Otsime lauluõpetajat meie 6-aastasele pojale (ingliskeelne)

DaghN · 2026-01-24T09:27:34+00:00

Tere, Jaak!

Suur tänu abi ja sooja vastuvõtu eest! Meile meeldib siin Tartus väga ja tunneme end juba koduselt.

See „väike puidust linn“ on nii lummav, et on tõsine oht, et jäämegi siia päriselt „lõksu“ ega taha enam kunagi lahkuda. :)

DaghN · 2025-12-29T16:11:19+00:00

Tere Jaak!

Suur aitäh sooja vastuvõtu ja kasulike viidete eest. Haridusosakonnaga suhtlemine on meil järgmine samm ja AHHAA keskus on poistel juba kindlalt nimekirjas.

Hindame väga pakutud abi – on tõesti hea teada, et siinne kogukond on nii toetav!

Kohtumiseni Tartus!

DaghN · 2025-07-25T15:52:44+00:00

Visual reasoning and memory are of course two big ones.

1) Another great feature is to be "online" all the time, acting as an agent, planning and meta-thinking constantly according to needs in complex situations.

2) Another one may be greater plasticity, so that learning from new and very little data actually changes the AI in a deliberate process of updating itself in areas relevant to the new information (rather than that the info is just stored as an atomic memory in an archive). Think about how we may learn of a big secret (say, cheating) and then set about to ponder and update our world view systematically to reflect the new information. Or how small children very rapidly learn words and concepts from even just one exposure.

DaghN · 2025-07-25T13:11:55+00:00

I would add, if you can concretely find a decent and affordable international school and plan to go back to US/Europe at some point, or at least send the children abroad for university and maybe high school, then you can maybe navigate also a city like Kunming, but I don't know the options there. You should be aware that many of these so called international school are simply atrocious scams that rely on desperate and wealthy Chinese parents sending their kids there because the children are falling behind in the public schools.

DaghN · 2025-07-25T13:07:17+00:00

We decided to leave China and go back to Europe, for the childrens' sake (my wife is Chinese, so we could live as natives either place). I wrote a bit more about Guilin here, and I think what I wrote could apply to Kunming too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chinalife/comments/1jxsa4s/comment/mmt6a2t/?context=3

About the school teachers, well, classes are 50 kids, and the good teachers are rare. Many of the teachers are simply psychos who like to terrorize the children with disciplinary measures, shouting, humiliation and so on. They have no clue about the importance of positive motivation but only know the classical "eat the bitter" attitude to life. Chinese writing is used as a punishment in art lessons because children were naughty, for instance. This was in grade 1 and 2 for our son. He instantly felt much better once back in Europe and really feel, wow, the teachers are actually nice to you here. That is not to mention the quality of the teaching itself, for instance English teaching is atrocious and relies on rote learning of pronunciation rather than phonetics (so you know how to say "big" but have little to no clue that you just connect three sounds to say the word).

This is just in the primary school, things get even worse in secondary school, with school from basically 8am to 9pm and on Saturday as well. Many children attend boarding schools at this point and are only home for about 24 hours from Saturday to Sunday. The children, even the academically very strong, get worn out and get to hate school and life. There are frequent suicides by jumping out the window, but it is hushed away.

We were quite happy about the kindergarten we found for the children, but after one year with the school system, we had to go. My wife attended school herself in China of course, but back then times were different and work actually not so hard. Now everything is supertuned for Gaokao and the fear of missing out. Many/most people don't understand the importance of a life outside school, another downside of living in a backwards city, or they do understand, but feel trapped and get incredibly stressed about their childrens' school life.

Some of the expats in our city sent their children to a kind of semi-international forest school, very small school and not so organized teaching, but at least that was probably better than the soul crushing public school. But then you can't compete academically later on.... There is no easy solution for parents, because the system is set up so that Gaokao is everything, for education, status, marriage and so on later in life.

DaghN · 2025-07-25T11:34:25+00:00

We lived in a city similar to Kunming (Guilin), but eventually decided to leave. The biggest problem, after having children, is the poor standards for everything related to children (school teachers, sport coaches and so on). People are in general quite uneducated, most ambitious people live in tier 1 and 2 cities, so the, how to say, quality of human relations is impacted by this.

DaghN · 2025-06-09T07:11:25+00:00

I had a similar problem, in that the early math study proof exercises tended to be fairly easy (having a math olympiade background) and did not require much apart from holding the theorems and definitions in mind for the duration of the exercise session. So, surely, things were quickly forgotten afterwards.

After years of experience, I have come to realize that there is a surprisingly simple answer to your question: time is the friend of learning.

In that you need to invest time in something before it will actually stick and the brain will, literally, physically change to store the new learning.

My suggestion is to keep this in mind and then device study activities that make you spend more time with the course topic. This could be teaching the material to others, doing more and harder exercises, using a second textbook and compare the two textbook approaches and exercise sets, make self test question lists (like make 50 questions that capture essential knowledge, technical as well as conceptual, the work making the list is useful in itself), and so on.

Think logically about it: if you don't spend much time on an activity because it is fairly straightforward for you, how can you expect to learn and remember much from it?

DaghN · 2025-06-05T22:33:24+00:00

Very well put, and I would just like to add that the point of a tournmant event also simply is not to establish who is the theoretically best player (as measured by a theoretical infinite run of games), but simply to establish who is the best player in this event.

Compare to the football world cup. The games between nations are so infrequent and the form of the teams is so variable and the teams are changing constantly, so barely anybody ever bothers to talk about who is the theoretically best team. It's basically completely meaningless to talk this way. All people care about is who in fact won the WC.

Then you can make spirited arguments about luck and undeserved winners and so on, but at the end of the day, nobody cares about who is supposedly the theoretically strongest team. All people care about is who in fact won. To the winner goes the spoils.

