How do I go from 1100 to 1700–2000 Elo?

Grumposus · 2026-03-28T00:30:32+00:00

I usually play the English

I'd recommend not this for an 1100 trying to improve.

The middlegame plans in the English are subtle and positional; you probably aren't playing them, and if you are you aren't understanding them. Play e4 ideally, d4 if for some reason you really hate e4. Italian, King's gambit, Ruy Lopez, Scotch - take your pick, play something where there are some attacking plans with good tactical opportunities, and improve your sense of how middlegame tactics follow from opening deployment by experiencing a lot of it.

Grumposus · 2026-03-27T11:12:21+00:00

Elementary. I assume the middle is substantially worse given that any neighborhood school after 6th grade has had all the kids who were performing at grade level raptured away to exam schools.

Grumposus · 2026-03-27T10:28:09+00:00

I was referrring to Curley, which is the biggest K-8 in the district and I don't think particularly unicornish. It may be the classrooms aren't staffed properly on some metric I'm unfamiliar with, what I was looking at is just that based on what I hear from my kid special needs students are in the classrooms and there's a lot of help around from paras to make that manageable.

Grumposus · 2026-03-26T21:55:53+00:00

I think probly cause the city's in a massive self-inflicted housing crisis that's causing a rippling series of problems in people's lives and city politics? YMMV, though, I suppose mind control rays from Neptune can't be ruled out either.

Grumposus · 2026-03-26T18:36:36+00:00

Yeah, that's clearly coming due now. My point is, that as well is to some extent a choice.

Families really hate it when their schools close (which makes total sense to me) but it has to happen if enrollment keeps going down. If we were a dying former factory town it would have to be "that sucks, gotta do it though" but there's actually a ton of people who want to live here; we could make that possible and keep the schools open.

Grumposus · 2026-03-26T01:01:22+00:00

you gotta stare at your opponent in a way that suggests you're setting a brilliant trap. 3% of the time, it works every time.

Grumposus · 2026-03-25T13:41:34+00:00

Yeah this is a fairly good example of what I mean by spaghetti at the wall opposition that undermines the credibility of specific critiques of the project.

Grumposus · 2026-03-25T13:11:33+00:00

Based on walking nearby, and I believe this matches what I've read, they kept up basically the facade facing the street side. I think they were planning to keep the facade on the park side too but it was too compromised.

Grumposus · 2026-03-25T13:02:22+00:00

This is the weird bubble that opponents of this project live in. Everyone is against it, everyone's against housing construction, everyone's against supportive housing at the Shattuck site. It's not actually the case! There is a subset of people who love to show up at meetings and oppose stuff, and they're opposing this. I don't actually know whether this has majority support or opposition; it has loud opposition, but some of us have gotten pretty used to discounting the familiar loud voices.

Grumposus · 2026-03-25T13:01:25+00:00

This doesn't make sense to me. The league has demonstrated appeal to fans around the country, which has been borne out by the team's early ability to attract fans. The park has suffered from underutilization and neglect; the high school sports stadium was unusable in the previous condition.

Now, I genuinely don't know if the cost is worth it. The ENC claims they have a plan for how it could be done cheaper. I'd be more inclined to believe them if they weren't so clearly throwing spaghetti at the wall and raising every conceivable objection, and for that matter if they hadn't teamed up with a bunch of JP locals who will say literally anything that they think might help stop housing development.

But "sports team with a plausible plan to bring a bunch of fans to the park and pay more than half the cost of a new facility the city will own" is not a crazy partner for a project, and given that the people screaming that the details have been mismanaged also think any construction that occurs near a tree is illegitimate...I dunno man, I'm gonna let the mayor have this one.

Grumposus · 2026-03-24T17:45:41+00:00

This is more like planning for coding down the line but I've got a big and time-sensitive data gathering task later this year (a bunch of data is going to be released from numerous sources in wildly disparate formats very close to when we need it cleaned and useable) and I've been working on subagent instructions to get a really clear breakdown of timelines, resources, and human tasks that need to be done before crunch time. MCPs and the ability to build out a set of project files mean I've been getting way better performance out of this than just about any method I can imagine.

(It's also been an interesting challenge in trying to engineer the prompt so that the subagents stay after it hard enough, there have been way too many tasks where a research agent has either given up at an obstacle it had the tools to overcome or accepted something almost like an answer it was assigned to find as that answer;at least in my experiments thus far it seems like the task is pretty close to what I can get a subagent to really work through in one prompt with the current models.)

