As a matter of fact, I do NOT understand the overwhelming opposition to this. What's your deal if a guy is good at multitasking and people on the other end of the wire don't mind it? It isn't like he is desecrating a temple, or intruding into your home and using your toilet, or jerking off in the public... Wait, actually I'd say even the latter shouldn't be your business, unless he stains something. Why cannot people mind their own business?
> It isn't like he is desecrating a temple, or intruding into your home and using your toilet, or jerking off in the public...
Just like jerking off, defecation should be done in private. Meetings are not private.
Very few people want to see/hear/smell you do that and that includes over zoom or phone conference. Most people really do want to mind their own business, and that means having no part in you doing those very private things.
If someone is in a meeting on their phone while in a bathroom stall it's also very rude to everyone else in the bathroom trying to do their own business as privately as they possibly can under the circumstances.
Even that I'd call somewhat petty, but it is more defensible if it's insulting to you when you hear toilet noises from your phone, and you are totally in your right to tell it straight to the person who is calling you, that it's hard to hear him behind all farts and flushes. That's ok. People here seem to be complaining that somebody else is talking to somebody else on a phone while being in the public (office) toilet. I mean, I kinda understand if it distracts them from their business due to some psychological difficulties they may have, but that's the public toilet design fault when you cannot feel isolated enough, not the guy's talking.
Me either, which is why I find it so satisfying to shake the stall with explosive bowel movements when necessary. I’m very private by nature so it makes me giddy to cut loose. Only when necessary of course.
What a weird take. If I'm also in the bathroom, I can tune out all the other noises around me because everyone's in there to do the same thing. If I were on the phone with someone, paying close attention to what they're saying, and then I'm treated to a thunderstorm of bowl challenges, I'm going to be annoyed.
Humans pee, fart, and burp. That's perfectly normal. And yet, it's considered basic politeness not to do those things in a freaking business meeting if you can help it.
At the end of the day it's very easy and free to not shit while on a conference call. I think 99% of people would prefer a shit-free conference call, so, maybe we're all spoiled.
Asking because I was pretty much on-board with the comment and took it as being fully serious, up until the point of “jerking off in public shouldn’t be anybody else’s business, unless they stain something” being mentioned.
Now, I am not so sure. Either the entire comment was sarcastic or I am missing something major. But putting jerking off in public and talking on the phone in a public bathroom into the same bucket of activities (in terms of appropriateness) feels crazy to me.
They are not in the same bucket, and I'm being intentionally provocative, if this confession makes things easier for you, but I really don't think you should mind that much if somebody is jerking off in public unless it harms you in some way (in broad sense, e.g. being intentionally annoying, loud and doing it right into your face). The point is that you should do whatever you want unless it harms others, and shouldn't mind other people doing whatever they want unless it actually harms you. I would say a guy watching tiktok without a headset right next to you in the airport harms you waaay more than a guy jerking off in the same airport standing 10 m away from you or anyone else. I mean, it's disconcerning, because you'd rightfully assume he must be crazy, but the activity itself really shouldn't bother you.
And surely anyone mentioned is a hundred times less harmful than a guy smoking on the street. That should be illegal. Yet people for some reason act as if it's ok, and it is broadly legal in most places (unlike jerking off in public).
If that's the case, then sure, that perspective is way more understandable.
I didn't take it that way, because "in public", to me, implies that other people are fully exposed to it. I don't consider "in a private stall" as public, just like I don't consider "taking your underwear off in a bathroom stall" (very normal) as "taking your underwear off in public".
I have no wish to listen to other people's bodily functions when I'm working, or conversely to listen to them working while I'm answering a call of nature. The correct response to these behavior is to either hang up on them or tell them to shut the fuck up, respectively. It's not OK to impose yourself on others like this.
Thank you for helping me clarify something. Your last example, jerking off in public, is not only a crime (as it should be) but is clearly antisocial behavior. That helped me realize that's what all the other shit is too, no pun intended. Using the restroom while you're talking to other people on the phone, or generally just doing anything that forces other people to listen to you use the restroom, is antisocial behavior and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone civilized.
