Some quotes from Herbert Read To Hell with Culture — he is somewhat too naively found of the pre-industrialization era where there is no machines and mass production. The fundamental truth about economics is that the methods and instruments of production, freely used and fairly used, are capable of giving every human being a decent standard of living… To Hell with Culture Still his thoughts are insightful: A culture begins with simple things—with the way the potter moulds the clay on his wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside. Culture has always developed as an infinitely slow but sure refinement and elaboration of simple things—refinement and elaboration of speech, refinement and elaboration of shapes, refinement and elaboration of proportions, with the original purity persisting right through. ...

Professor Sunderam gave a talk at Booth about Dynamic Competition for Sleepy Deposits at the banking workshop. It reminded me of how local small banks in China get people to open up account and do deposits. Local small banks’ major customers are grandmas — so banks would give rice, oil and/or eggs as gifts for opening up account or putting deposit. Then, grandmas would periodically “move” their deposits from bank to bank to get free gifts. They would even compare all banks and communicate to get the best deals. Somewhat isomorphic to PhD students searching for seminar food. Anyway… Professor Sunderam and the author team collaborated with Fiserv, a software solution provider for a lot of small-scale banks and credit unions. They got a total of deposit data from 58 million accounts at 920 banks/credit unions. ...

The concert originally featurs Pekka Kuusisto. Late March he can’t make it. Assistant Concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu stepped up, learnt the concerto in two months and performed it for the May 21 week concert. You can read more about the interesting story here from CSO. Fun fact: Kreisler wrote the concerto in 1927. For eight years or so, he claimed it had been written by Vivaldi. Read more about the performance here from Chicago Classical Review.

It’s the season of Yangmei (Chinese Bayberry). Source: Wikipedia Yangmei (Chinese bayberry) is a near-impossible fruit to move. It almost doesn’t have a skin. At room temperature, fruit rots in 2–3 days; plain cold storage at 0–2°C and 85–90% humidity buys only 9–10d. The full preservation toolkit known to the industry — pre-harvest calcium chloride sprays, a permitted 20–30 second dip in CaCl₂ / salicylic acid / sorbic acid, modified-atmosphere packaging with 12–15% CO₂, end-to-end cold-chain trucking — pushes shelf life to roughly two weeks, and only if every link holds. Worse, ripening peaks from late May through June, which is the rainy season in southern China. Humidity is the enemy. Mold is the killer. ...

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. ...