Episode 275: Cartel Chaos & Travel Troubles

0:00Conor:Maybe maybe I'll clip this as the cold open. Listen, folks, this is all chaos, no algorithms. Feel free to skip if you are only here for the algorithm content. I don't want to hear, you know, I'm 17 minutes in and I haven't heard anything about a reduction. Listen, folks. Chaos with sprinkles of information. This is all chaos. And there will be a tiny bit of information. There is lots of stuff Bryce and I need to talk about.

0:51Bryce:Oh man, what a week.

0:54Conor:What a week, folks. Let's dial the chaos up to 12.

1:00Bryce:So you're safe now, at least. You're safe now, at least.

1:04Conor:I am I am safe. I think I was always safe. It was just a little what's the word?

1:10Bryce:Touch and go for So my perspective on this is that it's more important, perhaps, whether you feel safe on a trip than what the actual level of safety.

1:23Conor:I always felt safe. I mean, most listeners won't remember this, I don't think. But back in I don't remember the year, but it was 2017-ish, there was a van attack in Toronto. And this was pre-ADSP, pre-podcast. And I think it was like 10 or 11 people died. I remember that.

1:47Bryce:Which I guess for I guess for America is like not a big deal, but it it was the I think are you saying that because there is m more people in America or because there's more violent crime in America?

1:59Conor:No, America has a problem with I don't want to upset a of listeners with your Second Amendment stuff, but I mean you guys seem to have a lot of mass casualty events. The point being, it it doesn't even like break if you include America, you know, the top whatever I can find the stats, but it was the worst or second worst attack in modern Canadian history. And if it's if you ex the sec the worst one was like a hundred plus years ago. So I mean in the last century, it was the worst one.

2:28Conor:Anyways, the point I'm going on a digression that we don't need to go on here. The point being is I lived right on top of that. I remember my father calling me or messaging me uh like ten minutes after the attack happened because he's a journalist. So in in his newsroom, it was like coming across the wire that something near Young and Finch, which was only a couple kilometers from where I lived at the time, was happening. And I had my headphones in and I was working, and I took the headphones out and I could hear like helicopters and sirens, and I was like, oh, I guess maybe something did happen.

2:58Conor:And I walked out to my balcony and I could see I think it was 14 emergency response vehicles, including this in your old apartment, the one that I've been to post-pandemic. No. That one was downtown that you stayed at that one time. This one was before long before we had even met. This was at my very first job when I was working at a company called GGY. Oh, that's right.

3:22Bryce:2017. We wouldn't have even known each other yet.

3:25Conor:Yeah, back when I was a budding programming programmer and mostly an actuary at the time.

3:30Bryce:How many years ago was 2017?

3:32Conor:That was like a decade ago.

3:33Bryce:Yeah, it was a decade ago pretty much.

3:35Conor:Yeah. And the point being is, yeah, I look down, I see like 14 emergency response vehicles, there's an ambulance bus, which I don't think I've ever seen in my life, and I'm just like, oh damn. And so I live, you know, right where it happened. It was like a two-kilometer stretch, or maybe three, from Young and Finch to Young and Shepherd. And in order to get to work, which is on the opposite side of the street, like 500 meters from where I live, just down the road, I had to walk all the way to Young and Shepherd and like do a 180 because they had roped off or taped off and they wouldn't let you cross the road.

4:08Conor:And it was pretty wild. The point being here is that I basically lived right on top of a quote unquote like a domestic terror attack. And there was 200 people at that company, and I don't think anyone knew directly anyone that was like affected by it. One of my best friends, Victor, who you met at the wedding, he was literally walking down the other side of the street while the truck was you know ramming the sidewalk of Young Street. All this to say is that like it reset my perspective of you know safety levels and and danger because for the next like week, it's all you know, Canadian outlets were showing.

4:47Conor:Like there was helicopter footage of like both my apartment and the building that I worked in. And you could literally see like the corner cubicle, like level technically on the screen of of the TV. And things pretty much went back to normal within quote unquote normal, not to minimize what happened. It was it was a tragedy. But the day-to-day life went back to normal, like you know, within 24 hours. And I was thinking the same thing, so everybody's probably like, what happened?

5:14Conor:Why is Connor talking about this?

5:16Bryce:We're really burying the lead here.

