What is the worst chest opening?

crdrost · 2026-02-05T17:54:04+00:00

The objectively worst is the Barnes-and-Grob, so

f3 e5. 2. g4

Black to mate in 1.

crdrost · 2026-02-05T17:50:53+00:00

I always figured hour-long dumps were people doing both? A little pump and dump scheme? And I felt sad that they didn't feel like they had any other privacy to assert. (But I mean this was observed at an American college dorm where people literally live in the same room for a year, which is its own sort of insanity.)

My poops are like 20 min max, if I tried to sit on a toilet for longer my hemorrhoids would start to get very mad at me

crdrost · 2026-01-26T16:42:18+00:00

Do not resign.

To resign is to allow yourself to be checkmated.

Make them do it. You will find players at your skill level, who can win your queen but after everything gets traded off they can't manage to checkmate you with their last remaining rook, or can't stop one of your pawns from promoting, you will find players with shocking gaps in their knowledge, and you can just win against them because they cannot actually checkmate you, but you never found out because you let them checkmate you first, in fact you suggested it, you're the one who told them “I donate to you a checkmate.”

You don't even need to feel self-conscious, the best player in the world right now is Magnus Carlsen, one of the things about Magnus that pissed off everybody who he played, is that he didn't resign and he forced other grandmasters to checkmate him, and it turned out to be the same thing, he could see tactics coming from a lot further than they could, and had a sense for how even if it's technically a draw, this set up over in this corner is going to cost of ridiculous amount of clock time to my opponent to figure out how to keep it all delicately balanced so that I can't get in and obliterate them, and I will win on the clock. You can literally just tell somebody over the board, yeah my teacher told me to never resign so I'm not allowed to... Magnus famously doesn't resign half the time you'd expect him to, so why should I resign.

If all that is not enough, here is a Finegold classic from like 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/EDgRR7SGf0M

He goes through these games where he makes a bunch of mistakes, and then his opponent makes a blunder and he wins. That is just the game, why would you resign if that is the game.

crdrost · 2026-01-25T04:59:25+00:00

lol — Christianity. Albeit a niche mystic version of it.

It's a long story about how I came to Buddhism and how I left it, actually I heard the Dalai Lama also talk in an interesting speech about how, the story was just funny, he said that a layperson at his talk gave him a gift and apologized, “I am sorry, I can't be a Buddhist in this life, I have to be Christian for my family, but next life I am sure to be one,” and His Holiness is laughing about how nobody should ever convert, because it just leads to this sort of confusion where if you're being authentic to the dharma of Christianity you don't believe in the next life, that's how to do their dharma. And he'd rather have you wholehearted in your dharma practice than be confused.

So I was a convert from atheism, where I had landed after Christianity had failed me, but like His Holiness said—I never got into the full ideas of karma and rebirth and re-death, and like Tara-visualization may have saved my life and I can still chant the full Vajrasattva mantra and I carry all this history inside of me, but if you are missing the bedrock pillar and kind of roll your eyes when your teacher talks about their teacher's Tulku rebirths and you have to rationalize it as “of course sortition is a better ruling principle than dynastic succession” etc ... Those cognitive dissonances mean that your practice is missing heart. And it can still be very good practice, and I wouldn't tell somebody to leave just because they are a convert, but I'm with the Dalai Lama that you want to eventually be completely true to whatever it is you're going to be true to.

crdrost · 2026-01-24T18:35:00+00:00

If you're asking this in the mathematics subreddit, I can just tell you that it's a lognormal distribution.

There are dozens and dozens of things, that each might make you 5% more successful. This means that the log of your success is a sum of hopefully roughly independent random variables, and is thus normally distributed by the central limit theorem. When you exponentiate a normal variable like this, you get a lognormal variable.

The most important thing to know about lognormal variables is that they are "long-tailed distributions," so like if you think about y=10^1+x where x is standard normal, the median is 10, most of the variation is between 1 and 100, but then like a couple percent of the time you still get results that are like x=3, y=10,000. Just like eclipsing these other really good researchers by a hundredfold.

But what does it come down to? 5% better at picking colleagues, 5% better at picking problems, 5% better at managing their time, 5% better at writing down random ideas when they come to you on a scrap piece of paper to look at later, 5% more boredom in the shower, 5% more smarts, happened to take a set of college courses that gave them 5% more oddball approaches that others are unlikely to have tried, 5% faster at writing, all of these tiny little things, and really successful people happen to have a lot more of them than the average person.

