2014
Snowy Minnehaha Creek.
Christmas Eve steaks on the Big Green Egg. Nice grilling weather!
Lego Firetruck
Modern Legos seem so very different than the generic shapes I remember when I was a kid. Did Legos take over the plastic model scene from my childhood? These pieces are so specific to each solution. Very proprietary, in software terms. 😀
Blokus
I got Blokus for Christmas in the brother-in-law swap on the Olson side (thanks Max!). It’s a really fun game. Ultimately best suited for 4 players with a graceful way to play with 2 players. 3 players works but its not a great fit. The strategy of the game is to block other opponents off as they try to lay tiles down on the board. While Go players would probably cringe at the comparison it seems loosely related.
Happy to see Dollar a Day pick EFF today! Have been an EFF member for many years.
The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry Kasparov
A compelling read on how an objective was achieved, but not really. This part from the end of the article really struck me:
This is our last chess metaphor, then — a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors. via The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry Kasparov at The New York Review of Books.
I’d add advertising optimization to the other items our best minds have gone into.
I finally got Tyler to try a fruit smoothie and he decided he liked it.
Really like how sslmate does certificates, but I sort of want to get wait for Let’s Encrypt to get going!
The view from the #TeamSPS deck at night is fabulous.
