@ianthetechie @janriemer Thanks to AI, players now recognize that losing some points to help shut their opponent out of the game is a good tradeoff. If you can win without getting into complicated late game fights, it's worth avoiding them. 2/2

(there are some simplifications I made about the rules of Go in the previous post, but I won't go into them since they're not important. The only thing I'll mention is that in Go, the white player is given 6.5 points to compensate for going second.)

@ianthetechie @janriemer "you can't 'almost' lose" - this was a shift in perspective for Go players after AlphaGo.

In Go, your score is the amount of territory surrounded by your living stones at the end of the game, and the player with most at the end of the game wins. Good players used to maximize their territory at all costs; doing otherwise was seen as suboptimal, even "vulgar" in some texts. 1/2

one must imagine sysadmins happy

@alcinnz Reading through Let Over Lambda gave me one of the biggest "mind expanded" moments in my 20 years of programming. If you take a lambda and make it switch on the first argument:

(lambda (cmd &rest args)
(case cmd
((:foo) ....)
((:bar) ....)
....))

Then you basically have an object with methods. Now make it part of a closure:

(let ((x 0) (y 0))
(lambda ....))

and you've got member variables.

You can make an entire object system with nothing but closures!

a butterfly landed on my window and so i learned how to do vector art and made a flag for distractible lesbians

@sudorandom another fun discovery: 2600 hz is within the range of an Otomatone ("Hi" octave setting, ~16-18 mm up from the lowest point on the stem).

So if you find yourself in the 1960s and you can't whistle but you have a music toy that wasn't invented until 2009, that's another option.

I am once again begging indie game developers to learn how to process pixel graphics to avoid obvious scaling artifacts.

@sodiboo it's hard to know for sure, but all evidence suggests the most widely used Tor hidden service node is... Facebook.

You know. For checking Facebook via Tor.

*Spoooooooky dark web!*

@rootwyrm @soatok "Rubber-hose cryptography? What's that?"

@sudorandom I can do it!

#VibeCoding your MFA

@ygor I still have those dreams and I've been out of school for almost 15 years

It is both Friday the 13th and a full moon today. If you play NetHack, you'll get this message:

"You are lucky! Full moon tonight. Watch out! Bad things can happen on Friday the 13th."

These effects actually cancel each other out - the full moon gives you +1 luck, and Friday the 13th gives you -1 luck. (The full moon has some other effects on werecreatures and dogs, but they're relatively minor.)

@soatok someone is not happy about your blog, and they wrote a Visual Basic 6 app on their Windows 95 computer to spam *several refreshes a minute* to take it down!

@soatok My little princess never comes out of her fursuit. Luckily she's good at keeping it clean.

(I'm on vacation right now I miss her so much T_T)

@tflynn Knowing things just limits your ability to innovate. How are you supposed to develop innovative technologies like the Juicero or the Titan submarine if you let pesky facts get in the way?

@tofugolem I support trans rights and trans wrongs

@jonty
"I wish to cause pain to GIS programmers" - person who just invented the spherical geopolitical border