codehotter

The identity verification support page says 'updated this week' but that is just an update to the appeals process. https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/

There was, however, also a change to the privacy policy, effective July 8, 2026. See https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o... It now says:

"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."

The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.

An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858

I appreciate that you're demystifying this, but you are downplaying the difficulty of keeping 4 tallies with perfect accuracy for 100 steps while processing new inputs every 300ms. That produces demands on working memory and parallel processing that probably exceed the capabilities of our linguistic systems.

The claim is not that the algorithm is complicated, but that the abacus training helps in execution by involving visuospatial brain areas instead. Your argument is like saying training methods for track athletes are all equally effective because running is simply putting one foot in front of the other quickly.

I agree that multiplying 42x37 is not difficult. Many western mental calculators can do so quickly. I also agree that grinding, memorization, and tricks play a role in mental math.

the correlation between Asia and mental math + abacus is spurious

However, I do not think the correlation is spurious. Involving additional brain areas like premotor (imagining moving the beads) and parietal (seeing the beads) is likely responsible for the incredible speeds achieved by trained abacus users. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00050-8

Western mental addition operates on fundamentally different timescales. Here's Aaryan Shukla adding 100 4-digit numbers in 300ms per number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouUk0zIbos

I view this as a political constraint, cf. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscra.... One's identity as Academic, Democrat, Zionist and so on demands certain sacrifices of you, sometimes of rationality. The worse the failure of empathy and rationality, the better a test of loyalty it is. For epistemic rationality, it would be best to https://paulgraham.com/identity.html, but for instrumental rationality it is not. Consequently, many people are reasonable only until certain topics come up, and it's generally worked around by steering the discussion to other topics.

? These are complete unacceptable, developer feedback loops should be measured in milliseconds not minutes.

Some context. The dress code and rules for enforcement are created by the players' representatives commission in FIDE, consisting of active and former competitive players [1] [2].

In a presentation shared with the players about the dress code before the event, jeans are listed on a slide titled "What's NOT allowed?" with "Not Approved" stamped in big red letters over a picture of jeans [3]. FIDE CEO says jeans have been banned in this event since 2018, and that players were asked for feedback on the dress code before the event, and none complained [4].

The same dress code presentation shared with players also has instructions for the Chief Arbiter:

  The dress code is strictly enforced to maintain a consistent level of professionalism and respect for the event. The Chief Arbiter, in consultation with the FIDE Athletes Commission, will ensure that the dress code is upheld.
  
  First Infringement
  A financial penalty of 200 € for open events and 100 € for women's events. The player is allowed to play the current round.
  Further Infringements
  Exclusion from the pairings for the next round. Each round counts as one infringement.

In an interview, Magnus stated he was not having the best tournament, explained he had already lost his patience with FIDE due to an ongoing feud over the freestyle chess championship, and stated he declined to change into approved attire as a matter of principle and would withdraw from the rapid tournament and also the upcoming fide blitz tournament, apologizing to fans at home [8].

[1] https://doc.fide.com/docs/90%20Congress%20Agenda%20and%20Ann...

[2] https://www.fide.com/directory/commissions (GM Ahmed Adly, GM Eugenio Torre, IM Dinara Saduakassova, WIM Jesse Nikki February, GM Irina Krush, GM Wei Yi, IM Alina Kashlinskaya, IM Oluwafemi Daniel Balogun, IM Noaman Omar, GM Ioan-Cristian Chirila, IM Irine Kharisma Sukandar, GM Ivan Cheparinov, GM Evgeny Tomashevsky, WGM Aleksandra Dimitrijevic)

[3] https://doc.fide.com/docs/2024_WRBC/wrbc2024_dress_code.pdf

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWi5CIKhuSs [ Magnus Carlsen Jeans Scandal | Full Story ] from 15m00s

[5] https://www.fide.com/news/3363

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrK88j-fyaw [ FIDE World Rapid Championship 2024 | Rds 6-9 ], Magnus' round 7 game finishes around 2h24m30s, round 8 2h59m50s

[7] https://www.facebook.com/chess/videos/-magnus-carlsen-is-unp...

