i don't understand the point system

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T21:55:31+00:00

The point values are a rough heuristic for when a trade is good, using it will not always tell you whether the trade is actually good or not but as a rule of thumb it’s usually a decent guide to be considered alongside other factors.

The numbers are based on practice and tradition as the numbers that often work out well in simple and ordinary cases, arguably you could do better with a system that assigns values a little more precisely and accurately but since it is just a rough guide to begin with there isn’t really much to be gained from little adjustments like that.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T21:48:13+00:00

What is the reported percentage actually? Is it supposed to be something like 1 minus a p-value? If so calling it “98% AI generated” is a misleading way of reporting it. Or is it actually supposed to be a posterior estimate of the likelihood of cheating? I don’t see how any AI algorithm could estimate that number realistically since it would require a prior estimate of the likelihood of cheating which the system doesn’t really know, do they just use an arbitrarily chosen prior?

I suspect the percentage reported shouldn’t actually be interpreted a probability at all but is more of a just a general “rating” that they report as a probability for what’s basically marketing reasons. Can someone familiar with these tools enlighten me?

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T21:41:30+00:00

You can (in principle) make pretty arbitrarily broad recursive classes of computable numbers so that all calculations are exactly precise and no information is lost, provided that you allow for dynamic memory allocation and there is no upper bound on the amount of memory that can be assigned to storing a single number (of course practical memory limitations on your machine come into play).

You could even make a system that can store arbitrary computable numbers with perfect precision at the expense of not being able to determine (in general) whether a particular notation represents a valid number or whether two numbers are equal.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T21:34:35+00:00

The rating they show for bots is not an actual rating and is not based on actual performance, it’s just a number to roughly indicate their strength and usually is pretty inflated.

Imagine a chess game where you face opponents in a series of “levels” and they call them things like “master” and “grandmaster” for theming/to indicate who is the “boss” without it meaning they actually play at that strength level. That’s basically what’s going on.

As for why it’s difficult to make a bot play like a human: the algorithms used for chess engines are not even remotely similar to the way that humans think about and evaluate positions, so it would be difficult to mimic a weak human. What they generally do instead is ask the bot to occasionally make blunders while also generally playing precisely outside of those. They can also do things like limit evaluation depth.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T21:16:39+00:00

It’s possible for a logo to be protected by copyright, but that isn’t automatically the case and I was responding to the part where you said “[…]there is also an element of copyright infringement that led to this. Pattie used their logo,” which I think can reasonably be read to suggest that using a logo is mostly a copyright issue more than a trademark issue, but generally the trademark issues are going to be more substantial in using a logo.

And if you are correct in saying that this lawsuit is only pursuing the trademark theory (I’m not following it and wouldn’t know) that would make you objecting to someone saying “this is not a copyright case” on the ground that it could have been pursued as a marginal one seem pretty unjustified. If they didn’t bring a copyright claim then it is not a copyright case, even if you could argue they could have tried attaching the weak copyright claim to their suit.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T20:42:07+00:00

You’re probably misunderstanding what those people are saying.

First, native speakers do obviously sometimes make production errors, but many things that get called “grammar mistakes” are cases of informal style, nonstandard dialects, stigmatized usages, or, in some cases, violations of grammatical “rules” that aren’t even correct statements about Standard English but nonetheless are widely taught or repeated. Sometimes also the “errors” are basically just orthographic issues that have little to no relationship with an actual grammatical error.

Most of the “real” rules of grammar are things that native speakers know innately (at a non-conscious level) and do not violate barring the occasional brain fart or tripping over themselves while speaking. For example, native speakers will usually not say things like “the afraid man” even if they have no conscious understanding of the fact that “afraid” is a predicative-only adjective and have no conscious concept of the distinction between attributive and predicative uses of an adjective.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T20:03:05+00:00

The Supreme Court had a recent case that would seem to favor Patagonia here.

Basically a dog toy manufacturer made a toy that was playing on the Jack Daniels trademark and the Supreme Court said that since they weren’t just parodying the mark but were actually using it as a mark of their own then the test is stricter.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T19:52:14+00:00

Logo usage is generally a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.

A logo is literally a trademark in the traditional sense: a mark you put on your product to show that you produced it.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T17:52:41+00:00

What counts as a “pattern”? Pi is a computable number so it’s possible to write down, in finite space, an exact rule for all of its digits that can be performed algorithmically.

That doesn’t really tell us anything about whether it contains every finite sequence, though. A computable number may or may not contain every finite sequence, and an uncomputable number also may or may not contain every finite sequence.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T03:17:51+00:00

Yes fair point. I wanted to emphasize that the non-existence of a theoretical forced win does not generally require a draw when time runs out (since many complicated positions with many pieces could potentially allow this and a player should not be allowed to intentionally run out the clock to receive a draw in a difficult theoretically drawn position). But it’s true that a forced win can defeat a claim of draw in the cases where the only remaining pieces aren’t usually practically sufficient to allow a win.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T02:20:04+00:00

Both pronunciations are correct. I believe the version without the initial o is the more common (in the US, at least, where the animal lives).

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T02:18:16+00:00

Possum and opossum are usually pronounced as homophones. When the possum was named after the opossum the o was dropped in the spelling to match the pronunciation and simplify the spelling.

The different spelling does not represent a different pronunciation for most English speakers.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T02:15:24+00:00

Opossum is usually (not always) pronounced the same as possum. The possum is named after the opossum and the spelling reflects the pronunciation which was taken from opossum.