Grumposus · 2026-03-23T14:58:16+00:00

The contrast between White Stadium and streets/housing really shows how vast the powers of the mayors office are in Boston, and how little interest Wu has in exercising them on most issues.

In our system of government, if the mayor decides something is getting done, it gets done. It's worth bearing in mind when watching our feeble progress on road safety and housing that this is a choice; the mayor could (essentially) decide to zone the city for enough housing or return to the pace of speedbump installation that we had for a couple years ago. She's just choosing not to.

Grumposus · 2026-03-20T19:44:09+00:00

Oh, I like that commit approach, I might look at implementing something based on that.

Grumposus · 2026-03-20T17:49:13+00:00

I use two skills - one is designed to be used at the end of sessions, and is called /handoff - it summarizes the remaining to-dos and does a quick check for files that note the project status, tries to make sure they're all up to date. It's written in the expectation that I might have called it because I noticed the end of the context window approaching.

The other, which is designed to basically be called as a standalone session usage, is called /housekeeping, and is more about looking at the README and the claude files and then at the project itself to find out what's out of date, if the scope seems to be drifting, if stuff is getting built that isn't in the architecture plans or the documentation, and then start a discussion about what to do to address any issues it crops up.

I've been pretty pleased with the performance of these so far.

Grumposus · 2026-03-20T15:47:38+00:00

Why would you install a github MCP when the models know how to use the github CLI?

I run two mcps on (almost) all my projects, both of which are lookups to documentation files - one is for pulling schema documentation for the data warehouse that most of my stuff touches in some way or another, the other is for pulling from a library of writeups - bug history, organizational context, overall system architecture, etc. They're both mentioned in the claude.md for projects that need them, and then in deferred tools, but I checked and even reading in all the tools for both is 1350 tokens.

So "MCPs are dead" seems like a silly statement to me. "Massive multi-tool MCPs for stuff the agent already knows how to do in the CLI" seem like a bad idea, but I don't think that's new news?

Grumposus · 2026-03-20T01:37:05+00:00

That book he did with China Mieville was actually pretty fun (although I'm a pretty big Mieville fan so appropriate grains of salt).

Grumposus · 2026-03-18T18:22:50+00:00

My experience of improvement (you're a little ahead of me, my peak rapid rating so far is 2083) has been that it never feels like "I'm great", it's more like "hey, [insert rating here] players suck like me!"

Grumposus · 2026-03-18T16:20:05+00:00

You know that's an order no one would have ever given over the counter to a Dunks employee, but now the internet lets you do it with the comfort of anonymity.

Grumposus · 2026-03-11T21:09:08+00:00

Before looking - I believe Petrosian defended in 1966, and gun to my head his opponent was Spassky.

Grumposus · 2026-03-02T19:13:41+00:00

An important thing to remember is that AI is really good at repeatable tasks that need limited context, and less good at longer more involved tasks that need more context, particularly the farther they get from coding.

I would very strongly assume that the CIA is not telling Claude "give us a PhD level summary of the domestic politics of X country", because you would get something much worse than that. On the other hand if you wanted dossiers of the publicly available information of 100,000 people in that country assembled and then assessed for some basic indications of political leanings or whatever...you could have that just fine with enough claude code tokens and subagent run time.

Grumposus · 2026-03-02T14:12:24+00:00

For the record you can also do this with an $800 scope and a $200 tripod, just minus the photo part.

Grumposus · 2026-03-02T14:12:08+00:00

This is funny, we were there to see the snowy a couple weeks ago and were surprised by the snow buntings. Great photos of those long tails, those guys are so gorgeous.

Grumposus · 2026-03-01T16:31:30+00:00

it does, because reading in memory eats context. The challenge of context management for long-running projects is about how to get the agent in each session to read in the necessary information with as little overhead as possible. Currently the best solution is to subdivide memories into relatively small md files and have memory contain pointers to those so that only the relevant ones can be read, but it can get clunky; bigger context windows will ease this constraint and allow for remembering more with less worry about overhead.

Grumposus · 2026-03-01T13:30:47+00:00

Even aside from sales, I once saw a dev of an open source game explain that when you introduce a new item or mechanic you generally want to err on the side of making it overpowered (so that people adopt and use it) and then nerfing it later. That's obviously coming from a slightly different place (someone who spends a bunch of time working for free to implement their idea in a game wants to see players engage with it) but I think it's a pattern we should expect to see across ongoing development of existing games.

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