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWi5CIKhuSs [ Magnus Carlsen Jeans Scandal | Full Story ] from 3m28s

Note that it’s legal to sell stockfish as long as you’re compliant with GPLv3. ChessBase seems to be compliant.

Unless your license has been terminated by the copyright holders, in which case you cannot be compliant with the license because don't have a license to distribute the material at all.

Stockfish argues that ChessBase isn’t compliant because they refuse to release the weights.

I haven't seen them argue this anywhere. You've linked to their previous statement in which they only say that they "condemn" the fact that the weights are not being released.

The announcement says that they've filed the lawsuit "to enforce the consequences of the license termination" because "ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products."

But GPLv3 doesn’t give you the ability to terminate a license arbitrarily; it requires you meet some specific criteria, and it’s unclear that ChessBase meets it.

You seem to be talking about this paragraph in the GPLv3 (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/sf_14/C...) :

"Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice."

However, this is not ChessBase's first violation. They've also tried to pass off Houdini as original work: https://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/houdini_6_pro_multipr...

Houdini 6 is also a stockfish clone. https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/29181/is-houdini-6...

While it seems plausible that the network weights would fall under the "installation information" clause - the intention seems to be to limit this clause to consumer products (e.g. a Digital Video Recorder) and it's not clear that it can apply to Fat Fritz 2.

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/sf_14/C...

1. ChessBase was in violation of the GPL, but then cured the violation by releasing code (https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/statement-on-fat-fritz-...). But the post claims they refused to release the weights.

They mean that the weights are not open sourced. If the weights are distributed separately and not considered part of the "Corresponding Source", that may not be a GPL violation, and the blog post does not imply that it is. (They only say that they condemn the approach.)

2. But the weights are already being released with the program they're selling. Otherwise, how would the program run? Why would they refuse, when they already distribute the weights with every copy of the program? I thought maybe Fat Fritz 2 was a cloud-hosted solution (weights aren't provided locally), but https://en.chessbase.com/post/running-leela-and-fat-fritz-on... seems to indicate it can run on a laptop with a GPU.

The GPL can be interpreted to require that all the input necessary to reproduce and run a functioning binary must be distributed. If the weights and engine are integrated in one binary, and not "all the source code needed to generate, install, and run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities" is provided, that could be a GPL violation. This does not apply if the weights are distributed separately under a different license.

I'm on Stockfish's side here, because I suspect ChessBase simply duplicated StockFish's training methodology and tried to pass it off as their own. (The engine's performance seems almost identical.) But I hope Stockfish has an airtight case for court. It'd be a bad idea to hinge the GPL violation on "they refused to release the neural net weight training code."

They may have terminated the license in response to the Houdini revelations[1] which is another chess engine based on Stockfish that Chessbase has sold as original work, disguising its Stockfish origins in violation of the GPL.

As the GPLv3 says under Section 8 [2] the license can be reinstated if "this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder" - the first violation would have been Fat Fritz 2.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/fishcooking/c/DygaIdBvJm0 [2] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/sf_14/C...

I like that it's a hedge against governments printing endless amounts of money that isn't backed by anything

This depends a lot on how much you of the price of bitcoin you think is speculation (versus fundamental), and exactly how much inflation you expect. If the FED overshoots the inflation target speculation could cool down a lot [1]. That may give you an "inflation hedge" that evaporates if inflation actually happens.

[1] Page 74, Section A.7 Speculative premium, https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/0p0966... [PDF, 1.8MB]

The 40 block version of AlphaGo Zero is stronger than the 20 block version of AlphaGo Master.

AlphaGo Master, unsurprisingly, was significantly stronger than AlphaGoZero. AlphaZero, although it can play multiple games, was weaker yet. In both cases, they compared the 40 block version of the one with the 20 block version of the other (they had to double the network size to approach the level of the predecessor.)