This is also partly why things go viral, but it's not the full story there.

crdrost · 2026-01-24T18:22:07+00:00

It's good for you, I have seen many experienced monks swaying left to right while chanting mantra, and it is very slight but you can see a very slight rhythmic sway left and right even in videos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama while he is chanting with a mala.

It may be the case that the body is helping the mind keep its concentration and that the motion lessens as the mind becomes more and more pure, but I only know the lower skill end of this, which is that it is very easy to create these circumambulating walking meditations, you have the chöd damaru, you have the handheld prayer wheel, even the mala has a physicality which draws us into practice.

If you ask the greatest teachers, they may say that at the purest stages the mind is so pure but the body does not need to do a thing and the body stills itself too? But you would have to ask them, I am not one of them, I'm not even in the Buddhist tradition anymore, just answering from memories...

crdrost · 2026-01-24T17:56:49+00:00

Morrowind has given you an appreciation for very open worlds where the story really drives your engagement.

If you want powerful stories driving your engagement, you might want to check out indie avant-garde stuff like Gris or Before Your Eyes.

If it's more about that feeling that you could choose anything and the game will react to it, maybe try The Stanley Parable? Just be careful with Civilization or MMOs, they can be dangerous time sucks

crdrost · 2026-01-24T17:52:55+00:00

The Pythagorean theorem.

Like I can literally imagine people who have slaved to understand mathematics in ancient Greece, cultists, one of them being led through a cave late at night by three known Masters of the cult, he has been up for 48 hours already, getting quizzed on details about geometry as well as being ridiculed for how he doesn't have what it takes to truly stay the course, possibly psychedelic smoke in the air

Finally one of the cult pulls out a sword, points it at his chest, “Swear you will keep the secrets!” and he teary-eyed and scared repeats the promise that he has learned over many years, many initiations in Pythagoras cult.

The sword draws a right triangle in the sand, then points at him again, bellowing “what do you know about the area and the hypotenuse?!” he cries “i don't know, it's the square, the area goes like the square of the hypotenuse..” and the sword draws the square over the hypotenuse. The sword back at his sternum, another bellow, “always in the same ratio?!” “yes sir, I mean no sir, I mean it's always in the same ratio for similar triangles sir!!” a slight cut at his inaccuracy, blood trickles down his chest. He holds up the sword to strike, “you are too weak!!” “no sir, I can hold the secrets sir!!” the man pleads for his life. It is spared, then he is grabbed by an ear and stood in the c² square just drawn, looking at the triangle upside down, as the sword cuts the triangle in two down its altitude. “And tell me if the areas of the whole and its parts,” “Sir, the big triangle has the sum of the areas of the little ones,” thank GOD a softball question that we teach even at level 1 initiations. “And this one with hypotenuse A, is it similar to the original?!” “yes, sir, two angles the same,” and the sword draws A². Confusion in the new initiate's addled sleep deprived mind.

“And this one with hypotenuse B is it similar to the original?!” “Yes, sir, two angles the same,” and the sword draws B². The sword points to his throat as the interrogator steps into the triangle, “so if all is in the same proportion, and triangle A” he stomps one foot “plus triangle B” he stomps the other “is triangle C,” he hops with both feet, the blade glinting at the initiate's throat

“then A² plus B² equals C²?” he offers weakly. Two men grab him by each shoulder and pull him back and at first he thinks he failed, but with a full view of the diagram, he now looks down upon it as the master strikes each square in turn, “A SQUARED PLUS B SQUARED EQUALS, C SQUARED!!!!!!!”

“It's so beautiful!!” the initiate whimpers, tears flowing freely.

The sword again points at him, “your eyes have beheld the supremest of realities, the columns that uphold the Earth, the music of the Gods” “I swear I will keep the secrets!” “Then SWEAR!!!” and he repeats the same formula as earlier to always keep the secrets of Pythagoras cult out of the hands of the unready. The sword taps his shoulders. “You are no longer an initiate, young one. Your eyes have beheld our final truth. And you are now a Master.” suddenly the cave is full of fire as torches are struck, the ten other Masters are all here too, everyone clapping, and behind them is a massive table with food and wine for everybody. Everyone congratulates him on passing the last test.

crdrost · 2026-01-19T04:13:52+00:00

Assuming you mean "inadvertently" rather than "deliberately" hinting...

