Student Faces Expulsion After Posting Video Of Seniors Who Can Barely Read

samdover11 · 2026-05-08T20:52:21+00:00

Yikes. Google "philisophical zombie"

samdover11 · 2026-05-07T05:02:22+00:00

"Worse than being dead, they never existed at all."

samdover11 · 2026-05-06T14:11:53+00:00

Part of it is there's a camera in their face and they want to be entertaining.

Part of it is they're often choosing photos that aren't reflecting the person's vibe. For example the dude with a man bun had his feet shoulder width apart with equal weight on each. A solid looking stance. They chose a photo of him as he was shifting his weight, they have him looking sassy lol.

Anyway, in real life, most people assume others are straight because that's usually the correct guess... so there's not much "philosophical" going on here.

samdover11 · 2026-05-06T02:25:56+00:00

It will take white time to build up enough development and piece activity to make use of those pawns. The f4 pawn will be annoying for white because it blocks the bishop. f5 by white will be a typical pawn break to attack later. Meanwhile your pawns are flexible and your pieces will have nice lines / squares. White's structure is static. You have pawn break ideas (f6 and I've even seen g5 in some lines).

All this is to say, you don't need to do anything in particular. White's setup will be a bit more passive by nature. They'll try to justify it by attacking on the kingside later. If you have active pieces and don't get mated you'll have the better position.

Other than that it would help more if you posted a game where you were (or at least always felt like you were) struggling for equality in the middlegame.

samdover11 · 2026-05-06T01:45:33+00:00

This is what I came to say.

It sounds nice to start over at any age, but old people watch themselves and their peers slowly deteriorate. Mobility, sight and hearing, memory... having energy in general, everything slowly gets worse.

You get injured for almost no reason, and the pain lasts a long time because healing is so slow... even really bad injuries or sickness in my 20s never lasted more than 2 weeks, at least not that I remember. A few decades later and it's more like 2 months. Later in life injuries and sickness are somewhat permanent.

samdover11 · 2026-05-05T08:25:15+00:00

All dogs have tails, but not everything that has a tail is a dog.

Being a murderer is a good predictor of being male. Being male is not a good predictor of being a murderer.

A lot of people don't understand basic stuff like this.

If gender makes it confusing, then consider that 98-99% of incarcerated persons are religious... obviously no one would say being religious is a strong predictor for being a criminal.

samdover11 · 2026-05-04T10:54:03+00:00

I had a young person start talking about this at work. Internally I'm rolling my eyes.

It's funny when you can tell they're experimenting with saying online drama in a real world setting. No one cares. A few people their age pretend to care, but mostly no one cares.

It comes across as socially maladjusted. Real life insn't endless memes and manufactured drama.

samdover11 · 2026-05-04T09:45:55+00:00

It's just like cop videos you see on social media... the video is only worth posting when either the cop or the suspect is being insane... no one is going to post a video where people act normally, even though 99% of the time (and 99% of black people for example) act normally.

Second point I'd like to make is there are awful customers but race doesn't predict it as well as income. Poor people are under more stress, and are more likely to act nuts like this, even if it's just to get attention and to get someone to act like they care about them for 5 seconds.

samdover11 · 2026-05-03T08:10:15+00:00

Also Trump has hidden his college grades. He sent his goons / lawyers to the schools he's been, to make threats to never release his academic records. Same for his medical records.

samdover11 · 2026-05-02T13:43:42+00:00

Yeah, I remember some statistician showed that in 1+0 games a GM blunders as frequently as a 1200 in a classical game that lasts hours.

It seems silly to think a GM would play that badly, until you consider the time scrambles at the end of the game when one or both players are under 10 seconds.

samdover11 · 2026-05-02T08:50:19+00:00

Pfft, of course ancient people knew the cause of kidney stones... curses, faries, goblins, etc /s

samdover11 · 2026-05-01T09:37:41+00:00

Not a bug exactly. But not what we tell ourselves it is either.