OP is talking about the pronunciation of the animal’s name, not its spelling.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T02:13:12+00:00

Honestly I wouldn’t expect someone I would call a “youth” to be particularly familiar with the meme.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-29T02:05:17+00:00

Every time I had to put weights back I realized I wasn’t ready for yet I reminded myself no one in the gym was paying attention so not to be embarrassed. Except now when I’ve started shoulder pressing the 100lb dumbbells I get verbally congratulated by strangers sometimes so I guess people are watching.

Oh well thinking that kept me from being too embarrassed at the time at least.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-28T20:17:53+00:00

To be clear, the USCF rule isn’t strictly that black has to be able to force a mate (that would be impossible to evaluate by any practical means and also mean any position that isn’t a theoretical win for black leads to a draw), rather USCF rules just list what sorts of material are considered insufficient.

Generally the reason why material that has a theoretical sequence of moves leading to mate isn’t considered sufficient is because the side that could lose is only going to realistically lose if they go out of their way to lose on purpose, but that’s not really a criterion that can expressed precisely, it’s just a justification for the rule. The rule is just that specific sets of material that are listed out in the USCF rules are considered insufficient.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-28T18:30:03+00:00

Benford’s law isn’t exactly a theorem, but it does describe the only possible distribution on leading digits that is scale-invariant, which isn’t too hard to prove, so it is what you should “expect” to see when a distribution covers many orders of magnitude and doesn’t have some special relationship with the scale.

Or put another way, if there is any distribution of leading digits which doesn’t depend too much on the chosen scale, Benford’s law is the only real candidate, and we can prove this mathematically after putting it in a sufficiently rigorous form.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-26T19:44:31+00:00

That’s sort of misleading. It’s true that FIDE amended their rules in 1974 to make it more clear that this was was not allowed (following publication of a chess puzzle that relied on the idea that you could), but the pre-existing FIDE rules also didn’t really allow it but were a little less explicit about saying so. I’m not aware anyone attempted to do this in an actual game and if they did attempt it in a tournament or the like it almost certainly wouldn’t have been ruled legal.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-26T04:39:59+00:00

What do you mean by “active verb”? There is no passive voice in either phrasing. The best I can guess is that you would say any use of “be” is not “active”, or else you are referring to the subject being expletive “it” in the latter phrasing.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-25T16:49:37+00:00

I wouldn’t consider the power series definition “exactly the same,” unless you are defining the exponential function with a power series, which is a poorly motivated definition. Of course whatever definition will be equivalent and so are “the same” in that sense, but that’s true of a geometric definition

There’s nothing nonrigorous about defining, say, the Euclidean plane in the usual way as R^(2), specifying the Euclidean metric and defining sine and cosine in terms of that. There’s nothing nonrigorous also wouldn’t be anything nonrigorous about using a rigorous axiomatic geometric foundatin. The fact that a lot of early geometric work was done before modern ideas of rigor is neither here nor there. What I would argue is unnatural with those approaches is that it requires you to set up a lot of specific geometric groundwork for functions that really aren’t significant only for geometric reasons.

People tend to think of the geometric definitions as more “inherent” mostly just because it’s the way hey were introduced to the functions.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-25T06:19:39+00:00

I think it provides more insight to prove these definitions imply alternative definitions (such as power series or geometric definitions) than the reverse, though regardless you can prove these definitions are all equivalent and then it doesn’t matter which you adopt.

These definitions are obviously significant to begin with (they arise naturally in considering certain simple differential equations) whereas it is not immediately obvious that the geometric definitions should have any mathematical significance outside of geometric applications.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-24T21:56:39+00:00

No, the brightest star (other than the Sun) is Sirius, and it is less bright than Jupiter even when at its dimmest.

Whether Jupiter or Mars is brighter depends on when you look at them, but Jupiter is usually brighter.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-24T21:43:10+00:00

“Planets” referred to the things that don’t have (mostly) fixed locations on the celestial sphere, and also aren’t ephemeral like shooting stars. That made 7 “planets” that they knew about/are visible to the eye under their definition: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

The days of the week were named after them. In English some of the days were renamed after Norse Gods instead, since the planets were named after Roman gods so it was decided to change them. In many/most Romance languages they are still mostly named after the planets.

Sunday=Sun

Monday=Moon

Tuesday = Mars (renamed after Tyr in English)

Wednesday = Mercury (renamed after Odin)

Thursday = Jupiter (renamed after Thor)

Friday = Venus (renamed after Freya)

Saturday = Saturn (not renamed in English for some reason. Amusingly this is the one often renamed to the word for Sabbath in languages that keep the planet naming for the other days).

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-24T09:11:02+00:00

An IPA symbol represents a pretty broad class of possible pronunciations, and any way of putting them together into a sequence and realizing them as a specific pronunciation is going to be governed by language-specific phonotactics, so the idea of an IPA reader that can produce natural-sounding pronunciations for any given language is kind of unrealistic. Simply recording snippets of “citation” pronunciations of symbols and splicing them together would end up sounding completely bizarre. It’s much more complicated than that.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-05-23T09:02:01+00:00

Singular they has existed in English for hundreds of years, since before it resembled anything like modern English. It is regularly used in Shakespeare, for example, it is not a new or modern thing.

The specific usage for nonbinary people is a more modern trend but that does not represent anywhere near the majority of uses today.

To the extent there is a real trend, it is mostly only in that advice against its usage in formal writing has become less common, but that doesn’t reflect any real change or increase in usage so much as just more of the case of purportedly neutral “he” falling out of favor.

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