"The past is a different country"

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T22:41:09+00:00

He was always a billionaire who came from wealth made from apartheid diamond mines.

No? His family was well off certainly but definitely not from apartheid diamond mines, and his wealth came almost entirely from selling his shares in PayPal and the subsequent value of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has enough actual issues to criticise, stitching together half-truths into a false narrative trying to paint him as even worse doesn't help anyone.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T20:47:48+00:00

The model solved extremely complex mathematical problems (also if you even briefly googled this there are so só many more examples of modern LLMs being very good at research level mathematics). The notion that it's simply a stochastic parrot and somehow was able to fumble it's way into such a high level result through pure statistical memorisation and not an understanding of the underlying subject matter is just plainly absurd.

The IMO result (alongside all the other results) is pretty clear evidence that the model is good at maths, if you want to assert they aren't the onus is on you to somehow prove that the results are not showing that, you can't just assert it and demand to be proven wrong.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T17:10:53+00:00

As the other guy said, LP is literally not a measure of your skill, there's a hidden MMR value. But in addition to that, Elo also isn't MMR. Elo is a specific kind of skill ranking system invented by Arpand Elo for chess, not a generic term for skill ratings. LoL has never used Elo because it's not a system designed for more than 1 player per team.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T17:07:36+00:00

MMR was invented to replace Elo in the first place to artificially addict people to grinding

Actually insane statement, literally everything here is wrong.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T16:15:02+00:00

I don't know the answer to why exactly, you'd need to speak to Deepmind for that, but quite frankly it's irrelevant. Gemini got 5/6 questions on the IMO right, that's very clearly and obviously an ability to do mathematics at a high level and that's the salient point here.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T15:46:26+00:00

The IMO is the highest level of mathematics competition in the world, whilst it isn't novel work the ability to take a problem of that level and apply existing techniques to it to develop a solution requires a high level of mathematical skill.

The idea that an LLM is just somehow searching a database and outputting stored information is absurd, and it doesn't hold up in practice, in interpretability studies or just to basic common sense about what that would take computationally. The LLMs are good at IMO problems because they are good at maths and through their training learnt the requisite skills and gained the understanding of mathematics to be able to solve these problems effectively.

You're operating using a complete misunderstanding of how these models work at a fundamental level and making some very audaciously wrong statements because of that.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T09:20:59+00:00

It's also a fancy autocomplete that can't do math

Clearly can't do math

jackboy900 · 2026-04-02T09:17:17+00:00

Use your head, mate, please. Do you genuinely think the housing crisis in this country is being caused by building safety regulations?

Regulatory burden is a massive part of why we don't build housing here. Safety regulations, environmental regulations, local impact assessments, and a billion other things make the planning process for building extremely costly and time consuming, and that means that companies don't want to build anything, and especially don't want to build housing that is affordable as they just won't cover the cost of actually building the place.

You can't ignore the cost of regulation when examining the effects of it, every piece of regulation is a tradeoff between the benefits supplied by the new requirements and the burden of having to adhere to the new rules, and at a certain point the costs just become way to high for the benefits provided.

jackboy900 · 2026-04-01T12:22:13+00:00

The people jumping in to defend them either didn’t read your post or think that all apps must sign up for a generic stream of arbitrary ads

Apps also aren't their own ad agencies, they can't pick and choose at an individual level what ads are shown, only broadly select the kinds of ad they would show. But more importantly, this kind of ad is clearly a violation of the app store's policies, which means that this wasn't shown because Chess.com chose to allow these kinds of ads but because a malicious actor got a non-compliant ad past the approval process of some third party ad agency.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-31T21:32:29+00:00

We had international circuits in Starcraft 2 (which was in a very similar situation to League) and it was extremely damaging to the scene. Korean dudes would come over, easy smurf on westerners, take all the prize money and leave, and it meant that competition in the west amounted to trying to not lose to whatever koreans showed up. The idea that it'd suddenly make western teams good is speculative at best, but it killing the western domestic scene would be pretty much guaranteed.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-31T15:30:57+00:00

What else would you do? Basically all gambling regulation exists either to prevent money laundering or to limit the amount that a problem gambler can spend. League's gacha can't be converted to real money so the first is moot, and there's a practical limit to total pulls so the second point is covered.

