thomaswilson-sveltekit/.netlify/server/chunks/2021-03-26-things-learned-33-6b144699.js

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var import_index_10ac95e2 = require("./index-10ac95e2.js");
const metadata = {
  "title": "Things I learned this week #33",
  "author": "Thomas Wilson",
  "date": "2021-03-26T00:00:00.000Z",
  "draft": false,
  "slug": "2021-03-26-things-i-learned-33",
  "imageUrl": "preview-images/33.png",
  "tags": ["things-i-learned"]
};
const _2021_03_26_things_learned_33 = (0, import_index_10ac95e2.c)(($$result, $$props, $$bindings, slots) => {
  return `<ul><li><strong>This cassette revival</strong>: Last year\u2019s (2020\u2019s) sale of tape cassettes, the 90\u2019s mainstay of car sound systems and OG Walkmans (Walkmen?) were the highest they have been since 2003. An increase of 94% on 2019. Despite having inferior sound quality to CDs and vinyl, the medium is a lot cheaper and easier to produce which means a lower initial investment and potentially higher profits, which is great for indie musicians. Especially given how reluctant modern streaming services are to pay musicians and livable or useful fee for their streams. The global pandemic has made it a lot harder for musicians to tour, and a the related economic recession has made shifting merch a little harder. The sudden demand for cassettes is part of the \u201Cyou can\u2019t hold a digital download\u201D trend which has seen a resurgence in tangible, physical things. It makes sense, if you love music or artists, then you want things that resonate with that belief: band Ts, a vinyl collection, a feeling of belonging, ya know? (<a href="${"https://theconversation.com/audio-cassettes-despite-being-a-bit-rubbish-sales-have-doubled-during-the-pandemic-heres-why-157097"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">link</a>)</li>
<li><strong>This money making chimp</strong>: Raven, who is a chimpanzee, is the most successful chimpanzee on Wall Street. In 1999, she created an index fund by throwing darts at a list of 133 internet companies. The fund saw a 213% return on investment, outperforming thousands of professional Wall Street brokers. So here\u2019s your reminder that humans like to construct stories and narratives around what is actually chaos, and like to believe that we have more control than we actually do. Anyway, yeah, Raven the chimpanzee. (<a href="${"https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-successful-chimpanzee-on-wall-street"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">link</a>)</li>
<li><strong>This paper computer</strong>: <em>Magic: The Gathering</em> is the oldest collectible card game, which had its first set of cards released in 1993. There are literally billions of <em>Magic</em> cards in circulation right not, which is cool. It\u2019s actually a really fun game, you should totally play some time. Anyway, <em>Magic</em> is technically Turing Complete, a term used to describe a machine that can take and perform any arbitrary computer algorithm, i.e. any set of arbitrary instructions. This means that (practicality be damned) <em>Magic: The Gathering</em> can perform anything that most programming languages could. The authors of the cited study acknowledge that using this technique might be possible but in practice \u201Cmay effect an individual\u2019s ability to successfully execute the combo due to concerns about the sheer amount of time it would take to manually move the tokens around to simulate a computation on a Turing machine. This would not be a concern for two agents with sufficiently high computational power\u201D so I guess we should just let the robots play the game for us now. (<a href="${"https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">source</a>).</li></ul>
<h2>What I\u2019ve had on rotation</h2>
<ul><li><strong>Something New</strong> <em>TIME</em> by Jess Gillam (Classical, 2020). Gillam is a classical saxophonist, and this album is a collection of modern classical pieces. It\u2019s all really beautiful. It contains the (rightfully) popular <em>On The Nature of Sunlight</em> (Max Richter) and <em>Dappled Light</em> (Luke Howard) which act almost like the gateway drugs for lesser known composers and arrangers, and the result is an album which really fills the space without ever feeling cramped. I am far from a classical music person, and definitely not a saxophonist, but Gillam comes across as crisp and precise, supported by her ensemble. (<a href="${"https://songwhip.com/jessgillam/time"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">links</a>)</li>
<li><strong>Something Old</strong> <em>We The Kings</em> by We The Kings (rock, 2007). Oh wow, I didn\u2019t remember this album at all until it started playing and then suddenly it <em>was</em> 2007. This is peak in-ear headphone buds plugged into my MP3 player and walking to or around college. According to Spotify, the band is most popular in Chicago (USA), Jakarta (India), and Singapore (where chewing gum is still illegal btw) - I never would have guessed that combination of cities (and city states) in a million years. (<a href="${"https://songwhip.com/we-the-kings/we-the-kings"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">links</a>)</li></ul>
<h2>Cool articles</h2>
<ul><li><a href="${"https://pudding.cool/2021/03/love-and-ai/"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">Nothing breaks hearts like A.I</a> by Pamela Mishkin for Pudding. Pudding is pretty much everything I love about the internet: nerdy cool people making nerdy beautiful things. In this piece, Mishkin uses GPT-3, probably the most advance text-generating AI, to generate part of a personal romantic essay-cum-story. It blurs the lines about what\u2019s real: the details or the sentiment. The piece is also incredibly well produced and presented. You can tap to re-generate certain parts of the text, to rotate wheels. For example, half of this sentence was generated by GPT-3: \u201CGPT-3 doesn\u2019t care about my friends. It doesn\u2019t care that I work at a start-up, live in a city, that I am quarantined in a house with two other people. It doesn\u2019t care that Omar and I didn\u2019t have the language to say what we wanted from each other, that we fought about his insecurity and my loneliness, that I felt like I was losing myself. It doesn\u2019t care which of my sentences are tired or stale or cliche.\u201D Could you guess which part? Which of that feels like it wasn\u2019t written by a human?</li>
<li><a href="${"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/17/mushrooms-as-houseplant"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">Why growing mushrooms at home is everyone\u2019s new pandemic hobby</a> by Adrienne Matei for The Guardian. This is such an odd piece, and I can\u2019t explain it but looking at pictures of mushrooms makes me deeply uncomfortable. They\u2019re so alien, and they\u2019re almost in an uncanny valley: my brain can\u2019t decide if they\u2019re alive or not. They\u2019re plants but they\u2019re not. Apparently there\u2019s been a boom in growing them indoors since the beginning of the pandemic, which is cool I guess but not for me. I love when people grow (and then eat) things. Matei also reports that some people have started growing mushrooms to trade for eggs and bread - so we\u2019ve been in the pandemic long enough for an emergent goods-and-barter economy to arise.</li></ul>`;
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