kndyry

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that, since playing Lee Sedol in 2016, AlphaGo has completely revolutionized professional and amateur go. It's certainly not unprecedented — the last major revolution happened in the early 20th century (often called the 'Shin Fuseki' era [0]) — but AlphaGo has demonstrably surpassed any previous high-water mark.

> I wonder if this system produced more new styles of play.

Absolutely. One such innovation has been the use of early 3-3 invasions [1]. There are many more, and indeed AlphaGo's games are still being analyzed by professional players. Michael Redmond, a 9-dan professional, has been working with the American Go Association on one such series [2].

> I wonder if the fact that it had no outside reinforcement made it produce movements that we have already seen that are somehow inherent to the game...

Interestingly, yes. Strong players have commented that AlphaGo seems to agree with things that players like Go Seigen [3] have suggested in the past, but that were never fully developed or understood [4].

Very, very interesting work indeed.

[0] https://senseis.xmp.net/?ShinFuseki

[1] https://www.eurogofed.org/index.html?id=127

[2] http://www.usgo.org/news/category/go-news/computer-goai/mast...

[3] https://senseis.xmp.net/?GoSeigen

[4] https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=14129

Satoshi's original posts to the cryptography mailing list, and its members' responses are also of tremendous value. The chain starts at: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/...

Sure, though I have to confess to trending more toward IT than anth, and being limited in exposure to my sub-discipline (cultural anthropology).

Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University. My team provided web application development and protected data management to social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public Instruction on certain projects.

Without question, data management is the thing. Field data is almost entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia, but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air gapping).

It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of best practice in the social sciences.

I was one of the remote hires brought on through the first Bitcoin SAT on Reddit. I recall completing the test and thinking "well, that was fun, but there's no way I aced it," particularly because one of the questions, I was pretty sure, was a trick meant to see how you'd handle not coming up with an answer.

To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered "when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit."

A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and tickets) were pouring in.

The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds.

It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.

For those who might like to see this concept explored more fully, I highly recommend Greg Egan's Permutation City [0].

To quote: “Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull – and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called ‘the present’?”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

Their peers will learn that 'screw ups' on whatever arbitrary scale, which are as common as human, will be punished by loss of employment, plus all of the negatives that status carries. This will teach them to become militantly risk averse and, by proxy, utterly afraid of and resistant to change. Meanwhile, the folks you let go, the ones who truly learned the lesson, end up using their newfound experience to improve processes elsewhere.

Playing devil's advocate, my first response would be to register accounts for, say, the 2,500 most common English words and then compose some rather nice essays.

@Yes, @something @like @that @might @prove @quite @funny.

Toward your latter paragraphs, I am reminded of the medieval practice of reflection on mortality, momento mori [0]. There is a great deal of extant architecture and art meant to inspire one to meditate on the subject, for example the Capela dos Ossos in Portugal, whose entrance bears the phrase Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos ("We bones that here are, for yours await") [1], and the imagery in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting The Triumph of Death [2]. It's unfortunate that, despite the amount of rich Western thought dedicated to such contemplations, popular modern literature, as you observe, seems at least generally averse to the subject.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capela_dos_Ossos

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

There are a few browser add-ons you might be interested in, for example Pentadactyl [0], or an entirely new browser like luakit [1], to return navigation control to the keyboard.

Another thing you might consider - and my personal preference - is switching your mouse for a trackball. I use the Logitech M570 [2] and find that I can be doing heavy UI work all day without fatigue. This is because your thumb drives the trackball, leaving the mouse body and your wrist stationary. In fact this mouse has been so great I've gotten everyone on my team using one as well.

Hope this helps.

[0] http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/

[1] https://mason-larobina.github.io/luakit/

[2] http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/wireless-trackball-m57...

Ms. Peng's client is most certainly not the State. As a public defense attorney, her clients truly are the accused unable to retain private legal services - the indigent. As Ms. Peng argues, the service provided by public defenders is a constitutional right, not to mention one of the fundamental elements in a system designed to provide for adequate and universal representation. That the State issues her salary is a direct result of the constitutionality of the services public defense offices provide, and is the mandated prerogative of the State in due compliance with the Constitution. Ms. Peng has granted us an insider view of what is becoming an increasingly slippery slope. We cannot eschew the rightful defense of any group, no matter how "marginalized," and presume in the same breath that those criteria will never broaden or change. Nor can we expect legal disenfranchisement, and an inevitable increase in unjust incarceration, to resolve anything.

The author at several points seems to dither between an insightful consideration of the technological present, and what I can only quantify as an underlying fear indicative of the very sleepiness against which we're being warned. For example:

> My deeper question comes from my position as a professor here for the last 12 years, where I have watched the lure of Silicon Valley grow stronger. If the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building addictive apps rather than making great journalism, important films, or literature that survives the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished?

Might not have Rip said, on the day of his return to waking life, "if the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building democracy rather than making great works in the name of the monarchy, an institution that is sure to survive the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished for lack of grace?"

One cannot claim that the future is being misunderstood because it does not look like one's past. Yes, the increasing ubiquity of processing machines has altered society. These are still early days and the changes are so new, it's a bit like bumbling around in the dark. It seems short-sighted to assume that the current state is in any way permanent or indicative of future states.

> I was lucky enough to be involved with some artists like Bob Dylan, The Band, George Harrison, and Martin Scorsese, whose work will surely stand the test of time. I’m not sure I know what the implications are of the role-model shift from rebel filmmaker to software coder.

Neither are we. Something, however, is quite certain: whatever the implications, the future is coming and calling it wrong because it is incongruous with the past is to miss it.

And to moderately lessen that work, here's the link to the jump-off page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Smsaa08...

A hack near and dear to my heart! The toggle bit on this is a very nice touch. I wrote something similar [0] a short while ago, except that, after the native styles are stripped, a very small amount of css is added to: constrain page width, make text a green monospace on black, improve line-height and remove images.

[0] https://github.com/kndyry/detox