Is this why my wife is constantly complaining that her playlists constantly keep playing the same songs over and over?
No, that’s just random being random. In order for something truly random to feel less random to the average person, you have to reduce the repetition.
and that is what spotify actually does: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/11/shuffle-making-random-feel-more-human
<sigh>… And here I am, expecting “shuffle” to be a random ordering without repetition at all, like a silly person apparently.
You mean “shuffle” like when you shuffle a deck of cards and have exactly the same cards still but in a different order with no single card repeating because you started out with a deck of cards and why would there suddenly be an extra card or 5 of the same face value in the deck because that’s just crazy talk? That kind of shuffle?
Yeah sorry, Spotify doesn’t do that.
My problem with Spotify shuffle was that it always ended up throwing a similar order of songs. The same group of songs would end up in the same general position on the playlist every time. It’s not random, and it stands to reason that people doesn’t actually want real random order. But it was super obvious, noticeable and quite annoying to hit the same songs at the same time on your walk every single time. They even admitted publicly that their shuffle function sucks.
This is why I switched!!! I don’t use streaming services much, but I hated spotify’s shuffle and general music suggestions. So I tested qobuz and tidal, and can confirm that tidal’s suggestions are far superior to Spotify’s. I still prefer collecting albums and listening to them individually though
This, the Shuffle function should play every song exactly once, just in a random order. This is what cd players have been supporting since the late '80s.
It is a very simple algorithm but Spotify turned it into something complex that barely works. By default, in large playlists, it will heavily prioritize some songs while others are almost never heard. People have complained about this for years and there is an option in the settings for it now, although I am not yet sure if that setting really disables all of the “smart” algorithms Spotify has associated with shuffle.
Idk why the donwvotes. This is how these players implement shuffle, because people don’t actually want a random shuffle most times.
This is the difference between randomly choosing songs and randomly choosing songs without repetition.
Both are random but the later is much better for humans.
https://www.statisticshowto.com/sampling-with-replacement-without/
Of course there are other possible methods of choosing. It seems like Spotify is doing some kind of weighting from another comment posted here.
function GetRandomNumber(): return 42;It’s a random number, what more do you want 🤷♂️ /s
IllegalArgumentException: expected random number, got Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Fuck yeah, it is.
My favourite example of Spotify being shit is:
I want to play an album, so I go to it and press play. Then a bit later I want to queue a second album after the first one is done. How do I do that? As far as I can tell the answer is to go fuck myself. I have start a new queue or playlist with both albums in it.
That’s apart from all the basic software quality stuff like randomly restarting the queue.
Edit: so now I use finamp with jellyfin, which I can actually fix when it does something I hate.
Have you fixed anything when it’s done something you’ve hated? I sometimes think, “I can fix this” and the I let my workarounds last for years. Like a leaky faucet where I fix it by rotating the handle not to 180° but to like 185.
Yeah, I try to make a point of using free software and contributing where I can. It does have to rise to a certain threshold of annoyance though.
The point of these apps is to leech as much money as possible.
An opposing goal would be to make the app better for users.
Spotifys UX has always been terrible. We all got used to having crappy software. It’s too convenient that’s AI also makes crappy vibecode without supervision. No one will notice anything.
Podcast. Filter out episodes I’ve already listened to. Turn around. Filter out episodes I’ve already listened to. Put the app in the background. Filter out episodes that I’ve already listened to. Finish an episode. Filter out episodes I’ve already listened to. The year is 2026. Filter out episodes that I’ve already listened to.
Tell me, why is that not persistent?There was a time back in maybe… 2009(?) when the UI was great. It made sense, you could do everything you could possibly want very easily. Then they broke everything I think around 2012 and completely revamped the UI, and it’s never been good ever since.
Glad I left it years ago.
I too remember when there were actual markets with actual products who actually competed with one another
2009 would be back when it was a native application, rather than just a web browser
Promotes ICE and uses AI. What a company of assholes.
Well…
They are swedish
que
Used to be, anyway. They don’t act like they are.
Don’t forget that they fork over millions of dollars to Joe Rogan while they are doing it.
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said.
Cool, so your goal is to replace your senior engineers with AI slop, but it’s still generating bugs? Doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.
“And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”
Translation: Want to work as hard as a sole proprietor but not get paid like one? Great! You can work from your car while dealing with bullshit commuter traffic. Also, if you get into an accident, you can’t claim worker’s compensation or SDL, because you’re not technically on the job, yet! Thanks for being a team player!
