ANewFormation

These sort of black and white, good and evil, analogs don't make any sense as NATO is, in large part, a proxy for the US. And we've overthrown, invaded, and destroyed more countries than literally anybody. Multiple of those invasions were also based on fabricated evidence/lies. And when international law, such as the UN, gets in the way - we simply ignore it.

These are not the behaviours of a 'neighbourhood watch.'

The ironic thing is that as visual programming languages become sufficiently robust, the necessity of typing quickly returns.

Blueprint in Unreal is the best example where you can try to dig through a tree of thousands of nodes (where hierarchies inherently start to become counter intuitive in at least some cases) or you can just start typing the node names.

And then once you start also specifying the parameters you end up, more or less, typing out the calls anyhow - but with the downside that visual programming rapidly becomes inscrutible at scale with size + flow control/branching.

Every major tech corporation is grossly in violation of anti-trust laws. 'Back in the day' Microsoft lost an anti-trust lawsuit over nothing but bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, seriously! [1]

Nowadays that's not even scratching the surface of what companies are doing. But we seem to have simply stopped enforcing anti-trust for the largest corporations, about the time they all started joining PRISM. I don't think that's a coincidence. Quid pro quo.

At one point in time the concept of the separation of State and Church was revolutionary. It's time for the separation of State and Big Business/Banking. So many things could be fixed basically overnight if the relationship between corporations and the government was more adversarial, and less incestuous.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

It's also not just your phone. People seem to have forgotten about things like PRISM [1] because it's no longer in the news, but it's still very much around and likely only more extensive. The surveillance state extends far beyond just phones.

Yet these articles, from well known organisations, extensively investigating (even featuring 0 day revelations) the decline of civil society in lieu of ever more pervasive surveillance and manipulation of opinion, only seem to ever focus on geopolitical adversaries of the US.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Any link to carriers 0 rating Spotify? I believe you but am also in the same boat of looking for literally any downside to net neutrality being canned.

That said even this would hardly count as a negative for users though you're spot on about it hurting competition for other streaming services - on the other hand it's a way for ISPs to compete. Hmmm... still haven't formed an opinion on this issue yet.

I'm bearish on 'ai war' but this sounds like a huge positive if it comes to fruition because war would become more about two sides trying to kill each each sides leaders, instead of these leaders sending masses of doe eyed young people off to die for them.

If politicians had real skin in the game there'd be far less war.

It seems such costs would become prohibitive quite quickly? Stuff with moving parts breaks, and I'd expect ongoing maintenance costs to be proportional to the unit cost. Pair in the fact that most factories run on thin margins but massive volume, and it would seem cost is very much an issue.

Are you trying to tell me there are people without a million tabs open?

I completely agree that was an attempted decapitation strike, but where we may disagree is that I don't think they were banking on it succeeding - but it was rather just a high risk, high reward play. For instance they also tried something similar in the first Chechen War, and it failed there as well.

But in this case I'd emphasize that even if that was successful they would have known it would be far from the end of the war. The 'nationalist units' and at least some regular forces would resist, the West would predictably back them endlessly (and probably bring in proxy forces) and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.

The fallacy most people make is assuming the status quo, making a change, and imagining that there are no other resultant changes.

A change like this would be a dramatic shift and the indirect economic consequences are mostly impossible to foresee.

For a simple example the overwhelming majority of jobs that involve unpredictable physical labor aren't going anywhere - everything from janitors to plumbers to doctors.

But in this brave new world these workers, especially the lower paid, would likely require dramatic pay increases, when they have the option of simply not working for an at least comparable 'salary' (and presumably much more if former white collar workers expect their basic to provide more than a janitorial salary). So now you end up turning the labor market upside down with dramatic changes in the overall economic system.

And keep in mind how finely balanced economies are - most Western economies, if growing, are only growing by a couple of percent by year. And now imagine hitting them with this scale of change.

I don't think most are primarily concerned about war applications, but simply driving mass unemployment.

This even seems to be the exact goal of many who then probably imagine the next step would then be some sort of basic income to keep things moving, but the endless side effects of this transition make it very unclear if this is even economically feasible.

At best, it would seem to be a return to defacto feudalism. I think 'The Expanse' offered a quite compelling vision of what "Basic" would end up being like in practice.

Those who are seen (even if through no fault of their own) as providing no value to society - existing only to consume, will inevitably be marginalized and ultimately seen as something less than.

The tie breaks were rapid, not blitz. And rapid is where Magnus' gap over #2 is the largest.

And no great player is bad at any time control - they're just 'less good'. Except Magnus - since he's #1 at everything he's just more or less dominant.