"Minding your own business" when it comes to antisocial behavior is enabling when the correct response in shaming and ostracizing. It's not going to work with LBJ but it will probably work with Kevin from accounting.
As others pointed out, this isn't a very strong offer, but I'm wondering, if it would be competitive (price/performance wise), does anyone have a use-case for this? I mean, I can name quite a few if it would offer me some hardware that my laptop I'm using to access it just doesn't have, like some A100-level GPUs and stuff, then it would be fantastic: login, do your job, forget about it until the next time you need it. But for anything else it feels like I'd just prefer something more… traditional? Like, DigitalOcean droplet, AWS instance, Linode VPS, you get the idea. At least a managed Docker container. Even if it's technically more expensive and less performant, we are talking like $5/mo, and you can pretty much always easily scale-up or buy additional storage volume, all these things. And it's all yours, for pretty much all practical intents and purposes.
Does anyone have a legit use-case when it would be actually nicer to use this on-demand type of service? (Once more, unless we are talking some serious on-demand hardware.)
For these kinds of services, I think the main value would be UX improvements, such as offering an environment preconfigured with a certain set of tools (e.g. nmap, tmux, curl, etc.) and other defaults. SSH in, and don't deal with a web panel. They may also be valuable in a learning environment where you don't want student servers running 24/7.
Other than those points, offering access to more powerful hardware is probably the best use-case.
A legit use-case is long-lived but infrequently accessed sessions.
Think debugging, learning environments, or experiments where the hard part is recreating state, not paying for compute. A VPS can do it, but suspend/resume avoids either leaving it running or constantly rebuilding it.
Does it handle languages other than English? I remember trying out some APIs like that for some tasks, and while I managed to find titles in English somewhat successfully, any other languages (be it the original title, or a translation of some fairly well-known book) were basically inaccessible.
You're most likely to run into issues with non-latin languages. Particularly picograms and the associated schemes for how to interpret them in a context sensitive manner. Substring search for example is likely to be broken in my experience.
In UK there is simply no such status as "non-profit", so technically none of what you listed are "non-profit" organizations. These are unincorporated associations, that, by the way, can be making profit (but that would be on shaky grounds, since common law makes it hard not to fuck up, being as vague as it always is). However, there is a "charity" status in UK, and you'd have be a registered organization to obtain it.
Anyway, "non-profit" is (i.e. "only makes sense defined as...") a legal status, it isn't just a way to say "not making money" (after all, we wouldn't call any failing business a non-profit, right?), so it really doesn't make any sense to ask if an illegal underground gang is "non-profit". GP is correct to point that out.
To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for a track to be "virtually unplayed".
First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to.
I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all.
I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year.
So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?
You might not listen, but surely you have heard of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and of course Christmas Staples of Mariah Carey and Wham?
First off, this is not the top we are talking about, since there is one that AA provided[0]. I am not sure what it matters which names exactly I've heard of, but if you are that curious: I don't know what is Ed Sheeran and Wham (but cannot vouch I've never heard their music in a supermarket), but I definitely remember "Coldplay" being mentioned in a joke onstage by a NIN member[1], but I didn't bother to check out what they are. I can imagine the faces of Taylor Swift & Justin Bieber, but cannot name any song, and I'm sure I've heard Mariah Carey somewhere, since that name is around longer than Rihanna. I have a song or two of Ariana Grande in my playlist though.
Are you sure? See, my point is a conjecture (based on a reasonable assumption that I cannot be that special), that there must be really a lot of us "outliers" out there (so I'm not even sure it's reasonable to call us that).
Let's reiterate. I am well aware that more people listen to that Bad Rabbit, Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber than they listen to <random name from my playilist>, it's not really a surprise. There even is a special name for people like that, it's "celebrity". In fact, that's probably how most people who are into music (including myself, I might say) would categorize them, as "celebrities", not as "musicians" (though, mind you, of course they are musicians, as everyone who ever sang a song is, it's just that when I hear the word "musician" I don't necessarily think of Taylor Swift). Hence these people indulge themselves for not knowing who these guys are, explaining it that "they are not into celebrities".
And it's no surprise that a lot of people listen to celebrities. I mean, if Trump would release a song right now, it would become #1 on Spotify in no time (for a very short time, but still). Well, maybe not #1, but close.
