Faith Hahn

Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most... See more

“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to... See more

In 1926, the year before The Jazz Singer popularized pre-recorded sound to cinema, theater pits employed 22,000 musicians in the United States; by 1934, there were only 4,100. Fewer musicians’ salaries meant lower ticket prices and more daily showings, and attendance almost doubled. New York City’s Local 802 organized picket lines outside theaters... See more

The major labels are finally facing a crucial reality: Independent music's market share keeps climbing, and controlling the infrastructure behind it is becoming as vital as owning rights.

Universal Music Group's Virgin Music Group led this charge in 2024 — snapping up Downtown Music Holdings in a $775M power move (pending regulatory approval), as... See more

That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had... See more

Here is something for the incubator to think about: if we take this notion of hyper-personalisation to its extreme, the endpoint is a world where every DSP user receives a slightly different version of every song release. Is this a dream, or another episode of Black Mirror ?

Twitter is packed with thinkbois writing threads about how to 100x your productivity with AI tools I bet they’ve never used. Here’s what the thinkbois won’t tell you: better tools are not the bottleneck to creating great work. A person focusing on one thing the antiquated way - pen and paper or whatever - will beat the tool optimizers any day. A... See more