Links for Tuesday November 20th 2018

Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?
I'm impressed by the technique used, the pop music science produced, and the design of this essay,

Links for Wednesday November 14th 2018

Swoole – PHP asynchronous programming framework | Swoole
This looks like it could be really useful for work and a few personal projects.

How AI Agents Cheat
This is brilliant. And disturbing. If we are all wiped out by an AI in the future, this is going to be why – not because an AI has applied a moral judgement to us, just because wiping us out represents the most efficient path to the goal we've programmed it with. Imagine, for example, an AI with the goal "prevent the largest possible number of humans from dying". An efficient path to this goal would be to entirely wipe out the human race. Sure, it kills billions, but it efficiently prevents a potentially infinite number of humans from dying.

How to use Eloquent ORM migrations outside Laravel – siipo.la
New job, new round of bookmarking for tools I'll find useful in the medium term.

Now That’s What I Call Music: How one compilation came to rule them all – BBC News
A history of the music compilation albums. Lots of interesting stuff in here. (In case you're curious: I owned NOW 3 and listened to it exhaustively. It was ace.

City Street Orientations around the World – Geoff Boeing
Interesting visualtation of the direction orientation of streets in major cities. Sydney and Melbourne stand out as interesting oddities, having the planned nature of cities built mostly in the last few hundred years, but with some oddities. Beijing also revealed as suprisingly modern.

DieScraper | Roll Plus Hot
Mike has come up with what looks like an interesting alpha for a game here. Filed for future reference.