> I’ve got no pre-rewrite history of the repo to check).
I love this type of story, because it describes a different Internet that I'm familiar with. And honestly it sounds pretty rough out there! But regardless, we all should be using some kind of version control (git), and as an added bonus you'd get your pre-rewrite history from it.
I mean they mentioned they had the code on codeberg initially, so it must have been in a git repo before. Maybe they just did the ol' `rm -rf .git && git init .`
It's been under my skin for a long time now, but every single free music player app I've used in the past 8 years plays my locally stored mp3s in the exact same order each time the shuffle button is on. Many others complain about that too.
I don't know if it's happening on Android OS level, but even VLC, plays songs in the exact same predictable order. I've left support notes on VLC's forums, and submitted the issue to issue cues and there are no responses each time.
None of that encourages me to pay for a premium app, shuffle has been around since CD changers.
I would rather have the same "random" order than what Spotify does; random never plays some songs, and overplays other. I get true random has the possibility of that, but when I've heard the same song for the 4th time in an hour, on a 20-hour playlist, something is wrong.
It sounds like maybe what you want is to have the "shuffle" mode play songs close to truly randomly while still penalizing songs that have been played too much recently. This gives us an optimization problem:
minimize KL(π || uniform) - β E_π[times played already],
where β is an inverse temperature determining how much you dislike repetition and π is your policy. Here I've arbitrarily chosen a reverse KL divergence because it leads to a nicer closed form:
π(song) ∝ exp(-β⋅"times song played already").
I wonder if anyone has implemented this before in a music playlist.
Easy version: Make a smart playlist whose criteria are 'last played is not in the last 3 weeks, last skipped is not in the last 3 weeks'. Randomize within that. Possibly add some other conditions like 'genre is not podcast'. I've been having iTunes/Music.app do this for... probably at least a decade, at this point, it doesn't track when you made playlists so this is just guessing.
I think the Spotify algorithm is weighted in the opposite direction because a lot of people, not me personally, don't have much diversity in their taste so they really just want to hear the same songs over and over like on the radio.
My experience for years before finally dropping Spotify, and reinforced in some random comment online, was that it only grabs the first X songs in a playlist and shuffles among them, never proceeding to the rest. "First" may not be entirely correct but it was relatively consistent that a given playlist would always shuffle the same songs so it may have something to do with internal ordering/IDs.
I have this issue with youtube music only for some reason. For me "Shuffle" seems to be starting random, then after a handful of songs entering a loop of 6 or 7 songs. I never figured out why or looked it up, I just refresh the page. I know it must be only me somehow, but don't know what's happening.
>I have this issue with youtube music only for some reason…
Try navigating to the playlist and look below the currently playing track. There should be a "shuffle type" button bar showing 'Familiar', 'Discover', 'Chill', etc. It seems to produce better results for me if I explicitly choose familiar tracks or discover mode (or the other options, but i use the first two 99% of the time).
I just looked at the code and it's apparently using the Fisher-Yates shuffle with a call to arc4random each pass. It's literally eight lines of Swift!
I've never suggested this before, but if the Android app store has truly been as bad as you claim for as long as you claim, you should seriously consider buying an Iphone to solve your problem.
To implement shuffle play, it is not necessary to actually shuffle filenames in memory. Just generate a random number modulo the number of files, and then play that file. That way your program can shuffle play any number of files, no worries about running out of memory.
By the way, the Roku box has a "media player" app in it by default, and it cannot shuffle play more than a handful of files. Completely useless.
That's random play, not shuffle play. Random play can repeat songs before all songs are played. Shuffle play will play all songs exactly once before any repeats occur. Random play "puts the card back into the deck" before dealing the next one.
You are correct, and that matters if it is a small number of music files. If it is a large number of files, the difference in user experience is irrelevant. But not needing to remember what was already played keeps the player memory footprint small.
Except "small" is very large because this runs face first into the birthday problem so the average distance between duplicates grows to the square root of the number of files.
