I love clicking on a random person's profile and seeing that they're actively using the account (as in, I can see they're currently listening to a specific song!) they've had for 20+ years. So cool.

For me last.fm's value lies in the community aspect: you can leave a comment on any artist, album, or individual track's page. There's not a single other place on the internet where I can go to to see what the people think of a song I'm listening to at any given moment (apart from perhaps YouTube, but we all know what the comments there are like - last.fm attracts a more sophisticated crowd by nature).

Unfortunately they have recently taken a rather drastic step towards undermining this community aspect of the site by gating the comment (or "shout", as they call it) box behind a "SEE WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING BUTTON". Previously the top 5-10 comments would by default be visible on every artist/album/track page, but now there's an extra level of indirection you've go to go through to see or post comments. The move was never justified despite the vocal community's outrage on their forums [1], but I suspect it's got something to do with the site's poor performance, as previously comments failed to load about 30% of the time. Strange, yeah.

I've cancelled my Pro subscription a while ago as a result, but I'm excited to see what their independence from Paramount will bring.

[1]: https://support.last.fm/t/artist-shoutbox/117534

I think RateYourMusic also allows for commenting pretty much on everything (and it also extends to film and, IIRC, videogames).

It might not be as friendly as last.fm on the surface, but it is surely richer in content, and more diverse. It's a gem, and I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.

> I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.

It already has. Between the worst kind of Reddit tier moderation, the extreme anti-scraping measure affecting humans (can only access album pages from artist pages here, I get 503 errors otherwise) and the hiding of its forum from public view, it's already lying on said ground.

For me it doesn't really compare: with Last.FM all I've gotta do is navigate to my profile and the song I'm _currently_ playing on Spotify is right at the top, I just click it and boom, I'm on the track's page.

Besides, you can't leave comments under specific tracks on RYM.

It's not the effort or the lack thereof here that's the issue, but rather the message you're sending by using slop tools to create the design of the advertisement of your research. It looks cheap.

I'm sure that, at first glance, many more people would take this much more seriously had the authors gone with a style-less HTML page or something, and that'd require _less_ effort, not more.

I have heard this logic before, defending over-engineering the looks to hide a brittle backed. Both sides look very entrenched on their position, I lean more towards having a solid backend and see the polished frontend as a waste of effort, but I understand your logic of seeing it as professionalism. My point is that you are not sending only one message by using a cheap slop static html: some will see lazy and cheap people, some will see people focusing on the real thing with no time or willingness to make shiny sites.

You can make a simple and serious website pretty easily now. Don’t need the shiny part

Totally agree, the same fonts at the same pixel sizes often look massively different in different environments. I -love- macOS’ native font rendering, but have been unsuccessfull in emulating it on Linux :/

Freetype can render almost indistinguishably from OSX post-Retina.

Set `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"`, and then also enable (S)light hinting on LoDPI, or None on HiDPI. Also, disable subpixel and use greyscale only.

OSX looks the way it does because they use excessive stem darkening combined with incorrect gamma blending. GDI, WPF/UWP/WinUI, most ClearType/DirectWrite consumers, GTK, and most browsers also do incorrect gamma blending as well.

Qt is the exception. It enables stem darkening by default, but then uses correct gamma blending. Unfortunately, this is the objectively correct way of rendering, everyone else is doing it wrong.

The only thing you can't do is OSX gamma blends incorrectly for 1.8 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Everyone else blends incorrectly for sRGB/2.2 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Light on dark's obscene behavior on OSX shouldn't be replicated.

If you want the opposite, and make it look like Windows, force stem darkening off (use the above env, but set both to 1), and set hinting to Full to make it look like pre-Cleartype, or Medium to make it look like DirectWrite.

Why can you not enjoy both the journey and the destination? Surely you find some sub-disciplines of writing code more pleasant than others - can't you just keep doing those manually and offload/automate the rest to the machine?

Why is the comment calling out the biggest issue with this so heavily downvoted? Privacy is a massive concern with this.

You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?

… Or how hard it is to replace archaic software that’s extremely prevalent.

I agree, but surely your description is art in itself?

You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

If you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.

What do you mean I'm not helping?

I mean you're not helping. Why is that?

What's a tortoise? What desert? How come I'd be there?

Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows?

Hm... Why? Ah! Because you are also a tortoise

Tortoise have been observed righting other tortoise that have become stuck. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DZ57D608fiM (two tortoises helping a third) this has a terrible voiceover but you get the idea

They're just questions

> You're absolutely right

Bot detected

But crucially they used "--" and not "—" which means they're safe. Unless it's learning. I may still be peeved that my beloved em dash has been tainted. :(

Of course they'll learn. LLM bots have been spotted on HN using that hipster all lower case style of writing.

i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.

No need to be clever, just add the instruction to write in that way.

I think that's the joke.

I found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.

The issue is clear

Not sarcasm. Not cynism. Just pure humor.

Oh my God, this is peak GPT.

Never admit when someone else is right. They'll forget they were right and begin to think they won a fight.

Or something. You're right.