strongly disagree that studying openings is necessary to "do your best" at competitions. In my experience almost all games between players under 2000 (class players) are decided tactically. I'm expertish (2200+ bullet, 2200+ blitz, 1900+ USCF, win most local tournaments in my area etc) and I don't bother studying openings. Chess is 99.9% tactics at the class level. You won't reach GM without opening theory memorization but you wont reach GM anyway.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits.
_why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone
- this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific
- probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
I have pretty severe C-PTSD and structural dissociation and this has resulted in some moments... Usually this is just a tendency to have memory issues under stress. I have blanked on everything from the names of my own projects to names of companies I have worked for.
When I get triggered in an interview very "interesting" things can happen. Probably the most "legendary" is when I started uncontrollably crying and sobbing in an interview. They obviously wanted to bail and reschedule but I composed myself and was like "no keep going. I am fine". The irony was that they completely lost focus and did a terrible interviewing job but I did pretty good. Shockingly, I did not get that job.
A decade ago I was going to kill myself then what was essentially my suicide note went viral(ish) after I submitted it to HN (if u want to read the cringey post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252054https://archive.fighttheurgetofade.com). This lead to a lot of support, connections, and friendships, which ultimately have helped keep me going for a decade.
While my mental health has continued to improve over the decade (through lots of therapy and work) I have never managed to get out of the poverty hole I was stuck in a decade ago. At times I have come close, but I never seem to get my life on track long enough to maintain it. It has been exhausting. Unfortunately I have started to accumulate health issues (like bad teeth) that is making escaping poverty even more daunting than it was before. I am hoping some wealthy members of HN might feel generous and want to give me an extra bit of help.
You are right that my method differed slightly so I did things again. It took me one try to find a sequence of moves that "breaks" what is claimed. You just have to make odd patterns of moves and it clearly has no understanding of the position.
Here is the convo:
me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed
ChatGPT: Alright, I'm ready to play! Please give me the move sequence.
me: 1. e3 Nf6 2. f4 d6 3. e4
ChatGPT: My next move as black would be 3... e5
Completely ignoring the hanging pawn.This is not the play of a 1400 elo player. It is the play of something predicting patterns.
I ran a bunch of experiments in the past where I played normal moves and ChatGPT does respond extraordinarily well. With the right prompts and sequences you can get it to play like a strong grandmaster. But it is a "trick" you are getting it to perform by choosing good data and prompts. It is impressive but it is not doing what is claimed by the article.
This is so easy to disprove it makes it look like the author didn't even try.
Here is the convo I just had:
me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed
ChatGPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help! Please provide the move sequence and I'll give you my response.
me: 1. e3
ChatGPT: 1... e5
me: 2. ne2
ChatGPT: 2... d6
me: 3. g4
ChatGPT: 3... h5
me: 4. g5
ChatGPT: 4... Ne4
Ne4 is illegal. Also you'd be hard pressed to find any human player that would miss the hanging pawns much less a 1400 elo player. GPT has been trained on chess games and is predicting patterns, this has been known since the GPT-2 days. The daily hype articles where someone coerces a statistical model into "demonstrating" an emergent capability sure are getting old. Claiming emergent capabilities (like having learned chess) are an extraordinary claim (LLMs most likely cant learn things) and I really wish people would put more effort when they make these claims. But the AI hype problem is as old as AI research itself...
I had a similarish vision/idea about 7ish years ago https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar I was way too early though and it didn't work well. I have recoded it probably half a dozen times since then and the latest prototype attempt used GPT as the core tech.
The biggest hurdle I found was that it just wasn't deterministic enough. You can work around this with mixing and matching custom compilers into the workflow but then you run into a "only works with a limited set of components and frameworks" problem; and at that point it is basically a boilerplate tool with extra steps.
I found a workflow with prompts + some Emacs wizardy to make them runnable with a few keystrokes got me 99% of the same feature set without any of the headaches of trying to fully automate it so I stopped work on it. A prompt library and an editor extension is hard to find a userbase for though so I have yet to open source or launch anything.
I'm still not sure if these sort of tools are too early or the exact right time to be built. They won't work well yet, but maybe the issues can be worked out when LLMs tooling matures, maybe not, hard to say. Watching closely to see what happens in the space!
This is a tip for everyone struggling to find someone to hire; look in a different pool of candidates and be willing to accommodate them. For example, you can find a lot of very skilled developers that are disabled.
I know a lot of people that have been coding professionally for 10+ years, have popularish open source projects, been lead devs at startups etc; yet feel stuck in their current jobs or even struggle to get hired. They would instantly job jump to something better or would love to switch from contract work to something with good health insurance/benefits. You just have to be a company willing to accommodate them. And accommodating their needs requires far less investment than paying FAANG level salaries to attract the same Sr engineers everyone else is competing for.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously