Stockfish being so strong is not merely a result of scaling of computation with search and learning. Basic alpha-beta search doesn't really scale all that well with compute. The number of nodes visited grows exponentionally with the number of plies you look ahead. Additionally alpha-beta search is not embarassingly parallel. The reason Stockfish is so strong is that it includes pretty much every heuristic improvement to alpha-beta that's been thought of in the history of computer chess, somehow combining all of them while avoiding bugs and performance regressions. Many of these heuristics are based on chess knowledge. As well as a lot of very clever optimisation of data structures(transposition tables, bitboards) to facilitate parallel search and shave off every bit of overhead.
Stockfish is a culmination of a lot of computer science research, chess knowledge and clever, meticulous design.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's just factually true.
Police and politicians talking about outlawing things that help criminals as though it will somehow affect the criminals, will never cease to amaze and amuse me. It's such an elementary error of logic.
The fact is that in a reasonably free society it's quite feasible to get away with lots of crime, if you're smart enough. There is no stopping this. Especially if it's a crime which doesn't leave a whole lot behind in terms of physical evidence. Downloading an OS is one such thing. Sure, if you seize my phone, you could prove it runs Graphene. But in a free society, you need probable cause for that, sorry. And if I am some major criminal, and Graphene stops my criminal enterprise from being proven, in a free society that's always preferable to getting busted, because the punishment for using graphene is gonna be meaningless compared to the punishment I'm avoiding by using it. Because a free society includes a protection against disproportionate punishments for minor crimes. Sure I'll pay your $500 fine to avoid 20 years in prison. Cost of doing business.
Once you realise this, you realise the only way to tackle crime is by legalising as many of them as possible, as long as they're not actively and unambiguously violating people's rights. Murder and other violent acts, obviously stay illegal. Drugs, prostitution etc? Legalise them. That's most of the crime right there, because these classes of crime actually provide something that's in wide popular demand. Demand + black market pricing + lack of taxes means lots of money, and money means power to create strong criminal organisations that can do whatever they want with impunity, including influencing politics. With all that out the window, all you have left is a bunch of individuals going at it alone; murdering psychopaths, desperate poor people, the mentally ill, crimes of passion, sex crimes, etc. And you just freed up a ton of societal resources to channel into those vestiges, both via targeted, intelligent policing and broader societal reforms that target the sociological processes that cause these kinds of crime(like wealth inequality, to name one).
Instead, what we get is a never ending arms race towards a totalitarian society. Oh well, see you after the next revolution, I guess.
Legalizing drugs had a pretty bad outcome for Portland, which is why they re-criminalized some drugs.
Prostitution leads to trafficking, a word I absolutely despise, particularly when it is used as a past-tense verb: "trafficked." Ugh! What poorly educated government hacks do to our language should be criminal! Regardless, human trafficking is terrible and if that part could be fixed, then maybe prostitution wouldn't be so horrible, but it is because it is pretty much never a voluntary situation for the women, but always some kind of coercion.
I spent some time* working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them. Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project. They're not even that great for prototyping. Besides the aforementioned hardware design issues, the "arduino" language(really just C++) and core library had several problems both in terms of code quality and abstracting over things that shouldn't be abstracted over when working with such a limited chip(8bit, 2k SRAM...), like significant memory allocations and interactions with SREG.
My EE partner in crime ended up designing a prototyping board himself, with various creature comforts included that we needed shields for with Arduino, and I ended up writing just C with avr-libc instead of using any of the arduino library/tooling, developing a set of core modules to use the things we added to our boards, in a more flexible manner than the Arduino library. It took some time, but it saved us a lot of time and friction in our future prototyping efforts.
All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering. I do think they could've done a better job bridging the gap between that and prototyping though.
* Ten years ago, so my memory of specifics is very fuzzy and only reflects the state of things back then.
> Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project.
Baby’s first microcontroller project is exactly what they excel at and, by doing so, they made hobbyist microcontroller development vastly more accessible.
The Arduino value comes from the ease-of-starting and they made that a lot easier than the then-extant state of the art.
>So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."
Like I said:
>>All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering.
