2018: When VS Code Eclipsed Visual Studio IDE — Visual Studio Magazine
As unlikely as it would seem, providing a free, performant and versatile code editor was probably a requirement for Microsoft to complete its journey to open source advocate.

Random UO anecdote #2 – Raph’s Website
In Ultima Online, horses were pants and players were maps

The End of the Ad-Supported Web – Unlock – Medium
Ads are not viable anymore for most web creation. They are now becoming less delivered, less relevant, and even less profitable as well as increasingly more detrimental to the whole web ecosystem: when they were the “default” choice for any kind of online monetization, they are sometimes turning into a liability for the websites which display them.

Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. immigration
the United States can be envisioned as a tree, with shapes and growing patterns influenced by immigration

AlphaZero really is that good | chess24.com
One year since the bombshell announcement that DeepMind’s AlphaZero needed only the rules of chess and four hours of self-play to be able to beat Stockfish in a match, the long-awaited full paper has now been published in the academic journal Science. We have new games – Matthew Sadler has produced videos about five of them – and what seems conclusive evidence of AlphaZero’s superiority. It won a new match 574.5:425.5, despite Stockfish running in a powerful configuration and managing its own time. AlphaZero also won when given just 1/10th of the time to think.