daviddaviddavid

I'm a gigging jazz drummer and just cause you mentioned "with the back seats down", I gotta say: I always wish there was a car that was optimized / defaulted to having the back seats down. But in a pinch, on those rare occasions where you actually have more than two people in your car, you could pop some seats up.

Every car I get (currently have an Hyundai Elantra GT), I end up with the back seats down 75% of the time, and it just looks crappy. If the default mode was back-seats-down, with no big seams or gaps or unlevel parts, I'd be in heaven.

I think the key here is that you only deliberately practice things that you really, really want. Things that you want so bad that you obsess over them and you wake up realizing you've been dreaming about them. I quit a comfortable software job to take about 9 months off to devote to piano recently. Every free moment I get, I'm throwing myself in the waters. It's really hard to push through the painful points of learning stuff if you're not obsessed.

Hey thanks, it is very hands on and focused more on performance than composition. It covers comping, soloing, playing in different substyles, pretty much everything if you take both courses. Sometimes the units fly by too quickly and you need to note to yourself to revisit a topic and apply it in all 12 keys or apply it to a bunch of Real Book tunes.

I knew I'd pay for recommending a paid course but it's really great and the price is a steal given that Berklee Online courses are around $1500 and private lessons w someone of this teacher's calibre might be $100/hr. I'm not affiliated w the teacher/college at all other than being a student.

Jeremy Siskind's jazz piano courses taught out of Fullerton College.

https://jeremysiskind.com/jazzclass/

This is a bit of a cheat because these courses are not free ($50USD for California residents and around $400 for non-CA residents) but they are so good that I had to mention them.

I am nearing the end of the Level II course and have learned so much stuff. They force you to do so many things that you otherwise would not do. Basically, ever week you have to post a video demonstrating what you learned from the previous week. And the video is in a public discussion forum with the other students so there is this incentive to do an extra good job. And he gives great feedback on your assignments.

The title of this article is a really good Garden Path Sentence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Just want to share a couple great works by Sakamoto. I'm a big fan. One of my favorite bossa nova albums is A Day In New York by Morelenbaum/Sakamoto. Here's Desafinado from that album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rtdR9WkOOY

And his early synth-y stuff is just so hip. Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1978) is some badass stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGo7n6CMCcE

Here is a the letter from Russel to Jean van Heijenoort in response to the latter's request to print the correspondence between Russell/Frege in "From Frege to Godel" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/).

----

As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise that there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege’s dedication to truth. His entire life’s work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known. (Quoted in van Heijenoort (1967), 127)

"mostly just okay, and certainly not great"

The guy cowrote Principia Mathematica AND won the Nobel prize in literature. He pretty much destroyed Frege's life's work in a witty little personal letter that could've fit on a napkin. He's one of those rare thinkers that did so much that if he only did a tenth of what he actually did he'd still be considered great.

Good lord, I play every day and didn't know this was even a thing. I usually quit as soon as I hit Genius. I clearly need to level up!

Thanks! I love it so much. The one thing that annoys me is that it rejects anything that it considers to be domain knowledge or some such criteria. For example, today you'd think you could use 'potto', which is a cool animal in the loris family. But nope, Spelling Bee seemingly rejects it because it considers it to be specialized zoological knowledge or something. BS.

EDIT: Removed spoiler.

For anyone that plays Wordle on NYT Games site, there is another anagramming game called Spelling Bee in which the notion of a pangram is featured prominently. Basically, you get a set of letters from which to build anagrams (one privileged letter must appear in all your anagrams). Pangrams are considered to be any anagram which makes use of all the given letters and it will flash the word 'Pangram' on the screen when you get them, to give you a minor nerdy dopamine hit.

I am addicted to the game and get pissed at myself if I don't get to the top scoring tier every day.

EDIT: Removed spoilers for future readers.

One bit of complexity that lots of tools like this seem to always punt on is the fact that most chords (at least in jazz) are typically played rootless and inverted and with lots of 'upper extensions'. It would be nice if a tool really did a deep dive in actual chord voicings that one would play in the real world (i.e. in a context where the bass player is covering the root and therefore it is best left out of the chord).

As an example of something that is very systematic (easy to put in an app), a rootless C maj 7 is equivalent to an E min 7. A rootless C min 7 is equivalent to an Eb maj 7. etc.

It is a pretty tough leap to learn rootless jazz piano comping when almost everything out there (except for the old-school dead tree books) only ever shows rooted voicings.

This reminded me of my favorite Mary Oliver poem:

  Entering the Kingdom
  by Mary Oliver
  
  The crows see me.   
  They stretch their glossy necks      
  In the tallest branches    
  Of green trees. I am      
  Possibly dangerous, I am    
  Entering the kingdom.
  
  The dream of my life   
  Is to lie down by a slow river    
  And stare at the light in the trees–      
  To learn something by being nothing    
  A little while but the rich    
  Lens of attention.
  
  But the crows puff their feathers and cry   
  Between me and the sun,    
  And I should go now.      
  They know me for what I am.    
  No dreamer,      
  No eater of leaves.

