Just posting Small Stuff this week - I'm getting ready for Christmas break and also working on a longer piece about what it looks like to release music in 2021 that I might break up into multiple parts. We'll see. For now, enjoy the handful of links below and see you next week!

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Small Stuff

• DeepMind makes a major contribution to the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. Quick summary is that 1-D amino acid sequences "fold" into 3-D proteins where the specific structure largely determines its function, but the nature of that 1-D to 3-D folding has been very difficult to predict computationally. DeepMind modeled each 3-D protein as a graph structure and built an attention-based neural network to predict the graphs of other amino acid sequences.
• This great Twitter thread on teaching without grades. Crucially, this doesn't mean teaching without feedback (instead, actually more feedback), but making the teaching process about helping students achieve self-set goals as an iterative process rather than reducing learning to a single-dimensional metric.
• Penny Fractions documenting the accelerating consolidation of music firms.
• Hawaii is incentivizing remote workers to move there, and has its own slack and discord servers. Very cool.

Until next time,

\ - Keaton