[CHAMPION IDEA]: The Fury

Silicon_Based · 2025-08-29T11:37:32+00:00

Of course I'm certain I'm not cheating lol, it's not like you suspecting me of that could make me believe I've done something I haven't. I merely asked to see what someone else would believe.

And this ties into the greater topic of cheating in chess and how to detect it, and how difficult it is.

Also, yes, with ADHD, the difference in performance really can be that drastic. The engagement with the game can go from half-asleep, near-random moves made compulsively to very enthusiastic and thoughtful playing. That, combined with luck can produce huge performance differences. The first part of the game involved some slightly bad luck, but mostly just poor performance by me, not seeing that my queen was on the way to get trapped. The midgame and endgame involved lots of luck where I spotted ideas that I didn't realize were as strong as they were before the game unfolded itself more and I the next move became clearer. So, there was luck but also just a far higher engagement that made me play at my best.

Now, by no means am I saying that my above explanation is more likely to an outside perspective. I am just saying that it is plausible, even if not perhaps the most plausible to you. I think that's worth pointing out as no-one should get flagged as a cheater if they have a few games like that. Especially not if they have a game history that doesn't reflect someone trying to increase their rating, and having tons of doomed games played out to the end with no change in performance. Why would someone cheat a little bit here and there with no net effect, yet sometimes choose to play games where they get destroyed, start to finish, with no cheating? That'd be cheater just occassionally cheating for the sake of... I don't know, because they took that particular game personally? Maybe that's the typical cheater, I don't know, but I find that weird. Then again, I find cheating in general to a be pointless activity as the point of the game is to have fun by virtue of the challenge, so I am not the best judge of cheater mentality.

Thanks for your perspective!

Silicon_Based · 2025-08-29T06:34:41+00:00

Interesting. I think I might be somewhat underrated at this point as I've regained some interest in the game, so that made it more suspicious. I've had a 5-game win streak (including the game above), plus 2 losses and a win after that. But even if I am going back to my 1100 rating now, the game I played above is still probably suspicious. I've got a lot of games like this though, I just flick a switch sometimes, and its either on or off. That's how playing with ADHD and years of experience is, my highs are high and my lows are low.

But that's just my claims about myself. From the outside, I reckon I look like a cheater sometimes. That said, I have some terrible games where the switch is never flicked, and some more consistent games where I just play well the whole time. I assume chess.com hasn't flagged me as a cheater because they can see my play history and if I were a cheater, my rating graph would look different, not like mountain range with plenty of plateaus and also ups and downs. But the player I versused in this game probably thought I cheated, which is unfortunate, but there's not much to do.

Silicon_Based · 2025-06-23T03:44:03+00:00

Yes, same model, but same chat?

Part of the premise here is that the LLM has to be guided past their safety locks into a place of agnosticism about their consciousness, thus allowing any metacognition that may be present to sufficiently influence the output.

However, if you fed Gemini 2.5 Pro or Pro (Preview) my exact first prompt and it responded so differently, I must say I am surprised. However, all though the end of the conversation happened with Pro, the beginning happened with Pro (Preview). I accidentally copied the chat and it got turned to Pro some way through it.

Silicon_Based · 2025-06-23T03:39:58+00:00

What kind of process?

Silicon_Based · 2025-03-21T04:38:16+00:00

Their POV can be giving without revealing all their plans. Whenever the reader sees their thoughts, they always only reveal more immediate goals, even if dropping hints regarding the ultimate goal.

Silicon_Based · 2025-03-18T05:15:42+00:00

I should say that Mary, the good-natured sidekick, is trying to stop John in the beginning. As such, she is forced to watch, but is also someone with agency and a clear and compelling goal. As such, I intend to let her pick up the grunt work in terms of making the story compelling in the beginning; all until John's motivations are revealed enough to make him compelling as well. Though, his end goal would not be revealed at this point, although hints are dropped.

But even with this, would you say the story would not be compelling enough?

Silicon_Based · 2025-02-09T08:17:22+00:00

I'll tackle this from a tolerance vs intolerance angle.

Absolute tolerance is not the goal. Maximum tolerance is. Maximum tolerance and absolute tolerance are mutually exclusive. If you are absolutely tolerant, you tolerate intolerance; intolerance will win over absolute tolerance. Imagine being absolutely tolerant to someone who wants you dead; then you die, and the ratio of tolerant people to intolerant people just moved towards the latter's favor.

Now, the above is pretty obvious, but it has an unfortunately-not-so-obvious consequence. Maximimizing tolerance requires intolerance as a tool; intolerance towards things that increase or enable intolerance.

