…if tomorrow python ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.

  Set up a website — and while you’re at it, start a mailing list, because email is basically the only means of reaching your contacts that can’t easily be taken away from you.

I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!

Well put, totally agree! The key word here is “affirms”.

Here, watch; I hereby affirm that I am god incarnate, that I have no flaws, and that every unit test I’ve ever written has passed on the first try. It cannot be denied that I affirmed that!

Sure, it’s not the same as a human suggesting music. But sometimes people consume art for the art, not for the curator! Both are worthwhile.

Sure, and a simple random number generator will use significantly fewer resources for the same desired result.

Surely you’d agree on second thought that Spotify’s recommendation algorithms are more reliable than pure chance?

I’ve always found Spotify’s recommendations to be aggressively bad, to the point that complete randomness would probably be preferable.

Spotify has spent 5 years pushing podcasts and audio booms at me, despite me never clicking one and showing interest. Spotify has very little idea what I want, it seems.

not so sure actually

The article isn’t about the DJ feature at all, despite claiming to be. It is very clearly and openly about Spotify not catering to classical music in general. It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!

>It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!

It does not. The only reference to literacy is the following:

"The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate."

That is entirely reasonable and correct.

There’s a reason there’s no deterministic recommendation engines. How would that even work?

Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.

Don't try to deflect with pedantry.

The system is clearly resolving the users query.

Mixing that with the deterministic “play the songs requested instead of random crap” or even “play related classical music instead of random crap” is clearly not an impossibility.

It actually almost did the right thing. …but no, rather than handling the difficult edges cases like this, just do whatever for edges cases.

It is lazy.

Handling complex difficult edge cases is what differentiates good products from lazy ones.

You don’t use a DJ feature(/any recommendation feature) to play specific songs, you use the search bar. Again, a recommendation system that gave you just exactly what you asked for wouldn’t be a recommendation system!

Re:”play related music”, yeah clearly Spotify isn’t built for classical music. Maybe it should be — I certainly would vote for it to be a priority for a state-operated alternative! But calling a specific feature lazy because of a high-level corporate priority concerning content isn’t valid, IMHO.

Apologies if I'm stepping on a joke, but just in case: Nativism is about cognitive capacities, not sensorimotor ones. All apes could easily communicate just as well as Helen Keller, yet none of them have ever asked a question, much less written a book!

No joke. Same sensorimotor neurons in the human speech apparatus have cognitive analogues, developed together over vast expanses of history.

Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.

IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".

If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.

[1] Minsky, 1991: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...

  There's a parallel in linguistics. Chomsky showed that all human languages share deep recursive structure. True, and essentially irrelevant to the language modeling that actually learned to do something with language.

...this is so absurdly and blatantly wrong that it's hard to move past. Has the author ever heard of programming languages??