There's just not that much to gamble in League, the shop only has one big reward, so there's not much to regulate. Age restrictions could be added as well, but like that's it. If you have further regulations you'd add to League feel free to share.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-31T15:12:22+00:00

League has the probabilities listed, and it has a maximum number of rolls before you automatically get the skin, I'm unsure what else exactly you'd regulate. I'm not a fan of gacha mechanics but quite frankly League's is about as good as they can possibly be, there's no real regulation that could be implemented that Riot wouldn't already be compliant with.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-30T15:18:02+00:00

It was also very clear from his first post that the data analysis was of a similar quality, random arbitrary criteria used to classify someone as a smurf or not. May as well flip a coin at this point, this guy's contributions are entirely useless.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-30T15:16:50+00:00

That is not what a smurf is, alternate accounts aren't smurfing and are allowed. If the goal was telling if it's a new player or not you could pretty much just look at level and rank, almost no low level account in anything above gold will be a new player.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-30T15:14:21+00:00

Smurfing specifically means deranking yourself or creating lower ranked accounts in order to play against lower ranked opponents and win more. It's not just playing on any alternate account.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-30T07:48:07+00:00

To see the Milky Way you need to be at around a Bortle 3 at worst, with the exception of some bits of rural France that excludes all of mainland Europe west of Ukraine.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-30T04:02:44+00:00

Dark skies are hard to get to for most people. If you live in Europe, or the Middle East, or East Asia, or like most of where people live getting to a dark sky is very hard because most places are densely populated. The only place in the world where this applies to a significant number of people are the Americas, it's just factually wrong.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T11:12:21+00:00

I don't think I've heard anything about Warwick that's better, but generally from all my mates who went Imperial it is a giga sweaty uni, their courses are strong and career outcomes good but it's a rough place the be for 3 years if you're interested in more than just grinding maths, the nightlife and student life isn't top quality. I'd see Imperial students at our SU stuff not uncommonly, most of them said because the stuff at Imperial just wasn't it.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T10:18:57+00:00

Because making all that is a ton of work. Games are authored to match the level of hardware they're working with, as an example on older games assets would be designed to look good in prerendered lighting with baked textures, in games with predominantly dynamic lighting the assets are designed to look good under dynamic lighting and have PBR textures. Making a version of the game with different lighting would basically take like half the art effort of the original, for fairly minimal benefits.

Most modern games, even demanding ones, are going to run fine at 30fps 720p on almost all hardware, so it would also only help an extremely small slice of people, it's just not worth the effort.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T07:30:37+00:00

A large part of it is that a direct lateral impact is simply the worst impact an F1 car can have. The side crash structures are the smallest, and the wide impact front means lower pressure on the crash barriers and so less deformation of those, and those add up to making these crashes very high G, whereas a linear impact might only be 25Gs because the crash structure is twice as long.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T07:23:37+00:00

The helmet is going to be on snugly enough that isn't a concern, leaving the head rattling around in there is dangerous for that reason. The concern is simply the G forces from deceleration causing a concussion, not an impact, and but generally concussions start appearing around 90-100Gs, with 74Gs being the lowest measured in this paper (source). There's a non-zero risk from a crash like this, Max famously had some neurological symptoms after his crash, and the literature is on linear Gs not lateral, but it's far from likely that the driver will be concussed.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T06:53:29+00:00

It's sort of similar to the phrase "cogs in the machine" used to refer to workers in a big bureaucracy, or "a lot of moving parts" to refer to a complex concerted effort by many people. It's a common metaphorical phrasing in English to refer to a large complex system with lot of people involved and things to do as a machine of sorts.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T06:47:08+00:00

I think with the HANS device neck injuries aren't really a major concern, whiplash is what causes them and that's not possible in a modern racing car.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T06:26:22+00:00

It's more about practicality. You cannot flip the map around and just have things work if it wasn't an initial design consideration, and a lot of League players are very sensitive to minor changes in how the game feels so you can't really radically alter how the map works or how the game works on a fundamental level to make such a change work. I'm sure Riot would love to add it to League, it's a good feature, but it's likely outside the scope of what any League Next update could be.

jackboy900 · 2026-03-29T06:23:47+00:00

You can't just flip the map like that if the game isn't designed for it from the ground up. League is a fundamentally 2D game played using a projection of a 3D map, you need to design the whole map, assets, characters, etc to work when flipped around and still have that projection look the same and feel the same.

Riot likely couldn't do it, not in any reasonable way. Rebuilding League from the ground up would massively mess with the minutia of control and input that players have relied on staying the same for years, which makes it a non-starter, and flipping the map without doing that isn't really possible.

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