Hit Forensics @hitforensics

Carrie Fisher would have turned 70 today. The world knew her as Princess Leia. Hollywood also knew her as a script doctor, uncredited on Hook, Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3 and The Wedding Singer. On Hook she rewrote Julia Roberts's Tinker Bell, and on Lethal Weapon 3, Rene Russo's part. Drew Barrymore says she was brought onto The Wedding Singer to 'write the girl's part to make it balanced.' Her cure for bad dialogue: 'Make the women smarter and the love scenes better.'

Michael has made $1.03 billion, and six of his old hits went back onto the Hot 100 after it opened. It feels like this should happen every time. It almost never does. Of the twelve music biopics since 2015 that made over $40 million, only one other moved the chart: Bohemian Rhapsody, with one song. Elvis, Rocketman, Back to Black and A Complete Unknown managed, between them, none. #dataviz

Which one climbs highest this year? The answer lands on Billboard's chart in the second week of November.

Monster Mash has come back to the Hot 100 every Halloween since 2021, which would be called haunting if it weren't so punctual. It was the No. 1 song in America on this day in 1962. It brings friends: Thriller, Ghostbusters, This Is Halloween. Last year Thriller reached No. 10, its first top 10 since 1984, on fewer streams than the year before. Billboard had quietly cleared the older hits off the chart. #dataviz

At least eleven AI acts have reached a Billboard chart. Most peaked on download charts, where a few thousand sales can top a genre chart. One made the Hot 100, and in August its rapper confirmed using AI. That's week 1 of The Machine Chart, a new list every Monday.

That kind of already happened in maths: a proof that was too big for its referees was settled in the end by a machine checking a machine. 🍊Thomas Hales's 1998 proof of the Kepler conjecture (the densest way to stack oranges) ran on 3 GB of programs and data. After four years the referees said they were '99% certain' but couldn't certify the computer parts; a formal computer-checked proof closed it in 2014.

@qikipedia Might be the case even for older movies. Frances Marion was the first writer to win two Academy Awards: The Big House in 1930 and The Champ in 1931. And she was reported to be one of the highest-paid script writers in the business.

Chuck Berry was born 100 years ago today, and one of his songs is leaving the solar system. Johnny B. Goode is the only rock'n'roll song on Voyager's Golden Record, which next month will be a full light-day from Earth. Back home, the Hot 100 kept a stranger record. His only No. 1 was a novelty song called My Ding-a-Ling, and his longest run belongs to a Christmas song from 1958: 31 weeks, 28 of them since 2019. #dataviz

For two years, AI labs have been teaching models to think slower. Now the fast half of the mind is having its moment: first came Jev from TypeSafe, and now AWS has open-sourced Strands Decider 👾 Both are "System One" models, in Kahneman's terms: the fast autopilot that makes most of our decisions, leaving verification and more complex problem solving to System 2. Strands Decider is a 2B model with its text-writing head cut off. It's replaced with a tiny pointer whose only job is to pick from the options you give it. One forward pass, about 115 ms on a gaming GPU, not a single word generated. Doubt, Kahneman wrote, isn't in System 1's repertoire. But a probability is a measure of doubt, and Strands Decider returns one with every call: at 0.9 or above, it's right about 95% of the time on short tasks it hasn't seen. Below that, the decision goes to a bigger model or a human. It fits anywhere a decision has to be fast and honest about itself: - checking every tool call an agent makes before it fires - routing requests so the expensive model only sees the hard ones - steering game characters and robots, where a slow decision is a wrong one - making snap calls on your laptop, without your data ever leaving it Where would you put a System 1 model? 🤔

@JonahLupton Agents excel at the most boring stuff tbf. Most of that 20% is the inattention tax, or "will do it tomorrow" kind of thing. An agent never gets bored on hold

Even the 'can't tell it from Opus' dev still calls Opus 5.5 in to review the critical code. Cheap model writes, expensive one checks... the oldest org chart in software engineering.

Kai @hqmank

2 weeks ago

1/ This post is worth 5 minutes of your time. A dev spent a month using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash across a dozen projects. He says if he doesn't check the model name, he genuinely can't tell whether he's using DeepSeek or Opus 5.5. Same quality, same speed, way cheaper. So why isn't

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Part 9 · Titles x.com/vadwarp/status…

Hit Forensics @hitforensics

2 weeks ago

1965: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction 2024: APT. The median hit title went from 17 characters in the ’70s to 11 now, and 29% of 2020s hits have a one-word title. Emoji titles next? 🙃 #ROSÉ #BrunoMars

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Has social media made music simpler? This question reappeared in my feed yet again while the second solo of Shine On You Crazy Diamond was playing in my headphones, so I decided to see for myself. 1958: a hit ran 2:25. 1992: 4:23. The 2020s: 3:16. So yes, songs got shorter; shorter than grunge, but also longer than rock ’n’ roll. It looks like the ’90s could be the outlier, and probably not because listeners suddenly had more attention, but because it was the CD era, when a new technology gave every song more room than it ever had. Which decade is your baseline? 👇 #DataViz #Music #Billboard

1965: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction 2024: APT. The median hit title went from 17 characters in the ’70s to 11 now, and 29% of 2020s hits have a one-word title. Emoji titles next? 🙃 #ROSÉ #BrunoMars

Part 8 · Did Hip-hop make songs shorter? x.com/vadwarp/status…

Hit Forensics @hitforensics

2 weeks ago

“Hip-hop made songs shorter” sounds right: rock fell from 61% of the top 40 to 2%, hip-hop rose to almost half. Except 95% of the fall since 1990 happened inside genres. All of music got shorter 📉

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“Hip-hop made songs shorter” sounds right: rock fell from 61% of the top 40 to 2%, hip-hop rose to almost half. Except 95% of the fall since 1990 happened inside genres. All of music got shorter 📉

@Philip2Phl99 and every night it retrains the soldiers with the insights of the army that won that day

57 years after the 1202 alarm, agent builders are still relearning Margaret Hamilton's rule: know which job matters most, and when you're overloaded, shed the rest and hand the call to the humans 🌖

Çağrı Mert Bakırcı @cagrimbakirci

2 weeks ago

Margaret Hamilton has died at 90, and the first thing I thought of was a number. 1202. That's the alarm that flashed in the lunar module during the Apollo 11 descent, with Eagle still about six miles above the Moon. The computer was overloaded. A radar was feeding it work

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@NickADobos Spot on comparison. A system that is developed quickly and does its job in a well defined range of all imaginable scenarios will always be chosen over the one that takes more time to develop, even if it's somewhat obscure.

Part 7 · The Intro is Dead. x.com/vadwarp/status…

Hit Forensics @hitforensics

2 weeks ago

The intro is dead ⏭️ Billie Jean makes you wait 29 seconds for Michael. Hotel California, 52 for Don Henley. The typical 2020s hit: 6.5. Most of the intro was gone by 2005 though, which gives social media a reasonable alibi here. So who's the culprit?

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