The primary improvement to human life expectancy was not medicine, but public sanitation. Prior to that, death was bi-modal, with peaks at infancy and old age. When people (and doctors) started washing their hands, the infant peak was flattened. Dead toddlers really kick the average in the nuts.
Quick, someone link that xkcd where a crucial open source technology is being maintained by basically a single person, while billion dollar companies rely on it.
Maybe, this is what people actually want to listen to and the algorithm is just doing what it's supposed to. I see people listening to these no name artists, the most boring unimaginative generic contemporary music. Maybe this guy just really knows what the average listener likes. In my opinion Spotify's algorithm is the best in knowing what I will like and probably will replay, I don't think it would work this well if they were manually directing us towards artists.
I feel like Spotify'a recommendations want to funnel me into a cohort whose music taste I supposedly share, but I actually don't. Last.fm seemed to both consider my likes more directly and more creatively. 15% or so of duds are fine, it's better than "oh you liked that dark techno track, it's mini-popular right now so have 20 more".
By the way, last.fm radio exists again, though YouTube is the music source these days.
I'm developing an open source app(flutter) I have already started it in a simulator(kvm). I just don't want to jump through all the hoops and pay to be able to publis the app somewhere for ios users.
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