This is not unusual. Spotify is included because it is a relevant source of evidence as the custodian of the data. It improves the narrative that the data wasn't just indexed but obtained illegally.
It's because the higher up the stack you go, tools become more declarative and literate. Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.
> Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.
This was one of my gripes in college, why am I implementing something if I just need to understand what it does? I'm going to use the built-in version anyway.
Because that's the entire point of college. It's supposed to teach you the fundamentals - how to think, how to problem solve, how to form mental models and adapt them, how things you use actually work. Knowing how different sorting functions work and what the tradeoffs are allows you to pick the best sorting function for your data and hardware. If the tools you have aren't doing the job, you can mend them or build new tools.
So you know which sort to call because there isn't a right answer for all cases.
And so you can write your own because you're probably going to want to sort data in a specific way. Sort doesn't mean in numerical increasing or decreasing order, it means whatever order you want. You're sorting far more often than you're calling the sort function.
My degree was not specifically CS, it was a related degree, the focus was on landing jobs, but they still covered some CS concepts because some students were in fact doing a CS degree. I was more focused on show me what I need to build things. I have never had to hand-craft any algorithm in my 15 years of coding, it just makes no sense to me. Someone else figured it out, I'm contempt understanding the algorithms.
In my twenty years, I've rerolled famous algorithms "every now and then".
Its almost wild to me that you never have.
Sometimes you need a better sort for just one task. Sometimes you need a parser because the data was never 100% standards compliant. Sometimes you need to reread Knuth for his line-breaking algorithm.
My high school computer science teacher (best one I ever had) once told us this anecdote when we were learning sorting algorithms:
He was brought in by the state to do some coaching for existing software devs back in the 90s. When he was going over the various different basic algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, etc.) one of the devs in the back of the class piped up with, "why are you wasting our time? C++ has qsort built in."
When you're processing millions of records, many of which are probably already sorted, using an insertion sort to put a few new records into a sorted list, or using selection sort to grab the few records you need to the front of the queue, is going to be an order of magnitude faster than just calling qsort every time.
Turned out he worked for department of revenue. So my teacher roasted him with "oh, so you're the reason it takes us so long to get our tax returns back."
Thinking that you can just scoot by using the built-in version is how we get to the horrible state of optimization that we're in. Software has gotten slow because devs have gotten lazy and don't bother to understand the basics of programming anymore. We should be running a machine shop, not trying to build a jet engine out of Lego.
I mean, the lesson I got from my 10X class was pretty much that: "never write your own math library, unless you're working on maintaining one yourself".
funnily enough, this wasn't limited to contributing to some popular OS initiative. You can call YAGNI, but many companies do in fact have their own libraries to maintain internally. So it comes up more than you expect.
On a higher level, the time I took to implement a bunch of sorts helped me be able to read the docs for sort(), realize it's a quicksort implentation, and make judgements like
1. yeah, that works
2. this is overkill for my small dataset, I'll just whip up basic bubblesort
3. oh, there's multiple sort API's and some sorts are in-place. I'll use this one
4. This is an important operation and I need a more robust sorting library. I'll explain it to the team with XYZ
The reasoning was the important lesson, not the ability to know what sorting is.
Cocaine (the powder) is extracted from the coca leaf, which indigenous South Americans have chewed for over 8000 years. While the synthetic drug is insanely addictive, the natural form is still commonly used as a mild stimulant, probably safer than caffeine in coffee. So yes?
I'm a huge green energy supporter, but the data belies the headline. These types of headlines are often leverage to discredit the transition.
1. US emissions didn't jump. See the first chart. The 2.4% increase easily falls within 1 standard deviation of typical changes. In that line, US emissions have remained flat since 2019.
2. The caption over that chart uses more neutral language "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025" instead of jumped. Which is it?
3. The 2.4% increase in emissions matches 2.4% increase in energy use nationwide.
4. The title is structured to make it sound like coal power is primarily causal of the emissions increase even though that's clearly not the case.
Unrelated point: Coal quite literally poisons the air. Why are activists so fixated on the abstract specter of climate change to convert others? I'm pretty sure we could win over lots of MAHA types with that framing.