Hell even actual shuffling is not necessarily enough to "feel" right for human psyche, famously despite the ipod doing actual shuffling[0] users complained because tracks of the same artist / album could still cluster over shuffling an entire library, so they implemented "smart shuffle" to skew the shuffle and break up clusters. An other option is to weight the random pick by how far back a track was last played, or how little it's been played overall. This has the advantage of favouring less played tracks across listening sessions.
[0] and frankly if the ipod was able to do actual shuffling back in 2005 the memory footprint is just a lazy excuse
My car's player (reading from a flash drive full of MP3s) doesn't have "shuffle", it has "random". The difference is subtle, but it means that each time it advances to a new track, it selects that at random. The result is that I never hear all the tracks in an album/playlist without hearing a bunch of repeats. Infuriating!
But when I play from my phone or PC, I use PlexAmp (backed by my Plex media server), which is the opposite extreme. Not only does it know what randomly shuffling is, but the server has analyzed the sonic profile of every track, and knows about similar artists and similar albums. So you can play an "artist radio" featuring that artist and other related stuff. And you can choose an auto DJ, which inserts between tracks the closest sonic match to the song it just played, or a brief detour of about 3 tracks that are spaced along the path from the track that just played to the one that's about to play. It's fantastic for discovering stuff you haven't heard in a long time within a very large library.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend trying the app Symphonium. It can connect to your Plex music library and the "Smart Flow" playlist bring all the auto DJ modes from Plex amp and add a few more options. It also looks far better imho.
Auxio music player[1] for Android shuffles a new order each time the shuffle button is clicked (and ime is excellent for handling well-tagged libraries).
foobar2000 for Windows also changes the shuffle order but (at least in earlier versions) only after a relaunch.
The engineering of perceived randomness is an art.
The iPod comments don't fully apply to 'songs play in same order on shuffle', but still relevant if the players you tried actually have a smart shuffle that does things like matching metadata between consecutively played songs or some quickly computed properties like energy, and end up producing just a small set of plausible orderings that make a playlist listenable.
In VLC I create a playlist myself, then save it as a file.
Then when playing that list the random function behaves as expected, by playing any random song after any other, including repeats and seeming omissions in no pattern whatsoever.
Disengage the random switch and it plays top-down.
This post makes no sense. The author goes from having no internet due to a bombardment to LLM'ing. I find it hard to share the plight of a warzone when they go unhinged to build their own audio player afterwards (?!). If I want a music player every OS comes with one, and phones hold enough storage. USB thumb drives are also good. Failing that, burning CDs and using rechargeable batteries is another off-the-grid solution that will work fine, and CDs are easily transportable and will last for decades. Slightly physically damaged CDs are somewhat resilient and can be brought back to life with toothpaste, so they're somewhat "better" than files which shit the bed if there is any data corruption.
Interesting Story. Starting my own hardware music player as a learning project[1] (that will probably take years until the first release) I noticed how MANY music player projects are out there (software and hardware ones).
This seems to be a field with so many different approaches and requirements, that no solution can fit them all and everyone settles with the least annoying one or starts their own.
Personally, I've found that since breaking up with macOS/iOS in 2020 my most missing feature is using my headphone remote to control volume or skip songs without taking my phone out of my pocket / touching my keyboard. It's still in my muscle memory, because I'm using my iPod Nano 7 to listen to audio books a lot and while every iPod and MacBook does support this, Linux capable notebooks don't.
Besides this single feature, for music I found navidrome with smart playlists[2] and Substreamer[3] / DSub[4] to be a great way to listen to local music, since Substreamer supports OFFLINE sync for playlists. So every time I get home I sync my smart playlists, which includes a "last played" filter / ordering - so I get to listen to "new" music every time.
Unfortunately the headphone remote stuff probably will never be fully fixed on Android, because google chose to block "longpress" on OS level for their own Voiceover, but like I said: The least annoying option.
