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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.




  • It’s possible to play games like that, but most folks don’t. Even professional or tournament games are mostly played over the course of an hour or two; there are just a few extremely high level tournaments where the games are split over a few days. I’ve played a couple of postal games that went on like that, but people do that with chess too. All my in-person games have been under two hours, including in tournaments, and most under an hour.

    I’d encourage you to find a local Go club and check it out. As I say, the folks are very friendly and eager to teach newcomers.


  • This is why I think Go is actually significantly more approachable than chess. With chess, you really need someone of very similar level; if one of you is a little better, that person will almost always win, and that’s often kinda boring for both of you. But Go has a handicapping system built in that makes it way more forgiving of differences in skill, so that you can both play a pretty challenging game. I think it’s contributed a lot to the culture around the game being more open and focused on teaching others, too.

    That said, there are still a lot of things that high-level players memorize. But it seems like there are a lot more folks just playing for the joy of the game, and at the low levels, those folks will often outplay those who get very into the memorization too early.




  • You know that the other two words also exist though, right? Like, you can effect change in an organization, and there can be something strange in the affect of a psychopath. So there’s a verb “to effect” and a noun “affect” (although here the pronunciation is different–the accent is on the first syllable). It’s true that the most common usages follow the rules you’re laying out, but it genuinely is an oversimplification.




  • Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

    Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.