brucesterling:

Artificially Inflated Music Streaming

SMITH then created randomly generated song and artist names for audio files so that they would appear to have been created by real artists rather than artificial intelligence.  For example, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Zygophyceae,” “Zygophyllaceae,” “Zygophyllum,” “Zygopteraceae,” “Zygopteris,” “Zygopteron,” “Zygopterous,” “Zygosporic,” “Zygotenes,” “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” “Zygotic Lanie,” “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zyme Bedewing,” “Zymes,” “Zymite,” “Zymo Phyte,” “Zymogenes,” “Zymogenic,” “Zymologies,” “Zymoplastic,” “Zymopure,” “Zymotechnical,” “Zymotechny,” and “Zyzomys.” 

Similarly, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the “artists” of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Calliope Bloom,” “Calliope Erratum,” “Callous,” “Callous Humane,” “Callous Post,” “Callousness,” “Calm Baseball,” “Calm Connected,” “Calm Force,” “Calm Identity,” “Calm Innovation,” “Calm Knuckles,” “Calm Market,” “Calm The Super,” “Calm Weary,” “Calms Scorching,” “Calorie Event,” “Calorie Screams,” “Calvin Mann,” “Calvinistic Dust,” “Calypso Xored,” “Camalus Disen,” “Camaxtli Minerva,” “Cambists Cagelings,” and “Camel Edible.”

North Carolina Musician Charged With Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence

via TorrentFreak

Coeio is probably one of the most famous tech startups in the funeral business. Remember when former Beverly Hills 90210 actor Luke Perry died last year? Shortly thereafter, his daughter revealed that the actor was buried in a biodegradable mushroom suit from Coeio. The ‘infinity burial suit’, although suit might not be the best way to describe the strange-looking black bodysuit, is made entirely of mushrooms and other small organisms, and was designed to help decompose remains into nutrients that return to the earth. Coeio’s mission is simple: to reduce dead people’s environmental impact by cleansing the body of toxins that would otherwise have seeped into the ground by feeding them to fungi, all this with a $1,500 (£1,140) suit. For many, the price for an eco-friendly decomposition might seem over the top, but the fungi suit seems to be one of the cheapest options the funeral market has to offer.

via https://screenshot-magazine.com/technology/innovation/tech-startups-funeral/

The office as the default way of working is dead. But the office itself isn’t dead. With working from home, what we gain in work-life balance we might lose in innovation and creativity. There are people who could directly challenge that sentence but I suspect they will come from highly mature companies who have fully mastered the remote working learning curve. Many of us are still at the stage of doing what we did in the office , just remotely. The timorous amongst us may use the lack of productivity net gains as a reason to regress rather than push through the ‘pain barrier’ as Matt Mullenweg describes it. We can do so much better, for ourselves, our customers and society if we stop being so frightened or so certain of the future.

via https://paulitaylor.com/2020/09/12/why-do-so-many-people-want-us-back-in-the-office/

The office as the default way of working is dead. But the office itself isn’t dead. With working from home, what we gain in work-life balance we might lose in innovation and creativity. There are people who could directly challenge that sentence but I suspect they will come from highly mature companies who have fully mastered the remote working learning curve. Many of us are still at the stage of doing what we did in the office , just remotely. The timorous amongst us may use the lack of productivity net gains as a reason to regress rather than push through the ‘pain barrier’ as Matt Mullenweg describes it. We can do so much better, for ourselves, our customers and society if we stop being so frightened or so certain of the future.

(via https://paulitaylor.com/2020/09/12/why-do-so-many-people-want-us-back-in-the-office/)

Tech startups are getting involved in the funeral business

(via https://screenshot-magazine.com/technology/innovation/tech-startups-funeral/)

Tech startups are getting involved in the funeral business

(via https://screenshot-magazine.com/technology/innovation/tech-startups-funeral/)

Given this trend of rising corporate and central banking interest in blockchain technology, it’s inevitable that the first widespread mainstream adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency will be driven primarily by the existing status quo and power brokers. […] Business models which operate on artificial scarcity simply cannot exist alongside a reality of public blockchains. Even if a group did attempt to deploy a for-profit protocol on a public blockchain, the code by default is opensource and thus it’s trivial to copy the code, lower the fee and then redeploy. Public blockchains are owned by nobody, controlled by nobody and can never be shutdown. Smart contracts can be owned by nobody, controlled by nobody, and execute as coded every time. The result is a blockchain commons; a universal common resource which renders old-world business models obsolete, and ushers in a new foundational paradigm on which to create value for all of humanity.

