Tim's blog

After buying another MP3 player for sport activities, I realized that selecting not a brand product did not make me happy (usually I even avoid brand products because the ration between price and product/service is with brand products bad, meaning expensive).
I came across something which I came across over a decade ago with my first portable CD player but also at the PC with the MP3 player software Winamp (and other applications like this).
There is a randomizer function coming along with such applications or tools. Actually, these are not really randomizer. These are software programs simulating a randomizer. A true randomizer would e.g. use the spontaneous emission of radiation of a radioactive material as trigger. And even if this is really random can be doubted (different discussion).
But for a MP3 player, the quality of a true or false randomizer is not the issue. The issue is the concept behind it. If there is for instance a list of 10 items, then within a certain time frame the number of calls for each item is aimed to be equal. This is as more accurate as more calls are made. This is probably 5th grade math.
The problem is that such a randomizer is actually not desired by the users of a music player. If you have 10 songs making up 1 hour of music and you want to listen to this for 1 hour, you want to listen to all songs. And because listening to them always in the same order makes it more boring, the user wants to listen to it in a “random” order. In 1 hour, these 10 songs are wanted to be played each 1 time.
The problem is that when starting to play, it is not known how long it will be played. So the mathematically correct randomizer way is used.
This way makes it happen that for instance song # 3 is played twice in a row or pretty close to each other in the list of played items.
If the listener listens 1 hour and 10 items make up these 1 hour in summary, the user acceptation is to have these 10 items played each once. Even if the 10 items are listened for 3 hours, the user still does not want to hear a song twice in a row , close to each other or not within this 3 hours.
All in all, the randomizer, the one which is mathematically correct, is not want by the users and the programming of a customized randomizer is nowadays a very easy think to do.
This does not prevent thousands of different types of players to use the standard randomizer for the mixing of items in a playlist.
Is that crazy? How can it be that the user’s expectation is on such a wide scale being ignored? It is even not really a rocket science thing here.
This example of it is very interesting.
We are human beings with the ability to create tools. Further, we can use tools to create other tools and so on. We are able to estimate future events, real and even fully unreal. We produce thousands of sophisticated utopian or dystopian stories in writing and in other ways.
BUT (sorry for this scream) we are unable as a group of beings to sometimes solve the simplest problems.
Usually, the reason lays in system related issues.
So we can make tools from tools but using them in a system is decreasing its effectiveness. The challenge to deal with it is in so many ways lost.
What I find really disturbing, that if we are able to fail with the simple things, we are certainly doing no better with very complex matters.
Yep, probably we are damned to suffer for ever or at least a pretty long time.
Of course the music player is not really making us suffer a lot but it serves well as a example.
Logically and based on the standard evolution theory, we will change over the years. Not only from this point of view, of course not only, we will change and what we will be will be different enough that we will think of us now the same way we think of us before as “pre-human”.
So if we were not human before we became human, we will stop being human based on our current way to measure being human.
That means we will not only change as humans, we will stop being humans. May be we will carry on calling ourselves human but from the current point of view we will not be humans and the future beings after us will think of us as being different.
Logically, there are 2 situations:
We will call us in the future humans but will deny of us now being humans or we will not call us in the future as humans and the difference is expresses in this way.
We are now the pre-humans for us in the future. I try to live with this fact but it is difficult.

PS: A technical detail: to be fair, Winamp always was able to save playlists, which had been randomized. This feature prevents the occurrence of the problem but after all the on the fly playing randomizer still is undesired in its way.