Averia is a new font composed by taking the average of every font on some guy’s computer. It’s weirdly pleasing, but also looks very versatile (see it on the right with very different personalities).
It might be interesting to try this same experiment with subsets, like fixed width programming fonts or script fonts.
Hillarious:
Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.
This is a technique fish thought up for improving the performance of unsigned integer division by certain “uncooperative” constants. It does not seem to appear in the literature, nor is it implemented in gcc, llvm, or icc, so fish is optimistic that it is original.
Labor of Division (Episode III): Faster Unsigned Division by Constants
It feels like the international professional StarCraft scene is happening organically, just like it did in Korea all those years ago. Local tournaments are being played every day for prize pools anywhere from $100 to $2,500, giving new players a chance to make a name for themselves before working their way up to larger tournaments, then challenge themselves to qualify for the big prizes. These big prizes are getting very large indeed: $34,500 in total for the TSL3, a rumored $150,000 for the IGN league, and a whopping $400,000 for NASL. Teams are forming. Sponsors are being found. Stories of future legends are being written. The only difference is that in Korea it happened in the local PC bangs, whereas now it’s happening over the Internet so that the entire world can join in.
E-Sports is an incredibly interesting thing; as someone who is competitive enough to play most sports but uncoordinated enough to be bad at them, I think it’s really fun how people are able to make sport out of anything. Take curling, or pool, or basketball, and it’s amazing how humans can push themselves and each other to make increasingly small gains at a game that has no meaning outside of itself.
See also, this earlier Ars article, about engineering students writing competitive AI’s for StarCraft. Humans pushing algorithms!