slphil

Wrong shooter, wrong targets. Not allowed to talk about that.

I enjoy many chess variants. Atomic chess is quite fun (in 2012 or so a friend and I created an opening book to find forcing lines for White, where Black must know the correct line or lose by force). I have spent hundreds of hours playing bughouse, especially playing both boards against a normal team (which is a very fun way to play for stronger players). The difference is that none of these variants make a claim to be a replacement for normal chess. The seriousness of chess960 is exactly why I don't like it. Bughouse is not intended to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, a lot of strong chess players do not enjoy playing Chess960 because we've already invested hundreds of hours into learning openings and how those openings transition into a middlegame. While it's certainly fair (position is the same for both sides), it gives positions which are almost impossible to evaluate. This is exciting for spectators, but for me it's excruciatingly nerve-wracking. I can't play it.

To the contrary, many chess players are opposed to the increasing computerization of the game. Computers have already devastated opening theory (by finding solutions to difficult lines and forced draws in others) and made cheating 100x easier, requiring draconian monitoring at tournaments just to keep them fair. Even if a surveillance camera could track every game and create a scoresheet for every game in a tournament (which I strongly doubt is possible), this is the kind of thing I want out of the playing hall.

It's only tedious for brand new players, who should get over it and do it anyway until it is natural.

I am a chess professional, although more as a teacher than a player, so I have a lot of experience in this field. As caro_douglos pointed out, it slows down the initial reaction to opponent's moves, which is one reason why it instantly improves performance for new players. It forces the player to settle into a certain rhythm of play which prevents silly mistakes.

It is also permitted (and encouraged) to write down the time on the clock after each move, and to record all draw offers, both of which are valuable information during and after the game. If one of my goals is to grind down my opponent's clock in a complex position where I have the initiative, seeing how much more time he is using on average gives me an idea of how long I need to maintain the tension to gain a sufficient time advantage. For example, in a game where both players start with two hours, entering the endgame with 1 hour versus my opponent's 15 minutes is an enormous advantage, even in a position which should otherwise be drawn with perfect play.

Also, in some time controls, players gain extra time after a certain move (generally the 40th), so it can be very important to know exactly when you're going to get that extra hour. These time controls are less common than they used to be.

I have students as young as 5 years old learn how to keep notation after only a few weeks of learning chess. It is a very important skill.

This makes no difference. Players are required to keep notation in tournament games, and the use of external software (like what is used at the top boards at some tournaments) does not absolve the players of this responsibility. Writing down the moves of the game as it is being played is a major part of playing chess, and it is one of the most important things for players to learn because it directly improves play (even disregarding reviewing the games afterwards!).

I own Wasteland 2 but I haven't been able to make myself play it. It's my own failing, but it's just so old-school. It's very hard to find a game that keeps old-school charm without the old-school mechanics.

I have bad news for you: Fallout 4 is an incredible game the first time, but the second time through you notice that the game has very little depth. I had a blast the first time, but couldn't force myself to finish a second. I say this as someone who beat New Vegas at least a dozen times.

Fallout 4 has tons of options that are flavorful and make you feel like you live in a dynamic world, right up until you realize there's not much actual dynamic content.

It's important to point out that he was basically emotionally abused by researchers (apparently paid in part by the government) and never really recovered from it. Also that his manifesto (and later works, while in prison) are genuine works of philosophy by a person who really shouldn't ever be let out into society again. Kaczynski is a really interesting guy.

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world (although not the most common first language) and is the lingua franca of the Internet. While language mistakes shouldn't be seen as evidence of technical issues, it should be common practice to ask a skilled native English speaker to review a group's public statements and marketing materials.

This was genuinely painful.

I'm not sure where you got that impression. The lowered attendance rate of in-person chess clubs is more than made up by the enormous amount of chess played online, high-level professional chess is doing better than ever, and it's seen by many parents as one of the most generalizable skills for a child to learn.

(It's possible I just took a joke too seriously, but "chess is dead" is a common and incorrect take.)

The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time.

Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost.

There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, as long as it doesn't blindly ignore economic reality (a la communism). Many of the right-leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.

I don't quite agree, but I see where you're coming from. Instead I tend to see them as being just different behaviors, with bystanders (clueless rubes and cynical manipulators alike) causing conflict in order to support their own inflated diversity bureaucracy.

The only thing that really has to be noticed in order to see the problem here is that almost all of the women writing blog posts about how women should go into STEM did not themselves go into STEM. Yesterday I saw a video about an organization trying to get women to go into STEM. All of the women involved in the program had degree in _____ studies, communications, etc.

It's OK to be extremely cynical about this.

That said, I don't have a problem with women working whatever job they want. Just don't expect me to play along with the self-esteem parade and grievance bureaucracy that tends to come along for the ride.

You are willfully missing the point. Animals have instincts. The complexity of humans does not make them an exception to this rule. There are in fact large amounts of brain function that are baked in at birth (or developed in a predictable timeline after birth -- humans are basically born premature). Humans are able to instinctively perform behaviors which are not taught, although the majority of critical behaviors in humans are socially learned. Feral children (like Genie) are functioning organisms with complex behaviors. They're just defective humans because humans rely on a distributed learning system called culture in order to do the work that biology cannot.