Recently, Katago has reached similar levels of strength using a small fraction of the resources: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10565

It depends on what you mean by "more efficient." The significance of AlphaZero was that you can reach good results in a variety of domains even without human expert knowledge to provide supervised learning data or engineer features. It's efficient in terms of engineering resources.

A precisely tailored approach can always get better results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strong_(Pennsylvania_j...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_F._Stone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Hunt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associate_Justice_of_the_Supre...

Good question. I'm not a lawyer; I assume edge cases will be decided by the relevant tax authorities. Speculating here, but if there's a single place where management decisions are made, say where the CEO lives, the corporation might be tax resident there. Otherwise, they might decide to tax you in place of incorporation.

For such a company, what address would it have? Maybe where you place its headquarters has some significance too.

Many countries, and I think most countries in Europe, have language related to "place of effective management" in their tax code. Even a corporation incorporated in Cyprus (say), it could be considered resident in Germany (say), if the tax authorities feel the place of effective management is in Germany.

Interestingly, this link says that in the US: "Generally a corporation is treated as a domestic corporation if it is created or organized under the laws of the United States, any State, or the District of Columbia. No other criteria related to place of management will cause a corporation to be domestic."

https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementati...

If you do decide to incorporate somewhere else, and you manage the company from the US, make sure it's a place where the tax code also doesn't care about the place of effective management.

However, if the income is US-source, aren't you always taxed on that income in the US anyway? "A foreign corporation engaged in a US trade or business is taxed at regular US corporate tax rates, but only on income from US sources that is effectively connected with that business, and at 30% on US-source income not effectively connected with that business. By contrast, US-resident corporations are taxed based on their worldwide income."

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tax-services/publications/assets/d...

How much stronger is a team of top players than its strongest member?

I wonder what the best way of coordination would be. Perhaps they can identify several promising lines and each player chooses one variation to calculate more deeply.

From my own experience playing (as a weak amateur), I feel I'm rarely able to think so systematically -- often ideas I discover while contemplating one line are tried in entirely different variations, so it would perhaps take some getting used to before a team can function optimally.

The games were played with 5 seconds per move for the computer and 30 seconds per move for the human. (Where unused time is lost, not saved).

I am not sure if slower time settings favoring the human is still true -- AlphaGo works a little bit differently from traditional computer go programs.

Earlier versions of AlphaGo against Fan Hui, the slower official matches were 5-0 in favor of AlphaGo, whereas in the unofficial blitz games, Fan Hui managed to win some games.

As play gets closer to optimal it gets more and more difficult to play more efficiently than your opponent. To play so much more efficiently than your opponent to overcome a handicap of 6 stones strikes me as extremely unlikely at pro level.

At amateur level, say a 2d vs a 2k player would perhaps have a 99.9% winrate. To make it an even game, would take 4 handicap stones. But at pro level, I think it's possible for player A to have a 99.9% winrate against player B, but on two handicap stones, for player B to be the favorite.

Even an engine that is enormously successful against top human players would struggle at high handicaps vs them.

Just to be clear, this calls the command "rd" (remove directory) with argument /s (recursively remove all subdirectories) and path \ (root of your drive).

Initially it looked to me like a switch called "crd" as argument to the "cmd" command. This would have fooled me into thinking it is harmless. I wouldn't have fallen for "format c:" but I might have fallen for this.

The space between "/c" and "rd" is apparently not necessary. I tested it and it really works.

I've also been a vegetarian for the last decade and change, and the idea of eating dead animals disgusts me, as does the taste of it.

I find it very difficult to understand how meat eaters can manage to get it through their throat without throwing up, but to each their own.

I sometimes get comments about how environmentally conscious I am or how ethical I am for being vegetarian, but I don't feel virtuous at all. It doesn't take any special willpower for me not to eat meat, I have zero craving for it.

I hate vegetarian food that tries to replicate the taste and texture of meat.

As other commenters have mentioned, there's a big market for just honest vegetarian cooking that does not try to imitate anything.

The same goes for food as for people: just be yourself! Don't try to be something you're not.

