a blog about research, art and life 💋

A loosely sorted and lightly annotated catalogue of through the music posts on this blog.

Sleepingbot is the chat widget on my homepage. It answers questions about the blog. Here’s exactly how it works. posts are loaded once at startup All posts under content/posts/ plus about.md are read from disk into memory when the server starts. They stay there — the bot doesn’t go looking for posts mid-conversation. It works from whatever was loaded at deploy time. every message triggers two Claude calls Stage 1 — post selection. Before answering anything, the server sends Claude the user’s question alongside a plain list of post titles. Claude returns a JSON array of up to 4 titles that are most likely relevant. This call uses 200 tokens max and produces no visible output. ...

Details of CSO program When you put all the genres in a cauldron: Ma Mère l’Oye is what happens when a grown-up sophisticated composer insists on dressing a child’s piece in silk: Ravel spoils the innocence with his harmony and orchestral superpower, and you can’t quite decide whether to thank him or scold him. Poulenc’s Gloria arrives in full sacred dress — a lot of Handel, a little Bach tucked between the devotions — though Poulenc’s own mischief keeps slipping in around the corners. ...

Once upon a time… How Uber and Lyft Used a Loophole to Deny NYC Drivers Millions in Pay Natalie Lung, Leon Yin, Aaron Gordon and Denise Lu. Oct 10 2024. Bloomberg The Big Take. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-uber-lyft-nyc-drivers-pay-lockouts/ Basically: The law: In 2018, NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission enacted the nation’s first minimum-pay rule for rideshare drivers, guaranteeing compensation not just for trip time but also for waiting time between rides. Pay rates are calculated using a “utilization rate” — the percentage of online time drivers spend with passengers (set at 58% for 2024). A lower utilization rate means higher per-trip minimum payments from the companies. ...

This is gonna be a never-ending debate. But here’s what’s happening right now, according to folklore Lyft claim that Lyft fee is capped at 30%. What they mean by it, according to Lyft’s blog, is Rider pay = Insurance + Taxes + Gov Fees + Lyft’s fee + Driver’s Income Insurance + Taxes + Gov Fees are “External fees” and does NOT count into those 30%. Eg: Does anyone understand how lyft insurance works? by u/Apart_Vegetable_9699 in lyftdrivers

Week 9 of Price Theory III covers VCG. Here’s an interesting application of VCG: How mechanism design theory helps optimize Amazon-vendor collaboration Dirk Bergemann, May 5, 2026 Amazon buys products from vendors (like P&G). Today, Amazon dictates the order: “Send 5,000 cases of Tide to Phoenix by Tuesday.” The vendor can only choose how much to ship — not where or when. This is inefficient because each side has private info the other can’t see: Amazon knows: customer demand, outbound shipping costs Vendor knows: their factory locations, trucking routes, production costs ...

A large, opaque resale market for frontier LLM APIs has emerged to serve users blocked from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google endpoints (somewhat like a VPN). Two independent papers in the past two months provide the first systematic evidence that a substantial fraction of these intermediaries silently substitute models, truncate context, or misreport billing. Apart from inflated price, the shadow market maybe more chaotic than ideal: for example, shadow-API providers would steal tokens by using fake educational accounts. The claim to provide expensive good models while quietly substituting for cheaper ones. ...

Our empirical analysis course is really cool. Here’s what we covered last week: The setup is quite clean. There is one agents. Four objects: Object Symbol Role Likelihood $\ell(x\mid\theta)$ family of probability models for data $x$, indexed by parameter $\theta\in\Theta$ Prior $\pi(\theta)$ your subjective beliefs over which $\theta$ is true Utility $U(\gamma,\theta)$ what you care about; $\gamma$ is a “prize rule” mapping data into an outcome Decision rule $\delta(z)$ what you actually choose, as a function of observed $z$ Split the data: $x=(w,z)$, where $z$ is observed before act and $w$ is realized after—the decision $\delta$ may only use $z$. The prize is then $\gamma_\delta(x)=\Psi(\delta(z),x)$. ...

On May 9, 2026, the University of Chicago’s University Symphony Orchestra (USO) and our Alumni Orchestra are celebrating music director Barbara Schubert’s 50-year tenure with two landmark performances: Brahms — Academic Festival Overture (Alumni Orchestra) Mahler — Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection” (USO) I’m playing in both pieces across the May 9 and May 10 performances — roughly two hours of music in total, with the Mahler alone clocking in as an eighty-minute marathon. Wish me luck. ...

I was invited by my pianist friend to a Music of the Spring music appreciation event at our International House. We covered music from around the world related with Spring spirit. This was my favourite: