists and "shuffle" is a mess now. It used to be half-decent, but now from what I've heard from insiders, though no official confirmation or anything, is that the algorithms were modified to heavily favor sponsored artists, and so only really works with popular genres with lots of sponsored artists from major record labels, and "popular" songs, which means the more a song is played, the more often it gets played which becomes a self-fulfilling popularity cycle that excludes less well known songs. Really does a bad job for me with interests across many genres and wanting to hear more "b-sides" from artist I follow.

To be fair,i switched to Tidal for a bit because i got a several moth discount for talking with a product manager about what I thought the app needed (though they didn't seem to take any of my advice anyway), and it's no better than Spotify with finding new music. It paid artists better at the time and streaming quality is a bit better (not sure about now), but it was also missing a lot of artists I listen to, unfortunately.

I really miss the early days of Pandora when it used to use the "components" of music to cross genres and didn't rely as heavily on how popular a song was and had just about all artists I could possibly want. Sure, I did a lot more skipping of songs back then, but now I just hear the same 50 or so songs over and over. I get really tired of it and don't have the time to make my own playlists, not to mention even if I make a list, I want it shuffled, and even that just plays the same songs over and over way more than "random" would.

I'd love if there was a service for finding new music that allows me to hear new songs and then choose to purchase them if I want to hear them again.

And even better if it gives me a list later to review if I want to purchase so when I listen in the car I don't have to touch 4 or more buttons to "like" a song. Never understood why Spotify, Tidal, etc., car apps always bury the like button and instead present a back button that doesn't work if you aren't in a predefined playlist anyway, and a shuffle button that I'm not going to want to turn off and on on the fly anyway. The like button should be immediately after the next and pause buttons in priority order. Such bad Ux design.

I also really miss Aimee Street that Amazon bought and killed. It was a cool way to get less popular music for cheap as well as getting the artist more exposure and more money the more often a track was purchased. Got so much stuff for pennies that I ended up really liking and buying a lot more from the artist.

Anyway, that's my rant about music apps for today.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Only if you're running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn't a concern.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it's unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I've never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it's being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.

With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that's mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Based on the latest AOSP missing Pixel device trees, binaries, and kernel source, GrapheneOS might be on the way out, or at least for newer phones and android versions. Still not sure what this means, but it doesn't look good, so I wouldn't recommend investing in Pixels as they are no longer open platforms like they or the Nexus line before used to be. I have a Pixel 7 Pro with GrapheneOS which works great, but it's likely my last Pixel. And I've been buying Nexus and Pixel exclusively since the Nexus One.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

They hire experts to deal with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The issue with any crypto mining is that you can't uaually do it casually. You are generally competing with others to return the result first in order to get paid for a block. If you mine too slowly, you'll never actually complete any blocks. If you mine too fast, you use a lot of energy. The only way I found it economical for an average person over the long term is if it's not a popular coin, but popular enough to have some value or you generate a lot of excess power from solar and your power company either doesn't buy it or the rate is miserably low. There are short term scenarios where it can work, but much like the stock market, you need to be paying very close attention to profit margins, power rates, crypto price, current local temperature, etc.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago

Gendered restrooms only exist because men wanted to keep women from being out of the house for too long because public restrooms were men only. Then they used them to keep people of color from being out in public too much by making the "colored" bathrooms as unbearable to use as possible. Now it's trans people. It was never about safety and always about discrimination.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, and it was a one off restore, so others who are mentioning self hosting will still be taken down as long as that policy remains.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It means the same as it meant for X and Facebook. Allowing hate speech against minorities currently being targeted by the American government (mostly Latin immigrants and LGBTQ+, especially trans, people as well as racism and sexism in general), in exchange for dropping investigations against them. They'll lose a small percentage of users, but get to maintain their monopoly powers, privacy violations, and other illegal activities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of "work" on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can't be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn't keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you're more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.

It's a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they're spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they're making on the crypyo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah one thing I find these kinds of tools good for is warranty tracking I'd something breaks and insurance claims if there's a fire or robbery or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there's still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they're all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.

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