I was just adding my 2 cents on Arduinos based on personal experience. That is all.
>Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.
Yes. What led you to believe I was suggesting otherwise? I made no criticism of the ATmega328, any other ATmega chip, or the AVR ISA for that matter. I could make some if I wanted to, but it doesn't seem relevant. The topic was Arduino boards, which typically contain an AVR chip, but is in fact not a chip but a dev board.
Yeah, I can't wait for this slop generation hype circlejerk to end either. But in terms of being used by people who don't care about quality, like scammers, spammers, blogspam grifters, people trying to affect elections by poisoning the narrative, people shitting out crappy phone apps, videos, music, "art" to grift some ad revenue, gen AI is already the perfect product. Once the people who do care wake up and realise gen AI is basically useless to them, the internet will already be dead, we'll be in a post-truth, post-art, post-skill, post-democracy world and the only people whose lives will have meaningfully improved are some billionaires in california who added some billions to their net worth.
It's so depressing to watch so many smart people spend their considerable talents on the generation of utter garbage and the erosion of the social fabric of society.
In my experience(currently about 15kg into a 40kg weight-loss program), eating enough fat can also be very helpful for losing weight. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works for me. Fat contributes a great deal to satiety. My diet setup has been to have breakfast and dinner only, no lunch on most days. This way I can make both meals quite calorific, filling and plenty tasty. Crucial for maintaining adherence to the setup, which is by far the hardest part of weight loss.
When you have to go 7 to 8 hours without eating before dinner you want plenty of slow-burning calories. Long chain fats, protein, slow carbs, with plenty of fiber.
My typical breakfast ends up being one slice of bread with liver pate and cheese, another with peanut butter and either nutella(if I'm doing morning cardio or some other exercise mid-day. Lots of sugar in nutella, which gets used up immediately by the exercise anyway) or various kinds of jam with no added sugar(usually pear and apple, since they're not so tart and are pretty sweet without added sugar), and a protein pudding cup(20g protein). The bread needs to be whole-grain, of course. Ideally 100% whole grain.
This ends up being about 700 calories, which is a pretty substantial breakfast. And most importantly, it includes a lot of protein(from liver, peanut butter, cheese, the bread and the pudding), a good mix of saturated fats with plenty of SCFA and MCT from the cheese and liver, mono- and polyunsaturated fat from the peanut butter, and tons of soluble and insoluble fiber from the bread and peanut butter.
This tends to keep me full until dinner time, at which point I can typically eat up to 1300 kcal depending on how active I've been.
On extremely active days, I might either add another slice of bread to breakfast, or have a protein snack and some fruit after exercise, as well as electrolyte drink with sugar in it during(important both for energy and fluid uptake).
Anyway, I'm rarely hungry except for just before eating, which is the idea. I think this would be much harder on a low-fat diet.
Yes, some people are fine, and some people are not fine at all. Even Terence Mckenna had at least one extremely bad trip(that we know of) on mushrooms that drove him to quit taking them for the rest of his life. That was with a lifetime of experience taking mushrooms and other psychedelics, and at a dose several orders of magntiude lower than the dose suggested by this paper.
And this is not a one-off thing, but a monthly regimen. So we're talking about taking a dose that's way beyond heroic, every month, for the rest of your life. That's so far outside the realm of responsible psychedelic use, I don't think any human has even come close to attempting it. The only thing that's for certain is there's no way of knowing what the psychological effects would be, but I have a hard time believing it wouldn't get extremely ugly.
I looked at the code for this once. It's sort of a hack. It generates a random puzzle, tries to solve it with a deterministic backtracking(IIRC) solver that detects situations where it's stuck. If it is stuck, it shifts some mines around in the place where the solver got stuck, according to some heuristics, and keeps solving. It keeps doing this until the entire puzzle has been solved, verifying that the puzzle can be solved without any guesswork.
I will second the recommendation. As someone who's wasted too many hours on minesweeper, it radically changes the game. Because I know there's a logical solution, I'm able to find patterns that I never found in the original, because I'd often assume it was just one of those guesswork situations. It's similar to how chess puzzles are easier than an equivalent position during a game. Because you know there's a neat solution, you're more willing to put in the legwork of searching for it. Learned a lot about the game simply by playing Simon's version.