5:18Conor:Yeah, burying the lead here, folks. I was in uh Mexico, and so this is probably news to a lot of our international listeners. I know it was on the news internationally, but I although today I just saw, I've only listened to like 10 minutes of it. The daily episode today is of the El Mencho, I think it's the Jalisco, I don't actually know the name of the cartel. It's the Jalisco cartel, but it goes by CJNG or something like that. And anyways, apparently this was I don't know, I know it was Mexico's number one most wanted person.

5:49Conor:He's the head of a cartel. I don't know if he's the most number one person wanted globally, but the Mexican military killed him. I happened to be on a extended weekend trip down to Puerto Vallarta, and the crazy thing is, folks, we weren't supposed to be in Mexico. We initially booked something to Cuba.

6:08Bryce:Oh, okay.

6:09Conor:And then because Trump invaded Venezuela, they cut off the oil supply to Cuba, and then pretty quickly Air Canada and WestJet, which are the two main airlines in Canada, canceled all flights until the end of April down to Cuba because there's no oil down there.

6:26Bryce:And so they can they can send the planes down, but they probably can't bring them back.

6:31Conor:Yep. And so we were like, all right, because the reason we want to go to Cuba is it's the shortest flight, and we were only going for like leaving leaving, you know, for three or four days. Like we I took a couple days off, but we weren't going for a full week.

6:43Bryce:We just that once for like uh Puerto Rico, which is like it is like an even shorter flight for us because we're a little bit further south, yeah.

6:50Conor:Yeah. And so then the next thought we had is well, what's closer? Because like we don't want to go further. And so Shima's been to the Bahamas, I hadn't been. And so we looked into there, but because I think all the Cuba flights had been canceled, there was very little ability, but we found some one place we were gonna stay, and so we went to go book that, but then it when we booked it, it said this is actually like sixteen hundred dollars more than what we were showing you because the prices are out of date.

7:17Conor:And that was like across the board at every yeah everywhere we were looking at. Long story long, we finally were like, we found a place, it was more expensive than we wanted it to be. Port of Arta is a little bit further, but we had just been in Cancun for our wedding, or or Riviera Maya for our wedding, so we didn't really want to go back there. And so we just said, you know what, screw it. We haven't been to Puerto Vallarta, it's only for three or four days, whatever.

7:43Conor:And then we were supposed to come back on Monday, and the day before that, the Mexican military kill the cartel leader, and it's funny because we were sitting on the beach that morning. It's a Sunday morning, and usually like all of the chairs fill up pretty quickly, and I heard someone saying about like flight cancellations, and so I was like, are there is there like a weather thing? Because I had heard that there was some bad weather. Oh, yeah.

8:07Conor:And I went and checked. Yeah, we'll get there. I went and checked, and there was nothing recent. And I was like, ah, this person's lost in the sauce. And then we get to like lunchtime, and a big group of like 12 people just got up, got all their stuff, and like left. And I was like, wow, it's our lucky day. Like, we can move closer to the beach, we've got all these options for chairs, and then when we go to get a bite to eat, we see that they're like taping off the beach, and we're like, what?

8:34Conor:And we ask some guy, and then he points over to the horizon, and you can see smoke coming from like the hills, and he basically says, like, well, there's a bunch of like shootings and some unrest. I'm gonna head back to the room because there's like messaging coming out that you need to uh whatever. Shelter in place. Shelter in place, yes. That's the key, that's the words they're using. And so I I'm immediately like, oh, what's going on? Cause it is typically the case that when stuff goes down in Mexico, they leave the hotel and tourist destinations alone.

9:10Bryce:I like one of the things I meant about like the perception of safety. We traveled to some maybe not as safe parts of the world, particularly in Africa and in the Middle East, but I've actually always felt safer, even in unstable parts of the world, like Africa, than I have in some parts of the Western world. Like as an example, I felt safer in like rural parts of Ethiopia, despite there being like civil conflict and like running into one point in Ethiopia we were out in the countryside and we were driving back and we got stopped by these guys with guns, and our target's like, oh, this is the local militia.

9:49Bryce:They don't get along so well with the you know federal government, they're just checking to make sure everything's okay. But I felt safer in like that environment than I felt like in public areas in Rome where I have to worry about like pickpockets. And the reason is that it's in a lot of these places it's sort of like there's a there's this respect or at least fear of doing anything to tourists. Like in in Africa, all the tourist vehicles have tourists written on it in big letters, and like if the police stop your your car to try to shake you down, if your tour guide's like, hey, look, like I got I got like white people in here, like you know, the police are just like, all right, I'll I'll try to ex extort a bribe from you, you know, some other time.

