10 December 2023

It's culture and behavior. Yes, we have fallen quite far.  (Is that Roy Hargrove's mellifluous trumpet? Or Arturo Sandoval? - No, it's Benny Golson's Park Avenue Petite.

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This is a handy map of 4G and 5G cell phone coverage in Oregon. I switched to AT&T for their superior coverage, and am glad I did.

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With offices sitting empty, landlords are ‘handing back the keys’.  This is actually a NYT article, so I'm not sure how much applies to Seattle, but I bet it does a lot.  Will this cause another Great Recession? The author thinks not, but I'm not so sure. Since that vast majority of wealth is debt instruments instead of hard assets, anytime someone can't pay off a loan worries me.
And here's Peter Schiff discussing the upcoming SCOTUS case regarding taxation of unrealized gains – basically a tax on assets that may have increased in dollar value (like because of inflation) but that didn't actually make you any richer.
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In Seattle, some people think it's fun to deliberately run over people on Aurora Avenue. "Y'all hit this bitch".

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The dminishing half-life of knowledge. Scary commentary about how much maintenance it takes to stay on top of your game, especially in the tech field. It's also like that in medicine. This is why companies only want younger engineers. Except for COBOL engineers, of course.

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The state of LLMs in mathematics. Thank goodness ChatGPT4 and GPT4 are mainly good at being search engines and "struggle" with hard problems.  Guess we still need human mathematicians.

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Things I learned from teaching. How to teach difficult and important but non-exciting things to students. This is education seen from the teacher's end. The author is a college senior, so probably not yet cynical and has not had his lofty dreams of making a difference in the world shattered. Only the motivated will want to learn, and will get something out of a course. For the rest,
If you're teaching a topic, you're probably really passionate about it....At the end of the day, though, [the students] are not getting a Ph.D. in this stuff, and they've got half a dozen other classes on top of work, family, friends, and this weekend's party to think about.
Unless they see that the material is relevant, or that they're building or creating cool or useful stuff, they'll be bored.

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So glad that the Scottish fiddler got his flddle back.  The saying goes that the difference between a violin and a fiddle, is that no one cares if a little beer gets on a fiddle.  But I bet this guy would care.

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