I tried some no-guess variants but somehow there's a kind of sterile feeling to it. For some reason it makes it more boring compared to vanilla variant. It of course excels when I'm getting frustrated at guesses and 50/50, but otherwise I play the normal minesweeper more.
It's an entirely a different metagame if the goal is to improve your personal best time over multiple games within a given time frame. Once you get good enough with the deterministic reasoning, the game transforms into probabilistic strategies for time saves in both the vanilla and the guaranteed solvable game, and at that point the two games are very different.
For the vanilla game the guesses become integral part of the game that you can strategize around. There are guesses where some squares are less likely to contain mines than others. You can also try to uncover guesses as early as possible in a game, so you don't waste too much time on a game that is doomed to fail.
Fully agreed. Norway has this same legislation. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense if you only look at it for 2 seconds, through a thick fog of radical sex-negative feminism.
Yes, it is true that the pimps and human traffickers are the real criminals, and that the vast majority of prostitutes are in fact victims. And yes, it's a good thing not to prosecute them. But when you make buying illegal, you force prostitutes away from the safety nets that could help them anyway. If you're the police, how do you catch johns? Follow the prostitutes, of course. So they're forced to avoid the police, lest they're unable to meet demands from their pimps, and get punished, often violently. And in avoiding the police, they also become more vulnerable to abuse by johns.
The real world just doesn't work like this. You can't nearly separate these things into legal/not legal bins. They're entangled and can't be unentangled merely by way of ideology or wishful thinking.
The other issue is of course, is it wrong to buy sex? If you're a sex-negative feminist, the answer is yes, because your ideology rests on projecting your own sex-negative outlook onto all women, which to me seems hilariously and ironically sexist. Personally I believe women have very diverse attitutes to sex and should have autonomy to do whatever the hell they please with their lives and bodies.
To me, the only thing that really matters if whether the sex is consensual, without clear-cut coercion. Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who is clearly a victim of human trafficking? Absolutely, I think so. This is basically slavery.
Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who's selling it, because it's their only option? This one is trickier, but I think it's about as wrong as getting your iphone screen fixed by someone who couldn't cut it in "real" IT work. Or getting your garbage picked up by someone whose only marketable skill is emptying a bin into a truck. Society is full of people doing jobs they hate because it's all they got. And that sucks, but criminalising their customers doesn't seem like a reasonable solution. It's a systemic issue.
Is it wrong to buy sex work from someone who does it because they genuinely love it(yes, they do exist, though they are awfully rare)? How the hell could it be?
So in summation, it seems to me human trafficking is the real problem. Criminalising johns seems like a stupid way to tackle it, and it demonstrably does not work. Extending it to the online sphere makes even less sense.
Most of what you are saying makes sense, except this:
> I think it's about as wrong as getting your iphone screen fixed by someone who couldn't cut it in "real" IT work. Or getting your garbage picked up by someone whose only marketable skill is emptying a bin into a truck. Society is full of people doing jobs they hate because it's all they got.
Selling sex for money is not in the same bin as other jobs people hate. Sex is an intimate act for humans, like it or not, and being coerced into sex, whether physically or economically, is especially toxic. Like long-term PTSD toxic.
This is not the same as cleaning latrines or collecting garbage (which yes, can be a foul work experience). Although as I'm thinking about it, there are other jobs which have a similar soul-toxicity as sex work, like industrial animal slaughter or mass executioner (e.g. in a concentration camp). Jobs that require you to give up your humanity in exchange for a paycheck.
Sex is an intimate physical act, which often/usually has intimate emotional consequences.
Sex work is not foul like garbage collection. Sex work is invasive like body horror stunt work.
How many jobs have an essential requirement to put non-edibles in your mouth? Claude suggests people who are paid to play wind instruments. Note that flutists own and maintain their own instruments. It would be really "gross" to
stick someone else's used instrument in your mouth. Particularly if you had no relationship to the person and didn't know to what extent you could trust them.
Stockfish is a culmination of a lot of computer science research, chess knowledge and clever, meticulous design.
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