When it works, it’s Arby’s. When it doesn’t, it’s hour-old Arby’s.

This is too American for me - Arby’s sells food? Is fresh Arby’s great or merely ok? I assume hour-old is bad.

Congratulations on an excellent event, and I look forward to next year’s. The codebase should be more settled then and hopefully you’ll manage to get a decent amount of sleep, unlike this time.

Also, happy birthday!

You’re arguing against a point I’m not making.

I play Go, and have since I learnt about the game when it was discussed in my Computer Science degree course (then computers were considered 50+ years away from beating humans).

Overall, AlphaGo has been a good thing for human players, with it validating a lot of what we thought was right, but also that some tactics we’d thought not worth playing do work out. Having a superhuman, free advisor has made improving much easier.

The negatives include that there’s less individual style amongst those that play like AIs, and also that it’s easier to cheat at the game.

As in chess, humans have been outclassed by computers in Go for years now, but that doesn’t stop us playing and enjoying it.

One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.

I’ve been rationing these out, thinking there wouldn’t be any more. I’m glad to see Tom doing more quiz stuff again (yes I know about Lateral).

Humans can’t beat AI at Go, aside from these exploits that we needed AI to tell us about first.

Lee Sedol managed to win one game against AlphaGo in 2016 (and AlphaGo Zero was beating AlphaGo 100-0 a year later). That was basically the last time humans got on the scoreboard.

designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.

I think that’s true. I trust Mozilla, based on their statements and their actions, and I distrust Facebook for those same reasons. Compromise is the only path forward, despite those who argue we should reject anything that’s not perfect.

No ☹ When they said they chose that species because “they favoured the bricks as a habitat”, I thought the frogs might just get in on their own and feel better, but that researcher then goes on to talk about bringing frogs into captivity.

People say they want that, but do those independent cinemas get enough people through the doors to stay open?

In a parallel universe there’s an Erica Barlow that decided she was too busy with her thesis and that sample remained just a pet rock.