10:32Bryce:I'm not gonna mess around with with these folks. And yeah, like it feels like usually it's like an unwritten rule that like the tourists are i it are exempt in a lot of these areas because like that's where a lot of a lot of foreign money comes in, and if people are afraid to go to the city.

10:48Conor:Yeah, that's I mean that's the main reason, right? It's the economic like engine of Mexico, or at least one of them.

10:54Bryce:And so And even if you're you're you know a criminal, that's still money coming in, and you're probably getting some cut of that money.

11:03Conor:Aaron Powell Well, I mean it's it's a well-known fact that the cartels are very involved with like a lot of industries, not just the drug industry. So like a lot of times when you're on a resort, there's some percentage of that revenue that is going to cartels. Anyway, so it's it's bad for business across the board. There's all these headlines now of like Canadian tourists and people like reassessing their destination vacation and like snowboarding them where they're going, because it's a very common thing, like like Shima and I were doing, we want to escape the winter for a couple days.

11:34Conor:Where do we go? And I even I think I even mentioned on a podcast on ADSP at one point, I'm not sure if I ended up cutting that, that I was like, you know, we would actually wouldn't mind going to like the States because it's closer and it's a short trip, but like we don't uh, you know, uh we're not totally boycotting, but if if we have the choice of going to like you know some other place that's only an extra hour in America, I'd rather avoid America right now for I think obvious reasons.

11:57Bryce:And especially speaking as an American, I do like my country, but we get it. I get it.

12:04Conor:You're having a moment is generous to say that you're having a moment is a generous thing. And it's it's kind of wild though. It's just like, you know, we didn't want to go to America for reasons, you know, maybe someone was involved with that. And then we couldn't go to Cuba because of an oil shortage. Someone was kind of involved there. And I can't really blame this individual for causing a crackdown on the cartel. Like, you know, having less cartel involvement's a good thing.

12:27Conor:It's just I saw some headline that's like the probability of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is at a peak. And uh all this to say is that there was some a couple hours of scrolling on Twitter and watching the and the footage was I had to reassure my my family because my dad was just he was like, Yeah, the footage does not look good.

12:46Bryce:That's always the problem, is like, you know, remote Ramona's like super fearless. Like Ramona, she's always like, Oh, can we go to North Korea? Can we go to Iran? Can we go to like insert other places here? And I'm like, sweetie, you're in the process of getting your ink card. You you should not go to any like you could in theory go to some of these places. You probably should not go to these places.

13:07Conor:Yeah, yeah. It's anyways, it was the honestly, the biggest headache of it all was that I was on the phone, you know, multiple times, and at one point they had initially moved our automatically moved our flight to Saturday, yeah. Uh, which is no bueno, seeing as we were supposed to leave on Monday. Anyways, I won't bore the listener with how all the flights got moved around.

13:30Bryce:You gotta make me a promise. You gotta make me a promise, which is that the next time that you've got like weird, chaotic stuff going on with your flights, you gotta you gotta give Bryce a ring because it's not I literally said to Shima at one point when I was on the phone at 2.30 in the morning and it had been like 75 minutes, and this lady was like gaslighting me.

13:48Conor:She's like, There's no tickets available on any airline. And I'm like, I'm on Air Canada.com looking at business class flights. I've gone through the process, I'm about to hit the and she's like, Oh no, no, no, don't hit the buy button. Okay, something just has come available. And I was like, Are you kidding me? Like, it's gotta be illegal. It has to be illegal. Like, I know that they're dealing with like hundreds, if not thousands, of phone calls, but it's just wild.

14:09Conor:Like it it took over an hour. I'm like, you know, half asleep. And anyways, I was I told Shima at one point, I wish I had Bryce's both demeanor and skill set at this moment, because I'm sure you would have been like, you know, out of there on the first flight. There was a because we ended up going to Montreal, staying overnight, and then flying from Montreal to Toronto just yesterday. So we're so recording this on Thursday. So there was while we were in the airport, there was a Porter Airlines, which is uh a smaller uh airline that runs out of Toronto.

14:40Bryce:Now an American Airlines partner. So I I've always I've always I've always liked Porter because they have the new Umbrera.

