I went to university in Sweden, which I think is fairly gender diverse as countries go. My original major was Engineering Physics, which was about 40% women students, but I ended up quitting and coming back several years later to get a Computer Science degree. CS had something like 5% women students. It was distinctly…

I once accidentally stepped into a wikipedia edit war when I was following random links, as one does, and ended up in the wiki article on Lyudmilla Pavilchenko. The article had a section on how she was a popular figure in Japan, citing the "Moe Moe War Maiden Encyclopedia". That seemed like it wasn't a real thing, so…

You also never see a German in the entire film. There's admittedly some blurry helmets in the very final scene, otherwise the nazis are a vague menace lurking off-screen. With guns and planes and stuff, but still. They're terrifying monsters somewhere out of frame who strike suddenly and at random, depicting the…

It's just a fancy way of saying that the AI gets points for moving further, faster and it modifies itself to earn as many points as possible. There are a few ways of doing the self-modification, which I assume is where the novel part of this research is. You could for instance simulate several different muscle control…

Speedball has a bouncing cat called Niels, The Bouncing Cat.

I've now whittled away an idle hour googling that particular weird cult (NXIVM) and Keith Raniere in general. There's a dedicated watchdog for the cult called Frank Report that's full of various mostly unsourced reports on orgies, branding, slave hierarchies and so on. It's a weird cult so I guess it's possible, but…

Huh, so she is, and apparently along with Kristin Kreuk and Grace Park. Keith Raniere seems to have a predilection for mid-aughts nerd show actresses.

I'm in no way an accountant but my understanding is that 100 million dollars in profit in China is in practice not worth the same as it would be in the US. Right now the money from those profits is likely sitting in an account belonging to some subsidiary registered in China and not immediately usable elsewhere…

Even then I think it's pretty important to remember that being a member of David Miscavige's creepy alien cult doesn't automatically make you David Miscavige, born into it or not. Most members are just victims of a small cadre of exploitative assholes and the worst thing they're guilty of is being gullible, vulnerable…

I've been pretty impressed with the "Discover Weekly" playlist Spotify builds for me. It does a pretty good job of coming up with a diverse set of songs that a reasonable person would think I might like based on what I've listened to on Spotify, which is about the best I can ask for.

A Bioga is like a Bio, but it has twice the spell power and a fancier visual effect.

Oh, I've seen them. There are scenes in Jalla! Jalla! filmed on the street where I grew up, even, and one of the actresses was attending the same high school as me when it was filmed. It was a pretty big deal here and deservedly so.

Man, even a virtual Fares Fares has a seriously majestic nose.

Poor guy. Preaches loving your neighbor as you love yourself (ideally in a non-masturbatory way), is remembered as Sæhrímnir with opposable thumbs.

I really liked Pearl but it and other VR shorts like Dear Angelica are not interactive beyond letting you move your head around. They can still be pretty great but ultimately they're films that were filmed using a weird camera.

Just got out from my midnight-ish screening and I'd rank Wonder Woman above Age of Ultron. It has a good lead, good pacing, a number of surprisingly solid dick jokes and an unfortunate never-ending CG explosion of an ending that mostly serves to undermine the moral of the story. B- sounds about right.

Re: "An artificial intelligence may be able to instantly calculate every possible move in a board game", the big reason that AlphaGo is cool and unexpected is that in Go, it really, really can't. "Every possible move" is a number larger than the number of atoms in the universe so no Go AI will ever be able to…

AlphaGo also played 60 online blitz games earlier this year, including 3 against Ke Jie, and finished with 60 wins, 0 losses. So, yeah, it's pretty good at Go.

Both of those were region blocked for me. There's a US network that has broadcast rights, apparently.

Having moved from Sweden to San Francisco over the last year I've had the Eurovision go from the major TV event of the year, where the entire country comes together in an explosion of simultaneous deep investment and withering disdain, to virtually invisible. I looked for a stream but couldn't find one, also to my…