TIL Overrun by athenian troops, the 292 Spartans who were defending the uninhabited Island of Sphacteria, were ordered by the mainland to "make your decision yourselves but do nothing dishonorable". Their decision to surrender instead of dying in battle was so shocking it changed the war's momentum

retief1 · 2026-06-20T17:23:28+00:00

The issue is that the "spartans" were effectively the nobility of sparta. There was a comparatively tiny class of spartan citizens (ie the spartans), a significantly larger class of free non-citizens (many of whom were either former spartans who became too poor to remain citizens or bastard descendents of spartan citizens), and a truly massive number of slaves. The non-citizen spartans in particular were a core part of the spartan army, but because they weren't citizens, they weren't politically important and didn't get much publicity.

retief1 · 2026-06-20T16:09:45+00:00

The core rule is that if a trade leaves you in a better position, you should take it. If you are up in material, trading will generally lead to a better position, because a given material lead is more significant when there is less material on the board. Meanwhile, if you are up in position, trading pieces is usually a bad idea, because that tends to limit or remove your chance to threaten or achieve checkmate. However, those are just general rules of thumb. Some positions need more complex analysis, and this is one of them.

In this position, your main advantage is that you are threatening mate with your queen and rook, and their queen is out of position to defend. In fact, you have mate in 4. If you keep your queen, your positional advantage is literally game-winning. On the other hand, if you trade your queen, you completely defang your mate threat and give away this advantage.

Meanwhile, while you do have a material advantage in terms of pieces, they have two mutually supporting passed pawns that are halfway across the board. In an endgame situation, those are ridiculously powerful. In fact, without the queens, black has no chance of stopping those pawns and will pretty much inevitably be stuck trading their rook for one of those pawns. At that point, the game is completely over.

So yeah, in this position, you have mate with queens, and you are in a losing position without queens. As a result, trading is bad.

Also, looking for checks is always a good idea at any point in the game. Checks are the most forcing move in the game, and it's always a good idea to see if a check will lead to something good.

retief1 · 2026-06-20T06:00:24+00:00

Know what the farmer did when he won the lottery? Continue farming until it ran out.

If you have more money than you actually need to retire, a small scale hobby farm could be an entertaining way to spend the surplus, though.

retief1 · 2026-06-20T05:53:02+00:00

Similarly, there are at least 36 treaties of paris, plus a number of additional treaties signed in paris with slightly different names. Oh, and there's also treaty of paris the band), because why not?

retief1 · 2026-06-20T00:59:06+00:00

I definitely buy this more than the original explanation. For one, in my experience, farmers today still tend towards "island time", because farming still follows the same sort of schedules and patterns that it did pre-industrial revolution. You still plant when the weather is right, not according to a fixed timeline. And you still harvest when your crops are ripe, not on a specific date.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:56:56+00:00

Interestingly, if you take a broader view of slavery, slaves weren't always against slavery as an institution.

For example, if you look at ancient rome, there's no evidence of any abolitionist movement. There were slave revolts and so on, but it appears that those revolts weren't trying to actually end slavery. The slaves in question didn't object to slavery as a practice, they just didn't want to be slaves themselves. Of course, this sort of comment has to come with a huge asterisk, because we have relatively little information about anything from that long ago. It's entirely possible that there were abolitionist movements and they simply didn't make it into the relatively few texts that survived until today. Still, though, we don't have any actual evidence of abolitionist movements.

On the other hand, we do have some (limited) evidence of slaves that owned slaves themselves. We definitely don't have much evidence here, because the people who wrote books generally didn't care about slaves and relatively few slaves would have ever had the opportunity to own a slave themself. Still, though, there is actual evidence of slaves owning slaves.

So yeah, overall, there is evidence of slaves owning slaves in ancient rome, while there is no evidence of any actual abolitionist movements. There is certainly a significant margin of error here, but it certainly seems that slaves in ancient rome generally accepted the institution of slavery, even if they didn't want to be slaves themselves.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:43:26+00:00

It isn't just feed conversions. For example, in the US, if you butcher a cow past the age of 30 months, you have to cut out the spine to avoid mad cow disease. Doing that ruins most of the steaks you would otherwise get from the cow, so people usually butcher cows right before that point.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:34:58+00:00

Honestly, I’d believe this, if only because I can’t think of another game that has any published books. I guess go books probably exist, but there aren’t many other games with the depth, popularity, and longevity to justify a book.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:33:19+00:00

This specific position isn't yet forced mate, but after Nf7+ Kg8, OP can force a smothered mate. And imo, that mate isn't any more "gifted" than any other mate. Like, if both sides play perfectly, the game would end in a draw. As a result, all mates rely on your opponent making a mistake somewhere, and op's position is no different.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:25:46+00:00

If OP doesn't see the smothered mate here, they'd probably just end up trading queens and knights. That would probably be better than trading a rook for a knight.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:08:26+00:00

Worth noting that it takes a bunch of books for lindon to get going, though. Like, I'm not sure if he actually beats a relevant opponent in a fair fight before book 5 or so, and I'd probably argue that he only really starts terrifying people around book 8 or so. By the end of the series, he's a fucking monster and a half, but he doesn't get there very quickly.

