Four short links: 9 August 2018
Music Money, Faster Webpages, Sampling Neurons, and Catching Deepfakes
- How Musicians Make Money (Or Don’t at All) in 2018 (Rolling Stone) — When you end up tracing all the dollars, around 10% of it gets captured by the artist. That’s amazingly low.
- Why AMP? — an interesting answer from Hacker News to this question: AMP doesn’t support a lot of the crap that makes webpages slow, so it’s a way to say “computer says no” to feature requests that would slow page load time. If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important than whatever other resource they want to load today, I’d love to hear it. But from what I’ve seen, AMP is the only thing that’s had any success in tackling this problem.
- Neuropixels — most electrode arrays are built in academic foundries and house 64 sensors in a 1,050-square-micron device. Neuropixels were designed and manufactured in a foundry called Imec, owned by the Flemish government. The Imec probe packs nearly 1,000 recording sites onto a single shank about 1,400 microns square and 10 millimeters long, which spans the full depth of a rat brain.
- DARPA’s First Tools For Catching Deepfakes — via the Media Forensics program. Others involved in the DARPA challenge are exploring similar tricks for automatically catching deepfakes: strange head movements, odd eye color, and so on. “We are working on exploiting these types of physiological signals that, for now at least, are difficult for deepfakes to mimic,” says Hany Farid, a leading digital forensics expert at Dartmouth University. I do hope their “what is not fake” data set includes non-neurotypical people.