14:50Conor:Yeah. Anyways, we were there and we saw a Porter Airlines flight direct to Toronto, like leaving at the same time we were going to Montreal. And for folks that may have forgotten, I don't live in Montreal, I live in Toronto, so going to Montreal is less ideal. But we were happy to leave. Anyways, I the whole time I was thinking like, yeah, Bryce would have, you know, he would have been invoking some status. You know, I'm a I'm a valued customer, and I'm just there arguing with this lady, pointing it like I can see a flight.

15:15Conor:Please don't, please don't gaslight me.

15:17Bryce:Anyways, when you have stuff like generally speaking, if you need to like book a flight somewhere, Bryce is a good person to call. But especially like if things have gone terribly wrong, not not a terrible idea to call to call me up, because I have a couple of ways to like get access to customer support faster. If it's airlines that I have status with, it's pretty straightforward. But also like our corporate travel agency also does personal bookings.

15:46Bryce:And people may not be surprised to learn that I'm pretty good buddies with the people at our corporate travel agency. And uh, you know, it's I didn't know that. It's funny that like you know, a lot of people I think think of travel agents as maybe being a little bit of an outdated concept, but I actually place great value on travel agents because most airlines have different call lines for travel agents versus regular customers because a travel agent calls in, they're not gonna mess around, they're not gonna get all upset and yell at the airline or whatnot.

16:21Bryce:It's just gonna be like you know, very business professional, you know, they're gonna know exactly what they need. And and also for a lot of travel agents can do things like maybe like you know, 70 or 80 percent of the things that the airline itself could do. In the case of like cancellations and whatnot, when like your flight has to get rebooked, usually at that point the travel agent like can't help that much. And if it's like a flight that you booked yourself, they may not be able to help.

16:50Bryce:But if you're in the situation where your flight's like canceled and you just like need help like finding an option to get home on like a new ticket, like our corporate travel agent treat travel agency is pretty good for that. And the other thing is that like if you're working with a travel agent, and if it is something that like you have a ticket that you bought directly from the airline that's not managed by the travel agent, or that like the airlines made a change to it, the corporate travel agent can be the one to call, and then you don't have to stress out about it.

17:17Bryce:Anyways. But but so what when did you actually end up getting home? You got home on Wednesday?

17:23Conor:I mean, we got home yesterday at like 23 p.m. or something. But the important thing is we we left uh Mexico at the end of the day.

17:33Bryce:Did you did you stay at the airport in Montreal or did you get a hotel?

17:37Conor:Yeah, we there's uh in well, both. We there's an internal hotel that hopefully insurance will be paying for because uh it's rather expensive.

17:46Bryce:Yeah. I didn't know that that that Montreal had an internal airport hotel. They do have the very cool like little buses on the lift stand that take you to and from the planes. I like those. I like the Montreal airport very much.

18:02Conor:I think I don't actually think I've ever been to the Montreal airport. It was as far as an airport goes, it's pretty it's pretty decent. Anyways, we got home safe and sound. We left at Wednesday, five o'clock or something. And and yeah, a crazy, crazy story. Less honestly excited. I mean, at the time on Monday when everyone's messaging, being like, Where are you exactly? And it's like, oh yeah, I'm pretty much in the like there was a a few AI slopped videos of like Americans on the streets with helicopters flying above, being like, It's crazy, you know, they're going after the cartel.

18:35Conor:It wasn't like that. There were no Americans recording that stuff. That being said, there were a lot of vehicles on fire. I think it was mostly to send like a message. That being said, I do think like 60 people on you know, some on the military, some on the cartel were killed. So it was kind of it wasn't a non-event.

18:53Bryce:It was Did you get like gouged by the hotel on stained the extra nights?

18:57Conor:No, they had a special rate, which I assume also insurance is gonna cover, but the special rate's not like it is cheaper, but it's not cheaper than like if you find some deal online.

19:08Bryce:So one thing that we have is we had to get this for Africa. It was like required for our tour trip to Africa, but I think it's just generally useful to have, which is that we have a separate insurance prop policy for international medical and also for like international emergency evacuation. So that like if we end up one, if we're like, you know, in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and one of us gets sick and we have to be like Medivact out of there, that we don't get like a $50,000 bill.

19:35Bryce:But we also have like an insurance where like, you know, if we're in a bad place, that they come and like take you out. I don't really know the details of how that works, but it's not a good idea.

19:44Conor:You purchase this policy or it's on a credit card?