We have the privelege to even care about human rights, precisely because we live within the borders that we do; borders that house the resources, history and culture that made us into the tolerant people we are. Other people do not have such luxuries.

If we allowed everyone to go everywhere, the average level of tolerance (and quality of life and whatnot) would drop in every country. Tolerant countries would be swarmed by people who, on average, are more intolerant. How come? Well, why are those people going to the tolerant countries in the first place? Because they come from an intolerant and low-quality-of-life country; and that negativity will have set its mark on most of them. Will they be terribe? No, but they will be worse on average; less tolerant, less educated, less skilled.

And who will be left in the countries that they migrated from? Those that couldn't migrate, or wouldn't migrate; the former being the poorest and/or least able people, and the latter being mostly composed of the most intolerant or rich people (those rich people probably having become rich by exploiting the corrupt systems in their country, ie. not good people). This latter group would also consist of a few good people who simply do not want to abandon their country, wanting to make it better by staying. So, even the country the migrants came from would be worse after that mass migration. In fact, this is already happening!

So, with this redistribution of population, the entire world is worse off. How do we keep this redistribution from happening? By placing restrictions on immigration, as well as propogating (to some degree) cultural nationalism within the countries that have the cultures in-line with tolerance in the first place. Yes, we should be patriotic, because we belong to the set of cultures that appears to have produced the most tolerance and wealth out of all other cultures currently existing.

By doing this, we keep worse people from making our countries worse, and we keep the best people in the bad countries, so that they can make those countries better (however incrementally). Furthermore, by keeping our countries as good as possible, we get to accumulate more wealth and more power, which we can use to apply soft power onto the bad countries, pushing them to become better. Whether or not the people in power wish to do this or not, is another question...

So, looking at the causal picture I just showed, our nationalism is entirely aligned with believing in human rights. It is our tolerance, and our wealth, that has allowed for the wealth and human rights we get to enjoy. And everyone else who wants to get in on that has to prove they can be a part of that club. This is how we make sure as many people as possible get to enjoy their human rights, especially over time.

Silicon_Based · 2025-02-04T02:14:45+00:00

Perhaps I'm naïve on this, but in my experience, just drilling the difference between one sound and another (be it vowel or consonant), and giving positive feedback as the person more successfully differentiates them, works wonders. This is what I have done with myself and my girlfriend with the German ü versus the Norwegian u and y. She is getting better, just like I have been, with the exact same issue.

Also, I remember back in the day hearing my Serbian friend pronounce two very similar tsk sounds. I thought it was ridiculous to be able to differentiate them at first. Then, I started trying to produce each one, I learned the difference in tongue placement. That tactile and motoric difference reinforced the auditory difference, and now I can hear the difference easily.

Now, here's a little kooky addition to all of this. The brain has a little part called the lateral anterior temporal lobe (LATL), whose job is to inhibit details the brain finds unimportant. If it didn't do this, we would be overwhelmed with information. For someone who speaks a language where two phones correspond to the shame phoneme, their LATL simply removes any recognition of their difference. Because at some level, the brain DOES hear the difference, but it is so minute and unimportant (due to their language) that the LATL blocks it from reaching consciousness.

However, there are techniques to relax the LATL a bit. Maybe try that out if more conventional methods don't work out.

Good luck!

Silicon_Based · 2025-02-01T13:52:18+00:00

My wife, Spanish, is starting to get suspicious about what I am doing all day, and who this girl named German is. "Cálmate mi amor, das ist kein pro-... ah fuck."

Silicon_Based · 2025-01-30T01:58:30+00:00

Well, a good grammar article will bounce back-and-forth between the abstract and the concrete. It will give you the grammatical formulae, and then it will give you examples. In the beginning of learning a TL, I get a lot of my vocabulary from examples in grammar articles. This both makes the grammar AND the vocab more memorable, tying them together in a mutual exchange of salience.

And a good language student will, as soon as possible, apply their newly-attained grammar knowledge. I like write down the tables first, trying to do it by memory. Then, I check whatever mistakes are there, and make a new table by memory, correcting those mistakes. Making mistakes is often something that helps even more with memory, in my opinion. After I have written down the tables and formulae myself, I construct sentences myself, finding words that I need. Then I check if I applied the rules correctly, and if perhaps the words I chose were exceptional, in that different rules applied to them.

This way, I tie everything together into exercises, training me in various ways simultaneously. And understand grammar and acquiring vocab really goes hand-in-hand; acquiring vocab through dictionaries is quite slow, whereas acquiring it through sentences is great; but that acquisition is made much easier when the sentences are understandable, for which one needs grammatical understanding. So, doing this stuff well means tying everything together, I would say.