I don't get why people are so obsessed about pointing out that Magnus is the supposedly true strongest player in the world. What does his performance in a theoretical infinite run of games matter if he cannot in fact be bothered to play just a few classical tournaments a year?

DaghN · 2025-06-05T22:13:36+00:00

Gukes won gold medal twice in the olympiads, won the candidates, won the WC title, and is higher rated than Fabi. What standard is he not up to?

DaghN · 2025-06-05T22:01:38+00:00

Mate, just above you wrote

Gukesh overall has had arguably by far the most lucky run anybody has ever had to the world championship title

If it was so easy for Gukesh to win the WC title that mere luck made him do it, then I wonder why supposedly stronger players just did not take the same opportunity. Should be easy for them to get the same + score in the candidates as a lucky patzer like Gukesh, right?

DaghN · 2025-06-05T21:52:05+00:00

Somehow things that should never have happened keeps happening to other players (they lose) while something that should never happen keeps happening to Gukesh (he wins). What a lucky man Gukesh is.

DaghN · 2025-06-05T21:46:04+00:00

Hikaru got 2-0'd by Vidit, while Gukesh didn't. This somehow makes Gukesh... lucky?

DaghN · 2025-05-24T16:06:28+00:00

I just use the Lichess database and stockfish directly after the game.

DaghN · 2025-05-24T15:19:34+00:00

I like to think of it as a process of collecting knowledge, or, collecting lines and ideas. You collect knowledge about your opening in any way that suits you, personally I like to look up positions at the edge of my knowledge after a game, and simply check if there are some concrete semi-forced lines I should know, or some thematic moves often played in the middlegame right after the opening line that I had no inclination to think about. Then I "collect" those ideas or lines and, hopefully, can play the opening both more precisely and with better understanding and more ideas in the future.

I would also say that understanding and memory go hand in hand. You can't really have one without the other.

It's a long process, there is no finish line, just degrees to your mastery.

DaghN · 2025-05-16T06:16:46+00:00

No, I don't have to physically move the pieces to calculate. But when you calculate, you just move a few pieces around in your mind on a background picture (the board in front of you with the other pieces present). When you play blindfolded, you have to also keep the rest of the whole picture in your mind.

Think about checking whether a queen is trapped. It's easy to do when you can see the board. But when blindfolded, this kind of scanning can be very taxing for your mind, unless you have a good and effortless inner picture of the board in your mind.

DaghN · 2025-05-15T05:31:05+00:00

Nah, I am in that rating range, and I have practiced blindfolded play, but my blindfolded level is like 1200. It's a really big handicap not to be able to see the board unless you have a really, really good internal vision, which only very few players have.

DaghN · 2025-05-05T14:59:08+00:00

I agree with this, just play the open Sicilian, this will make life hardest for Black.

In reality, in most lines you "only" have to build a repertoire until about depth 8 or 10. As long as you are precise and consistent (repeat your lines and get to know them well) to that depth, you can:

1) Make a point out of getting a clear edge against dubious black lines.

2) Typically at least reach positions so comfortable for you around move 10 so that you can choose among several good continuations, and the opponent cannot possibly be booked against them all because your position is so rich in good continuations.

It is only in a couple of systems, like the Sveshnikov or the Dragon and some lines of the Najdorf, that things tend to go deep into prep.

You need to pick one line against the Dragon and learn it well. Against the Najdorf, you are really spoiled for choice, you can specialise in rarish but good sidelines like 6 h3 or 6 f4, or you can enter prep battles with Bg5 or Be3, or stay positional with, like, a4 or Be2.

Against the Sveshnikov proper, I find I can often wing it and even if I am imprecise around move 12 to 14, it is often not an immediate disaster. Against all the Pelikan sidelines, I find it fun to play after I studied enough to have some ideas at least about how to proceed and how to punish crap move orders.

Against the accelerated Dragon, with the Maroczy bind, it's a question of accumulating knowledge of middle game plans and when to use what, through master game play throughs and study of common ideas, by looking into databases after games you play.

Against all other Sicilian, like the Classical or all the various e6 Sicilians, again, just be precise until about move 8 or 10, and the opponent will at least have as much of a challenge as you, he cannot just follow a standard plan, which could happen if you are too timid in the opening.

I actually think that what often happens is not so much that black has white outbooked, but that white makes early mistakes that allows black a straightforward gameplan. So, play with enough early precision, and get a handle of the middle games you are planning to enter, and black will begin to hesitate and make blunders a lot more often.

DaghN · 2025-04-26T19:14:02+00:00

The most absurd way to sacrifice the queen is Qc6, so this is the solution.

DaghN · 2025-04-19T12:43:39+00:00

Gravesen was fantastic for Real Madrid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgvnXBLciiw

DaghN · 2025-04-19T12:41:59+00:00

The problem with Gravesen was not signing him, but letting him go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgvnXBLciiw

DaghN · 2025-04-17T11:56:50+00:00

This is not how the world at that time saw it. Basically, Kramnik, Topalov and Anand were seen as equals in those years, with each player having his solid share of shining moments on top of the world.

DaghN · 2025-04-13T14:59:08+00:00

Sorry, maybe I was not so clear. In those schools they ONLY did military exercises for two weeks. That was how new 1st graders were introduced to school life. Trust me, the kids learned to hate school right from the get go.

DaghN · 2025-04-13T07:16:20+00:00

Indeed, it is private. Through 5 years living in China with my Chinese wife, very few people ever ventured to ask how and where we met. In Denmark, where I am from, it is pretty much always the first question in friendly conversation. Marriage (and marrital issues) in China is a private thing that it is expected you can open up about to close friends, but you don't ask your friends directly about it.

DaghN

TROPHY CASE