19:47Bryce:We purchase this policy, like separate thing. Yeah.

19:49Conor:Gotcha. I was gonna say I don't I don't know. I've got some I got the best credit cards in terms of insurance coverage. I don't think it qu it recovers uh international situational extractions.

20:00Bryce:You know, I used to really I really used to really prioritize on the credit cards having the uh the car insurance, but after the incident with me and the rental car at your at your wedding, I'm just gonna wait until Waymo and the self-driving cars take over. I'm just gonna try to not rent a car or drive a car again until until the the the self-driving cars take over.

20:22Conor:It's around the corner. I guess we should have started this episode. Maybe maybe I'll clip this as the cold open. Listen, folks, this is all chaos, no algorithms. Feel free to skip if you are only here for the algorithm content. I don't want to hear, you know, I'm 17 minutes in and I haven't heard anything about a reduction. Listen, folks. Chaos with sprinkles of information. This is all chaos. And there will be a tiny bit of information. There is lots of stuff Bryce and I need to talk about.

20:46Conor:But wait anyway, we're we're home safe and sound. You've you've also had travel trouble. Or did you have one last question or what?

20:51Bryce:I also had travel troubles. I also was supposed to travel on Monday. And I I gotta say, the last three years, I have been very blessed where I've had very, very little travel disruptions, despite taking 50 to 60 flights a year. Part of this, folks, is just good planning. I don't book flights with super short connections. So I always sort of plan for my for what would happen if my first flight was delayed an hour or two. And uh I book, I had the luxury being in New York of being able to book a lot of direct flights.

21:23Bryce:So usually if there's a couple hour delay, it's not a big deal for me. And like I did last year have maybe one cancellation. But this year, folks, there have been two big snowstorms that hit New York this year. The last one was in January, and my mother and I were supposed to go to California. I was going for a work thing, she was gonna come with me at the same time to go visit a friend in California because my mother's a little bit older. She doesn't like to travel on her own, so she wanted to tag along with me.

21:53Bryce:She was gonna go do her own thing, but just to be on the same flight with me. So we were supposed to fly out on Saturday in January. And the snowstorm was going to hit on Sunday, and they they canceled our like last flight of the day to San Francisco, rebooked us for Tuesday, and then Tuesday came around and the snowstorm had just completely messed up American Airlines whole operation. And so our flight on Tuesday got canceled, at which point my mother was like, you know, I'm done, I'm going back to Florida.

22:21Bryce:But I had already missed one day of meetings, technically two days of meetings, and I really needed to be there on the third day. And I I I don't know what it is about my personality where I really hate like canceling plans. And if I've made plans, if I've made like a commitment to do something, I will sort of try at all possible to follow through on it. So like if I say I'm coming to your event and there's any way for me to get to your event, I will try to do that.

22:47Bryce:And so I I noticed that there was like this was like at 8 p.m. on a Friday. And I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna be able to get sorry, this was 8 p.m. on a Tuesday. I was thinking there was no way I would be able to get to California in time for this 9 a.m. meeting the next morning. But then I noticed that there's one flight to LA that has been delayed like three hours, which usually would be awful because then it's a flight that leaves New York at 11.30 p.m.

23:15Bryce:and arrives at LA at like 3.30 a.m., which doesn't sound like fun. But I'm like, this is great. If I can get on this flight, then I can get to LA. And then once I'm in LA, I'll just figure something out. So that's exactly what I do. I get them to put me on the flight. I sleep on the six-hour flight, I get to LA at 3 a.m. and I call up the Nvidia Corporal Travel at Corporate Travel Agency, and I'm like, hey, I'm in Los Angeles, please find me a flight that will get me to San Francisco by uh, you know, like 8 a.m.

23:44Bryce:so that I can make this meeting. And they put me on a 630 flight and they got me there. But sadly, my mom couldn't come with me on the trip. But then this Monday, I was supposed to go to Boston and or sorry, yeah, on Monday I was supposed to go to Boston. On on Saturday, they had already canceled my flight because there was this huge, record-breaking nor'easter that hit the uh the the New England area. I don't think it was that bad. I grew up in Connecticut.

24:11Bryce:We used to have a lot more snow when I was a kid, but you know, and it was mostly just rain on Sunday. But anyways, they canceled my flight on Monday and they like rebooked me for a flight on like Tuesday that was like not great, but would have worked. And but then like at that point, I was like, you know what? Last time when the snowstorm was coming, I was just like, it'll be fine. My flight will still be able to make it out. And this time I planned ahead.