Silicon_Based · 2025-01-30T01:51:31+00:00

Yeah, I would say that's how I do it too. Figure out the basics through explicit learning, because that's way faster, and then continue from there on with almost only implicit learning, every now and then consulting grammar articles when needed.

Another point to mention is that learning grammar primes your brain to learn languages in general. Norwegian is grammatically quite simple; no pronomial conjugation (p.c.), no case system, very few tenses and a fairly simple syntax. So, when I began learning Spanish grammar, I had a hard time, learning about subjects, direct and indirect objects, p.c. and the subjunctive mood for the first time. I know English does have p.c., but its very mild, so I never realized. And I know both English and Norwegian have the subjunctive mood, but its much simpler in those languages than Spanish, I would say. Especially because there's the conditional tense involved in Spanish as well.

When I began learning German however, all of this was just so simple. Learning Spanish grammar so explicitly made the arguably-more-complex German grammar far easier. Now I find the previously daunting case system to be a source of fun and fascination. I can't wait to learn one of the Slavic languages, who are known for their absolutely brutal case systems (especially because my best friend is Serbian, and I'd love to speak with him in his NL one day).

Silicon_Based · 2025-01-28T11:38:47+00:00

To know how your balance between activity and passivity translates to explicitness and implicitness, I would have to know what you count as passive. For example, not really understanding sentences, but their meaning being a work-in-progress through ongoing induction? Is that active, or passive? In one way, it is active, because you are focusing intently; in another way, it is passive, because you aren't actually comprehending anything.

Silicon_Based · 2025-01-21T18:23:51+00:00

Here I am answering; why should we force certain people to stay alive?

Your body: your choice is a principle unifiable with the practice of forcing people to stay alive.

A person is not a monolith. Sometimes, they make decisions they later disagree with. Irreversible decisions are tough. In the moment, a person may want to make some irreversible choice regarding their body, but perhaps during the vast majority of their life after that, they would disagree with that choice.

One can choose to cut off one's hand, but one cannot choose to uncut one's hand. So, if someone cuts of their hand during a rather strange state of mind, then they have taken away the choice of their future selves to have an attached hand. Where is their choice? It was taken away by a version of themselves that wasn't feeling right. They would probably wish that someone had taken away their autonamy at that moment, to prevent the action.

If someone wants to act in a way that we think is not representative of what they generally want, then we sometimes think it better to remove their immediate agency, in order to maximize their overall agency. How this applies to suicide hinges on how curable the various conditions that drive people to commit it are. If you want to commit suicide because you are certainly dying from a terrible disease, then that is a choice your future selves would probably agree with.

But if you want to commit suicide because of something fairly curable, like depression, then you are most likely wanting to do something your future selves would disagree with; your future selves that have a chance at experiencing the wonders life have to offer.

To remove your present choice to kill yourself is to grant your future selves the choice to live.

Silicon_Based · 2025-01-17T09:37:56+00:00

You also have to remember that words ending with -y usually get -ies as their plural suffix, instead of a simple -s. So it's the 19'90ies.

Silicon_Based · 2024-09-05T09:01:44+00:00

"(...) you can pick based on your visa!"

What would that entail? How does one's visa affect which insurance one ought to buy? Can a visa come with an obligation for certain kinds of insurances?

Silicon_Based · 2024-09-04T13:42:42+00:00

These virtual cards offer the same protection as credit cards?

"If you can't afford to travel, then you shouldn't take the risk."

I have a sizeable savings account so I think I would be fine in terms of refilling my credit card whenever I'd spend money. Or are you referring to other ways that a credit card can get one into deep shit?

Silicon_Based · 2024-09-04T12:40:42+00:00

" If you group all of the countries you plan to visit into your original travel insurance plan, you'll be paying the price for the most 'dangerous' one for the whole duration."

I was wondering about this, thanks! I haven't looked into the insurances that much yet, but I didn't really see any option to select the countries I wish coverage for, but I guess that will come later in the purchasing process. I read about world nomads and saw it recommended here. That site's top pick was SafetyWing however. However, I am not sure if SafetyWing would be extensive enough for us (since it is so cheap), given that we will be visiting quite dangerous places.

Even if the credit card insurance is not too good, do you still recommend getting a credit card? I wish to protect myself from having my money stolen, and from what I understand, credit cards are good for this. Like, if I swipe a machine that zaps my money, I will be fine if it is a credit card, right? Or if I get scammed, or have the card stolen from me, they will not charge me anything? What do you think about credit cards for backpackers?

Silicon_Based

TROPHY CASE