You are insisting that because humans do not have instincts at a certain level of abstraction (playing video games) that no part of these instinctive brain functions play a role in the development of skill at Starcraft. This is wrong. Abstract reasoning is not simply learned, but it is HONED by experience and neural development. An AI has to do an enormous amount of work in order to replicate functions that humans can already do. This is the basic visual problem in AI that stumped researchers in the 60s who thought that tasks like visual recognition, spatial rotation, etc would be trivial because they are trivial to evolved organisms.

You're relying on some kind of mental model where brains are just masses of neurons that form all of their connections and complexity after birth. This is ultimately a political idea, and it's wrong. No neuroscientist believes this. Brains have pre-defined areas (with fuzzy borders) and many behaviors do come baked into the template. Complex behaviors like language do not, perhaps, although even there, the underlying functionality that permits language is an evolved trait (which is why other animals can't learn language). Research the FOXP2 gene, as just an obvious example.

Edit: Your post contains "structures of the brain". What exactly do you think the structures of the brain are, if not evolved modular solutions to complex problems? Your visual center is somewhat trained after birth, but it already exists. The same goes for speech, motor control, and all of the other unconscious or semi-conscious processes that all humans (and other animals as appropriate) share.

As was pointed out in an earlier comment, 2001 really only got the economics of space travel wrong. It's possible that we could have done it, technologically speaking, but that it just would have been a huge waste of capital.

I think what he's trying to express is that patent law shouldn't be bound up in concerns of party policy. Once something becomes part of the polarization, it's over.

Compatibilism isn't simply a language game. The "free will" question has centuries of ethical baggage attached to it that are critical to a functioning justice system, among other concerns. Compatibilists basically say that although basic scientific reasoning would assert that there is no Ghost in the Machine, and that true libertarian free will is a delusional fantasy, that anything that comes from the brain of a single individual is that individual's free will, by definition.

If I hold a gun to your head and force you to do something, that isn't your free will, but if you choose to do something without my influence, that is your free will. Whether you actually had the option to make another choice (whether any specific moment in time has multiple different future paths based on some magical internal rational agent) is irrelevant.

You are "simply" along for the ride, but it is still you making your decisions, as opposed to someone or something else.

At risk of violating some HN etiquette about memes, "pro-tip" is a word of fuzzy and common meaning since it was memed back in the ancient era of memes ("Pro-Tip: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot it until it dies.")

Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.)

Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).

Defense and infrastructure are inherently the responsibility of the state. I'm not a small-government libertarian. Market forces should be used here whenever possible (military-industrial complex, etc) but there obviously can't be competing national militaries or competing national highway systems.

Scientific research: maybe, it depends. Innovation is complicated and there's no linear investment-to-payoff in research. People concerned with profit at least are discouraged by the profit motive from dumping huge amounts of money into failed research. At the same time, some critical research isn't market-profitable.

Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves. I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative. We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.

This isn't true. Hunter gatherer life is nearly universally harsh and violent. I posted an article on this in the same comment thread. Modern humans are miserable, for sure, but older forms of life were not better.

I don't know any other hypothetical building blocks for complex life. It could possibly be the case that the alternatives are too unstable and that alien life would be made of something remarkably similar to (but obviously not identical to) Earth DNA.

Healthcare is an obvious exception, and religiously fundamentalist capitalists won't admit to that, but the reason is simple. Healthcare has virtually infinite demand, and the demand for more expensive solutions is intense. It is one of the few sectors of the economy where traditional capitalist price optimization algorithms don't function properly. I wish people would admit this and move towards more rational healthcare considerations, but I also wish people would stop using obvious exceptions to argue against rules.

(Healthcare is also an ethical battleground in a sense that many industries never can be. Should a hospital administrator be willing to spend a million dollars to save one life, or should that money go to equipment that could save more lives? The answer seems obvious, but most people react with a sort of justifiable horror at the thought of letting some poor child die so the hospital can buy some new machines.)

To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us.

Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...

I have had downtime with their email on many occasions but never their web hosting.

Deliberate practice and natural talent are not mutually exclusive. I make a living as a regionally successful chess teacher. I have had many highly talented students who were not hard workers. I have had many hard working students who were not naturally very talented. Both turned out to be pretty good. Sadly for blank slatists, the talent seems to mean more, but "pretty good" isn't exceptional. I had one student who was a hard working genius who did deliberate practice and took four or five hours of lessons with me a week. He won a national championship for first grade.

Practice matters. Especially at the upper level. There are hordes of talented "strong casuals" out there.

It's important to remember that most cheaters are actually good at the game they're cheating at. They're just not as good as they want to be, so they cheat. It's too obvious if they're clearly just not good at all -- a new chess player playing like a Grandmaster because he is using some secret radio tech in his shoes is obvious cheating, but a Master or Expert who needs advice from his scheming coach for exactly one game to win a tournament? That's the more common scenario.

Todd Rogers is a genuinely excellent video game player. He's also a blatant cheater.

Hidden Bosses always get exposed at nationals because no matter how good or talented they are, they will get destroyed by players who are used to competing against other national threats. We've encouraged our local hidden boss (#1 in TN) to attend more nationals, but work schedules get in the way. Just like in chess, Melee is only profitable if you are one of the best in the world, and life gets in the way.