Just pushed another update to https://sightread.org which generates sheet music to practice sight reading and music dictation. Still rhythm-only, now with support for asymmetric (odd) rhythms like 7/8

Ha, I was just playing with making a simple pad in webaudio and it evolved into a progression-playing backing track tool (vanilla html/js/css page). It would appear there are a lot of us in the Venn intersection of programmer/guitarist/practice time alone enjoyers.

Not only US. A friend’s flight was late and about to land in Munich after the airport closes. So they had to land at a different airport and then take the train to Munich.

Sydney airport also closes overnight because it’s too loud for the surrounding residential areas.

Long Beach does something similar; I did a training flight there and we left right as it was closing, when my wheels left the runway all the lights went off.

It’s not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.

Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.

If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.

It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.

> Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere?

Idea: When you apply for a college, you have to prepay for the first semester. If you get admitted, you have already paid for the first semester. If you get rejected, you get this advance payment back. On the other hand, if you get admitted, but decide to go somewhere else, you loose money.

This should give the university a strong incentive not to reject strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the semester fee without having to provide any service for this money).

Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.

> you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.

Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).

Even getting admitted to two colleges would be financial crippling to a majority of applicants.

Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.

The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.

This would result in lots of schools moving to a rolling admission process with monthly (or even weekly) notification cycles. Students would then apply serially to several schools.

Of course, there's no way to get schools to all require a deposit, and even if there were schools would give fee-waivers to low-income students (giving them an advantage over middle-class kids).

> to make sure V8 doesn't optimize out something too much

A bit more explanation of “something” and ”too much“ would have been educational

I’ve published several books with them. Only once I asked and they managed to find the beast. They didn’t promise but they did deliver.

That's great! I am not surprised.

He also designed a Facebook’s office in Menlo Park. The roof was literally a park, seemingly blending with the bay and you could go for a nice nature stroll mid-day by just going up a flight of stairs. https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/facebook-campus-in-menlo-...

I worked in this building. It was terrible. Low light, completely open office, people walking around you all the time, extremely noisy, pretty ugly (the roof-top garden was the exception). My team expensed noise cancelling headphones because it was so loud.

MPK 22 was also designed by Gehry Partners, which was a massive improvement on the inside, but outside is still kinda terrible in my opinion: https://www.truebeck.com/project/facebook-mpk-22/

Not surprising to hear. I mean Gehry has always been more flair than quality. His studio has probably weakest execution from all of the star architects. But it's a great brand i guess thats why you hire Gehry.

I mean, having been in that building a few times, and working on the other side of the street, it's pretty clear the reason that building is such a disaster is that the architects did what the clients asked for. I like to give Gehry the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's cause he guest starred on Arthur. But you can only tell the client they're dumb and their building will suck to be in so many times before you just go ahead and let them have their hellscape.

The roof was pretty nice though.

Wow you weren't kidding. The insides of that looks like an absolute hellscape. Like a whole floor is missing and they just set up shop in a warehouse!

I’ve spent some time there, and it did seem like a building that was primarily designed for satellite view — never mind what goes on inside.

Same. Echo chamber hell. I appreciated the modernness of the interior as a design nerd, though it was uncomfortable as a primary desk for all the reasons you’ve said. Never mind the never ending flood of visitors up and down the walkways.

The roof was the main reprieve about the entire environment, wonderfully maintained and honestly a blessing to escape the main campus.

Nonetheless. Frank is a legend, very fortunate to have been able to been able to experience his work on a daily basis.

It’s really fun to explore, no two spaces are alike, and lots of nooks and crannies. Definitely in my top 5 favorite buildings on campus and in Cambridge.

Did he design the yellow pedestrian/biker bridge connecting Facebook to the the Bayfront? I recently drove underneath it and it's quite interesting.

Yup, it’s web performance advent calendar in its 17th edition. I’m the maintainer, AMA. Also still accepting contributions for this year.

Let me add also Blindness by José Saramago, it has pages-long paragraphs and sentences, characters have no names just descriptions… it’s surprising at first but not hard to get into. Amazing book!

I also recommend "Death with Interruptions" by the same author. I too was blindsided by how it was written but once you get used to the style it just flows.

https://SightRead.org - free, ad-free, etc, vanilla js (except for the abcjs notation library) web app to practice sight reading. Currently rhythm-only, but more is planned.