miniblog.

Never mind Go, Arimaa was *designed* to be difficult for computers. But in 2015, computers were beating humans! https://www.kingpinchess.net/2015/07/arimaa-game-over/

Maybe Wikipedia would work better with an SO model. Attribute articles to authors, allow multiple articles, and close rather than delete.

Elm will automatically download dependencies for you. Neat! It's too easy to pull changes to package.json and wonder why it doesn't work.

Why do we use SAT solvers today? In 2001, they became fast enough that we can apply them to real-world problems.

The widely used Ruby program 'bundle' is in a package called 'bundler'. A nice example of programmer happiness: failing gracefully!

PLs where you can see the ASM from a REPL (CL, Julia) tend to have high perf ceilings. If you can see issues, you're inclined to fix them.

The hyperlink has changed publishing forever, but it's made using underlines for emphasis much harder. I keep trying to click them.

Program synthesis is just magical. The next version of https://github.com/Wilfred/suggest.el will support nested functions. E.g. searching 0 => 3 here.

Rust is going to make ! (which represents a function never returning) into a fully fledged type!

Fun post showing how to emulate double precision with single precision: https://web.archive.org/web/20110831040222/https://www.thasler.org/blog/?p=93 (illustrated with mandelbrot fractals)

The IKEA Effect on Software https://medium.com/@khasan222/the-ikea-effect-on-software-95240dd58a3 (interesting perspective: "I've just built this so you should use it!")

Typescript 2.4 is out! https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/06/27/announcing-typescript-2-4/ The nice thing about type checkers as libraries is that they can be improved over time.

I wish I learnt about cl-defstruct earlier. A little struct with a few keys is really useful for complex return values in (e)lisp.

I've created a homepage for the London Emacs meetup! https://london-el.github.io/ Naturally, it includes an org-mode/zenburn style in pure CSS.

Understanding ResourceT https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2017/06/understanding-resourcet (covers how it works and the surprising number of pitfalls)