miniblog.

"In world championship [chess] matches, [...] players were ensconced behind polarized glass walls to prevent anyone in the audience from passing computer advice through signals." AI and human chess today:

@cstanhope I wondered the same thing! Was he constrained by computer power at the beginning? Did he set out to spend three years typing, or was he just fascinated by the results each day? I don't know the answers, sadly.

I've seen an interesting phenomenon where people watch videos on their phone even when sitting in a room with a TV. I sometimes do it and I've met others who do it. I think it's a partly habit. You pull out your phone in lots of environments which don't have a larger screen.

"smartphone sales have peaked, and seem to be levelling off at around 1.4bn units a year"

The JavaScript ecosystem, dependencies, and reflecting on best practices for tooling:

There are so many topics where you can do online tutoring on Skype anywhere! E.g. chess: https://lichess.org/coach foreign languages: https://www.verbling.com/find-teachers or programming: https://www.codementor.io/python-experts It's amazing to have a teacher on the other side of the world.

On the design of programming languages, a great introduction to the constraints in choosing keywords, and a proposal for new keywords in Java: https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2019-January/000945.html

Do you ever find yourself doing something manually, even if the computer could do it with a bit of programming? Even Ken Thompson has done this at times! From

Over the last 15 years, ~50% of improvement in chess engines is due to smarter programming, not better hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/76cwz4/15_years_of_chess_engine_development/ What other domains are like this? Lossy audio/image compression is definitely better today. There must be others situations.

One fascinating property of chess engine design is that a deeper tree search can be more valuable than a smarter board value metric. If a metric is more accurate but more computationally expensive, it might not be worthwhile! It's a precision/brute force tradeoff.

Rust's model of references confused me when I started out. I'd read that they were faster, so I tried to use them everywhere. You can't return a reference to a new vector though! Now I see them as primarily useful for signalling 'this parameter is not modified' rather than perf.

@cstanhope A friend also pointed out hotels dot com :). I do think they're rare though.

Reflecting on the dot com hype, there are actually very few sectors where genericnoun dot com has become one of the biggest websites. Seeing https://chess.com/ today made me think how rare it is. Are the other big examples?

In addition to appliance manufacturers exploring smart/wifi-enabled devices, there are now products that allow you to trigger physical switches wirelessly! https://microbot.is/push/ Reviews are very mixed, but with hindsight this class of device was inevitable.

Activity trackers now exist for animals too! Whistle is a Fitbit-style exercise monitor plus GPS tracker for dogs: https://www.wired.com/review/review-whistle-3-pet-tracker/ Ambient computing is becoming progressively more common.