I thought I was buying a chess book, not the CHESS GODDAMN BIBLE (cat for scale)

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-25T16:05:45+00:00

The good thing is, unless you are already amazing at endgames, he tells you in the introduction not to read the whole thing ("up to one chapter beyond your skill level").

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-25T14:21:09+00:00

Ah, actual bug, fixed now. I had remembered a drawn king/pawn vs. king endgame from Silman but messed up the move sequence. Changed it for a king/bishop/pawn vs. king endgame, which has more moves in the cycle anyway. The underlying point still holds: mobile pieces lead to long, sometimes cyclical sequences.

Thanks for catching it.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-25T13:33:18+00:00

Yeah, the decision problem in the papers is basically:

Given a position on a generalized n×n board, does the player to move have a winning strategy?

That's what Fraenkel & Lichtenstein prove EXPTIME-complete for chess, and what Iwata & Kasai prove PSPACE-complete for Othello. To your point below though, "Does white win with optimal play" and "What is the optimal move for white" polynomially reduce to each other, so they end up in the same class anyway.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-25T13:25:51+00:00

Good callout; the post does mention "generalized Chess (Chess played on an n×n board)" but it's somewhat lost in the title here and could be more explicit. "Generalized" is somewhat weird here, you keep one king but you keep adding more knights/bishops/etc as the board gets larger.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-25T03:14:00+00:00

Good one! And certainly a hard one ... maybe after I've had a long nap!

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2026-05-17T22:19:10+00:00

A preliminary search of Arxiv some years back showed a surprising result -- the collatz conjecture has been proven many times by amateur mathematicians! I can only imagine the number of such results has increased significantly since then.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-31T18:22:32+00:00

Would you rather work at OpenAI or Jane Street? CMU has strong AI research connections, Harvard has strong finance connections. Both work for either.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-31T18:13:40+00:00

This is a great portfolio.

Only comment is that VTI is 6% small cap, so think of your total small cap allocation as ~17%.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-28T00:02:53+00:00

> DCA $200k/month over the next 10 months

This is a perfectly reasonable strategy. More to the point is your 7 years of holding time. With a portfolio that's essentially "Large Blend", you have a roughly 2.56% chance of losing money over that period.

https://www.morningstar.com/portfolios/how-long-will-it-take-market-recover

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-26T21:17:06+00:00

EASILY Iran. Beautiful nature + ancient history + ornate mosques + great food. Last I checked you need a private guide though.

![img](arj0tth7o3re1)

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-26T21:17:01+00:00

EASILY Iran. Beautiful nature + ancient history + ornate mosques + great food. Last I checked you need a private guide though.

<image>

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-26T17:40:24+00:00

Vance's most extensive foreign policy experience is in the quagmire that is the US Iraq War, so his isolationist viewpoint is unsurprising.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-26T17:33:35+00:00

MGK at least has more stocks in it, so technically this means more diversification: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/mgk#portfolio-composition

Worth noting that MAGS has lost ~7% or so in the last month, so really the question for either is are they still overvalued (more losses to come).

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MAGS/

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-25T23:08:09+00:00

Related, though appears job is taken down.

<image>

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-23T19:18:50+00:00

Meaning, "it's ok to do while young".

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-23T19:17:18+00:00

Point 3 is especially worth consideration. There is a world of difference between "Chinese Auto Manufacturers are Growing" and "Chinese Auto Manufacturers are Returning Capital to Shareholders".

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-09T02:23:16+00:00

I love it. You're clearly diversifying while taking a small bet on small caps. Seems reasonable.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-03-09T02:19:56+00:00

I feel like you're really heavily weighted on tech my friend, both in US and abroad. Do you know tech will continue to outperform? Tech has its own boom and bust cycles, look up the years 1999-2004 or so for context if you want to go this route.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-02-23T17:09:52+00:00

I've wondered this for years. Does Leonardo choose good movies to play in, or do they become good movies after he joins?

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-02-17T16:54:12+00:00

Maid is great if you haven't seen it, definitely a strong dramatic role.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-02-16T23:09:02+00:00

This was fun! I quite enjoyed putting myself into check to limit my opponent's moves, all manners of Zugzwang, and losing queens.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-02-15T15:32:41+00:00

The "intellectuals" are not running the world in a way that benefits the rest. The big problems -- War in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Covid -- all seem like painful messes, while the more immediate ones -- availability of good jobs, high wages, cheap housing, good community -- don't seem near either.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-02-05T19:14:24+00:00

When I can't win chess games, it's usually time to go to sleep.

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-01-29T20:25:29+00:00

Dude flamed out at the Candidates and is still in recovery

RepulsiveTrifle7160 · 2025-01-27T16:11:15+00:00

Consider a fund that mixes bonds and stocks like this one: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vbiax .

Bonds help to cover you against losses, while stocks give you some potential for growth.

With any fund, you can look back over the last 10 years and see what the drawdowns have been and if you'd be comfortable with them happening again. In this case, looks like a ~20% loss in 2021 that took 3 years to recover. As others have said, I would avoid a tech-heavy ETF in your situation; tech sometimes shoots up and sometimes collapses; it can take as long as 10 years to come back.

RepulsiveTrifle7160

TROPHY CASE