“But you already have a queen on the board”

“Have you heard of a sex act called ‘the ladder mate’? You’re the bottom bitch”

WWII sent a very clear message. You can annex Austria. You can invade Czechoslovakia. You can take over Lithunia. But you don’t fuck with Poland

Well, I mean, you can fuck with Poland a little bit. You just can’t take over, like, too much of Poland.

According to here, Vermont and Utah do not have any titled players. At least Oregon has a FM.

I was saying Boo-urns.

The end game of chess is social alienation and alcoholism. The only winning move is not to play. Everything else is a blunder.

I play chess960, so I just keep aborting games until I get a board where f3 makes sense.

Let’s do the CBA.

Keep playing:

• Gain playing-from-a-losing-position XP
• Gain end-game XP
• Gain playing-without-a-queen XP
• Allow your opponent the satisfaction of a mate
• Bestow honour onto the name of your family

Resign:

• Save 1 minute of your time
• Feel like a stupid pansy bitch

Tough choice.

It is, but it probably shouldn’t be any more. WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined. (Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG). But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.

E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it). Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.

Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we’ve still got WebP. It’s not super great, but it’s at least better than JPEG and PNG. A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.

aborting everytime you are black

Here’s another reason you should never resign: endgames are crazy hard, and not resigning is the only chance you’ll ever get to practice them.

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you’re going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won’t happen because “Linux is different”)

The eval bar of the last 30 moves when I’m playing someone the same level as me

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.

Eventually I realized that the whole concept of “microblogging” is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)

It’s true. And people try to jump on to similar things. “It’s just like how email works!”, or “It’s just like how international phone calls work!”

Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.

The search term is censored by DuckDuckGo in Korea. Even robots apparently think it’s going to be an IoT buttplug.

That’s Saturday night in North American time zones. Just a heads up in case you’re planning a boys’ night out a couple hundred billion years in advance, maybe move it to Friday night in case the world ends Saturday night.

Oh yeah, totally. I, too, have solved chess. Haven’t we all? I totally get what you’re talking about.

Scraping is legal

Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?

The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.

All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).

It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.

Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).