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charmides

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I might be wrong, but regarding the anecdote about the physicists at Michigan’s Albion College attempts to model the spread of COVID-19, I think the author misfired. From what I understand, many non-epidemiologists have been surprisingly insightful during the pandemic.

"Lichess is for professionals. Plenty of GMs ims and masters play on it. Even Magnus plays the tournaments. This is like saying Linux is not enough for computer professionals."

This is a misunderstanding. Lichess is used by chess professionals for playing online chess against each other (which is mostly recreation and not serious chess preparation). Software like ChessBase is used for game preparation.

That is not a favourable comparison for this website.

For those who are looking for chess opening preparation software for free, I recommend just using lichess.org. Considering that lichess is ad-free and run by volunteers only, it is amazing how much it offers (although it's not enough for chess professionals).

When I first looked at the website, I thought that it looked like a nice student assignment or a weekend project. But seeing that you are already attempting to monetize this website and that you are treating this somewhat seriously, I have to tell you that your software is lightyears behind the chess opening modules of professional chess software such as ChessBase 15 or Chess Assistant 12.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/announcing-grand-chessbase-15-...

https://chessok.com/?page_id=19894

"It seems highly likely that these preferences are socially constructed."

People love to think this way, but study after study suggests that those preferences are at least partly biological. It's one of those cases where there is a disconnect between the scientific understanding and the beliefs of the general public (including policymakers).

See for example this research work: https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf:

"Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin."

Sounds like my experience is more unusual then. I would love to hear from other people. Java has been front and center on my CV since I graduated from college and for the ~10 mid-size and small companies that I've interviewed at, not a single one has put me on the spot regarding my knowledge. Not that I would mind. My partner was a little thrown off, though.

It seems like you are just repeating the same specious point that OP was refuting.

Right now, it feels like companies like Google are mostly silencing hate speech, violent extremists, and pornography, but there is no guarantee that their censorship will remain that way in the future. In a not-so-hypothetical future where a single private company has taken almost whole control over online media and starts imposing heavy censorship over non-offensive speech, are we going to continue saying "it's a private company, and if you don't like it, you can just share your opinions on this platform that nobody reads"?

To the author:

This does not add up. After they fired you and then had you fight to get your job back, you said they hired a "coach" to help you learn new skills. But at the end of this training, the coach reported to your boss that you "had a long way to go." It certainly does not seem like the coach was hired to help you out. It seems like it was just a backhanded way to get an assessment on you while you had your guard down.

To me, it seems like this company was just taking advantage of you and your youthful enthusiasm until they had no more use for you. By blaming yourself, I feel like you are drawing all the wrong lessons from this experience.

I would like it if submitters could tag their posts in three different categories or so; pure tech, economics, and politics. Users could then configure their settings to see the content they want.

I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.

He serves at the discretion of Google's parent company, Alphabet, of which Page and Brin are CEO and President respectively.