I love last.fm but never understood the URL structure naming convention. Why use a "+" instead of a "-" for every band page (e.g. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles).
I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?
I've checked RFC 1738 and it's not the case. The only standard for "+" is:
> (RFC 1866) specifies that space characters should be encoded as `+` in application/x-www-form-urlencoded content-type key-value pairs (see paragraph 8.2.1, subparagraph 1).
RFC1738 is obsolete. RFC1866, referenced in that SO answer, is also obsolete.
But none of that matters, particularly, because lastfm are consuming the URLs, they know full well what "+" means in a URL submitted to their servers, and also they've been around for decades (well before the whole "use %20 instead") - why on earth would they change up their URL scheme when it's working fine?
I suspect it was an intentional choice so that artist names like Jay-Z remain properly separated in the URL, especially in cases of multiple-artist billings (ex. https://www.last.fm/music/Nas+&+Jay-Z)
The "-" character appears pretty frequently in song/album titles, maybe even artist names. There could be some sense in not using it as a substitute for space in this context.
How much time is required to spend with someone to become friends with them?
If you assume 20 hours, that's 5-10 hangout sessions with someone. During a working life, that might take over a year. University life offers large windows of disposable time to forge those friendships. In work life, we don't have as much disposable time to spend building friendships.
The BSides events are awesome. Going through all of the video data, pretty much week in and week out by now, it is astonishing how diverse and down-to-earth the talks are. The sheer amount of different views and techniques on just about anything is mind-boggling. I hope this project can shed some light on the lesser-known tactics presented at smaller events around the world.
In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.
"SpaceX, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Reflection". I've never heard of one of these. Looks like Reflection started in 2024.
Things really are moving fast. To win a government contract within two years of founding wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. In the previous generation of startups just getting FedRAMP didn't happen until a few years after founding.
I'm not sure I believe these results. As the study notes: "We need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text. AI-generated text detection is itself an open problem..."
There is definitely AI-generated text that's easy to sniff out. Then there's a huge grey area that is misleading - like if you use an em dash. Or write concisely.
What specifically is cumbersome and annoying? It's not the ideal query language for every frontend app, but it's useful for solving a couple of problems that large organizations at scale have like over-fetching and a single network call rather than multiple REST calls.
Bots have always been a problem on these platforms, but it has taken the deluge of AI generated accounts to force platforms to truly wrestle with the problem.
The upside is hopefully there are fewer bots on these platforms, which has many positive second-order effects. The downside is the method of human verification as ID cards will lead to more identity theft, fake IDs, and a new set of problems.
Humans will always have this problem, though, in the digital domain. There has to be some way of proving you’re a human digitally, before any trust can be built. It’s a paradox, for sure, but if not ID verification for proof of humanness, then what?
I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?
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