I used to naively believe that people are generally good. I still believe that but with a major qualifier. There are some truly toxic people out there who are seriously mentally fucked up and don't hesitate to screw with others' lives. They seem normal and nice at first, but if you look closely enough, you see the trail they have left behind.

Goodbye, Ozzy. Your music was a big part of my high school and college life.

RIP.

This seems to be an example of Extremeistan as described by Taleb. Can this specific research be extended to any other domains, e.g. finance? Most financial software uses known worst case scenarios while doing retirement planning, such as a 30% drop in equities. What if the worst case is a lot worse than 30%? Asking for experts to weigh in.

I am interpreting this to mean that the model tried 10K approaches to solve the problem, and finally selected the one that did the trick. Am I wrong?

1) Practice doesn't make perfect, only "perfect practice makes perfect". Use a metronome, start with a speed I'm 100% comfortable with, and slowly build up my speed at 5 npm intervals. When I start making even minor mistakes, stop, go back 10 rpm, and hold my practice there for 5-10 minutes. Keep to this technique and I will get faster over time.

2. Don’t aim for perfection. Get comfortable with the concept of fast playing in my mind, and my fingers will follow. Warm up a little, but after that, jump to playing at my target speed, even if it sounds sloppy. Repeat this enough number of times and I will get faster over months and years.

I’ve tried both techniques over the last 3 years and have gotten considerably faster. But I'm not sure which of these techniques has worked more than the other.

My own take is that it takes time, and staying on the edge of what I’m capable of doing is important. No rules beyond that, really.

Question for this audience, especially for musicians and guitarists: how do you structure your practice to become great?

-Because opinion pieces increasing masquerade as news articles.

-Because journalists have no comprehension of basic math and statistics, so stats like "a woman earns $0.72 for each $1 earned by a man" are taken at face value or parroted endlessly. Most news articles show a lack of critical thinking.

-Context is deliberately avoided to paint nuanced topics as black and white.

-Graphs are intentionally created in a way to provoke outrage instead of understanding.

-Clickbait titles.

Sadly, all of this is true even for paid news such as NYT, WSJ etc.

Minor rant: All of this powerful technology, and yet the examples they can come up with are always about e-commerce/shopping, photos, calendaring etc. Why can't they talk about something more fundamentally useful, like a feature that would reduce your phone usage or budget better, etc.? I guess I can dream.