Note that capturing a live Russian soldier is worth 10 times more than killing one. Think about how that affects the incentives of Ukrainian soldiers. Avoid committing war crimes, get better gear for your team.
I’m starting to feel that comments about an article being AI-generated are super low value AND super low effort. Who cares? Soon most of the text you’ll be dealing with is gonna be AI generated. But there’s still good and bad AI generated content — start judging it by its merits.
I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux redraws the screen if you swipe). And then I discovered helix. It has all the things I was jealous about vim, BUT it has sane defaults ootb. And truth be told, another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.
The event’s currency are Łosie, which you get by taking part in classes and winning tournament games. By the end of each week there’s an auction where you bid for prizes. You can use your Łosie from previous years, but Tasuki implements an inflationary monetary policy to keep old-timers from becoming too rich (every year Łosie rewards get doubled).
Some people have been coming from abroad for many years, and at some point just figured out it makes sense to learn Polish (not the easiest of languages).
Apparently in manga and anime regular characters are often drawn as if they were European-ish (so, some of them are going to have blue eyes or blond hair, not common in Japan). This convention is in part historical (matching American comic books that inspired manga), and in part to make the characters more characteristic and easier to distinguish from each other. But in HnG this applies only to Japanese characters – people from abroad are drawn in a more naturalistic and stereotypical way. Koreans and Chinese will look actually like Asians, and Americans and Europeans will be an even more exaggerated version of themselves. I guess it’s a very different sensitivity than what’s common in the US right now.
I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
One consideration that that is missing: how familiar are LLMs with this technology? And from this point of view the app has sailed, I’m afraid we are stuck with the frameworks that are available today for eternity, for better or worse. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. I don’t do full stack programming in my day job, but I have this crazy idea that if I ever have a startup idea, I want to be able to code an MVP. So, every two years I do a deep dive and write a toy web app. I’m always learning something new on the frontend (fun!), while on the backend I just use Django, so it just works as it used to, except it usually gets more convenient in many small ways (boring). Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much fun.