You can try it yourself - apparently it was just this[0] single prompt:
>> This is a USB Stick of my MRI. Find all reports, find all images, use imagemagick to convert them into something useful, and get everything into a structured directory in the ./output folder that's worth retaining. Then, make an index.html that's a full exploration tool for the results. Use /frontend-skills and /generate-image skills if necessary.
> /frontend-skills you can find in the plugin marketplace, generate-image is just a small skill that allows the model to use nanobanana-pro. It used it for some diagrams.
There are a few things that confuse me about this potential acquisition:
1. You won't govern it. Greenland has it's own Self-Government Act. [0]
2. You won't own the land. Almost all land is owned by the State. [1]
3. The Danes have no special land ownership rights. [2]
4. Land use rights, however, are granted for different activities (fishing, mining) subject to approval. [3]
I'd imagine none of this changes under a new owner. Why the can't the US just sign up for mining rights already? It seems like that's exactly what it would have to do post acquisition--unless of course the US also plans to bulldoze Greenland's sovereignty.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone can provide color.
> > It seems like that's exactly what it would have to do post acquisition--unless of course the US also plans to bulldoze Greenland's sovereignty.
I don't want to repeat what others are saying, but how on earth could you not consider that all of the existing rules, laws and agreements just go in the trash under a new "owner"? Of course the US plans to bulldoze Greenland's sovereignty, goodness me.
To be fair the US acquired American Samoa and kept a lot of their law in place even to the point you can do stuff in American Samoa that would be unconstitutional like limit power of women in some of the tribal councils (sorry they have a better name but I've forgotten), do not provide 2nd amendment protections required inside the USA, and limit ownership of land based on ethnic lines.
The USA also for instance rehabilitated Philippines from Japanese rape islands into an independent nation by taking them as a territory.
> unless of course the US also plans to bulldoze Greenland's sovereignty.
It's probably not helpful for me to speculate, but surely this? If the US is truly prepared to invade another ally's territory for material gain, I'd assume the idea that they'd honor other existing laws is unlikely.
I don't see how it would actually work in practice. Can Trump really destroy Greenland's democracy via executive order? Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it? And even if not, how are you going to deal with all the people there? If Trump is ruling Greenland via executive order, then he is just a dictator, what happens to the people? It would end up as a long running sore and a terrible blemish on America's reputation.
Yeah, for what its worth I agree. But I can't see how those arguments would apply to abolishing Greenlands law, but not to invading and claiming ownership in the first place.
If the US doesn't have checks and balances to stop it invading a democratic ally with no cause, then I don't know what checks and balancing meaningfully can be said to exist.
> Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it?
my sense is that Trump feels to be above the law right now, having ordered the operation to seize Maduro without Congressional approval (illegal under U.S. constitutional law). Trump's reasoning was that "Congress has a tendency to leak", and so to him congress seems little more than background noise.
> Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it?
The entire mode of operation for the current administration is to ignore such things whenever they don't blindly rubber stamp or get out of the way. It has been very successful for them.
What I wonder is about the second order effects. I mean, I'm pretty far from Denmark but here the talk is pretty much like an existential crisis.
Even if the US does nothing about it, seems that many people has finally realized that Europe has no allies.
This has a lot of implications regarding the Pax Americana, the US/EU financial system, Eurasia, and many others.
I don't see any positive outcome for the west in general. Europe in particular is screwed but besides short-term gains I don't think the US is going to be able to sustain anything but very fragile and transactional alliances, if any.
> Even if the US does nothing about it, seems that many people has finally realized that Europe has no allies.
Indeed. But just because EU thinks too high of themselves and is turning down their last natural allies that is the South American/Mercosur countries. So whatever happens to EU is their own fault
Europe and the EU are two different things. The EU is already having it's own credibility crisis inside the EU, and there are already heavy pushes for reform.
The conversation is completely different in Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain, for example.
The EU has enacted pretty stupid policies but I don't think the status quo was about to last a lot. Now with the Greenland issue things are about to speed up.
My guess is that, because they shaked hands with conservative leaders in Europe, the White house thinks this is going to benefit them.
