Guy Berger

If we’re talking post-Coltrane, pre-Shorter saxophonists in Miles’s bands for which we have recordings - Imho George is much better fit than either Hank Mobley or Sonny Stitt.

So I’m prompting a series of humorous stories about my kids being students at a magical academy, with all sorts of zany adventures. A recent one is a LotR parody, they go on a quest to destroy a powerful magic ringpop. None of them are good children’s literature but they entertain my kids. excerpt: ” “I need more!” Sauron declared. “The One Ring Pop must not be lonely! I must surround it with Nine Grape Rings for the mortal kids, Seven Blue Raspberry for the sugar elves, and Three Watermelon Blasts for the camp counselors doomed to night duty!” He stood up and declaimed: 🧁 “Three Rings for the Counselors, soggy and tired, Seven for Elven teens with TikTok inspired, Nine for Campers doomed to sticky-fingered fate, One for the Dark Lord on his candy crate, In the Land of Wizzlewand where the Snack Flames lie, One Ring Pop to rule them all, and in the sugar bind them, One to lure the children in and Ring Pop-ly remind them… That cherry is superior. Fight me.” 🧁”

I use it for: 1/ coding (my R skills are pretty basic) when analyzing big datasets 2/ writing bedtime stories for my kids In my experience it’s super useful, with significant limitations. On the bedtime story side, the stories it writes if given free rein are quite lame. But it can produce stuff of value (for bedtime), if you give it a promising/creative prompt. As far as coding goes - I am guessing the code quality is terrible but it’s functional for my needs. However, it often gets fairly basic things about the data sets wrong and has to be steered. IMHO the best characterization I’ve seen is “infinite interns”. That gives a flavor of it’s value and also its limitations. Fwiw, that NYT piece was unsettling and a useful indicator of how proper usage is important. It’s an impressive probabilistic language generator that does a great job mimicking humans, but humans are easily fooled

What’s Rudolph’s backstory? He keeps convening all these great musicians together…

Side note, this is a great album, as is the same trio’s Time Will Tell.

I am extremely excited about this - it would be my first Mosaic since the Mingus 1964-65 Jazz Workshop box.

Aw man. RIP.

I think I was at that same concert, it was great!

Finally got around to listening to this. Worth hearing though not life changing.

This is great. Glad I picked it up.

And I got around to the last recordings in the box, the Carter/Bradford duos. Really great. Much more abstract and “cool” than the earlier work.

The recording Electric & Acoustic Hard Cell Live w/Berne, Taborn and Rainey is excellent. Not quite as great as the Science Friction recordings (that trio plus Marc Ducret) but very worthy if you like those.

I think the long term impacts (in terms of side effects) are well understood - these have been used as diabetes drugs for some time. as far as people regaining the weight - yeah, I think that’s part of the calculus, you’re 100% right. And it means that for people who don’t need these drugs to be healthy, it’s worth avoiding them as an unnecessary lifetime treatment.

Great ending to the best Star Wars production since Empire Strikes Back. Am a little sad that it’s over.

Complicated but I think this is far too negative. I think the fact that many people struggle to achieve significant weight loss on their own and that obesity has very serious morbidity impact means that these drugs are medical miracles.