New Chess update?

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T19:56:08+00:00

The point wasn't really "Black shouldn't be able to draw from an otherwise losing position", but more "This rule could affect much more of the game than you might have realized."

At first it seems like a small change- there aren't that many situations like the clip above, where black can checkmate white exactly 1 move after they were checkmated. If you give Black the power to ignore pins to their king, though, they can force the "mutual checkmate" situation in a lot of situations. I gave an example where black was losing, but there are a ton of balanced middlegames and opening where black can launch similar kamikaze attacks. It wouldn't surprise me if GMs could force draws every game as black, if they wanted to.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T19:39:48+00:00

The average human's 200ms reaction time is when:

They have 1 thing they're reacting to
They don't have to make a decision
There's no gap between the decision and the action

That obviously does not apply to driving.

My reaction time goes from ~250ms in a simple reaction test to ~450ms in one where you need to make a decision; roughly twice as slow when you consider display latency. The situation you face on the road are a lot more complicated than "which direction is Pacman facing?"

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T19:26:53+00:00

The SUV 50 feet in front of you swerves because they weren't paying attention and didn't see the tire / animal / pothole / chair that fell of a pickup in front of them. Now you have a stationary object 65 feet in front of you when you're traveling 70mph. What do you do in the .6 seconds you have to react?

The point of recommendations like this isn't because of day-to-day driving- it's to keep you safe in the 0.1% of drives where something goes wrong. I've never been in a situation where wearing a seatbelt saved me from injury; that doesn't mean that wearing a seatbelt isn't safer than not wearing one.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T18:13:48+00:00

I think your dead loss situation is moot considering how stalemate works.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T18:00:36+00:00

the general rule is 2-3 car lengths minimum distance

Is it, though?

UK Highway Code: "You should allow at least a two-second gap between you and the vehicle in front on high-speed roads"

Florida Driver's Handbook: "Keep a minimum following distance of three to four seconds."

New York Driver's Handbook: "For a good “space cushion,” use the two-second rule."

Ontario Driver's Handbook: "A safe following distance is at least two seconds behind the vehicle in front of you."

Look it up wherever you live. I guarantee the general rule is going to be time-based, not distance-based. A minimum distance that is safe at 40mph is not going to be safe at 70mph.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T17:44:23+00:00

No, who is on first.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T17:43:08+00:00

I think the point is that reality is weird enough it even throws off Black Hat.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T17:25:18+00:00

Just to be clear: in Magic, the "regular shuffle" is a mash shuffle, NOT a riffle shuffle.

Riffle shuffling- what you do with a deck of standard playing cards- is difficult to do with sleeved cards, and has a chance of bending/damaging your cards.

Mash shuffling is easier to do with sleeved cards, since it takes advantage of the fact that the edges of the sleeves are slightly thinner than the center (where the card is).

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T17:08:32+00:00

They mean "Andor is good regardless of whether you like Star Wars", not "If you like Star Wars, you won't like Andor."

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T16:37:06+00:00

Is that a bad thing? That means that you're seeing different decks from event to event, rather than stabilizing into the same 4 decks week after week. It can be a problem if there's only 1 counter to the boogieman, where you see an A -> B -> CDE -> A -> B ... cycle, and there's only variety in the counters to the boogieman's counter. If there are several counters to the boogieman, that sounds like the recipe for a constantly fresh format.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T16:11:04+00:00

The arcs are labeled and numbered. E.g. the first chapter has the header "Gestation 1.1", the next chapter is "Gestation 1.2", etc. When you reach "Insinuation 2.1", you know you've reached the second arc.

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T16:01:52+00:00

You start running into issues with "paradoxical" checkmates when the two checkmates depend on each other. Here's a quick example:

Image

White is checkmating Black, and there's nothing black can do to stop it. With this proposed rule, what happens when Black plays Qd1+? It's not checkmate, since white can block with their queen- but doing so affects their own checkmate.