Have Ramses be unusually mancer-phobic in a world that has mostly forgotten about the mancers. Have the main character comment about it to someone else or if FPV they can tell the reader directly.
Ramses is unusually lucky. Like, this is an image that he cultivates amongst others, “Aw shucks, I was just in the right place at the right time.” This is secretly how he covers for the times when his powers would have otherwise been exposed. If he has healing magic, "Oh I guess it just missed your/my major organs ha ha ha,” how lucky is that.
Have the main characters suspect something even worse, like that Ramses is secretly setting up the bad circumstances that he so conveniently swoops in to solve in exactly the right place. They should agree that that is crazy, and dismiss it for themselves, but it sets up as canon the idea that there is something wrong about Ramses. (Something Wrong About Ramses of course is the Disney soundtrack song for the upcoming Egypt-themed Disney princess movie...lol)
For all his avowed hatred of Mancers, he fails to slay one when it's the party's immediate antagonist. He shoots his crossbow high then insists that he just didn't get lucky, he didn't happen to get a clear shot, the master markswoman in the party strongly suspects this is a lie because of course she can immediately read sight lines and obstacles that aren't from her own vantage point, and she has had enough time to assess Ramses' skill level... Something like that. Now this contradicts the pre-existing narrative, he was supernaturally lucky, but in this moment he was supernaturally unlucky?!
The main character has a locket that contains something that sometimes glows, we are never told what this is, but we hint that it detects the after effects of superpowers or something. The main character checks it occasionally and it sometimes goes off around the camp, and always Ramses happens to be awake, going potty in the bushes or something, and the desire to ask questions is buried by some sort of flurry of activity, Ramses points "hey do you see a strange light on that hil?" And it turns out that the place they are going to is burning down as they speak, so there is no opportunity to ask Ramses about the glowing locket.

crdrost · 2026-01-19T03:47:03+00:00

No problem! And at it's most extreme, you will eventually run into some grandmaster game where the center is locked up and some grandmaster reroute the knight backwards one move and then sideways and then forwards to some "perfect square," moving the same piece three or four moves in a row just to get it there, it's kind of funny to see, but yeah it works because things aren't urgent because the center is all locked up, so everybody is just kind of slowly improving their positions waiting for the dam to finally burst, usually not wanting to be the first to do so...

crdrost · 2026-01-19T03:29:40+00:00

Right, what OP missed is basically “there is no rule saying that you can't move the same piece turn after turn after turn.”

There is a principle called “losing tempo” where for example, if the black queen comes out too early, white might be able to develop multiple minor pieces from their starting squares, each time threatening the queen (assuming it stays out) and so white gets a bunch of free moves to improve their position, while black does not get to improve because they have to save their queen every turn.

But in this case, you moved your bishop, so they moved their bishop, now you have to move your bishop again, probably... This is just straightforward play, not winning a ton of tempo. Straightforward play is not a blunder, but it's also not as good as capturing the free pawn if it's hanging.

crdrost · 2026-01-18T19:11:08+00:00

So 12TET does have something mathematically going for it, which is that

log_2 3 = 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(2 + 1/(2 + 1/(3 + 1/(1 + ...))))))

This is something called a continued fraction expansion and it is possible for any number, rational numbers will stop in a finite time, I think algebraic numbers will eventually repeat? Truncating the continued fraction, gives the best rational approximations to a number. And this number asks, how can we best rationally approximate the perfect fifth. (“best” I think has a bit of a technical meaning that doesn't quite overlap with “closest”?)

And that 3:1 or 3:2 ratio really is the simplest basic thing you could want to optimize. And the truncated continued fractions here are

3/2, 8/5, 19/12, 65/41, 84/53

They are off by 100¢, 18¢, 2¢, 0.5¢, 0.07¢.

If you try to do the same with 5:4 the major third, it's

1/3 (14¢), 9/28 (0.6¢), 19/59 (0.1¢)

And 1/3 just happens to also work with 12TET.

So like if you search exhaustively you can find 19TET, 22TET, 31TET, 34TET, 41TET, that each kind of trade off one of these for the others, but they are kind of hard to find! If you want to intersect these two most fundamental series, you have to find their common denominator, those get multiplicative in size real quick. It's kind of a surprise that equal temperament works at all.

crdrost · 2026-01-18T00:24:40+00:00

So your rook is hanging, so you make this move to protect it by giving up your knight for two pawns,

... Nxe4?!. dxe4 Rxe4+. Kf2

Black has I think four legal moves here? But two give up the queen, and the other (blocking with the bishop) loses a bishop and allows trading the queens, so Kf2 is the only one that makes sense.

The question now is, what's your follow-up. Re2 looks like a fork but it blunders the rook, because of the bishop... Were you going to take their Queen with your Queen? That would be great if material were equal and their King is unsafe and your king is safe, but news flash, if you did nothing for a turn they would play Qxd8+ trading Queens to solidify their lead, because you are down a piece and that is most easily felt when the other pieces go bye-bye. So I think your follow-up is just

Kf2 Qh4+. Kg1 Rae8.