For audio books I can recommend Audiobookshelf[5], which is self hosted and can be combined with the official Android app or some third party ones (Lissen, Storii and Voice from Paul Woitaschek). I'm probably sticking to my iPod until it dies completely - but lately I found the HiBy R1 to be Linux based and hackable[6], maybe I try to implement my own player / UI for it :-)
> I was surprised by my own ignorance and how much LLMs like to complicate stuff.
Exactly and it's like a plague. I think the main reason is that LLMs are generators, they like to generate code where code removal or reduction would solve the problem just as well. You ask them to fix something, they generate a fix. You tell them the fix didn't work, now they generate a fix for a fix, whereas a fix that would also reduce complexity existed from the start.
With a fair amount of babysitting and constantly reminding the agent that code removal is an option, you can eventually get a decent codebase but I wonder why this isn't a default. Because they are trained on mediocre code that is the vast majority of what's available on the internet? Most likely.
> the main reason is that LLMs are generators, they like to generate code where code removal or reduction would solve the problem
Don't over-index on this choice of words. LLMs can just as easily generate a diff that removes or refactors code, they don't have any intrinsic "preference" to always add more code, unless it's been trained into them.
A lot of the early training had concentrated on "wow factor" one-shot style demoable use cases, where the models indeed ended up with a tendency to assume they were in a "produce something new for me right now" situation and often or always started churning out additional code, even without all relevant information. As training regimes improve, and as customer demand evolves, this is changing, and the latest big models place a lot more emphasis on maintenance tasks - still not enough, but it's at least in the mix. As they mature, I'd expect the models' "instinct" to gradually align with what everyone's idea of a senior software engineer is, taking time to figure out if they can simplify and refactor rather than always adding more.
It's a new field, it will take time to get it right, but I don't doubt it will eventually be right.
> Because they are trained on mediocre code that is the vast majority of what's available on the internet
Again, this is outdated. It's true that the earliest training took this "spray and pray" approach, but data quality filtering is now a huge focus and the labs have made a lot of effort (and progress) in figuring out what good code is and getting the models to follow that. They've massively improved, in my experience, and it'll only get better. Again - give it time, this is new.
They have improved I agree but still, if left unattended they can produce a lot of unnecessary complexity. Even Fable and whatever the other top models.
Programming is engineering and it's hard. In fact outside of engineering the LLMs have become so impressively good at reasoning, pulling the necessary information, connecting the dots. And yet it's still not enough to produce high quality code.
The ability to delete code was never really the issue. It's knowing what can be deleted without breaking anything, and having enough confidence in that judgment to actually do it
Recent one was there was a text selection bug in Flutter that is fixed in the next minor version, but AI decided to create a hacky wrapper class that monitors all input gestures and manipulates them to avoid the bug with various timeouts and debounces. When it could have just updated Flutter.
I also "wrote" my own music player. It took less time to vibe code a player than it did to test 5-6 music apps and find out they were missing feature X that I wanted.
Same here. When I read this article a few hours ago, I realized that I should vibecode a player for myself. I often listen to multihour recordings of radio programs, and I have been wanting an app that would remember the files I've played and the playback position in each recording--that's all. I set Claude to it, and in half an hour it produced a native Mac app in Swift that worked perfectly on the first try.
I also wrote my own music player. Lazarus, mplayer in slave mode. Wrote it 10+ years ago and never changed it since, using it daily: https://imgur.com/zyaFRYF
"Perhaps there is a “universal” music. In addition, I was cheered by an earlier remark of the biologist Lewis Thomas, president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City. When asked what message he would send to other civilizations in space, Thomas replied with words to this effect: “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” “But that,” he added as an aside, “would be boasting.” - Carl Sagan (1978) from his book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
I've been meaning to switch to some CLI music player that uses mpd, but I've stayed with Clementine since I don't want to live without the moodbar. Also, the only thing I don't like about Clementine is the annoying "various artist" grouping feature.
It's interesting how there are countless options for music players, some simple, some fully featured, and yet there are still holes unfilled in the market. There's probably some soul out there who's even unhappy with Foobar2000.