via https://medium.com/peerism/blockchain-commons-the-end-of-all-corporate-business-models–3178998148ba

If you thought seat licenses were lucrative in the 1990s, wait until its city blocks in the 2020s. All are becoming increasingly embedded in physical systems, supply chains, mobility platforms and the architecture of data that makes these and other elements of the real world. One had only to notice how many seemingly incidental displays were malfunctioning in and around mass transit systems during the recent WannaCry ransomware outbreak to get a sense of where these companies systems are entwined with delivery of public conveniences. AWS, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook Messenger are now the mission critical sinews of the modern world. But you knew this.

via https://medium.com/phase-change/newsletter–29-sci-fi-economics–4a22d590d55f

The Chelsea thrived because it stuck to Philip Hubert’s original vision: to house and nurture New York’s creative community — and do so while still being affordable and open to all. It is unlikely that the Chelsea will house the next wave of American creativity (the hotel was closed in 2011, and the new owners are converting it into a pricey boutique hotel. Many of the rooms, including Bob Dylan’s, have since been destroyed.) Yet while New York city’s greatest art colony is all but dead, its structure and ethos continue to enrich American culture — albeit in a different way, and on an entirely different coast.

Yet despite the lucrative returns of Y Combinator and other startup accelerators sprouting up around the USA (like TechStars, 500 Startups, AngelPad and SeedCamp) no ambitious community-building projects exist for American arts like they do for American tech. While most talented tech gurus can find a startup accelerator to join (and fund them), aspiring artists are told to get a bedroom in Brooklyn or move to Iowa for an MFA — both of which cost upwards of $40,000 a year and don’t come with a patron.

Summing up the net worth of the Chelsea’s most famous residents […] the Chelsea Hotel was responsible for more than 2.1 billion dollars of value creation while it was open. That estimate is only going off of the net worth of the artists themselves — not all of the downstream albums or paintings or ticket sales they contributed to (i.e. a single painting by Pollock fetched $200M and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took in more than $190M at the box office. A single room of de Kooning paintings was estimated to be worth as much as $4B.) The funny thing? Despite their obsession with wealth, most startup accelerators don’t even come close to matching the economic impact of the Chelsea Hotel — much less its cultural impact.

via https://medium.com/@bagelboy/make-america-bohemian-again-de846e35d757

A report by the Australia Institute to be released today titled “Jobs and Growth … And a Few Hard Numbers” shows that there is little correlation between economic performance and either political party. The report, which examines the economic performance of Australia under every prime minister since Menzies, also found that the “business friendliness” of a government does not appear to have much impact either.

via https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2016/jun/14/new-research-abbott-and-turnbull-the-worst-economic-managers-since-menzies

A majority of value on the Internet now passes through the twin orifices of either Apple or Google, with the muscular sphincter of Facebook pushing value through the chain

via https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-dominated-apple-google-company-wants-forge-third-john-battelle

A majority of value on the Internet now passes through the twin orifices of either Apple or Google, with the muscular sphincter of Facebook pushing value through the chain

via https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-dominated-apple-google-company-wants-forge-third-john-battelle

“startup culture is fixated upon using digital technology to narrowly improve short-term efficiency in many different business settings, it is woefully inept at analysing what problems this process may accumulate in the long term.”

–Brett Scott

Barely anyone knew about Bouvier’s dealings: a handful of gallery owners across Europe, his lawyer, and Sotheby’s private-sales department. His staff at Natural Le Coultre noticed the art works stored on his account but insist that they were never told more. Their boss was rarely in the office; Bouvier travelled constantly, investing. He controls more than forty companies, which cover a bewildering range of interests, from R4, a new complex of galleries on the site of an old Renault factory in Paris, to Smartcopter, an idea for developing a low-cost helicopter. His manner discouraged conversation. Reynard told me that he never inquired where the money for the Singapore Freeport was coming from. “It is a question you don’t ask,” he told me. “Because you know that he will not answer.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/the-bouvier-affair