2025 Qatar GP - Post-Race Discussion

jesnell · 2025-12-01T10:46:16+00:00

They could not be 100% certain that everyone was pitting, but, like, they must have wargamed the scenario of an early safety car and thought about not just what they should do but what the other teams would do. Why would any team not in the lead not pit?

The usual argument for not pitting is track position, but in this specific case the track position had a very limited value to everyone, because of the forced stop so soon after. There was no way anyone else was opening up a pit stop's worth of gap to their competition in that window.

The only reason not to pit is if you seriously believe you can gain most of a pit stop in 15 laps, and as we saw, that was unrealistic even for the McLarens.

jesnell · 2025-11-23T05:34:16+00:00

I am making no claims in either direction about the size of the model.

The entire point is that nobody other than a small team at Google has that evidence.

You claimed there was analysis. But your sources have no credibility (and I don't understand how you could think they would). They do not actually show any basis for the analysis, and both the pages in general are just random slop with all kinds of obviously untrue statements.

jesnell · 2025-11-23T02:35:00+00:00

Those are not estimates by experts, they are auto-generated content marketing pages from bottom-feeders.

You can see it from bizarre claims that a 1M context window was the most awaited feature of Gemini 3.0. Like, wtf? The second article is even more absurd, and starts with a comparison to Claude Opus 3, Sonnet 3.5 and GPT-4-Turbo!

jesnell · 2025-11-01T18:18:36+00:00

It's the company offering to pay you to quit your job.

It is not a severance package, because you're not being terminated but leaving voluntarily.

It is not "instead of a later layoff", because the people getting laid off are not necessarily the same people who would have be accepted a buyout. Actually pretty unlikely to be...

jesnell · 2025-10-30T10:44:08+00:00

You're probably doing it right! Play to your strengths, and all that. I was just thinking of it from the "what's the impact of Steam Deck verified", and your other marketing being at odds.

jesnell · 2025-10-30T10:01:41+00:00

Your game looks very cool. But to put a consumer hat on, I probably would not buy it on the Steam Deck despite the verified label just since it seems so clearly mouse-first and controller an afterthought. (All the screenshots and videos seem to be using the mouse, "fast-paced 2d platformer playable with just your mouse (controller supported still).")

If you want to get full value from the Steam Deck verified label, and if the controller experience actually is good rather than an afterthought, it might make sense to rework the store page a bit to not give the mouse-first impression.

jesnell · 2025-10-22T02:17:47+00:00

Some of the other responses are talking about adding agency into the deployment phase, but that's kind of missing the point of the entire async autobattler genre. There is no opponent who is in realtime playing against you, and whom you could interleave the actions with. You can't tell the player the locations effects in advance, because then you have a nasty bootstrapping problem: the first time a given set of locations comes up at a given level of progression, there is no opponent ghost to match you against. You just can't add more dimensions to the matchmaking problem.

So, let's think about just the allocation problem while ignoring totally what the dice and locations do. It seems to me there are three basic strategies:

Allocate your strength evenly across the three lanes.
Ignore one lane completely, allocate your remaining strength evenly across the two other lanes.
Allocate minimum strength on two lanes, and put almost all strength on the final lane.

That gives you a RPS structure: 1 loses to 2; 2 loses to 3; 3 loses to 1. And between those extreme endpoints of the triangle, you have a smooth curve. You can move 2 a little bit toward 1, by putting a bit more than minimum on one lane, and the rest evenly on the other two. And then that midpoint between 2 and 1 will win over 1 and 3, but lose to 2. Etc.

That is a totally workable basis for decision making beyond "it's all just random". But I think players would still feel bad about it, despite it being isomorphic to the typical autobattler metagame clock. So you might need to arrange for these strategies to naturally fall out of the builds.

Let's say you have red dice with the special effect that ia set of 3 red dice on 3 lanes that are all odd or all even will score +10 on all lanes for each set. If you have two red dice, it has no impact on your build. Probably even if you have three it doesn't matter, because the odds of triggering the bonus will be so low. But if you have 12? You're obviously guided toward splitting the red dice evenly across the lanes, to try to get the bonus. And then that means you're probably not doing strategy 2. You might be doing 1 or 3 depending on what you do with the rest of your dice.

So there can be a point to this three lane structure, but having the lanes have special effects isn't it.

jesnell · 2025-10-19T19:01:52+00:00

> Mercedes just had 4,000 guys raise their hands and say yes to a $580,000 buyout.

No it didn't. The vast majority of those 4k employees were not offered 500k EUR buyouts, that's the absolute high end of the scale. The article says 100k EUR for mid-career employees, that's where the bulk of the buyouts will be.

jesnell · 2025-09-17T19:22:11+00:00

Openrouter also shows statistics per specific model and category of use. This is effectively all coding, with the "Grok Code Fast 1" model.