It's like a microcosm Linux: there are dozens of options, hundreds if you really go looking, but there are still holes in the market. Some are for somewhat understandable reasons beyond the individual distro/music program's control, while others are simply because no two features are in package at the same time, while others again are simply because no actual dev has had that idea and actually implemented it yet (maybe it's in some ancient thing, but nothing made in the past 20 years will have it).
On the one hand, I'm the guy that's largely happy with Linux Mint and VLC for playing my music files, so I apparently don't need much. On the other hand, syncing music from my Linux PC to my phone while keeping track of play counts seems to be an unsolved problem. Maybe there's that one program out there which can do it, but I've had to put that idea on pause while using Musicbee via Wine on Linux for syncing, which also stores my old play counts from my iPod and iPhone days. Hardly an ideal solution, just the least bad one.
Personally I have foobar2000 installed under WINE if I just want to listen to an album.
For listening to music on random shuffle? Maybe I'm the outlier in this regard, but honestly, I just use Rhythmbox. (Unless it's Android in which case I use foobar again.)
If I'm being really lazy and listening to just one song I'll play it with mpv. (Esp. with --loop)
I'm not one of those people that needs bells and whistles when it comes to listening to music.
>I wasn’t aware of other music players such as foobar2000 which my friend just pointed me to while writing this post.
This resonated with me. When I was coding as a 20-something, I very rarely looked at what others were doing in a space, and in 99% of the time, I opted for writing my own little library instead of using a third party.
Over time, I shifted toward the opposite. I very rarely roll my own thing because that means cognitive load and maintenance for me, rather I use the same energy to look for the best practice and whatever seems fit, established, and actively developed. And use my energy to bridge the gap between that and my needs.
I'm sure a lot of it has to do with just getting older, but it's very interesting how my earlier attitude seemed like a very personal thing for me, but now that I'm doing almost the opposite, it feels just as personal as the other one did.
I was taking some sort of mental notes while reading the article. I really liked this one. There used to be more such articles – written in this style (and no, it's not some highfalutin literary style). It is clearly not AI-written, and that was the least of it, it came across like a long diary entry. It wasn't either like those blog posts that often falls in either a hot-take or a getting obnoxiouly philosophical for the sake of coming across that way. For telling of existence under such oppsressive times it was I must say quite a light and refreshing read and at least to be that added to a heaviness - of things that were not in the post, having known, from far, what was going on there and what still is. Anyway.
V UI looks quite clean. Something to explore. Though I am not sure the screenshot on project landing page is something looks like that everywhere or a mac-like UI screenshot is shared https://github.com/vlang/ui. Apparently it's quite lightweight as well. I have been on a lookout for such a UI. Only hiccup is I am not so sure about yet another new language which would mean being almost 100% dependent on the LLM.
I wonder whether people who have ability (or rather habit) of being a voracious reader – anything – esp. fiction etc, because such literature are easily found everywhere, unlike specific books, like the books that are supposed to be "useful" or productive. I for one can just jump into a pool of written word (esp. not the soft or online kind – aesthetics and also entirely distractin free) and often not even come up for air for hours, days. But then I have never lived in the times and atmosphere author did and maybe one needs a bit of distraction in thsoe times.
I have always found this banning of accounts based on geography problematic. I not so much lamenting companies doing it – they just follow the law of their lands (most of the time) – I am rather concerned about not having enough options for users who can access such services, one way or other, irrespective of their geogrpahy.
Codeberg in a way scares me, or at least makes me apprehansive. Their words about AI and private repositories are disconcerting. I am sure they have reasons for this. I have a few small FOSS tools. As in I use it and I'd love to make it open source, not that it's the next tmux or vim. I'd just feel good if even 5-6 people use it. But then I also have some small repos that I need only for me - that is also personal, but because of the nature of it I wouldn't want to make it public and I don't want to have two git hots for two kinds of repos. Even though even combined these won't take more than 30-40 MB (in fact even that is too much!). That has kept me on Github. But I reckon author's a/c might have been banned if author was on Github, just like Anthropic.