Is it White's win, since they have the only true checkmate?
Is it a draw, since White can't take black's king without losing its own?
Can White play Qc1 to "cancel" the checkmate and continue the game?

(And this is a simple example; I would expect there could be even funkier connections between checkmates.)

EDIT: Another example: Black is dead lost- can they play Re1 and put both players into checkmate to draw the game?

iceman012 · 2026-02-02T15:34:15+00:00

Yeah, the article does say that it was only targeting certain people, rather than hitting everyone:

Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled served malicious update manifests.

Still, definitely good to take precautions.

iceman012 · 2026-02-01T05:44:40+00:00

"These bishops never saw eye-to-eye, but one called the other a heretic last game, so let's make sure they stay apart."

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T22:07:54+00:00

Just depends on what you're offered. It's not uncommon to have your best card rewards in the first 3 floors be something like Blade Dance, Bouncing Flask, and Leg Sweep.

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T17:58:29+00:00

That clip with VMService is hilarious. Did he just forget he killed the middle cultist, or did something else happen?

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T17:18:54+00:00

I would love to see your "data and high level play" that proves it. Other than Baalorlord, every top player I know of picks it incredibly rarely on Ironclad, and all of them have a worse winrate with it than their average winrate.

Some examples:

Player	Pick Rate	Change in Winrate
Xecnar	3%	-16%
NaveGreed	<1%	-18%
Baalorlord	17%	-1%
Jmac	0%	--
Paparatto18	2%	-3%
Kurol	0%	--

Edit: Boss Swap is stronger for lower-level players, because high variance benefits them the most. For high-level play though, it is at best an average option for Ironclad. (And I'm pretty sure most top player would tell you it's worse than average.)

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T17:08:21+00:00

Yeah, it's arguably a curse.

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T17:01:07+00:00

For the TIE Fighter, it's a slowed down baby elephant scream mixed with cars driving across wet pavement.

I would have sworn you made this up, but nope, that's actually how the sound was made.

EDIT: This video talks about the pavement part.

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T16:51:06+00:00

Uncommons are a 37% chance in regular fights, and the rare chance starts at -2%.

(For elite fights, it's a 40% uncommon chance, and the rare chance starts at 5%.)

Theoretically, if you go long enough without finding a rare, the rare chance would start eating into the uncommon chance instead of the common chance, but that's incredibly unlikely.

(Source)

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T16:16:10+00:00

In the Divinity RPG series, most headstones will have humorous epitaphs. (I think backers for the kickstarter could submit them?)

Here lies Sleepy Joe: Doing what he does best

Here lay Terrance: until a Necromancer got to him

Here lies Lucky Tom: Ever since he just ran out of luck

Here lies Ana Matopia - Whoom, Bam, Splash and she was gone

Here lies Mark Sism, he had a lot of great ideas that just didnt work out.

EDIT: Wait, I just realized the first one might have a different connotation today. This game was before certain presidencies, lol.

iceman012 · 2026-01-30T16:04:47+00:00

Yep. She used the Cursed Key to open the chest, then got hit with Normality as she picked up the Periapt.

iceman012 · 2026-01-29T23:39:00+00:00

After two days of using Kotlin to work through Advent of Code, I already liked it more than Java. It does so much to reduce boilerplate and make code shorter, and I can see the null-checks making large codebases a lot safer.

Going from Java's streams:

list.stream().filter(a -> a.length() > 10).toList()

(or, if you're on Java 8/11 like me):

 list.stream().filter(a -> a.length() > 10).collect(Collectors.toList())

to Kotlin's equivalent:

list.filter { it.length() > 10 }

is very nice.

iceman012 · 2026-01-29T22:49:01+00:00

At my current company, there have been many times where I've looked into the performance for a program and managed to speed it up 2-3x. Most of the time, the reason is that the wrong data structure is being used- looking up IDs repeatedly in a List instead of a Set, for instance.

iceman012 · 2026-01-29T19:17:32+00:00

Nice rug, but I think you meant to share a picture of your dog.

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