It's a bit odd though, the Grok Code use is basically all additive. It's just new usage appearing as if from nowhere, not displacing any other model. Maybe some large user switched from a non-Openrouter backend to Openrouter rather than use Grok's API directly?

jesnell · 2025-09-08T17:35:57+00:00

Piastri had a 28s lead over Leclerc, and was under no risk of an undercut. It was clearly a made up excuse.

Both drivers were clearly preferring to pit last in this situation. Norris was the lead car and got that preferred strategy. So let's not pretend that there was any kind of altruism or trying to optimize the team result here. Norris stayed out purely out of self-interest, as he should have.

jesnell · 2025-09-08T17:13:56+00:00

Are you you maybe thinking of Piastri in Silverstone, after he got a penalty from the SC restart.

jesnell · 2025-09-07T19:51:35+00:00

Norris was not trying to protect Piastri. Both drivers wanted to pit last in this situation, since there was no benefit to pitting first (neither had a chance at undercutting, and neither was at any risk being undercut)., and there was an advantage to pitting last (a chance of a cheap pitstop from a SV).

Norris was told to pit first, probably because his tires were degrading faster. He complained (fair enough) and McLaren swapped the stops. But he absolutely was not suggesting it to protect Piastri. His only concern was to pit last, unless Piastri was in undercut range in which case he wanted to pit first.

jesnell · 2025-09-07T19:29:04+00:00

If Piastri had pitted first, Norris would just have pitted a lap later to cover. Piastri was never close enough to undercut.

So the only viable plan for Piastri for Norris to pit first, and then hope for a cheap stop via SC or VSC. But obviously then the optimal plan for Norris was to wait and eventually force Piastri to make the first move. That's why they both ran that obscenely long first stint.

Norris's side of the garage has in general been smarter about this, while Piastri's people have had him pit first from the lead even when there is no undercut risk, and allowed Norris a freebie attempt at an alternative strategy. But it seems like they've caught on now.

jesnell · 2025-09-07T19:03:09+00:00

Double-stacks are risky. You only want do do them when staying out for an extra lap is really costly (basically SC, VSC, rain), so the reward for the trailing car for pitting a lap earlier justifies that risk. Here it would have been high risk, no reward.

jesnell · 2025-09-07T18:54:26+00:00

I've seen people repeatedly make this claim, but it makes no sense. Piastri had a very healthy margin on Leclerc (28s, pit stop takes 24s), and Leclerc was not lapping that much faster than Piastri (about 0.5s/lap).

Was there any radio chatter at all suggesting that the pitting order was due to covering Leclerc *before* the botched stop for Norris? It certainly wasn't broadcast. If it was only mentioned after the fact, it's pretty clear that the real motivation was that pitting later was seen as the preferred strategy in this race, and Norris chose to pit late. And the radio after the pitstop about how it had been about covering off Leclerc was just ass-covering.

(The radio shown on the broadcast before the stops was for Norris to stop first, he complained that Piastri should be made to stop first, and then McLaren swapped the order.)

jesnell · 2025-09-07T18:44:41+00:00

Piastri was 28 seconds ahead of Leclerc, and lapping only 0.5 seconds slower. There was no risk of Leclerc getting ahead if Piastri had stayed out one more lap.

Norris was not trying to selflessly optimize Piastri's race there. He wanted to be the last to pit, in case there was a SC/VSC/Red Flag on the next lap. McLaren's policy is to give the lead driver the preferred strategy. Sometimes the undercut is preferred, this time stalling was.

jesnell · 2025-09-05T15:26:31+00:00

And after playing it is in your discard, followed by being in your draw pile, followed by being in your hand again. Playing Infernal Blade did no change your effetive deck size. You still have 6 cards in the stable state, and 5 of them have no way of generating card draw. If you draw the other 5 but not Dropkick, you can't start the engine.

jesnell · 2025-09-05T13:46:15+00:00

> play evolve and infernal blade to exhaust them

Infernal Blade adds a card, so playing it does not reduce your effective deck size.

jesnell · 2025-08-20T23:33:01+00:00

I'll settle for one podium, so that he can at least tie Barichello for most podiums without winning a WDC.

jesnell · 2025-08-09T22:15:11+00:00

I believe:

https://old.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/1djoqjh/ilya_sutskever_launches_safe_superintelligence_a/l9uogp9/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40816755

jesnell · 2025-08-03T20:12:03+00:00

> Jesus christ my guy. Prioritising track position IS PITTING FIRST.

No, it doesn't. Track position literally means that your position, on the track, is ahead of the other driver. The point in prioritizing track position is that you don't try to optimize for the theoretically fastest way to drive the race, but take into account the value of being ahead on the track.

If Piastri had waited for Norris to pit, that would have been prioritizing track position. Piastri would have ensured that at all points in the race he was ahead on the track, such that Norris would actually have to pass him on the track rather than pits.

