Yeah I am not in a hurry to switch but I would like to at some point. But with android becoming more closed source every month it seems, I am more curious about switching to a linux mobile OS if that becomes viable in the future.

I have mostly been pushing myself to degoogle and self host to achieve my privacy concerns and in that regard I have been relatively successful. Switching to an open source OS is just the next major step that I am not sure I am ready for just yet. I do already run bazzite and arch on my desktop and laptop though so the phone is really the only thing I have left to switch.

Lidarr has a Spotify playlist syncing feature built in. You can set it to sync certain playlists and it will automatically add those artists to Lidarr. I think you can also configure it to monitor/download only the albums which the songs in your playlist come from, or download the whole artists discography.

I can’t attest to the quality of Usenet or private trackers for music as I don’t use either (mostly public trackers for movies and tv) but public trackers weren’t the easiest to get all the music I needed. I ended up using Slskd, a frontend for SoulSeek, with the Tubifarry plugin to connect to Lidarr and it is much easier to find releases now.

The next issue I have yet to tackle is porting those playlists to a player for Navidrome. If anyone finds a simple way to do so please let me know!

• Lidarr + Tubifarry + Slskd: automated downloads and organization
• Explo + listenbrainz: discover weekly replacement
• Navidrome: Subsonic Music Server
• Feishin: Linux Desktop client
• Arpeggi: iOS mobile client (Yes Ik iOS on privacy sub. Can’t afford to switch yet and my family has been using iPhone since I was s a kid)

Listenbrainz requires you to make what you listen to public as it is part of the open source project. If that is something you are worried about I think there are alternatives to explo that use last.fm but that is closed source as far as I know.

As others have said, buy stuff from small bands on band camp or at shows or something and pirate from whoever you see fit.

EDIT: I also should have noted, this is a self hosted setup that requires a server to be online unless you download your tracks to your client device. If you want a single device alternative, I am not personally sure what to recommend.

!c/whoosh

I am by no means an expert but I think most of the noise pollution coming from data centers is outside of the perceptible range for humans.

This video breaks down infrasound rather well and demonstrates the issues it can pose for people living miles away from the source. This could also have several unstudied consequences for wildlife as well.

I graduated last year and it was a rough search. I think I submitted over 300 applications across LinkedIn, my schools Handshake account, Dice, Welcome to the Jungle, and a few other sites.

I’d honestly recommend just putting a good resume together and going for the spray and pray option with applications. It didn’t seem like anything I did really worked. Career fairs never actually led anywhere for me and I even saw a stack of resumes in the trash one time which was really discouraging.

Eventually I got a call while I was on vacation from a recruiting agency saying they had some opportunities. They said I had applied but I still have no recollection of visiting their website tbh. I landed a job in software support through them with my current company which is buying me out of the contract this coming month after being there for a little under a year.

I was skeptical at first going into software support since I really wanted to do some coding myself but it has so far worked in my favor. I have had the opportunity to do some coding with some of our engineers and my regular job duties also require code analysis so it is a lot more hands on with code than I first expected. There is also a clear path to becoming a software engineer with my current role so I will be pursuing that.

Overall, if you are comfortable doing something other than software engineering as your main role, I would look for similar roles like devops, db management, or anything that might involve some scripting programming as a smaller responsibility. Then you can try to work your way into software engineering from there. Definitely continue to apply to software engineering positions as your man focus though.

Yeah I have actually been pleasantly surprised with how the output can be structured by providing it with additional instructions to specialize its role.

The ability to control its verbosity to a certain degree means that I can cut out the “You are correct, here are 20 bullet points to show you why”. I can also kind of turn it into an internal documentation search engine that can search our support ticket db, codebase, and documentation articles at the same time.

Still very new to designing LLM agents and AI in general, but I am glad my team and our department seems willing to do things right and roll it out slowly even with pressure from the C Suite to roll it out right away. I don’t trust any LLM to do any particular task in my role, but it’s decent at gathering information quickly since it is literally what it’s been designed to do.

I just wish we stopped getting posters generated by copilot for company events. They creep me out tbh.

This is exactly how I feel. I am rather new to the industry, still in an entry level position, but I have been tasked with building out an AI chatbot in our support team.

I accepted the task in hopes I can make the bot point people to references to read more on rather than give them the answer they seek outright, so that they hopefully understand why something worked and something else didn’t.

My goal is to make it easier to find those obscure references rather than regurgitate the source in a 2000 word slop response.