I don't think this is going to be the case mid term.
What are you talking about. There's little real opposition to the EU-Mercosur trade deal. It'll be ratified this year. The EU is the largest source of foreign direct investment in Mercosur.
>I don't see any positive outcome for the west in general. Europe in particular is screwed but besides short-term gains I don't think the US is going to be able to sustain anything but very fragile and transactional alliances, if any.
Europe became the forefront of human civilization, the home of the renaissance and the industrial revolution, because of internal competition between states (as opposed to the large centralized autocracies of Asia and the Middle East). In the long term more competition will ultimately be a good thing for Europe, forcing it to stop resting on its laurels, to start innovating and growing again.
The man in charge has said in the past that he admired dictators. Many did not pay attention to this.
Congress is easy to takeover by a political party and this happens cyclically, so no one was surprised by that.
People also ignored gerrymandering because both major political parties do that, and historically it can be undone.
However, the takeover and stacking of the judicial branch with political cronies was another definite warning sign. People that were paying attention noticed this came first, because it’s the brakes that can slow an administration from getting out of control. The brake lines were effectively cut.
If you’ve studied German history and World War II, you know that Hitler didn’t just happen. There was an imperialist history. Though not typically stated in this way, the U.S. has historically been an empire for much of the 20th century, if you consider bases around the world and involvement in world conflicts (and the same could be said about some other countries, NATO, UN, etc.)
The American people cannot rise up against its own government in any substantial way when (1) families are split with half of the people are brainwashed, and (2) they think that things can be undone after N years by voting that party out (but the opposing party can not pivot to undo the economic and world political damage done by the current administration).
Most dictators were not known from the beginning of their reign as evil incarnate.
Americans keep hoping to see in the news that someone will stop this, but they suspect that if they were to try to stop it, they and their families would eventually be punished or killed. So, they’re all just waiting a few years hoping that it will be undone, and that surely the military will not let the U.S. takeover a country that does not have a despotic leader; that would break the longstanding U.S. trend of only getting very involved publically at least if they are taking the stance of the respected jock defending the little kid getting beat up.
You're overthinking this. These are just stupid people. Think of the dumbest uncle you have ranting online over some ridiculous story. These are the people making these decisions, and they're putting about the same amount of planning into them.
Everything that's been said publicly is just pretence, just like Maduro's/Venezuela's supposed drug trafficking. This is about Trump being and old man in his waning days who wants to create a legacy. Those around him have ambitions of empire.
There is a more feasible future IMO that paints AI as the washing machine, calculator, computer, spreadsheet, automation, etc. Jobs AI can complete don’t lead to people getting let go, but rather those people sit on top of the AI who can do their job much better (sometimes at larger scale, sometimes not). Better outputs for the same cost (well wage+AI costs) -> more purchasing power, more efficient business, etc.
I don’t know if this is how AI will go, but this exact thing happened to me with deep learning. I did stupid math to optimize algos in 2012, but in 2022 deep learning was 100x better than me. I just babysat the AI, as it (and llms) still can’t talk to clients, understand business/culturual nuances, navigate an org, politic, innovate, etc
Money is just a proxy for value add. When automation replaces the labor, the only remaining value add may be withholding violence. I hope we don't get there
I doubt this was ever classified information. It's written all over DoD and NSA requirements and best practices for staff and diplomats.
She was probably briefed repeatedly about this as a member of that committee.
Here's one example:
> Headphones are wired headphones (i.e. not wireless) which can be plugged into a computing device to listen to audio media (e.g. music, Defense Collaboration Services, etc.).[0]
I have worked on out of sample problems, and AI absolutely struggles, but it dramatically accelerates the research process. Testing ideas is cheap, support tools are quick to write, and the LLM itself is a tremendous research tool itself.
More generally, I do think LLMs grant 10x+ performance for most
common work: most of what people do manually is in the training data (which is why there's so much of it in the first place.) 10x+ in those domains can in theory free up more brain space to solve the problems you're talking about.
My advice to you is to tone down the cynicism, and see how it could help you. I'll admit, AI makes me incredibly anxious about my future, but it's still fun to use.
reply