24:34Bryce:So I went and I I bought four fully refundable Amtrak tickets. One for Monday night, and then like three for Tuesday morning, like at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., and 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning. And I figured, like, you know, maybe they'll cancel my rebooked flight, which they did, but there's no way that that all four of these Amtrak are going to cancel. Well, by Monday night, my my Monday Amtrak had canceled, and then like one of my trains on Tuesday had canceled.

25:03Bryce:And so I went to sleep and then I woke up early try hoping to make this like 6, you know, 58 Amtrak to Boston. And then then that canceled, and then the 9 a.m. one canceled, and then I was like, all right, I'm just gonna take I just took an Uber to Boston. Uh uh because I'm I'm here.

25:22Conor:Just so the listener, the international listener knows, how long is a is a car ride is an Uber from New York where you live to Boston?

25:29Bryce:It's about about three hours, three and a half hours. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. It was not that much more expensive than the price of the train because the prices of the trains are crazy. Like multiple hundreds of dollars, and the train takes like four hours. The train is slower than driving. The train is slower than driving, the train is slower than flying, and the fast train, you know, the brand new fast train that they just advertised takes like three hours and fifty-five minutes.

26:01Bryce:The old train takes like four hours and twenty minutes. So it's like 30 minutes faster.

26:08Conor:Yeah, meanwhile in Tokyo.

26:10Bryce:Yeah, yeah. But so here I am. I am I am at the uh what's the name of this building? I'm at the Paulson School of Engineering at Harvard because I was doing a guest lecture on Tuesday and then also today. And then on Wednesday, I was teaching along with my colleague Katrina Real a Cuda Python tutorial. And uh been having great fun. Really, really great, very sharp students here. I did not realize that. Really? I haven't heard that about Harbor. No, I I I I mean, this is a a new building, a new school, maybe.

26:44Bryce:That's a joke, Bryce.

26:46Conor:This is Ivy League, one of the best schools in the world.

26:49Bryce:Bryce is being like, no, no, they do have some bright people here. It's one of the best schools in the world. But when you think of schools known for high performance computing or for like CS, I think Harvard is maybe not necessarily the top of mind. You people think of like, you know, maybe Harvard Law School. Or like what when you think of like what is what what departments Harvard is known for, what comes to mind?

27:12Conor:Well, actually, I'll answer a different question. I mean, definitely HBS is probably the number one. But when I think of top CS schools, I mean, it's not necessarily in the top three. Like, I think the top three for me like just that come to mind are MIT Stanford, and then probably Berkeley, but then I don't know, Carnegie Mellon's up there, University of Washington. But I mean Harvard, I uh Harvard's definitely gotta be in the top ten. We got I know that's CS.

27:42Bryce:Okay, maybe I'm more on that, but but but I I will admit that I can't.

27:45Conor:I mean, Zuckerberg's from Harvard.

27:46Bryce:If one person doesn't define uh a school, but uh I will readily admit that I may be wrong about CS in general, but for HBC in particular, supercomputing tends to be dominated by like large uh state schools historically. Like if you go to like a big supercomputing conference, you know, Yale, Princeton, Harvard are not gonna have as big a presence as like the University of you know Illinois or the University of Texas, uh, or even even like Louisiana State University, like these big, you know, publicly funded research uh universities.

28:20Bryce:But yeah, no, the students here are very sharp, doing all sorts of interesting research. The the class that I'm giving uh guest lectures for is specifically an HBC class. A lot of the students I've been interacting with are computational science doing scientists doing uh like from the physics department who are just using using computers to help them do their research better and faster. And um, yeah, I've been having a great time.

28:43Conor:I stand corrected. Harvard on the US News, the best graduate schools for computer science, comes in at number 19. And I think I got uh four of the top five. Although now there's some ad that's blocking me and not able to read it, but I believe it was yeah, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford Berkeley, and then Urbana Champaign. I can't see the fifth one now because the these ad blockers. And then also on CS Rankings, which is a website that was initially built by Emory Berger, who has not been on the podcast.

29:16Conor:We really should have him on the podcast. He's keynoted at different conferences and is a great picture. We'll link a couple of his talks. Harvard comes in at number 40. And interesting. The top five according to this site, and you can put a bunch of metrics, but it's just the default. I didn't click any buttons. It says Carnegie Mellon's number one, Urbana Champagne's number two, UCSD, University of California, San Diego is number three, Georgia Institute of Technology is number four.

