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Off Key - General Discussion

4.0k Topics 28.8k Posts

A place to talk about whatever you want

  • Carlos seriously injured

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    D
    There are videos saying he staged all of this. Ok. This is what people mean when they say it's not true just because you read it on the Internet. I would look at what the retired top level players both male and female have said. Besides. You only need your eye to see if you know what you are looking at that he's in a radically different physical and mental condition than a short time ago. GOAT! He could retire tomorrow and whether he does or not I don't think we're going to see his level of play again in our lifetimes. He's "coming back" but we'll see.
  • NYT: the World Is a Room with a Piano Waiting to be Played

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    D
    Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
  • The Lady Musick

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    No one has replied
  • Ever hear of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy?

    ai-related
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    wtgW
    On a related note... Since AI chatbots exploded in popularity and Google started offering AI-generated answers, people who research foreign influence campaigns have expressed concern that some governments may poison AI-generated answers with false narratives. But an experiment NPR conducted with NewsGuard, a company that monitors online falsehoods and issues ratings about the reliability of online news sources, found that popular AI chatbots mostly pushed back against false narratives spread by foreign states. AI summaries that are increasingly found at the top of search engine results didn't perform as well. But overall, they still pushed back against state-spread falsehoods a majority of the time. NPR also looked at how often AI-generated answers may have uncritically exposed users to false information compared to traditional search results. The experiment found that AI chatbots outperformed search engines, while AI summaries underperformed. The results suggest that compared with traditional web search links, using AI chatbots with web search access is a "good way for users to start to investigate these issues," said Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at the University of Washington, Bothell, who has tested AI tools for search extensively. NPR's experiment revealed that AI summaries at the top of search engine results may warrant more caution, depending on the product. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/30/nx-s1-5876436/chatbots-search-propaganda
  • In praise of bike helmets

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    D
    @realplayer Bike helmets FTW. Analogous to seatbelts. A seatbelt and passenger front airbag saved my life ten years ago. Be safe.
  • Canada calls his bluff

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    D
    Exactly.
  • Ting

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    MikM
    My Ting came from State Farm too. It also has a $1,000 remediation allowance if it finds an issue.
  • Adios, Milo

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    MikM
    AMF.
  • Meta-thread: Word association thread

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    wtgW
    @DougG said: Great, now Jon’s last post expects me to come up with a rhyme for “lits”. I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. Could this be the end of the word association thread?
  • Critical to national security

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    D
    Well, they were a communist country for the better part of a century. I will make a note to unpack my smallest violin to play for the oligarchs whose assets are seized. I know the subtext is- "Putin bad!" 10 years of Trump the Ubiquitous and- "Putin bad!" have made a long 10 years. I know this is a legitimate news story but Russia didn't practice "capitalism," either before the break up of the USSR, or after.
  • I never knew...

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    D
    Interesting. QEII had them. Assume she could have had any breed. That's a recommendation. Not a dog person. Wouldn't know where to begin.
  • Rest in Peace, Tim Curry

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    J
    Never heard of him though the character looks familiar. I only saw RHPS once.
  • I got fiber

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    B
    So I made the mistake of thinking that closing my Spectrum account would be quicker if I did it over the phone. Oh boy. They put me through to their account retention dept. Bastards. It all started out fine and I thought I was just speaking with someone who would take my directive, tell me what I owed, and close my account. What a spiel she went through. It was insulting. She seemed to forget that I had already switched providers and was only interesting in ending my relation with them. After 3 or 4 times of telling her I was in no way interested in what she had to offer I said, in a well-raised voice (I was fed up) that I'd go to my local office and hung up. The clerk at the local office actually sympathized with me. Apparently Spectrum has been hemorrhaging customers. I looked it up when I got home... Spectrum lost 172,000 internet subscribers in the second quarter of 2026. This follows a loss of 120,000 internet subscribers in the first quarter of 2026. Can't say I'm all that surprised.
  • Woman opposes vaccine because

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    Big_AlB
    Some people are beyond stupid and ignorant. Big Al
  • The principal

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    C
    As an adult I was in the office of a high school principal long ago. Cracking down on the kids was what he was talking about. Punishment was obviously was motivated him. Education was not on his mind. I think Burnside is an exceptional principal.
  • New semester starts soon at the music school

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    ShiroKuroS
    @Bernard I hope everything works out! Private (one-on-one) lessons can be quite expensive, so I can get why you might prefer the group lessons. Also, the group lessons sound like they have an interesting and compelling dynamic, I would be interested in that if we had something like that here. At the uni music program, the only group lessons they offer for non-majors are for very beginning level pianists. I think there's something called a studio class which is a group class and students play for each other (and the teacher of course). It kind of sounds like a semester-long masterclass. But you have to be a music major (or music grad student) to enroll.
  • Something jazzy: Don’t Know Why

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    ShiroKuroS
    So I also officially started working on Don’t Know Why yesterday. It’s a little tricky just because I don’t usually play jazz (or jazz adjacent). But it’s also almost comical how much easier it feels compared to Claire de Lune! DKW is also only 23 measures (not counting the repeats of course), so it’s a third of the length of CdL and that makes it feel easier as well. Having said that, this doesn’t mean I’ll be able to play DKW with the proper jazz inflection. We’ll see. But it’s super fun to play and I really like the arrangement I picked.
  • Who's baking?

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    AdagioMA
    Also, Italian plums/prunes are ripe here, and they’re perfect in plum torte. [image: 1787703006044-05f54ea9-19cf-46a5-953a-b4e23e669309-resized.jpeg] Recipe here It’s a mashup of recipes, and benefits from cornmeal being subbed for part of the flour.
  • Football Brain (American)

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    D
    A traumatic brain injury can result in the skull hitting or being hit with less than 10 mph or force moving against a stationary object. At least that's what the advocacy group told us after my then 16 year old brother's skull hit the stationary A pillar of a crashed truck at 40 mph with no seatbelt. Anyone who thinks some football players aren't being severely damaged is an idiot.
  • Beyond the antivaxx stuff, MAHA is either banal or fake

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    AxtremusA
    https://www.inquirer.com/health/measles-deaths-lancaster-county-pennsylvania-20260825.html Pennsylvania reported two measles-related deaths on Tuesday, the first fatalities from the highly contagious disease in the state in 35 years and the only deaths involving the highly contagious disease confirmed nationally so far this year. The deaths occurred in Lancaster County, the center of a major measles outbreak that has sickened nearly 400 people this year, state officials said. Both people were unvaccinated.