Boeing QA department

My complaint is no so much the requirement of a phone number as the requirement of an Android/iPhone app.

The desktop app should be a first-class client.

If the artist has a way to buy and download from their website, I do that. Otherwise I buy CDs or vinyl and rip them.

Sometimes I poke around Wikipedia and see what other artists collaborated with, influenced, or were influenced by artists I like, and buy their albums.

Sometimes I download highly-rated shows from random artists on Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive

Sometimes friends recommend stuff.

mpd + ncmpc

I am but a simple man. All my music is FLAC. It is arranged neatly in folders. I just want to select an album to play. I do not need album covers, playlists, search, streaming, tags, lyrics, analyzers, or scrobbling.

Like with anything, you will not know if you are going to be good at it until you spend a lot of time trying and failing and learning. If you enjoy it, just keep doing it.

Bert is clearly the kind of guy who is pretty sure that Ernie is his friend, but is afraid to say it publicly on the 0.01% chance that Ernie says “we’re not friends, just roommates”, which would emotionally devastate Bert.

used steam deck + bluetooth keyboard

My state is winner take all.

If my vote does not affect outcome put only expresses support, I am voting for somebody actually good (often from the Green Party).

Even if it was 55/45, nothing would change. The Senate would be very close, if not in favor of the candidate who got 45%. The House would probably also be close, because the legislatures of the states that voted for the 45% candidate would still gerrymander. The only change could come from the states that voted for the 55%. If they gave all of their votes to whoever won the national popular vote, nothing would change. If they did proportional allocation, then it would get even worse.

My vote does not matter.

It does not matter who I vote for for federal office. My state is never close to competitive and my house district is gerrymandered.

If fascists win my districts for state office, it will not affect the balance of power in the state assemblies.

So I told all of the Democrats running for state and local office that if there is not a primary for the presidential election, then I will not vote for any Democrats in the general elections in 2024, for any office. Maybe they can put pressure on the DNC.

This is the only way I can potentially have any input.

The only way this works is if Democrats would shift left if they started losing elections because people refused to vote for old white male conservative Democrats.

But I fear they would actually shift right. The Democratic Party is not a big tent that holds both the neoliberal corporate shills and the progressives. It is a hostage situation where the neoliberal corporate shills demand our support, otherwise the fascists will kill us.

Spring combines combinations of environment variables, system properties, files, and classpath resources, and handles a variety of patterns (e.g.: aConfigOption could be configured by system property A_CONFIG_OPTION, aConfigOption, or several other possibilities), so tracking down where the configuration came from is not always easy. Sometimes you think you can just set a property, but it turns out another property triggers loading a resource that overrides yours. This would be fine if applications/libraries clearly documented how to configure them, but most say “config via spring, good luck lol”.

And good luck if you are trying to use two different components both built on Spring, and they both rely on the dependency injector settings “db.url”. Now you have to start playing games with dependency injector scopes.

Nothing? I just use the language features and I use libraries for specific things.

I do not use an automagic configuration and dependency injection boondoggle. I read config in main(), create the objects I need, and do what I need. It is easy to see what my program does; it is easy to see where configuration comes from. It is easy to test any component, because you can clearly see what you need to provide to build the entry point objects.

While you are mastering Spring, I am mastering libraries that do the thing my program needs to do.

While you are trying to debug to your Spring app, which is a huge PITA because Spring is a rat’s nest of conflicting configuration paradigms and overlays and fills your call stack with dozens of layers of generated methods, I have finished my work and am at the beach helping my coworker debug his Spring app because he didn’t listen to me when I said not to use Spring.

Because not one of those laptops have a TrackPoint style mouse.