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Stray Links for January 20, 2023

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff!

  • The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners are out.
  • Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? “On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.”
  • How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions? I know infographics are so 2000s, but this comparison data is super interesting.
  • This week’s useful appReadow provides book recommendations powered by AI.
  • This week’s WTF LinkThe lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off. “The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.”
  • This week’s Gen X linkRemembering horse_ebooks in the age of GPT3. “it’s this fear of the uncanny which i think drove the negative response to the discovery that horse_ebooks was actually no longer a bot at all. more than the disgust at feeling like you’d been played in service of a viral marketing campaign, the deeper sense that a future is coming where it won’t be possible to reliably tell the difference between bot activity and human activity lay underneath that negative reaction. and ten years later – that future is here.”