Lego Jazz Quartet Idea

Lego Jazz Quartet

Jazz needs some serious love right now so this Lego Ideas set is well-timed. It looks like this idea has already achieved liftoff status with 10K votes, but feel free to show some love and build out your dream jazz club at home while supporting live jazz.
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Self-play as AI Reinforcement Learning Technique

Interesting and unexpected outcomes emerge from mass trial-and-error hide and seek actions: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents-startle-researchers-with-unexpected-strategies-in-hideandseek
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s viola organista

Are you a keyboard player who is a frustrated guitarist? Solution: Keytar   Are you a keyboard player who is a frustrated cellist? Solution: Viola Organista   Inspiration: Leonardo Da Vinci’s wacky piano is heard for the first time, after 500 years.
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Some Choice Toussaint

I have been listening to a lot of Allen Toussaint this week to honor his huge contribution as a musician, composer, producer and one of the great New Orleans pianists. Here are some of the highlights: Life Love and Faith This entire album is “desert island” Toussaint Cast Your Fate to the Wind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9l7FoWDnjM I […]
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Mancini on Piano Jazz

  NPR has posted an archive of a 1985 Piano Jazz episode to commemorate his 91st birthday. It is definitely worth listening to. Marion McPartland plays some particularly tasteful solo renditions of Mancini tunes and there are some interesting facts revealed in the hour-long interview: Mancini always believed that The Pink Panther theme painted a […]
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Web App Performance Metrics Done Right

Measure time starting at event.timeStamp Measure time ending at performance.now() in a requestAnimationFrame() Ignore anything that happened while the tab was not focused Aggregate data using “% of events that are under target” Visualize multiple thresholds Superhuman CTO recently posted a really useful and well-reasoned approach to setting up web app performance metrics: Much more […]
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Why are there not more AWS-scale child businesses being born?

There is a great deal of mythology surrounding the birth and growth of AWS. Tech idustry awe and amazement is mostly justified but generally focuses on weaving together a linear narrative path that was taken that got us where we are: Internal Problem Identified Solution Identified and resourced Aggressive iteration with continual expansion of problem/solution […]
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The Old Songs in The Singing Detective

Tin Pan Alley manufactured quick fixes and false promises, blue skies, and gold at the end of the rainbow. Those songs then, and pop songs now, permeated the atmosphere with an addictive artificiality. Chrisopher John Stephens I love these old songs and how they are used in Singing Detective. One of my favorite examples of […]
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My Old Used Record Store Rat Run

I still buy a lot of used vinyl online, mostly out of print jazz, soul and funk online but sometimes I wish I lived nearer to more used record stores. One thing that was great about growing up in Rochester, NY in the 80s was the record stores. These were the cathedrals of my youth. […]
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Codecademy PostMortem – Great React.js retrospective

I have played with React.js for a while now. One way dataflow, virtual DOM diffing, JavaScript components instead of HTML templates – this all seems to make a lot of sense. The small todo list style prototypes I have built work extremely well, are conceptually easy to grasp and are super fast. My lingering concern […]
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