I like the action on the Privias (and the similar CDP360s, which I played recently). My only complaint about the action is that if you're playing at low/practice volumes, you tend to hear a lot of mechanical plastic sound as the keys spring back up. I'm a big fan of Roland's actions. I'd check out the FP30. I also used to practice on a Yamaha P125B and they are great.

Though not a move into a completely different product area, it's been interesting to see them step up their digital piano game. For a long time it seemed like Casio had a reputation for not making serious keyboards that you could gig on. But they have been churning out really nice keyboards recently - most notably, the Privia line. The ones I've played have a really nice feeling action, pro-level sounds and they're visually quite slick.

Regarding Yamaha and synthesizers I just wanted to mention that I consistently hear rave reviews of the Reface CS. I am more into vintage electric piano sounds than synths and currently own a Reface CP and the sounds on that are legit.

This reminded me of a very hip recording of Anthony Braxton playing Donna Lee on contrabass clarinet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qL_hkYEf1M

I would add HP Grice to the list of startlingly clear ordinary language philosophers. His 1957 essay "Meaning" has this definition:

"A means something by x" is equivalent to "A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention".

It may seem less than clear taken out of context, but there is a wonderful argument working toward the definition and once he finally presents it, it's a bit of a mic drop moment.

Also, he is one of the few philosophers whose work proved to be foundational in linguistics. Any book/course in pragmatics will talk about Grice's work on implicature and background knowledge.

As a fan of Alice Coltrane, it's kind of frustrating that NYT would bother to put this together and interview all these people and then put these tiny 30 second, completely-out-of-context audio snippets. I encourage anyone who checks the article out to listen to the complete tracks. What can you possibly get out of a 30 second clip?!

Probably worth noting that Wittgenstein and Weil both came from relative affluence. Wittgenstein's father was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Famous composers such as Brahms would perform at their house. While not close to Wittgenstein, Weil's father was a medical doctor.

I realize it is not the same as finding a friend, but I recently found five crisp $20 bills in a used logic text book at an Amvets thrift store. I opened the book because it was written by Irving Copi, who wrote my undergrad logic text. I was paranoid it was counterfeit, but it was very much real money. To make things better, the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza and the employee said a mistake happened at the pizzeria and they accidentally made too many pies and gave me an extra large pie for free. I was on a roll.

I have been in love with this song for decades. There is definitely a feeling of circularity going on. Here are a couple of my favorite versions, if anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole.

SF Jazz Collective (heavy modern jazz arrangement):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-F_1OvPdqA

Cassandra Wilson (earthy, lyrics in English):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIehPcFebHo

Trio Mocoto (melody played on Cuica, which is nuts):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqTlFa3Fnlk

It's unfortunate that the entire article is focused on toxic productivity as a feature of individuals, as though their personal/psychological shortcomings are to blame.

I think it is worthwhile asking what are the cultural, structural, workplace conditions which contribute to people feeling like this in the first place. Are people more likely to have 'toxic productivity' when they are having unrealistic deadlines/workloads thrown at them? Does management foster a hypercompetitive environment? Does being tethered to Slack/Teams contribute? Do specific workplace methodologies such as Agile, etc have an effect?

I was really hoping this would be about Medical Logic Modules / Arden Syntax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_logic_module

Group texting works fine for me. It auto converts to MMS and sending/replying works as expected. On my old Kyocera, a group text would seemingly send individual texts in a loop over the recipients, which always seemed broken.

The one maddening thing about texting on my Sonim is the KT9 predictive texting. Short, high-frequency function words such as "am", "of", "the", etc always have way decreased preference compared to larger, less common words that start with those substrings. e.g. If I type "amethyst" just one time, that word will always be preferred over the much more common "am".

When Sprint/T-Mobile forced me to get a new flip phone because my Kyocera would no longer be supported, I had to decide between the Alcatel Go Flip, the Cat S22 and a Sonim XP3 Plus. I went with the Sonim and I am very happy with it.

https://www.sonimtech.com/products/devices/xp3plus/

The Alcatel had many bad reviews. The Cat seemed huge and defeated many of purposes I have for having a flip phone in the first place. The Sonim has incredible build quality, no apps, internet works fine. I have no complaints. I haven't tried using Google Maps on it yet, but if that works I will love it even more and ditch my Garmin GPS.

Watching my son grow/develop/flourish. When my cat climbs on me and purrs. The moments when you're playing music and you enter a state of flow. Pushing through difficult phases of learning new skills and coming out on the other side.

Regarding modern AI approaches not being great at what Prolog does, I'm curious if this will ever translate into an uptick in job postings for Prolog (or, at least, rule-based/declarative) jobs. One would expect hybrid systems in which the old school approach played some significant role, but I haven't noticed that happening in the market.

Also a big Paul Barton fan! He has a nice video playing the 18th Goldberg Variation by JS Bach (my favorite one).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zka65VYD318

And he is also a great painter and there is an awesome video of him painting a portrait of Josh Wright, who is a concert pianist that has lots of educational videos online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovu-u8BTGxI

One thing I love about watching Barton is that he has the hands of a mere mortal. So you can see how he accomplishes various reaches and fingerings if you don't have gargantuan piano hands.

This seems to have been how one of my favorite composers, Arnold Schoenberg, died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg#Superstition...