It's not about paying money, I'd rather donate (in fact do/did – though to Forgejo I must add). I reallise believe permissive, safe, and private and free services should be available, just like I support cheaper or free public transport in my country (and I am willing to pay more taxes; no - I am not some moneybags).
Not exactly, but I have felt somewhat of what an Internet and communication outage feels like. I was in a city in my country once where riots broke out and mobile, Internet, phone everything was turned off. It was quite suffocating. Even though I was in an affluent area (some sort of officer's colony) which was as safe as it gets and the friend's family had two hams right there. This arcile kinda, for some weird reasons, unlocked a bit too many tangets and I just dumped them in this comment it seems.
Oh, by the way, even after too many years away from the Linux desktop my ideal music player is still Amarok and I love that logo (almsot as much as HMV's).
73 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadI love this type of story, because it describes a different Internet that I'm familiar with. And honestly it sounds pretty rough out there! But regardless, we all should be using some kind of version control (git), and as an added bonus you'd get your pre-rewrite history from it.
And that's a curated list!
I don't know if it's happening on Android OS level, but even VLC, plays songs in the exact same predictable order. I've left support notes on VLC's forums, and submitted the issue to issue cues and there are no responses each time.
None of that encourages me to pay for a premium app, shuffle has been around since CD changers.
https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Weighted_random_g...
You start with a weight of 1 and you just have things affect the weights, e.g.
- for every time it's been played before, multiply the weight with 0.1
- if the total number of tracks is N, and it was among the last N/2 songs played, set weight to 0
- for every word in title, filename, artist, album etc. that the last played song had, penalize tracks for any of those words they have
- if the song has a very similar length than the last song was played, it gets a penalty
IIRC in Germany they don't want you to stream whole albums, as under GEMA rules an album "performance" costs more than individual songs.
Try navigating to the playlist and look below the currently playing track. There should be a "shuffle type" button bar showing 'Familiar', 'Discover', 'Chill', etc. It seems to produce better results for me if I explicitly choose familiar tracks or discover mode (or the other options, but i use the first two 99% of the time).
I just looked at the code and it's apparently using the Fisher-Yates shuffle with a call to arc4random each pass. It's literally eight lines of Swift!
I've never suggested this before, but if the Android app store has truly been as bad as you claim for as long as you claim, you should seriously consider buying an Iphone to solve your problem.
1. shuffle play does not work
2. crashes if there are more than N songs
3. does not find songs in subdirectories
All of these are trivial to fix. I do not understand the programmers who make the firmware.
By the way, the Roku box has a "media player" app in it by default, and it cannot shuffle play more than a handful of files. Completely useless.
Hell even actual shuffling is not necessarily enough to "feel" right for human psyche, famously despite the ipod doing actual shuffling[0] users complained because tracks of the same artist / album could still cluster over shuffling an entire library, so they implemented "smart shuffle" to skew the shuffle and break up clusters. An other option is to weight the random pick by how far back a track was last played, or how little it's been played overall. This has the advantage of favouring less played tracks across listening sessions.
[0] and frankly if the ipod was able to do actual shuffling back in 2005 the memory footprint is just a lazy excuse
That won't be uniform. If you want really random shuffle, mod to the closest next power of 2 then re-sample until you get a number within the bounds.
But when I play from my phone or PC, I use PlexAmp (backed by my Plex media server), which is the opposite extreme. Not only does it know what randomly shuffling is, but the server has analyzed the sonic profile of every track, and knows about similar artists and similar albums. So you can play an "artist radio" featuring that artist and other related stuff. And you can choose an auto DJ, which inserts between tracks the closest sonic match to the song it just played, or a brief detour of about 3 tracks that are spaced along the path from the track that just played to the one that's about to play. It's fantastic for discovering stuff you haven't heard in a long time within a very large library.
foobar2000 for Windows also changes the shuffle order but (at least in earlier versions) only after a relaunch.
[1] https://github.com/OxygenCobalt/Auxio
The engineering of perceived randomness is an art.
