Any shuffle algorithm is fine but the problem is Spotify's brainlessness: it routinely plays songs it just played. If you are any long-term user then you have playlists of hundreds of songs and my guess is that you haven't heard some of those songs in ages which means ... the FEATURE IS BROKEN.
I'd prefer a weighted shuffle based on the staleness of a song in a playlist. That way you eventually get through all of the music but in a pseudo-random order.
I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.
This article may as well have been about writing to file streams does not block until a read occurs. Maybe the documentation (on sockets?!) could be more clear but at some point more words don't help with conceptual understanding.
We tell our daughter what the acceptable limits are. Sometimes she pushes or breaks those limits. We talk to her about it, take away privileges for a bit, and then resume. She is 8 and addicted to her Kindle 3 but so far so good.
I'm 42 and just getting started in ML and "the math" myself. I never got beyond algebra in High School but I have made a successful career in programming. I'm taking it day by day, I dedicate an hour each morning to plugging away. It'll happen eventually...
I'm not sure I ever considered the iPod Touch a music player; Apple hasn't made a decent MUSIC PLAYER in years. They've made a lot of very capable portable computers that sit on your wrist or rest in your pocket but there's a lot more noise than signal coming from them ...
Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or any small/startup company.
I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:
"The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."
Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).
I'd prefer a weighted shuffle based on the staleness of a song in a playlist. That way you eventually get through all of the music but in a pseudo-random order.