Criticism of Spotify Puns

What the hell did Pete Townshend do?!?

I'm telling you up front that this is a ramble/rant that's been on my mind since I read an article on the evils of FP this morning. There may or may not be a bigger point here so consider this your fair warning.

This article was written from the perspective of a Go developer responding to some of the common criticisms of Go (something something generics) and a good portion of it was spent deriding FP concepts relating to list transformations and the inherit slowness/Big-O complexity therein. While well meaning, the comments were largely in agreement with the article. This isn't the only FP criticism I've seen in this vein and it's been bugging me enough that I'm sitting here on a Friday night complaining about it.

Edit: a few people are (rightly) saying that I use Big-O notation here in a way that's incorrect, missing the point of Big-O. That's completely correct, but I decided to express it this way because it seems clear and I'm not sure what the preferred alternative is. For any newcomers unfamiliar with Big-O, know that O(n * 3) isn't a real thing and is equivalent to O(n) and that I am using that notation to highlight that certain approaches need to iterate over a list multiple times.

The assertion: given a task such as "take every even number in a list, multiply them by 3, then find the sum of these numbers" FP is inherently inferior because each operation is O(n) for a total of O(n * 3). Compare that to Go's O(n) for the whole shebang since for loops > all.

I disagree for a few reasons:

1. It's not true
2. Readability > speed for the vast majority of applications

Hot takes, right? I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here but it'll be cathartic to go over this.

For comparison's sake, one Go solution could look like this:

func ContrivedFunction() int {
	nums := []int{1, 2, 3, ..., n}  
	n := 0
	
	for _, x := range nums {
		if x % 2 == 0 {
			n += x * 3
		}
	}

	return n
}

Readable enough and, as promised, it's O(n). Contrast this to an idiomatic-ish Elixir solution:

defmodule Foo do
  def contrived_function do
    nums = [1, 2, 3, ..., n]
  
    # For clarity I'm pretending that Enum.sum/1 doesn't exist 
    nums
    |> Enum.filter(&Bar.divisible_by_two?/1)
    |> Enum.map(&Bar.multiply_by_three/1)
    |> Enum.reduce(0, &Bar.add/2)
  end
end

Check it out! It's O(n * 3) and that's only getting worse as you add more

Frankly the dev's comments were taken way out of context. They were replying to personal threats and disgusting slurs. For the most part, they were not attacking the community as a whole. But it's perfectly understandable that we've turned into a circle jerk as if they had. Why? Because that was the ONLY feedback we got from them.

Respawn did not address any of the actual issues. The only change they made to the Iron Crown event was unanimously rejected. 99% of us jumped in on the thread and said "sorry, but that's not good enough". A minority of reddittors resorted to slander (surprise surprise) and which context did they decide to address? The dicks and ass-hats.

As someone who is part of the community, having spent hundreds of hours and dollars on Apex, and many, many work hours on the subreddit, I feel like those comments were as close as we're going to get to feedback on our actual concerns.

EA has pulled this before, without consequence, Respawn has apologised before, without consequence. Many of us are outraged by the Iron Crown scam, and for a lot of people it is simply the last straw and are now fed up.

So what are we supposed to do? Keep making respectful comments for them to ignore? Turn their monetization into memes to laugh at? The backlash they've recieved over the last week is about as monumental as it gets in this industry, and yet there seems to be little-to-no consequence - and worse - almost no rectification.

Give us a reason to focus on something other than the drama.

The laundry list of fuck-ups from Spo is growing. I love the guy and I think when it’s all said and done he’ll go down as one of the best coaches in the league, but he makes a lot of mistakes that I don’t see from other coaches/coaching staffs.

1. Why are we passively switching on every play? We end up with Herro or Duncan on their center. The game plan from there is help defense down low. This is such a flaw in our defense. Once we help, we’re practically double/triple teaming their center and leaving multiple perimeter players wide open. It turns into an embarrassing scramble that results in Amir FUCKING Coffey scoring as many threes as he has ALL SEASON!

2. Challenges.. I don’t have the stat on hand but Spo deserves way more criticism for this. It seems like he hesitates to use his challenges for glaringly obvious wins where we would get two points back, reverse a foul or out of bounds call - maybe earlier in the game. Then he’ll challenge late in the game when the game is on the line during a way more questionable call that is 50/50.

3. Rotations and in-game adjustments.. this may be up for debate, but outside of Jimmy and Bam, I think Strus is one of our best 2-way players. He cuts passing lanes, he bodies down low, he gets in front of his man. And we all know what he can do offensively, even cutting to the basket sometimes. Why are we not playing him more? Why do we consistently run with KO? Why does Spo always take so long to make an adjustment when a player is having an off night? Why does Spo give guys like Iggy and KO the green light on offense?

