Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

Living with Cantonese speakers frequently makes me wonder how much of the differences between us is culture, and how much is purely language. The language differences alone are astounding!

Okay, let's do this. I'd love for someone from Apple Music to try to explain how this playlist makes sense. How does a list start off so well with John Legend, SZA, and Zacari, then give me at least the third version of "Unholy" I've had in the last some-number of weeks, drift through some The Smashing Pumpkins and Biig Piig, and then suddenly drop Bailey Zimmerman singing "Get to Getting' Gone" in there? Then back to goodness with Arctic Monkeys, ThxSoMuch, and GloRilla, but then: back-to-back songs featuring Nick Minaj and Old Dominion? How do Old Dominion or Brett Eldredge end up on this list at all? And then the list ends just fine, with Joji and Billy Raffoul and Meadowlark!

Where on earth did Bailey Zimmerman, Old Dominion, and Brett Eldredge come from? The Venn diagram of people who listen to those songs and people who listen to nearly everything else on the list cannot overlap by much!

I'm sure there are people who love those three artists, and perhaps they're all lovely people. But I'm guessing anybody with those three songs on their playlist and *not* complaining would be upset to get my playlist for completely different reasons.

It's like Sesame Street: three of these things don't belong here.

#apple #AppleMusic #complaint

I really dislike "country music," but Apple Music has decided that I want between one and three such songs in my weekly playlist every week. I'm not sure why, except that perhaps the definition is fuzzy. I enjoy Dawes and Taylor Swift, for example, but Zach Bryan and Old Dominion were artists I couldn't stand for more than a couple of seconds.

I hoped that diligent instant-skipping of the songs would "fix" Apple Music within a week or two, and followed up with a week of avoiding my New Music Mix entirely in favor of other (non-country) playlists. I've even tried the "suggest less like this" button, but it's been at least five weeks with no obvious improvement.

Am I going to have to cancel a family subscription because they can't fix their New Music Mix playlist?

Maybe so.

#apple #AppleMusic #complaint

I am amused whenever people talk about the efficiency of corporations, because I see inefficiencies everywhere, and the bigger and more consolidated the company, the worse it is.

A friend of mine left my last employer shortly after I did, but while I've been happy in my new digs, they have not. So they're going back! (They're actually the second former coworker who left and returned, so there's precedent on the team.)

When we were both hired, we were hired by a company with 100-150 employees. A couple of years later, that company was acquired by a company with 600-800 employees. (Somehow the technical leadership of the smaller company ended up as the technical leadership of the combined company, but that's another story.) It was that combined company which we all three left, and to which the other two have returned.

This combined company uses a background-check company, a third party. Apparently for all new hires, even returning hires. Today that company sent my friend an email asking for contact details for a former employer, since they were unable to track them down.

Yeah, *that* former employer. The one with 100-150 employees. The one that was acquired and is now the company that hired the background-check company.

I laughed and laughed. Deep, deep laughter. Oh, the efficiency!

#blog #corporate #monopoly

Digital narration for audiobooks - Apple Books for Authors

https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks

This really boggles my mind. I think it is typical of Apple to find one of the best possible practical uses of what most companies would consider the edge of technology and many hard-core nerds would say was the leading edge a couple of years ago.

#nerdery #apple #books