That article doesn't offer much in the way of citations - instead assuming the claims and mocking the implied makers without clearly stating who they are. I think that's probably because the original quote about Kyiv falling in days didn't come from Russian political or military leaders, but from Mark Milley [1] - the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After that claim was demonstrated to be clearly less than brilliant, the propaganda machine then began subtly (and then not so subtly) suggesting it was actually Russia that was making such claims.

But that was always plainly absurd. The last normal war Russia had was against Chechnya, another country that was tiny and practically unequipped relative to Ukraine, yet that war lasted a decade and had tens of thousands of deaths with a huge culture of great music [2] perpetually reminding people how brutal that war truly was.

You won't find a single source from a Russian political/military leader saying it'd be short, because they all knew it wouldn't be if there wasn't a quick agreement reached. The one quote people were able to find was from some television personality in some segment. But I hope Russia(ns) aren't citing e.g. Rachel Maddow to get insight into American positions on issues !

[1] - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mark-milley-ukraine-war-pre...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e5GDbkS3Gw

His edge in rapid/blitz is generally seen as much larger than in classical.

One of the biggest examples of this was in his title defense against Caruana. Every game of that match had been drawn, and in the final game Magnus had a very promising position where he could squeeze with basically no risk.

Instead he offered a draw which was immediately accepted. That sent the game to rapid tie breaks where he casually butchered Caruana 3-0.

Before the invasion Ukraine had a total military force (including reserves) of 1.2 million backed by sizable numbers of highly motivated and heavily armed 'nationalist' forces. Since 2014 the West had been gradually arming Ukraine and various cities like Bakhmut were essentially fortified citadels enabling a defensive force to pose extreme resistance.

There was 0 chance Ukraine was going to just flop over. Iraq and Afghanistan were humble villages by contrast - one which we lost to, and the other which our 'victory' amounted to bombing the government then hiding out in tiny little ultra fortified 'green zones' while waving a victory flag. In both cases with the wars dragged on for decades. Now imagine if Russia had decided to jump in one of those invasions and start shipping hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to them, providing intelligence, and so on.

Russia obviously just thought they were ambushing Ukraine and could get some agreement for them to not join NATO without a real war. Then the West decided to get involved, similarly thinking they were ambushing Russia and that the first sight of HIMARS or a Panther tank would send the Russian army scattering.

Everybody was wrong, so we got a real war that nobody wanted.

I think the parallel many draw is that atheism is taking a position of certainty on the question of a God. And that certainty is based largely on personal belief as any evidence for such a question will inherently be weak.

To me agnosticism would be more the absence of religion, because the absence of religion doesn't imply any particular opinion on the existence or not of a God. One can believe there might be a God without embracing any religion.

Exactly, many top players (probably all of them, but some only speak on such issues indirectly) feel FIDE is increasingly power tripping and somewhat out of touch with both the game and the interests of the players.

During Kasparov's era sentiment was similar and ultimately an entirely new players' association with their own world championship cycle was created. In the end they reunified with FIDE, but we're back on the trajectory for something like that to happen again.

I would wager alot that chess.com is strategizing behind the scenes about ways to become that replacement.

Isn't fertility a simple economic explanation?

With high fertility rates each successive generation is a multiple larger than the one before it, and then again on endlessly.

And schools, nurseries, and every other centure would also be exponentially growing - even pediatricians and their reliable stack of baby books.

Basically it would just be a huge market with massive potential reach, and one that would be growing constantly, and with basically 0 barriers to entry.

There's no need for there to be changes to the question. LLMs have a rng factor built in to the algorithm. It can happily give you the right answer and then the wrong one.

Chess memory is not so rigid or limited. For instance another little demo from the same event had the players name what game a position was from, but the pieces were replaced with checker pieces. Nonetheless the players were easily able to do so.

This is why I said the test was quite adjacent to chess.

The most compelling of fiction tends to be compelling because it's based on reality. History is chock full of grand ideas intended to achieve some desired outcome only to create far worse problems than that you aimed to solve.

Irrigation has destroyed entire seas, crop pests have been near exterminated only to learn those pests were eating far more dangerous pests - resulting in mass starvation, and so on endlessly.

This entire idea really seems like the sort of action we're really not thinking through. Even the article points this out... "What’s not easy to quantify is what happens after the CO2-depleted effluent is returned to the sea. Theoretically, if.." To say nothing of the million other possible issues mostly just handwaved away.

For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening preparation which is quite short term - watch any player, including Magnus, stream and they all constantly forget or mix up opening theory in various lines. But of course if you expect to play a e.g. Marshall Gambit in your next game then you'll review those lines shortly before your game.

