ianremsen

Yes. You get a generated patch file for the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer.

How on earth are these metrics defined even somewhat objectively? How is it justified that countries such as China, India, and Russia occupy only one point despite being stunningly diverse polities? Why are all 'traditional' values rolled into one category? Why are 'survival' and 'self-expression' considered opposite extremes?

Commentary Magazine isn't exactly known for its wokeness, I'm afraid.

I hung around #lichess on freenode (where the wonderful dev team exists, including the founder Thibaut) a lot at the time (and I still do) and I was more or less definitively told about concerns of further splitting the userbase. The most recently added variant (Racing Kings) is not terribly popular, and they've made a commitment not to remove variants once they're added, so I appreciate the caution, but something in my bones told me then (which was about two years ago now) and still does that S-chess would be SUPER popular.

There's a variamt of chess created by GM Yasser Seirawan wherein he seeks to stoke the heady flames of tactical attacking chess where he introduces two new pieces: the hawk (which moves like a bishop + a knight) and the elephant (which moves like a rook + a knight). The problem is, there's absolutely nowhere to play it online! I wish I had the skills to build a site/mod lichess to make it work, but lichess isn't interested in adding new variants. If anyone's looking for a project...

You have to be good at slow chess to be good at fast chess, because slow chess builds that intuition you then cash out on in time trouble.

People particularly love attacking chess (possibly because expert, constricting, prophylactic chess is a slower burn and takes more skill in a lot of cases to appreciate), and with that being said, it's interesting because chess is sort of the opposite of that Sun Tzu quote: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

If you're a strategic chess master but you can't see tactics, that mastery doesn't matter and your opponents take all your pieces. If you're likely to get ground down in an eighty move game but you can sniff out an attack on your enemy's king, you can usually at least get a shot at doing that and crush your opponent.

The reason (in chess at least, which is what I'm familiar with) is to encourage more women to play chess, to close the gender gap formed in the first 150 years centuries of international organized chess.

In my opinion, World War II started on September 18, 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, because 1) the Chinese and Japanese didn't stop fighting until 1945, and 2) it had much the same spirit as the following conflicts. Admittedly, this subjective timing stuff is awful fuzzy.

My point was that the 'average' computer user is easily bewildered by many things, and using an IRC client isn't especially difficult compared to them. Using a link to a ready-made config for a web IRC client is easy and relatively painless and doesn't require any additional magical insight and fairy dust by a group of Silicon Valley dreamers. The use cases for Slack is arguable an Euler diagram circle exactly on top of those for IRC, a slightly different one than those for FB Messenger or Skype. Slack is redundant/bloated because of IRC, Messenger isn't.

No regular person ever renames files. No regular person ever uses a browser that didn't come with their system. No regular person ever properly navigates an average website without help. Your point is?

I would imagine most non-technical people could scrape by with a certain client, even a web one. As someone who's on Freenode, Lord knows they do.