The iPod comments don't fully apply to 'songs play in same order on shuffle', but still relevant if the players you tried actually have a smart shuffle that does things like matching metadata between consecutively played songs or some quickly computed properties like energy, and end up producing just a small set of plausible orderings that make a playlist listenable.
Then when playing that list the random function behaves as expected, by playing any random song after any other, including repeats and seeming omissions in no pattern whatsoever.
Disengage the random switch and it plays top-down.
This seems to be a field with so many different approaches and requirements, that no solution can fit them all and everyone settles with the least annoying one or starts their own.
Personally, I've found that since breaking up with macOS/iOS in 2020 my most missing feature is using my headphone remote to control volume or skip songs without taking my phone out of my pocket / touching my keyboard. It's still in my muscle memory, because I'm using my iPod Nano 7 to listen to audio books a lot and while every iPod and MacBook does support this, Linux capable notebooks don't.
Besides this single feature, for music I found navidrome with smart playlists[2] and Substreamer[3] / DSub[4] to be a great way to listen to local music, since Substreamer supports OFFLINE sync for playlists. So every time I get home I sync my smart playlists, which includes a "last played" filter / ordering - so I get to listen to "new" music every time.
Unfortunately the headphone remote stuff probably will never be fully fixed on Android, because google chose to block "longpress" on OS level for their own Voiceover, but like I said: The least annoying option.
For audio books I can recommend Audiobookshelf[5], which is self hosted and can be combined with the official Android app or some third party ones (Lissen, Storii and Voice from Paul Woitaschek). I'm probably sticking to my iPod until it dies completely - but lately I found the HiBy R1 to be Linux based and hackable[6], maybe I try to implement my own player / UI for it :-)
1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
2: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/features/smart-playlist...
3: https://substreamer.org/
4: https://f-droid.org/de/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/
5: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
6: https://github.com/Jepl4r/sonix-player
Exactly and it's like a plague. I think the main reason is that LLMs are generators, they like to generate code where code removal or reduction would solve the problem just as well. You ask them to fix something, they generate a fix. You tell them the fix didn't work, now they generate a fix for a fix, whereas a fix that would also reduce complexity existed from the start.
With a fair amount of babysitting and constantly reminding the agent that code removal is an option, you can eventually get a decent codebase but I wonder why this isn't a default. Because they are trained on mediocre code that is the vast majority of what's available on the internet? Most likely.
Don't over-index on this choice of words. LLMs can just as easily generate a diff that removes or refactors code, they don't have any intrinsic "preference" to always add more code, unless it's been trained into them.
A lot of the early training had concentrated on "wow factor" one-shot style demoable use cases, where the models indeed ended up with a tendency to assume they were in a "produce something new for me right now" situation and often or always started churning out additional code, even without all relevant information. As training regimes improve, and as customer demand evolves, this is changing, and the latest big models place a lot more emphasis on maintenance tasks - still not enough, but it's at least in the mix. As they mature, I'd expect the models' "instinct" to gradually align with what everyone's idea of a senior software engineer is, taking time to figure out if they can simplify and refactor rather than always adding more.
It's a new field, it will take time to get it right, but I don't doubt it will eventually be right.
> Because they are trained on mediocre code that is the vast majority of what's available on the internet
Again, this is outdated. It's true that the earliest training took this "spray and pray" approach, but data quality filtering is now a huge focus and the labs have made a lot of effort (and progress) in figuring out what good code is and getting the models to follow that. They've massively improved, in my experience, and it'll only get better. Again - give it time, this is new.
Programming is engineering and it's hard. In fact outside of engineering the LLMs have become so impressively good at reasoning, pulling the necessary information, connecting the dots. And yet it's still not enough to produce high quality code.
At least that's my experience.
Shoutout to LIBLRC, a free API for lyrics search.
It's like a microcosm Linux: there are dozens of options, hundreds if you really go looking, but there are still holes in the market. Some are for somewhat understandable reasons beyond the individual distro/music program's control, while others are simply because no two features are in package at the same time, while others again are simply because no actual dev has had that idea and actually implemented it yet (maybe it's in some ancient thing, but nothing made in the past 20 years will have it).