29:47Conor:I would have never even That makes sense.

29:49Bryce:As as somebody who like looks at a lot of resumes, like one, I know it's a I I know from uh my HBC days it was a big school, but also from somebody who looks at a lot of resumes, Georgia Institute of Tech comes across my desk a good bit.

30:01Conor:Interesting. Yeah, and then five is Berkeley, six is MIT, and then seven Michigan, and tied an eighth is Cornell and University of Washington. Anyways, I stand corrected. You were correct though. Number 19 on one site and number 40 on another site. I guess I've over-indexed, I've I've I've got a biased view of Harvard because of Zuckerberg.

30:19Bryce:So so, anyways, I I I think we've talked on the podcast before a couple times about how I dropped out of college. I think we have talked also about how I did not have a good time in college in general. I did not enjoy being in classes, I did not enjoy being graded on things. I feel like I always had this compatible relationship with just like the school system, and it was very frustrating for me. The only type of nightmares I still have, and I had one recently, the only type of nightmares I still have are nightmares about school.

30:47Bryce:And usually the nightmare is that like it's this persistent nightmare, it's the only persistent dream I have, and it's that I had signed up for some class, but then basically had not shown up for the whole semester, and I'd thought it would not be a problem, but then like, you know, I learned that no, it's going to be a problem, and I'm that I'm gonna fail this class. This is the only night, the only class of nightmare I've ever had has been about school.

31:09Bryce:So it's been really the only thing that's given me a deep-seated anxiety. However, I was here at this brand new or this relatively new building that's it's across the river, it's in the Alliston part of Boston, which is not as like cool an area, but really nice building. And we went and had lunch on the first day, and at the uh the the little like the cafe nearby was very nice food, and uh the building's got all sorts of cool stuff in it. It was the it was the first time I was like, hey, you know, this is actually a pretty nice school.

31:37Bryce:And I thought to myself, I really should have applied myself more because I could have gone to school here, and this seems like it would have been fun.

31:44Conor:Well, haven't you been to the Stanford campus, haven't you? Stanford's gorgeous.

31:47Bryce:I think I have been to the Stanford campus, and no, I I I'll tell you, I'll tell you when I was at the Stanford campus. Andrew Lumstein, who was a boost person back in the day, professor at a bunch of different schools. I think now he's in the Northwest area. He was at Pacific at the PL lab, and I think also with a Cadul appointment at one of the universities up there. I want to say University of Washington, but I could be wrong. But, anyways, longtime colleague of mine, back to my days at LSU, he's one of the people behind the Boost Graph Library back in the day, and uh did a bit of things on uh like the the the old like debate on modules, like back in the history of C.

32:32Bryce:He was a little bit involved in that. And uh, we worked together, a little collaborated a little bit on things relating to HPX. He gave a talk, I think, at some event at Stanford. And right after I'd moved to the Bay Area, I went to this may have been when I was an intern at Berkeley Lab for a summer. I went to go see his talk. But I think that's the only time I've really been on the same for campus. I think I dropped a friend off there once, too.

32:55Bryce:But dude, you have to remember, I worked at, I worked at I worked at at Berkeley Lab and thus was technically an employee of UC Berkeley. And, you know, Stanford, the arch, the arch enemy of uh UC Berkeley.

33:07Conor:It doesn't matter. I've been to Berkeley, I mean I didn't attend either school, but I've been to Berkeley. Campus, talking about it No, no, I've been to Berkeley. Berkeley's not as beautiful as Stanford. No, no, no. Berkeley, I've been to both. Don't get me wrong, Berkeley is a beautiful campus, but it's kind of on the the hill.

33:24Bryce:It's like pleasure part of the charm.

33:26Conor:I know, but it's kind of like the hill that could have a little bit more trees and like shrubbery to make it more green. So it's a little brown in the summer, whereas Stanford's always like immaculately manicured. And like I I used to bike there all the time.

33:38Bryce:Well well, this is this is clearly just a plug for somebody at Stanford should invite Connor and I to go give a talk or something at Stanford so we can go uh walk together.

33:50Conor:Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.

34:03Bryce:Low quality, high quality. That is the tagline of our podcast.

34:08Conor:That's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.