4. Our offense is SOOO predictable. We run DHO 85% of the game and it’s been scouted and shut down. Duncan has become non-existent. What happened to drive and dish, pick and roll, back door cuts, off-ball screens? Why isn’t Bam shooting the jumper more to pull their big men out of the paint? When we don’t DHO, it’s ad-hoc from Bam or Jimmy which usually works.. why don’t we do that more? If we consider Bam a max player all star, why is he not controlling the game like a KAT, Davis, Embiid, Jokic?

I’ve defended Spo til the end of time, but he deserves to take the heat (no pun intended) for our lack of quality this season. I’m not saying it’s all on him, but he has a lot to do with it. At least I’d he fixes the points above we can start pointing blame at Pat or elsewhere

I'll be the first person to admit that the writers haven't given Sansa any remarkable dialogue or witticisms that would illustrate her intelligence. And I think that Arya stating that she's the smartest person she knows really rubbed people the wrong way because of it.

Intelligence isn't just spouting off some witty one liners and sick burns. It's also being a good judge of character and knowing when not to say something. It's showing the people around you through your actions that you make good decisions, even if they're hard.

So here's my argument for why ya'll need to stop with the Sansa bashing, along with evidence that Sansa had every right not to trust Dany, even with her support of the North and the Long Night.

Season 8, Episode 1: We have a mirroring of the first episode of the show, with Dany's army riding into Winterfell just as the King and the Lannisters did. The shot is a direct callback, down to the little boy's POV race to find a better view of the spectacle just as Bran did.

But unlike the first episode, the first things the people of Winterfell (and Sansa) are shown are two things: an endless stream of soldiers, and dragons flying so low they can almost touch the walls.

This is a show of force. It's overdone and overdramatic. Jon and Dany could have ridden in first with her advisors, while the troops filed in behind, showing the North that their leader is still, well, their leader. Dany could have had the dragons flying much higher up so people could still see them but not be afraid.

No, this was an obvious, childish flex of muscle. Look at my power.

When Dany meets Sansa, she thanks her and says that the North is as beautiful as Jon claims, and Sansa is too.

In an episode rife with callbacks, it's no coincidence that this is also the first thing that Cersei says to Sansa upon meeting her for the first time. You can see Sansa bristle at the 'compliment', and offer up the same words her father spoke when turning Winterfell over to the King.

Sansa is no stranger to empty compliments, and this is a direct, intentional mirroring of Cersei's first words to her. This is the writers telling you, the audience, that we should be on our guard just as much as Sansa is.

The very next scene is Sansa discussing the need for the bannerman to get to Winterfell ASAP. We can hear her speak but the camera is showing the gathered lords and ladies of the North. When the view shifts, we see Bran to the far left, Sansa seated to the lef

So I'm an aspiring author, which means that I read Discworld books very slow because I spend so much time geeking out over the incredible prose. In this, I've noticed some lines from Guards! Guards! that really feel like cheeky stabs at common writing advice.

I don't have the page numbers on hand, but there is a paragraph that ends by saying, "it just goes to show, you never could tell." To me, this really feels like a mockery of the common piece of advice "show don't tell." Extra cheeky.

There's also a line about Vimes where, "he realized that he may have been a very flawed character." To me, this really seems like someone said he couldn't write flawed characters, so Sir Terry went and made a character so flawed that he can just come out and say the character was flawed as an extra fuck you to his critics.

Lastly, among countless creative and wonderful metaphors, he described a dragon by saying that, "its eyes were the size of very large eyes." More cheekiness.

Anyways, now that I've assembled my tin foil hat, does anybody know what his career was looking like when he wrote Guards! Guards! ?

Edit: after looking at y'all's responses, I'm thinking quote 1 was him quoting a song, quote 2 might be a stab at critics, and quote 3 is just Terry being Terry.

Over the course of the entire show or just specific to a single season, episode, scene or character.

I don't like the climax to 'The Crysanthemum and the Sword'. The entire setting of the show is built on the analysis of a very specific part of American culture. That culture is always played straight, but constantly explored in different unexpected ways. Aspects we took for granted are showcased, but deeply explored in a way that lets the audience judge the characters without the show doing so.

However, when the Japanese Honda representatives become uninterested in SCDP representing them, Don gets them back by betting on an incredibly simplified aspect of Japanese culture. He plays into their 'sense of honour'. I fully expected this to not work, as it seemed to go against everything the show tried to accomplish with American culture. But it did work. I felt it represented Japanese culture as a very simple, unlayered culture. Especially because it does the exact opposite with American culture.

Interested in your criticisms.