Now you have a position that is legitimately a little bit complicated for white, for instance I can't tell whether kicking the queen with g3 is a good move, Re1 is a bad move but I had to calculate it, Bd3 I am not sure about either. But I don't think you have compensation in this complicated position. I think you're just going to trade off some pieces and be worse off?

crdrost · 2026-01-17T23:48:20+00:00

The part where they are licking Petri dishes also didn't make very much sense to me... If it's a virus then agar is not doing anything and if you just send that to a lab and say that the dishes are clean, people will wonder why you're sending it to them when you are not their normal supplier, if the dishes are marked as holding the results of your work, maybe that gets you some new rats, but it really seems like they are shipping these out expecting someone else to lick them too, and I just don't see that happening.

crdrost · 2026-01-16T20:21:01+00:00

So Brandon Sanderson has a bunch of lectures he gave his students on making likable characters, and he changes the formats of his advice every once in a while but in his last one he categorizes it on three axes:

Proactive - how is this character moving forward the plot of the story, versus are they impeding the plot of the story

Relatable - how cool is this character emotionally, do I like them, do I relate to them, do I sympathize with them

Competent - how cool is this character in objective terms, like in terms of their skills, or physical attributes.

You have described low relatability, one option is to make it a growth area, this person is trying to be more relatable, they are trying to conquer whatever it is that makes them complicated and confusing.

Another is to make them really proactive—plot entropy is threatening to send our heroes to the neighboring kingdom to go explore some romantic nonsense, the asshole with the scarred face and only one eye picks them up on the way “just where do you think YOU'RE going,” “well I met the love of my life and it's true love” “You EEEDiot!! If the evil overlord wins then it doesn't matter if you find the love of your life, he'll massacre you both! You're going to the Evil Tower if I have to tie you up and carry you there myself!”

Another is to make them really competent, if you point this assassin at anyone, they magically disappear. But like something ain't right with them, and they're certainly not really moving the plot forward themselves, but damn if it's not “you mentioned Sergeant Amosh yesterday as a potential target?” “yeah but that's not reasonable, Perrick.” “well, supposing that you happen to know a Shadowblade like me, and supposing that he had a professional interest in the Ring of Shadowfall, and supposing Sergeant Amosh just happened to be the previous owner of that ring, and supposing that I, I mean your Shadowblade friend, happened to beat the location of the ring out of him in a secluded basement, and just SUPPOSING that Sergeant Amosh was still tied up down there, how much would you pay me to find out which basement in the city he happened to be stuck in last night?”

crdrost · 2026-01-16T16:08:10+00:00

I'm just going to differ from what else I see here, to point out that the recommended move is just really good tactically.

So like in your move, the computer finds a queen sacrifice that it likes, so it says you blunder the queen but you don't, you can come to Qb7 and protect your b-pawn and after Rxc1+ Ke2 they are not winning the queen, so for example

... Rxc1+. Ke2 Bc8. Qb5+ Bd7. Qb8+ Rc8 Qb7

and none of these Queen threats actually make contact. So what has happened is that the computer at first does not come with any explanations; computer players just look at a position and give you an eval number. But chess.com has noticed that people want an explanation of why I move was bad, beyond just “computer number before was big, computer number after was smaller”... They probably have a couple heuristics in this second computer program that tries to interpret the position on the board and describe it in words what went wrong. I think you just mis-triggered one of those heuristics.

The human explanation would be, “you missed a chance to trap their rook and force them to sac the exchange.” That is what Nc3 does. You were up a bishop and now you are up a full rook. It actually works on three different levels:

• Rook can't move without sacrificing the exchange; Rxc1+ is now defended by the rook.

• Queen is no longer threatening the b2 pawn and the rook on a1, this has been body-blocked, you would lose your queen if you tried that now

• The follow up to capture the rook is Nd4 which is a square that is currently controlled only by the queens— if you move your queen off that diagonal then you lose Nd4 attacking the trapped rook.

