I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services.
Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week.
Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week.
Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting".
And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore.
Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.
This annoys me to no end. I'm sure there are more curated playlists on Spotify out there, but having it always shoveling music at me based on whoever is paying them the most to push it is exhausting. And as others have pointed out, the app experience has seemingly deteriorated over time to the point where my Offline music is difficult and frustrating to get to play... when offline!
I'm slowly returning to curating my own music files and integrating them into my homelab via Jellyfin and Fintunes (can be found on F-Droid). I currently keep Spotify around for its podcast archive but those days are likely numbered as well. I'll end up supporting them forever though, since weaning my family members off of its convenience is unlikely to happen.
Edit to suggest "Cloudspeakers Weekly Chart" as my recommendation for a curated Spotify playlist with a wide variety of new music with updates on Saturdays. Occasionally includes pop hits, but I've otherwise found lots of new artists in there. Found it through a recommendation on here, definitely not through Spotify itself.
No matter which is your starting track, if left to their own devices the "For You" and "Music Station" features will start veering into Top-40 pop music just after a few songs. They should be renamed "Six-degrees of separation from Bad Bunny generator".
I haven't experienced the top-40 veer, but it seems like any jazz song from absolutely any subgenre will eventually lead to Freddie Freeloader off Kind of Blue, and then the algorithm just continues to generate from that direction. It's become a running joke between my partner and I. "Just threw on a Cal Tjader album - how many radio tracks do you think we'll get before it's a Miles Davis station instead?" I recall back when I used Spotify, that service's radio similarly insisted that any playlist incorporating even a single indie rap song MUST become a radio featuring JPEGMafia.
It really highlights the limitations of these automated discovery services. I would love a service that makes it easier to explore the vast amounts of recorded music in jazz's various subgenres, and current streaming services are not it. The human curated playlists on Apple Music are pretty good for exploring a genre, at least, but relatively surface level. You are unlikely to discover the deep cuts I'd expect to surface two hours into a generative radio off an album that was itself kind of obscure.
Gosh, I miss what.cd. The industry destroyed it and never replaced it with anything close to it. I have to imagine so many of those cassette rips, like lost Dilla tapes handed out at shows in the 90s, are just gone forever now.
I don't have this problem with Apple Music at all?
My 'for you' gives me a weird melange of stuff I love, stuff I forgot I loved, and occasionally 'wow what is this new stuff that's awesome', with the rare 'oh god I like this band but not this album' kind of thing.
It's pretty spot on, and has led to discovery of quite a few new artists I like.
I have a pretty wide taste, so it's sometimes...jarring to listen to, but it never veers into Top40.
You might want to try YouTube Music, which also includes whatever YouTube users upload (so you get rare mixes and other otherwise unavailable music), and will apply the usual “people who liked X also liked Y” recommendation algorithm. You won’t get any tour or merch info though.
I wrote a bot for GitLab that can do a few different things:
* Nag (Comment) on Merge Requests to tie it to proper release milestones and labels, something that is easily forgotten, or simply ignored by their UI due to the "never consistency" method of Javascript frontend.
* Create ChangeLogs from a Milestone, by traversing all the MR's merged during the time window, or associated with the milestone.
* Generate Wiki pages with above ChangeLog, as well as generating markdown templates with release notes as well
* Tag projects for release, automatically using above ChangeLog to generate a correct list of changes that has happened.
All this assumes a certain workflow, in our case time-based releases where multiple projects get tagged regularly for release, and development for a release is tracked in a milestone.
The tool is FLOSS, but it's fairly specific to my usecase.
As with many checklist items, it is a useful technology that when set up and followed, can be totally awesome.
Turning on and adding some "proper" filters on the audit subsystem won us the first spot in a CTF, as the early markers that "something is up" turned out to be excellent.
But if all you do with it is pipe it to your log server and ignore it? Well, then it's not really going to help you, and is only a checkbox item.
I feel that much of this disparaging on various "checklist" items is crappy half-assed semi-elitism. Checklists are _amazing_ tools for preventing accidents in many industries, everything from surgery to trains and flight use them with great success.
So why can't information security professionals use them without being derided by others in the business? Perhaps the same reason as doctors insisted that hand washing was time consuming and unnecessary, or the financial institutes that insist that oversight and auditing is unnecessary.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Variables to abstract out some, a bit of "repeat" to loop over something, and you get pretty drop-downs that you can combine to show nice graphs.
Then you think "I'll add it to a playlist". and you do so.
Then you think "my kiosk can't scroll this much for all, let's have one screen each for the apps" and you do.
And then you realize you cannot use variables from playlists, and you cannot template screens.
So you make eight copies of your screen, one for each variable configuration.
And you edit each copy of your screen to set the variables, and save it.
And then you realize that there was a typo in one panel.
So you go in and edit in eight different screens to fix that typo.
Then you realize that it doesn't look good on the TN panel, so you need to change a few colours to get better contrast.
So you do that on eight different copies, by the means of clicking in every pane, navigating through the point-n-click and then pressing.
But you realized that you learned this, so you're fast, and use the keyboard. Except then the change doesn't take.
Because grafana requires you to click in another field after you've edited, or your change doesn't hold if you press "Escape" or other key to navigate back.
And that's how I learned how Grafana is best of breed in GUI dashboard tools. Sort of how a pug is best of breed in a dog competition.
I use Ansible + Jinja2 templates to create and update my dashboards. Minor tweaks and changes can be pushed to hundreds of dashboards using the grafana API
I don't have an easy way of sharing this but I'm free to answer any questions about it.
My process is
1. identify services that benefit from a generated dashboard (a service that I am running hundreds of instances of, for instance)
2. create the first dashboard by manually
3. export the dashboard to JSON and turn it into a jinja2 template
4. use ansible to access the cloud provider api to get whatever metadata I need to populate the now templated dashboard
5. store the updated dashboard as code and also push it to Grafana via API with Ansible
This is all automated and you can skip all the way to step 4/5 if you plumb this to your service build/delivery automation.
A few years ago we migrated from Jira to Gitlab. To use their project-planning features (Epics, etc) they take a massive preḿium if you're not interested in the other features.
Still, the basics are sound, and even without epics and a few of the other neat but expensive features, it goes pretty far.
That massive premium bothers me too. I don't mind paying for those premium features, but as a small company (less than 20 employees) the cost is not justifiable.
We already use GitLab's community edition as a self-hosted package combined with MatterMost, and we love it. We are not using its issue tracker, only the git repository hosting and integration with MatterMost.
However, having to go to enterprise tier just to get epics is not an option for us. I really wish GitLab would price their tiers more appropriately for small businesses.
Also, what on earth are you doing with that acute accent on that poor m?
Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week.
Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week.
Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting".
And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore.
Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.