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

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. ...

In an interview with Jacob Effron, Yann LeCun talked about why the LLM as they are now aren’t the path to (general) intelligence and how the JEPA architecture will help. Judge yourself — but before, here are some sources to understand what IS JEPA: Comment by u/johny_james from discussion in learnmachinelearning Basically, an "encoding" is just the model's internal compressed understanding of something — the gist, not the pixels. Think of how you remember a movie: not every frame, but "hero fights villain on a rooftop." That summary is an encoding. Let’s look at a concrete example. Show an AI a photo of a dog with the right half covered, and ask it to fill in what’s missing: ...

May 17 2026, Kissin’s regular returns to Chicago Symphony Center: Program Beethoven Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3 Chopin Mazurka in E Minor, Op. 41, No. 2 Chopin Mazurka in A-flat Major, Op. 41, No. 4 Chopin Mazurka in C Minor, Op. 56, No. 3 Chopin Mazurka in B Major, Op. 63, No. 1 Chopin Mazurka in F Minor, Op. 68, No. 4 Schumann Kreisleriana, Op. 16 Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C-sharp Minor Larregla y Urbieta ¡Viva Navarra! [Encore] ...

Sleepingbot started as a widget embedded in the homepage. It now has its own page at /sleepingbot. Here’s what changed and how it works. what’s new The dedicated page is a Hugo layout — layouts/_default/sleepingbot.html — activated by a content stub at content/sleepingbot.md with layout: sleepingbot in the frontmatter. No new section, no new content type. The homepage widget still exists with a small “open full page →” link in its header. ...

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 ...