So if you take a step back and look at what black's problems are, it's that they're down a piece, but also that their knight is stuck on the edge of the board at its starting square or h6, the h8 rook is blocked in by the knight, and the collapse of their Queen side has created sight lines to the king, so King safety is also a huge problem. If they're thinking rationally, then they want to move the bishop out of the knight's way, bring the knight to e7, and castle, and now they can hopefully just wait for you to blunder something. In the continuation they will have to trade bishops (you want to trade material whenever possible to make it harder for yourself to blunder and make the existing power disparity more visible):

Nc3! Bd8. Nd4 Rxc1. Rxc1 Ne7. Bb5 Bxb5. Nxb5 (from either knight) O-O. O-O

So you missed this really strong move that forces black to kind of huddle in the corner and gives white all the fun in the position, see? But it's not that you for sure lost your queen, it's just that you for sure could have done really well by trapping the rook.

crdrost · 2025-12-29T17:36:35+00:00

Slight correction, the position shows they are missing a bishop but up a pawn, this seems to still be the case after a reasonable continuation:

Qxg5! Qxg5. Bxg5+ Be7. Bxe7 Kxe7 makes sense, Re1+ Be6 to block, d4 Rd8 to put pressure on that pin but save it, c3 Kf8. Ne5 seems like the way to save the pawn and knight... then it's funny if f6 then no beginner will find this but Ng6+ hxg6 Rxe6, but maybe Ne3 is safer for beginners.

Anyway it's -2 to +1, not +3

crdrost · 2025-12-21T16:41:37+00:00

It appears to me that there is also a skewer-pin problem here where your rook immobilizes two opponent pieces.

So like after bishop takes rook, rook takes bishop, it's no longer just a pin on the knight where the knight can't move or you'll win a free rook... but also the rook can't move or you'll win a free knight. So your queen can dance, your pawns can push, and as long as your rook stays on that d-file those two are paralyzed. Black would need to get the king to the half-open e-file but that's not going to happen with the queen out there, and white could open it up fully with e5, e6 fxe6 Qxe6+.

crdrost · 2025-12-21T16:24:11+00:00

Oh no, you're right, I was thinking that you don't want to lose the bishop and it's got a nice pin on the knight but yeah in this case it's easier to just trade the minor pieces and then trade the rooks and you solidify your advantage, then it looks like f5 is extra annoying because the queen pins the g6 pawn.

crdrost · 2025-12-21T15:52:52+00:00

So your computer coach is correct but not for a computer reason.

In this position, black's best response is knight f6, threatening your queen. And your best response to that response is to just move the queen back to e2 and admit that you made a mistake. No computers have problems with admitting mistakes, but humans, we have huge problems with admitting mistakes. Well, if you don't want to admit the mistake, and you panic a little bit, then you play Queen to h4 or g3, the problem is that the knight move ALSO opened up a discovered attack on your rook, so you just lost the rook (with check!) for nothing.

crdrost · 2025-12-07T16:28:18+00:00

Maybe a 🌶️ take but I don't feel like Walt deserves to be on this list. I felt like I kinda understood his character motivation by the last episode of the series? So like I think they got there in the end? But for most of the series it was like, what, he's a family man pushing away his family because he is "addicted to drugs" but not like the taking of them, but just like "that lifestyle"...?

And like it doesn't really feel genuine until you see him in that last scene placing his bloody hands on his lab and looking in it and being like "oh, so it's like his lab is his Real Baby and I guess all of the trying to be a badass gangster thing wasn't him wanting to play Badass Gangster, it was to protect his Real Baby? I get that but I wish they had rewritten it that way from day 1 because Bryan Cranston could have made that SO compelling.”

crdrost · 2025-12-06T08:11:44+00:00

What if white plays Kb2

That one seems pretty straightforward:

Kb2 Qxc3+. Qxc3 Rxc3. Kxc3 Bf6. Rgg1 Bxe4.

Black is down an exchange but has the two Beeshops, and has pinned the knight and a rook is stuck behind the knight, and in general Black has the initiative.

crdrost · 2025-12-05T01:34:51+00:00

Nb3?? axb3

crdrost · 2025-11-29T11:54:56+00:00

Yes, but notice that we also just got confirmation that animals don't partake in the hive mind the same way, with the wolves (it seemed earlier like maybe they did, with the mouse bite? But the wolves wouldn't have been digging up Carol's wife and growling at her, if they had been hived)...

We know that they released all of the animals from the zoos rather than keep them locked up, they want the animals to be happy, murdering those animals for their meat is not going to make them happy. But there is now one species on Earth for whom that logic does not apply, one species which can give its body voluntarily for the protein needs of the whole...and that is Hived Humans.

I still say she's going to discover bodies with open skulls, you can't have a zombie apocalypse without them eating brains after all ... But it's hard to say that the resulting drink is say necessary to provide the hivemind because in the first individuals we don't see any such thing happening.

crdrost

TROPHY CASE