Well, good management/tech leadership is about making sure that the risks coming from individual failure points (10 people in your example) are recognized and mitigated, and that the individuals involved can flag risks and conflicts early enough so that the overall project success probability does not go down as you describe...

The problem with collapsed repeated chords comes not only from the data processing -- most Ultimate Guitar songs are written down entirely ignoring how often a chord is repeated -- the classic "lyrics plus chords" format is incomplete and requires the player to somewhat know the structure of the song anyway. The write-up usually just gives hints where, relative to the lyrics, the chord changes.

Exactly. In my experience, it's not just Ultimate Guitar, all of these sites with chord progressions assume you already know how the music sounds. They're not enough for someone to lean a song having never heard it, so they're almost certainly not enough to automate analysis of the chord progressions.

Typically, chord progressions are described independently of the key they are in.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2750s_progression

While this is from ByteDance, who also are behind TikTok, this algorithm is likely not the one behind TikTok.

Instead, it is likely a component that powers ByteDance's commercial recommender system solution, which they market to e-commerce companies: https://www.byteplus.com/en/product/recommend

This was mentioned in past discussions of the paper on HN.

And even if aspects of this are used for TikTok: (a) it would be just one of many components of their recommendation system, and (b) the TikTok recommendation system has changed a lot during the 2+ years since this has been published.

So take what you see here with a grain of salt. After reading the paper and the code, you will NOT know how TikTok's recommendations work.

Most of these sound like team/people problems, not technology problems.

Like most problems in IT in general :-)

> Most of these sound like team/people problems, not technology problems.

I wonder what are the frameworks or libraries that have exactly one widely accepted, idiomatic and correct way of doing most things, where the technology itself discourages anything else? Angular, maybe, at least with how batteries included it is?

... and the compound interest of being consistently slightly better makes these people much better than others in the long run.

People here in the comments seem to focus on whether it is possible to predict an artist's success based on secondary "civic" virtues, and criticize the author for having subjective criteria for what "success" means. I'd argue that independently of how you measure success, all other things being equal, having diligence and other civic virtues will get you further, on average.

That said, the most interesting lessons are in the first and sixth (the 2nd 6th, the actual 6th) item: How to do a better/more widely scoped job than what you got hired for (by understanding how interests, incentives and responsibilities align in an org) and the fact that in most places, most people are not serious (meaning they tend to not go deeper, look at the big picture, etc.).

I think the point is more that there are indicators that a person is in conflict with their own mission. Struggles to respond, complains, focuses on the immaterial. I think OP is completely right. When a person is aligned, they get out of their own way, this people are easy to differentiate. One produces mediocre work, the other produces great stuff. I also agree it’s within the power of the individual to be either.

I like this view. Still, this seems a way of reasoning about that artist’s success at that particular gallery - perhaps the artist is busy with art projects that are better aligned with them.

Quite likely, though I think we are talking about different things. OP and I are talking to shared alignment, where they came together to sell art for mutual benefit and how to spot good partners to work with. Sure if a partner isn’t good for you, they might have other places where they work well, but I think that’s out of scope to the article IMO.

"The people" are the president's superior.

> Only in the same sense that bottom-level employees are the CEO's superior. Which is to say, they aren't.

Fascinating: What companies do you know of that have democratic elections of CEOs?

Your "just" is the point.

So the Soviet system was democratic?

> Only in the same sense that bottom-level employees are the CEO's superior. Which is to say, they aren't.

There's an important difference. Bottom-level employees don't get to choose the CEO at most companies.

IM software can be closed, too, and in a healthy company the expectations around IMs should not be that they are "instant", but more of an async medium like email.

Next step: The Onion buys X.