On the one hand, I'm the guy that's largely happy with Linux Mint and VLC for playing my music files, so I apparently don't need much. On the other hand, syncing music from my Linux PC to my phone while keeping track of play counts seems to be an unsolved problem. Maybe there's that one program out there which can do it, but I've had to put that idea on pause while using Musicbee via Wine on Linux for syncing, which also stores my old play counts from my iPod and iPhone days. Hardly an ideal solution, just the least bad one.
For listening to music on random shuffle? Maybe I'm the outlier in this regard, but honestly, I just use Rhythmbox. (Unless it's Android in which case I use foobar again.)
If I'm being really lazy and listening to just one song I'll play it with mpv. (Esp. with --loop)
I'm not one of those people that needs bells and whistles when it comes to listening to music.
>I wasn’t aware of other music players such as foobar2000 which my friend just pointed me to while writing this post.
This resonated with me. When I was coding as a 20-something, I very rarely looked at what others were doing in a space, and in 99% of the time, I opted for writing my own little library instead of using a third party.
Over time, I shifted toward the opposite. I very rarely roll my own thing because that means cognitive load and maintenance for me, rather I use the same energy to look for the best practice and whatever seems fit, established, and actively developed. And use my energy to bridge the gap between that and my needs.
I'm sure a lot of it has to do with just getting older, but it's very interesting how my earlier attitude seemed like a very personal thing for me, but now that I'm doing almost the opposite, it feels just as personal as the other one did.
V UI looks quite clean. Something to explore. Though I am not sure the screenshot on project landing page is something looks like that everywhere or a mac-like UI screenshot is shared https://github.com/vlang/ui. Apparently it's quite lightweight as well. I have been on a lookout for such a UI. Only hiccup is I am not so sure about yet another new language which would mean being almost 100% dependent on the LLM.
I wonder whether people who have ability (or rather habit) of being a voracious reader – anything – esp. fiction etc, because such literature are easily found everywhere, unlike specific books, like the books that are supposed to be "useful" or productive. I for one can just jump into a pool of written word (esp. not the soft or online kind – aesthetics and also entirely distractin free) and often not even come up for air for hours, days. But then I have never lived in the times and atmosphere author did and maybe one needs a bit of distraction in thsoe times.
I have always found this banning of accounts based on geography problematic. I not so much lamenting companies doing it – they just follow the law of their lands (most of the time) – I am rather concerned about not having enough options for users who can access such services, one way or other, irrespective of their geogrpahy.
Codeberg in a way scares me, or at least makes me apprehansive. Their words about AI and private repositories are disconcerting. I am sure they have reasons for this. I have a few small FOSS tools. As in I use it and I'd love to make it open source, not that it's the next tmux or vim. I'd just feel good if even 5-6 people use it. But then I also have some small repos that I need only for me - that is also personal, but because of the nature of it I wouldn't want to make it public and I don't want to have two git hots for two kinds of repos. Even though even combined these won't take more than 30-40 MB (in fact even that is too much!). That has kept me on Github. But I reckon author's a/c might have been banned if author was on Github, just like Anthropic.
It's not about paying money, I'd rather donate (in fact do/did – though to Forgejo I must add). I reallise believe permissive, safe, and private and free services should be available, just like I support cheaper or free public transport in my country (and I am willing to pay more taxes; no - I am not some moneybags).
Not exactly, but I have felt somewhat of what an Internet and communication outage feels like. I was in a city in my country once where riots broke out and mobile, Internet, phone everything was turned off. It was quite suffocating. Even though I was in an affluent area (some sort of officer's colony) which was as safe as it gets and the friend's family had two hams right there. This arcile kinda, for some weird reasons, unlocked a bit too many tangets and I just dumped them in this comment it seems.
Oh, by the way, even after too many years away from the Linux desktop my ideal music player is still Amarok and I love that logo (almsot as much as HMV's).