Right? This article is so full of shit, there’s hardly room left for anything else. It’s like they only collected soundbites from the employees who are furthest from any actual development role…
i assumed the commuting to be done via public transport, but yes, you should not give one minute outside of working hours to the soulless company. I don’t know what these engineers are thinking, digging their way in the future when they’ll be made redundant.
Is the idea that they’re somehow reviewing the code on their phone during their commute? Or are they just pushing to prod without even glancing at it? Why bother with the middle man. Just have the AI push it. What a stupid admission.
It’s a “concrete example” that’s almost certainly fantasy. I bet everyone stood up and clapped when the engineer got to the office, too.
There is zero chance this is true.
Truth no longer matters to these clowns. Who cares about it’s true? Who cares that Spotify is already good… And the one thing they can do to is make it worse?
Yeah, I wonder about this often: the product is finished; aside from curation, what else does it need?
An A-B repeat feature. Member when media players had that? I member. Back in my day you could listen to the ooga booga section of Freak on a Leash 162 times in a row with just two clicks.
You will never see that implemented. You should be thankful you even have a pause button.
I’m not so sure. I could believe their entire productivity has been consumed by failing AI slop in code reviews.
If I was working foe spotify I would honestly lie just to do something better than ask an AI to do bullshit for me
Probably just lying to their boss. I have an AI obsessed boss and regularly lie about how much I use it because productivity is actually measured entirely by their perception of you and not by any real metric.
I thought about lying on my last report but decided to not. At this point they’re going to have to fire me if they can’t accept the truth. I’m not lying to save my skin.
And their bosses are just lying to their bosses, and it’s lying and yessing all up and down the line, and the rest of us out here just have to live with whatever The Machine pukes out for us.
I’ve tried explaining this to me peers that just quietly bust their asses while noisy jerks (including me, but to a lesser extent than most) get perceived as high performers because they engage with their bosses and work on things that have high visibility.
It’s probably true.
Think of it with this alternate headline:
Spotify reclassifies what constitutes a good developer
And no doubt, they’re capturing what these “good developers” do to better train the clanker to make the “bad developers” redundant.
The same company who got their whole DB of songs leaked?
More like scraped. You can’t really leak smth that’s already publicly accessible
Spotify has public databases? That’s so nice of them. Really progressive.
So where can I download my fave albums?
They were accessed through the API.
An API that at best allowed a small number is users to access millions of hours of content in a relatively short window of time sure as shit feels like a leak to me.
Spotify’s best dev reporting for stand-up
I need to watch scary movie again. Haven’t seen that since … Probably some time in the 00s. It’s probably super problematic though.
Eh… funny is funny
Seeing this screenshot has prompted me to watch it tonight as well.
“Smell this!”
"Ew, what’s that?
“MY ASS”
I’m pretty sure the only way this is true, is if they qualify their best developers as the developers who use AI the most and by absolutely no metric which would indicate this is actually good code.
Is fixing all those AI written lines of code not counted as writing line of code?
You are assuming those bugs get fixed.
I mean… how much are you really changing at this point anyway?
Please someone give me a decent non US alternative to this company.
Make transfer easy for a family group.
I dunno where Tidal is based out of so I’m gonna recommend Lidarr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_(service)
US (Block owns the majority)
Ah, yeah, that’s that then. Lidarr it is.
I would love to set the arrs up but I dont have the time or skill
Deezer or Qobuz. Both are French.
And you can use Soundiiz to move your playlists.
I’ve tried both and like Qobuz better because I can actually switch devices and it’s aware of what I was listening to on the other. Here’s an interview with someone from Qobuz talking about their service and music in general.
Vibe coding by experts can actually be effective. It’s the junior developers that really fuck it up.
Depends on what you call vibe coding. AI tools in the hands of experts can be effective, but definitely not fully hands off.
It can give me a starting point, but I’d never use it for anything production worthy.
If it’s only vibe coding, going by vibe, being an expert makes no difference.
If you go for thorough reviews and corrections, supposed code generation efficiency gains are typically offset by review and correction effort.
They wheren’t been coding anything even before AI
wheren’t
An LLM wouldn’t have made that mistake. /s
A generation raised on LLMs wheren’t been madeing this mistake.
An LLM would have called it out 😬
Thankfully I dumped this shit platform last year.
Has Spotify had any new code written?
Glad i moved away from Spotify a year ago. Happy to ve using Qobuz and bandcamp
Even if you don’t subscribe to Qobizz their magazine helps me find new music all the time
