Thank you. I’m definitely still very “in the valley” since it’s only been a few months, but I am in counselling which helps. And I’ve lost close friends to suicide and addiction in the past, so going through those before has helped me not feel quite so lost, at least knowing how to be gentler with myself this time.
I can only imagine such a loss based on my own, and from the many conversations I’ve had with my wife’s mum as well, trying to be the best supports we can for each other.
I would describe my wife similarly, it sounds like. Kind, value-driven, cared too much, was the biggest personality in the room but somehow always made people feel seen and heard. But also deeply troubled and hid a lot of it, even from me I’m discovering.
Sending love your way as well. I agree, platitudes or things like “they’re in a better place now” or “looking down on us” make me only feel worse, but genuine compassion does help feel like the weight isn’t on our shoulders alone, even for a little rest.
Thank you. It’s definitely the living definition of hell, a constant panic attack for a past you can’t change, but it’s also only been 3 months and I’m discovering resilience and supports I’m so thankful for.
I also decided to go visit one of our favourite places (Thailand) to get away for a bit, meet up with a friend, do some writing, and make some new memories here. It’s been really hard at points but definitely healing too.
Sisyphean is the word I’ve come back to a lot myself since my wife took her life on November 6, 2024. Feeling like I’m now trying to live for both of us, grasping at ways of honouring her memory despite the incredible love we had being unable to “save” her, and somehow not at all myself anymore, but having to keep moving forward feels hopeless beyond belief.
I lost my dad suddenly just two months prior, and my grandma shortly before that, but the loss of your partner (and in this manner after she refused help and I watched helplessly as she spiralled in her last year) eclipses any grief or pain I had experienced before or could have even imagined.
But I wanted to show a little appreciation for the OP and others on here sharing their devastating losses. Knowing love inevitably turns into grief but that that is a more universal experience makes me feel a little less alone. Small blessings but at points like these, we take whatever morsels we can get.
Snarky comments I’m seeing here aside, this merits serious discussion. Does this affect software sales, in-app purchases, services? A lot of us with a lot hanging on the line right now.
I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.
PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
Indeed. Search was working reliably for me for a while using gpt-4o via the API then yesterday suddenly stopped altogether right when I needed it. Hoping this fixes it soon.
The crazy thing to me is that since losing that weight people don't believe me and think I must be lying that I ever weighed more. I've even whipped out a photo once to prove it.
I gained about 50 lbs in my 20's by getting a sedentary job and eating poorly after moving out on my own. I spent a solid 2 years trying to lose weight by working out actively and lost nothing. When I changed my diet, I dropped it all over time and kept it off for the last 15+ years.
I tell people I know trying to lose weight to separate the ideas of exercise and diet, but few listen and most are quite resistant to the idea. To me, I think of exercise as maintaining a healthy heart, posture, etc. but keep it completely out of the picture for weight management.
The other side of this is motivation. If you don't see yourself losing weight from exercise, it demotivates you and that demotivation then carries into other areas like diet. So if you keep those separate, you won't make poor choices in your overall health as a result of feeling demotivated by the lack of results from exercise and you won't fall off the bandwagon so easily.
I make music and would be the main contact for several artists, but I'm not a label per se. Would I join separately for each, or will there be a way for each artist to be added under my account or on separate accounts? Thanks!
Oh nice! I gave a PechaKucha talk with the same title back in 2019[0]. Love the illustrated examples here.
One thing I touched on in my talk was the idea that code is an art form that expresses the values of the artist by making something new possible in the world. The artist is saying "this should be possible for people to do" and then makes it so. I think that's really cool.
Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.
This isn’t per artist, it’s per song, which means an artist might put out an album and only the single gets widespread play and if the few thousand plays the rest receive all fall just under 1k they’d be discounted to unpaid plays. Remember, for smaller artists every dollar counts. Most have already seen their revenues from music drop by 90-95% since Spotify ate the industry, so why should they be so willing to accept that the first 1k plays are worth $0.00 and the next are only worth $0.003 or less.
This is also compounded by their refusal to adopt a user-centric payment model where the artists you actually listened to that month are the ones your money goes to. Look at comparisons others have published and you’ll see how their current model siphons money from smaller artists towards major label artists (I’m discretely typing this in bits from our local chamber orchestra’s AGM and can’t look up facts for you atm).
With this change, it ensures that even moving to a user-centric model they’ll still be able to underpay smaller artists. It’s not so alarming on its own, but it ensures they can continue to keep the status quo even if they give in to pressure and adopt a user-centric payment model by being able to not have to pay for much of their catalog.
"Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players. It's a form of slowly extracting money that should have gone to smaller artists and instead gets funnelled into the pockets of major label artists who arguably don't need it, at the expense of smaller artists and especially niche genres that don't have the same mass appeal as pop music. That's a group that's severely lacking representation in the discussions around how to pay fairly.
Another way they're screwing smaller artists is next year they'll be requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization. They estimate that'll steal another ~$40M/year from smaller artists to help line the pockets of majors. It's actually sickening to watch from the sidelines.