But I also suppose there are a lot of people who are into music. Maybe not so many, as there are people who are into celebrities, but it's still a lot. And after seeing that top-10 000 I suddenly find it very plausible, that a lot of tracks these people call "massive hits" may turn out to be "virtually unplayed". And hence not in those "97% of Spotify (by # of plays)" that AA archived. I am not even claiming it, I'm just saying that this doesn't seem to be impossible.
For instance, any DnB fan would say that "everyone knows Noisia and Black Sun Empire". It would be absolutely laughable attempt at "preserving human culture" not to include them. Surely all of their tracks must be at least in top-5M, right? Well, after seeing top 10K I'm not so sure anymore.
Maybe you've never heard of them, but surely you've heard of Prodigy. Not a single track from Prodigy on top-10K. Or Chemical Brothers. Or Burial, or Placebo, or Nighwish, or King Crimson. These are very famous names in respective circles. There are 2 tracks from Massive Attack — both featured in super-famous movies and trending on TikTok right now. For God's sake, there are only 8 tracks from Madonna in top 10K. Versus 26 from Imagine Dragons and 124 from "Bad Bunny", whatever it is. How do you like Madonna for an obscure artist?
So, my point is that there may be a lot of people listening almost exclusively to "virtually unplayed" music. Entire discographies of (niche) cult-artists may turn out to be buried in these 66% of "virtually unplayed" tracks.
I guess I should just get the metadata and check, but I'm pretty sure that would be outside of capabilities of the hardware I have on hand, so I'm not sure how to go about that.
1) 10,000 tracks really is not a lot. It sounds like a lot, but isn't. My own - relatively small - collection is nearly double that.
2) 10,000 tracks... out of 256,000,000 that AA archived.
I'd be very interested to see some more analysis done on this, particularly as it relates to, say, Last.fm statistics - but I suspect the missing music is not as significant as you think.
In any case, even if every one of those "niche" artists you list are missing from this collection, I don't think it's fair to say it's a "laughable attempt" - it's certainly better than nothing, even if it's not perfect.
The funny thing is, since the advent of streaming I no longer listen to the radio. I listen to new music, but little pop music, and I have never heard a single track from Swift, Bieber, Grande or Sheeran. Coldplay is the only act I like on that list, and the streaming services are pretty good at only playing what I like.
If they were pre-streaming artists I probably would have heard a lot of their catalog because radio played it over and over. Unfortunately you just can’t get away from the Christmas music.
An while back, another site started with a pile of pirated music, and that was allofmp3.com Remember those peeps?
Their business model was to sell music by selling bandwidth. Basically is was all the music you want charged by the megabit download.
Pop titles were $0.10 to $0.25. A whole album at 256mbps was roughly $3 give or take.
What got me really thinking was how great the UX experience was. At the time, few came close.
The end of that site was packaged up with Russia's entry into the WTO.
I seem to remember hearing about huge torrents out there too. The right infohash can point a person to huge archives of various kinds, books, video, academic papers, music, the WikiLeak insurance files, which is password protected, as perhaps all of these are.
Sure, but I am totally willing to make that tradeoff, and when my earbuds die, I buy new wireless earbuds, not permanently switch to some wired headphones I have lying around (mostly just in case, to not be left hanging if my earbuds suddenly die). I didn't know that before I started using wireless stuff, but now I do. Because, you know, I can change my T-shirt, maybe even take a shower, and start cooking something in the kitchen without pausing that audiobook, all while my phone is charging in another room.
I am even cautiously aware that people have lost their hearing, because damn LiOH exploded in their ear. That's much scarier than knowing I will have to buy new earbuds in a couple of years. Didn't stop me using them either.
I'm not even sure people think that. Apple's marketing department thinks that, and other company marketing departments seem to be implementing some kind of master-slave architecture, where they are slave instances to Apple's master server. Does anybody really check specs and deliberately choose the thinner phone? Or do people just buy new iPhone regardless of whatever decisions they make just because having the last iPhone is cooler? Of course, I don't know, but I somehow really doubt it's the former.
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