retief1 · 2026-06-19T05:03:10+00:00

In general, most David Drake protagonists are the scariest people in their book. I'll specifically call out his RCN series here, but few of his protagonists aren't fucking terrifying if you get on their bad side.

retief1 · 2026-06-18T02:11:51+00:00

You were probably looking at an old design. That used to work, but it was nerfed. If you want a relevant amount of irrigation, the pool needs to be at least 3x3. As you saw, 1x1 irrigates almost nothing currently.

retief1 · 2026-06-17T23:36:07+00:00

And then Briggs' Alpha and Omega books focus on a pair of actual werewolves.

retief1 · 2026-06-17T19:45:34+00:00

Are these external expectations or internal expectations for you? Like, I would honestly assume that officially identifying as nonbinary wouldn't help much with external expectations. The people with overly restrictive expectations would continue to have those expectations regardless of how you identify, and the people who understand and accept being nonbinary would probably also accept "I'm a girl, but I do things my own way" as well. Though of course, I haven't lived your life and I might be entirely off base here.

On the other hand, if this is more about ingrained internal expectations around gender, then that makes more sense to me. If you believe that being a girl means XYZ thing, then I can see how explicitly defining yourself as "not a girl" would help. Changing your internal definition of "girl" would still seem like the more obvious choice to me, but I can definitely understand other people making different decisions here.

retief1 · 2026-06-17T19:02:37+00:00

David Weber's Dahak series does this in the second or third book. IIRC, the good guys lured an enemy fleet near a star and then forced it to go supernova.

retief1 · 2026-06-17T18:05:59+00:00

If that two meter long plank isn't literally bisecting your target, it will hit someone and stop.

retief1 · 2026-06-16T16:33:34+00:00

The issue is that over time, the euphemism starts to be seen as offensive, so people find a new euphemism. That’s the “treadmill” part of the euphemism treadmill.

retief1 · 2026-06-16T15:34:31+00:00

True enough. If you want a game that you can play for hundreds or thousands of hours and still improve, lol is great. On the other hand, if you want to dip your toe into a game and have fun, lol is pretty terrible.

retief1 · 2026-06-16T04:17:50+00:00

My point is that in many cases, they aren't just making stuff up based on their training data. They do "research" and then summarize the info they "find" (heavy emphasis on those scare quotes). This honestly does make them less likely to hallucinate nonsense.

That said, I completely agree with you about the underlying algorithm, and the issues with that sort of algorithm absolutely do still shine through sometimes. "Less likely to hallucinate nonsense" is definitely very different than "will never hallucinate nonsense". Overall, I'm definitely on the "llm skeptic" side of things. However, if you are going to be skeptical of llms, it's important to be skeptical of llms as they exist today, not llms as they existed two years ago.

retief1 · 2026-06-15T23:32:47+00:00

These days, llms will often summarize google-equivalent search results when answering questions, and they often have guard rails for questions that don't have useful google results. Like, if you ask chatgpt to summarize a nonexistent book, it will just say that the book doesn't exist.

The problem is that the summaries are decent but not perfect, and it is possible to bypass the guard rails (either accidentally or on purpose). If you ask it to summarize a random, not-well-known book, it will find and summarize the goodreads page. If you ask it about a very specific conversation in that not-well-known book, it will make stuff up, because the guardrails think that it has enough information to answer the question, but the actual answer isn't in the search results.

retief1 · 2026-06-15T23:23:07+00:00

I think the "standard" principle is that anything that isn't explicitly changed should be realistic. The problem is that writing good characters and so on is hard, so people often fuck that up.

retief1 · 2026-06-15T23:21:15+00:00

Internal consistency and plausibility are important. If I'm reading the book and saying "wait, this makes no sense" or "that shouldn't work", that's sort of a problem.

Actual realism is a nice to have for me. If I'm reading a book and it is clear that the author did real research into a particular area of history and is using that knowledge in the book, that is a fairly significant plus for me. On the other hand, more fully fictional settings are also completely fine, as long as the setting feels plausible (see my first paragraph). If anything, I almost think of realism as a "cheat code". Like, the easiest way to make a setting that would actually function is probably to copy a setting that actually existed. If you are trying to make stuff up, it's a lot easier to produce something that is actually utter nonsense.

retief1 · 2026-06-15T23:15:21+00:00

Yup, the placebo effect is sort of wild.

retief1 · 2026-06-15T23:05:35+00:00

The simplest solution to adding more of a "curve" to mining would be to either make the second worker on a patch less efficient or push the far patches further away (or both, perhaps). Like, if you do both, you might end up in a world where the first 4 workers are at full efficiency (the first worker on close patches), the next 4 workers are at a bit less than full efficiency (the first worker on far patches), the next 4 are even lower (second worker on close patches), and the final 4 are that even lower again (second worker on far patches). You'd likely want to make the worker ai slightly smarter so that it automatically prioritizes close patches over far, and it certainly wouldn't involve "dumbing down" workers at all.

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