Instead people think players have this enormous cache of memorized positions in their minds where they know the optimal move, but it's more about lots of ideas and patterns, which then show themselves immediately when you look at a position.

Watch any world class player solve puzzles and you'll find they have often solved it before 'you' (you being any person under master level) have even been able to figure out where all the pieces are. And it's not like they've ever seen the exact position before (at least not usually), but they've developed such an extreme intuition that the position just instantly reveals itself.

So one could call this some sort of memory as I suspect you're doing here with 'lifelong memory', but I think intuition is a far more precise term.

I think it's more about concern for society and Western civilization in particular. Low fertility will cause nations, and cultures, to contract and eventually collapse. 'Eventually' not being some excessively distant reference - South Korea may well become a failed state within our lifetimes if nothing radically changes, seouly due to fertility. And most other nations will be right behind them.

As for anybody's parenting - I have certainly raised my children in ways that would offend the sensibilities of this group or that. But it's what I think is right. So under this mindset, and a bit of the Golden Rule, I do not criticize other's parenting outside of obvious extremes.

Interesting point in the timing. In general I think it's probably just growing awareness of the issue, also combined with a growing number of people in tech starting families (often quite late) and being like 'zomg why didn't I do this earlier.' Many people in tech are also fascinated with countries like Japan which are acting like a living warning to the rest of the world about fertility.

In general though I think cultural shifts often lack any clear reason. People like Musk or Gates chiming in on the issue are almost certainly effects rather than causes.

Every single woman needs to, on average, have a bit more than 2 children to have a stable population. Fewer than that and your population (once it shares the same fertility rate across generations) will begin changing at a scalar of fertility_rate/2 each ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 = 50% decline every 20 years. And it's exponential - that decline never stops or slows until you go extinct or start having children again.

But in this case one frustrating thing is people don't know what they don't know. My wife was quite lukewarm on having children but shortly after our first she wanted at least two more. They really change you in ways that are impossible to describe without cliche, and I think this is, by nature, even more true for the mother.

In my case this is probably partly true, but more because I think many people are actively deluding themselves and trying to reject their own mortality with fantasies of digitally transferring ones conscience, bio/medical immortality a la Kurzweil, singularity stuff, and so on endlessly.

But if people look at these things objectively, there is essentially 0% chance of any of this happening, let alone in our lifetimes or anytime remotely near it.

And when you look at the people spreading/making such predictions the timelines always coincidentally come just before their expected end of life.

When you accept the fact that you, and near to every other person alive today, will be dead in 80 years (and mostly far sooner) it rather significantly changes your perspective on life. Want to transfer your consciousness? Not gonna happen, but having a few children is at least a reasonable second.

Because it's not only extremely fulfilling (well beyond what one might expect) on a personal level but also required on a social level for a culture to persist.

And this is in the context of ever more people complaining of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These issues are almost certainly causally related.

Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of sorts) in the future of humanity.

This comment should not be greyed out. See the Buffett Bet [1] for the most famous example of this.

Warren Buffet bet a million against Ted Seides (head of Protege at the time) that a simple index fund investment would outperform any handpicked selection of hedge funds over a decade. And critically this bet was made in 2008 just before the market crashed! That's when hedge funds should disproportionately shine, as per their name, by hedging. In the end it wasn't even close.

[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...

His memory is definitely rivaled. During the recent speed chess championships broadcast they had Magnus, Hikaru, Alireza, and some other top players play some little games testing memory, response rate, and so on.

The memory game involved memorizing highlighted circles on a grid so even something ostesibly chess adjacent. Magnus did not do particularly well. Even when playing a blindfold sim against 'just' 5 people (the record is 48) he lost track of the positions (slightly) multiple times and would eventually lose 2 of the games on time.

But where Magnus is completely unrivaled is in intuition. His intuition just leads him in a better direction faster than other top players. This is both what makes him so unstoppable in faster time controls, and also so dangerous in obscure openings where he may have objectively 'meh' positions, but ones where the better player will still win, and that better player is just about always him.

Fwiw this is normal in chess nowadays. There was some brief era in chess where everybody was just going down the most critical lines and assuming they could outprepare their opponents, or outplay them if that didn't work out. Kasparov and Fischer are the typical examples of this style.

But computers have made this less practical in modern times simply because it's so easy to lose in these sort of positions to the endless number of comp-prepped novelties which may be both objectively mediocre, but also nary impossible to play against without preparation against a prepared opponent.

So a lot of preparation now a days is about getting positions that may not be the most critical test of an opening, but that lead to interesting positions and where the first player to spring a novelty isn't going to just steamroll the other guy.

So in this brave new world you see things like the Berlin Defense becoming hugely popular while the Najdorf has substantially declined in popularity.