Isofarro

> My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two;

It still exists, but it's private / internal, and sometimes used for a few different things.

It was used by Kramnik to test the hypothesis whether no-castling chess was viable (basically chess, but disallowing castling). That was a year after DeepMind published the match they ran of AlphaZero versus Stockfish.

It was still in use last year, I remember seeing some Grandmasters with interests in chess studies were invited by DeepMind to judge the beauty of chess problems composed by AlphaZero (or whatever form the thing that used to be AlphaZero is now).

So it's still kicking around in the background.

What a fascinating subject. Nice one!

With LLMs replacing Google search results, the incentive for creating website content is changing again.

And I'm reaching the same conclusions as you: "In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!". I think we are reverting back to our original form of the Web.

Before the commercialisation of content. Also of the early blog days, when we wrote about stuff because we found it interesting, not because of conversion rates and eyeball counts, and session lengths.

And we found great stuff by serendipity and casual mentions in conversation -- like you right here. :-)

I suppose, with a rekindling of writing for our own amusement, we're going to need a catalogue of sites, to help people serendipitously discover these varied interests. yet another hierarchical officious oracle, maybe?

> Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert.

PBNs are designed to look legit to a Google manual review, to remain indexed, to retain whatever value Google gave to the previous legit incarnation of the site. (The key marketplace for sourcing candidate PBN websites are expired domains that recently had strong search engine rankings)

It's a pure organic SEO play, not a human conversion play. The idea is that the PBN site has a retained link value. And that link value is used to (directly or indirectly) link to a site that is the money site, to boost the search rankings of that money site.

The money site isn't going to be an AI-slop site, it's going to be the polished well-optimised, well-performing as it can be. The PBNs that give the money site credence, that varies based on how much work the money-site owner is willing to spend on the network. The lower end is not even AI-slop, but a static website programmatically generated by content spinning and synonym replacement, where the content is scraped from other sites or perhaps even archive.org snapshots of long dead sites.

If enough independent-looking, diverse-seeming, legit-looking sites are linking to a commercial site, that suggests an element of trust and respectability. That's what PBN creators rely on, creating the appearance of authoritativeness good enough to fool/coerce Google into ranking the money site higher.

The author travels the same path that ended up eventually with VS Code.

Reminds me strongly of Marjin Haverbeke's talk at Full Frontal conf in 2011: https://ffconf.org/talks/respectable-code-editing-in-the-bro... - Using Canvas, then contenteditable, and then DOM.

Haverbeke went on to create CodeMirror and ProseMirror.

I'm sorry, English is my first language. What does "Hilariously" mean in this context? Or is there a maths specific meaning/interpretation?

The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.

The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective.

RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't interest you flow by.

Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order. There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the next item that interests you.

Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And if something is really great, a good subscription list means someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.

> And a lot of these people do employ a lot of people so they just start companies elsewhere.

Great, do that! Go start companies in other countries, and trickle down their wealth to employees in the form of wages and salaries.

If only they thought of doing that in the UK! Instead of the rich buying up properties turning them into buy-to-lets, both pricing out working people of their first home, and then taking their income as rent.

They already "open companies elsewhere". From the article, the non-dom status is a tax-exemption on a non-dom for profits and revenues from businesses outside the UK.

If these non-dom billionaires leave, and they aren't currently paying tax, will we even notice?

The housing market noticed; again from the article, the value of properties valued above £10m dropped by 37%. So these "just leavers" aren't just leaving, they are taking a near 40% hit on selling up.

> Non domiciled are roughly 0.11% of UK residents and pay about 1.24% of UK taxes

It's curious that the percentages used to defend not taxing the rich (whether they are UK citizens, or operating as "non-doms") tend to be what percentage of the tax burden they pay. But it's never what percentage of their income and capital gains they pay as tax.

I think the latter is a fairer representation, considering we have a progressive taxation system. Someone who is earning over £125k a year should be paying close to 45% of their income and capital gains.

The question is: are they? If not, why not?

Dominic Cummings is the Chief-of-staff of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He managed the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, the primary campaign during the UK referendum on European Union membership (campaigning successfully to leave the EU).

His success in Vote Leave is down to a targeted digital campaign on Facebook using the services of Cambridge Analytica / AggregateIQ. These are the root actions that sparked Facebooks turmoil around election advertisements that may again affect the 2020 US Presidential campaign.

Cummings is an anarchist and has said he wants to tear down the UK Civil Service, getting rid of mandarins and long-term civil servants, and replace it with something else. This blog post is part of that change.

It's government by data science, perhaps technocratic. With a governing majority of 80 seats, by December 2019 election, he thinks he -- the government -- has space to do controversial or unpopular things, and tearing down the civil service is something he believes is necessary.

The first no-castling match has already taken place earlier this month as part of the London Chess Classic

https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm

The current castling rule was an innovation of the Italians when the game was brought in from India. It, along with pawns moving two squares on their first move, ushered in the Italian School of Chess, known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression.

However, the Indian form of the game did have something like castling, the king could move from its start square to g2, where a fianchetto'ed bishop would normally sit.