Occasionally the responsible thing is to admit you’ve built something completely unrelated to the stated purpose of this blog. This is one of those occasions.
VinylBins (www.vinylbins.com) is a hobby project. It lets you flip through random album covers the way you’d flip through bins at a record store — decade and genre filters so you can head to the “80s rock section” before you start digging, and buttons to play something on Spotify or buy it on Amazon when something catches your eye. No algorithm. No “recommended for you.” Not even a search button. Just the pleasant chaos of not knowing what comes next.
The thing streaming killed, and never replaced, was stumbling onto music. Finding an album because the cover looked interesting, or because it was sitting next to something you already owned, or because someone left it in the wrong bin. Algorithms optimize for what you already like, which is a reasonable goal and also exactly wrong. VinylBins is the other thing.
It’s a side project. The ML work continues. Normal service will resume shortly.