I love this. There's something unique about mixing a traditionally dry topic like history with the super playfulness of the narration. The choice of words, the ridiculous flashing text and little pictures and jingles... Couldn't stop watching.

How do you implement swap if deck is too large to hold in memory?

Don't underestimate algorithmic improvements. Today's chess engines running on DeepBlue hardware outperform DeepBlue running on today's hardware.

Modern chess engines are built on a testing infrastructure that makes it possible to measure how each potential change affects the playing strength. This "Testing revolution" has brought massive improvements in playing strength.

For AlphaGo, it's probably the training that requires the most computational resources. The 'distilled knowledge' could perhaps run on a desktop PC. The program would search fewer variations and would be weaker, but if AlphaGo improves further, that version might still be stronger than any human.

I get your point, but four stones is beyond ridiculous. Two stones is already a really large handicap. At two stones, Ke would have no chance whatsoever.

Games at this level are decided by a few points. The closer two players come to optimal play, the harder it is to be very much more efficient than your opponent over the course of a game. To be so much more efficient, at this level, that you could overcome a 4 stone handicap is unthinkable.

I would very much like to see computers improve to the level that they could take on a top professional giving a 2 stone handicap. That would be a sight!

"Let's get real or let's not play" by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig

Let me first state why I disagree with you, and then why I don't think you should be downvoted. (at the time I'm writing this, parent's post is light grey.)

Time and time again, studies demonstrate that we are all a little bit racist. Another commenter pointed out that the Implicit Association Test is a nice introduction to this research. You can take a test here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

Unconscious discrimination is a serious source of hardship for minorities and it's important to be aware of our bias. This is what the author of the article is getting at, and he is correct in the central point.

However, we live in a culture where racists are the scum of the earth, fired from their jobs, ostracized, hated universally. You can even be fired from your job if you defend someone that's a racist [1]

Given how hated racism is in our culture right now, debate about racial issues is skewed in three ways. First, we might not take the side of the privileged in an issue because we fear we are being unconsciously racist. Second, we might not take the side of the privileged in an issue because we fear we might be called a racist, and, if not immediately fired from ours jobs, at least shunned. Finally, we might not take the side of the privileged in an issue, because even if taking their side would be technically correct, the privileged already have enough privilege, so to say, and by speaking out in favor of them we might be weakening the forces which are working hard to eliminate racism from society as much as possible.

These biases can be just as unconscious. And they obscure the truth.

Parent is also speaking out of fear. He has come to believe that acknowledging the existence of implicit racism, is the same as always siding with the minority in every case. Even in cases where the minority is clearly in the wrong.

If you value truth, this is an abomination. If you value truth enough, it's something to get extremely angry about. By heavily downvoting parent's post, you are confirming these exact fears, while ignoring the true criticism hidden within. You are turning people away from the movement to eliminate racism, or at least making them less enthusiastic. And therefore you are doing more to slow the eradication of racism than posts like parent's ever would.

Can we upvote parent for his bravery in speaking out against the bias our culture currently has? And calmly and rationally debate his concerns? That would be infinitely more convincing than the downvote button.

[1] http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/turtle-rock-communit...

You seem to know a lot about this and it's something I've always been interested in:

When laws were passed to mandate 8 hour work days, what % of companies had 8 hour work days already? 10%? 20%? 80%?

Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days, even though you work less total hours, because your productivity per hour is much higher. Was something like this known at the time? Or was the push to 8 hour work days only so that people could spend time with their family? What kinds of arguments were used?

In 2006, Deep Fritz 10 beat Kramnik (then world champion) with a score of 4-2 [1]

On the Computer Chess Rating List, Stockfish is currently about 350 elo points stronger than Deep Fritz 10. [2] That means Stockfish would have about 88% chance of winning vs Deep Fritz 10.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_chess_ma... [2] http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.ht...

Would it be possible for charities to fund the medical costs of people with uncommon illnesses?

I'm not an economist - can you explain why a resource being necessary makes it involve market failure?