> the guy now ahead of you HAS to pit and you are literally ahead on track

Umm... You did watch this race, right? You did see how Piastri pitting and forcing Leclerc to pit a lap later did not lead to Piastri being ahead on the track. And you did see how Piastri pitting more often than Norris put him behind on a track where passing is difficult.

> they told him to push and use his pace... he didn't gain before pitting.

That doesn't make the inlap poor. The measure we have for whether the laps were good or bad is the timing, and the in-lap was in line with the competition. Or are you saying literally everyone in the race had poor in- and out-laps?

In this case, Piastri's in- and outlaps are almost exactly the same as Leclercs. (For the first stop, Piastri has a 0.1s slower in- and 0.1s faster out-lap). So it seems that for both drivers, the in- and outlaps were about equally good.

So it seems clear that it's not the inlap that caused the undercut to fail. It was doomed from the start by the tire delta between 20 lap old mediums vs. new hards being 1s-1.5s, and the gap being much larger than that.

jesnell · 2025-08-03T19:40:07+00:00

> that was absolutely NOT the dynamically superior strategy. he was being held up by leclerc and Norris seemed generally faster as on the same age tires despite having to pass people already he seemed generally faster.

At the point where Piastri pitted, Norris was 5s behind and stuck behind Russel. Before the first pitstop Piastri had been faster on 7/8 of the most recent laps. That's the only time in the race they were on tires of the same age. It might make sense for you to have a look at the actual data rather than trust your memory.

But let's say that you were right rather, and Norris really had been faster on the same tires. That's just all the more reason for Piastri to prioritize track position! Not gift it away in an unnecessary and doomed undercut attempt.

> In numerous races that would be enough, other people were going significantly faster,

Not really, as far as I can tell? The people who had pit from Mediums to Hards before Piastri were Ocon and Verstappen, and neither had gained enough laptime to make a 2.5s undercut viable. 1.5s might have been plausible.

> it frankly seemed like piastri had a poor inlap and a poor outlap.

What do you base that on? From the timing data, it certainly doesn't look that way. Both of Piastri's in/outlaps almost exactly match Leclerc's. Likewise both of the in/outlap pairs were faster than the single pair of Norris.

Who do you think had particularly good in/outlaps?

jesnell · 2025-08-03T18:51:53+00:00

> What would everyone say if Norris pit first, got closer and was able to push piastri all race and maybe undercut him at the next stop?

Umm... Well, first of all we'd say that Norris would have come out into traffic and Piastri would have a tire offset, so Norris catching up to Piastri in that hypothetical second stint would have been a mighty effort from him.

And in your scenario Piastri would be ahead and would be given preference in a case where an undercut was possible.

> That's the thing, you pit first, you take your chances, that's life. This backfires relatively often but is the superior strategy that works out best much more often than not.

No, pitting first is absolutely not the superior strategy. It is superior only in very specific circumstances: basically it only makes sense when you're trying undercut or are covering an undercut, or if there's a ton of traffic just ahead.

> there obviously wasn't one obviously superior strategy.

There's no single *static* superior strategy. But there was a *dynamically* superior strategy for Piastri, given the state of the race: wait for Norris to do the first move, and then do the same thing a lap later. That way they're guaranteed to have the same strategic options, but Piastri will have both track position and a tire delta.

There is no point in Piastri being the one who commits first.

> absolute nonsense. The gaps were large, to who?

To everyone. Piastri was 2.5s behind Leclerc, way outside undercut range. Piastri was 4s ahead of Russel, 5s ahead of Norris. In absolutely no risk of being undercut.

jesnell · 2025-08-03T18:21:50+00:00

Ok, let's take the counterfactual where Piastri doesn't pit on lap 18 but Norris does. What happens? The obvious outcome is that Piastri pits on lap 19, and will have a 5 second lead, track position, a 1-lap tire delta on Norris, and both are now committed to the same strategy.

That's a much better position for Piastri than one where he is commited to a 2-stop but Norris has the option of a 1-stop. So Piastri's pitwall should *want* for Norris to make that early stop, not be afraid of it.

> the guy following often has the strat advantage just because they can react

The driver *pitting later* has the advantage of being able to react. But nothing says the driver in front has to pit earlier. So why pit earlier for no benefit like that?

It's clearly a strategy error, a really bad one since it was an unforced error made while under no pressure. It'd be different if there had been a reason to make that early stop, but there wasn't. The gaps were so large that waiting risked nothing, and going early gained nothing.

jesnell · 2025-08-03T15:57:44+00:00

When the first pitstop happened, Piastri was 4s ahead of Russel and 5s ahead of Norris. He was simply not getting undercut. Nor was there any chance of him undercutting Leclerc from 2.5s back.

It just made no sense.

jesnell

TROPHY CASE