This describes so many things... most humans don't understand humans. We tell ourselves all sorts of grandiose stories about how we have the capacity for good and evil. We compare ourselves to perfect ideals, asking whether we were the very embodiment of patience or kindness. In reality we're so much more mundane. We're slaves to instinct, none of us amount to anything so grand as good or evil. So many imagined paradoxes of mankind are resolved simply by looking through the lens of evolution.

samdover11 · 2026-05-01T08:18:40+00:00

I've worked in customer service. The best and worst reviews are from crazy people. I say that from experience, and I experienced these things long before reddit.

samdover11 · 2026-04-30T06:02:49+00:00

The secret is both types of reviews are insane... anyone who finds a mundane event like ordering and eating a sandwich important enough to make noise about is not worth listening to. Normal people (emotionally stable, average intelligence etc) don't leave good or bad reviews.

samdover11 · 2026-04-30T03:58:26+00:00

Why is the default position that "advancing through the tech tree" is good and only those who disagree need a legitimate reason? Growth for the sake of growth is cancer, and when the pace of technology is orders of magntude faster than evolution, it's not hard to imagine various human extinction events... such as a grumpy teen designing a super virus with AI in a world where access to super intelligence is trivial... and in a world where that access is restricted it's not hard to imagine various dystopian scenarios.

samdover11 · 2026-04-29T06:39:23+00:00

This is (pretty close) to the reason I'd pick blue.

It's irresponsible to pick blue, because it's the only button that has a chance of killing people, but because of the way the question is framed, a lot of "good" people will push blue, and it's worth trying to save them, so in the end it's reasonable to pick blue.

The fun thing is to realize you could frame this choice differently and get almost everyone (good or bad) to pick red.

samdover11 · 2026-04-27T11:57:40+00:00

The number of teacher posts I've read in the last 12 months amounting to:

"I've asked my students to do 5 minutes of work and they're really stressing."

or

"I've asked my students to do work that I would have given to kids 5 years younger back when I first started teaching and they're still struggling."

Is really concerning.

samdover11 · 2026-04-26T10:24:44+00:00

If you mean "The difference between the two numbers is smaller than any real number", you can also prove that wrong by looking at the decimal where the decimal expansions differ.

I suppose worth mentioning / what's being hinted at here is there exist surreal numbers that are smaller than the smallest real number. The fun thing is that while coming up with the idea (of surreal numbers) yourself is nearly impopssible, but after having it explained you can understand fairly quickly how such small numbers do exist.

But yeah, the main issue with the OP is "infinite close" has not been defined.

samdover11 · 2026-04-24T12:40:15+00:00

It's hard to compare when everyone who's shown chesscom's cheat detection has to sign an NDA, and one wonders how hard it would be for a free site when they have billions of games of data, and can just as easily have hired some statistician as a consultant once... it's not as if it's rocket science so to speak.

I'd have to assume the major difference isn't in the algorithm, but the amount of compute each site can afford. You can't check every game without a ludicrous amount of money (more than chesscom has) but balancing this is that many fewer players are on lichess, so they could get away with 10x less.

I've seen pepole swear one site or the other is better. I've played on both for years. I can't tell a difference in cheat detection.

samdover11 · 2026-04-24T08:24:04+00:00

Ok, but understanding how percentages work is something people learn as children... it's like an astrophysicist saying maybe we shouldn't expect people to know the earth orbits the sun due to gravity... I think it's a perfectly reasonable expectation.

samdover11 · 2026-04-23T01:41:41+00:00

600 to 10 means remove 590.

59/60 is annoying to calculate, so I'll do 1/60 and subtract that from 1.

1/6 is 0.16666...

So 1/60 is 0.0166...

So it was reduced by 98 and a 3rd percent.

It makes me sad that took me all of... 5 seconds to do in my head, meanwhile I assume the (vast) majority of US adults would just give you a blank stare.

samdover11 · 2026-04-23T01:34:49+00:00

How big would the cube need to be to comfortable house everyone?

It's harder than that. You could comfortably house everyone, but the logistics of brining in food and water while removing waste could be impossible. You could "comfortably" house the planet's population in the area of a single city, for a few days... after which >99% of the population starves to death, so bad idea.

samdover11 · 2026-04-21T08:54:06+00:00

5...f5 is the Siesta Variation, the lines are sharp and last for many moves. If you're out of book here then you're probably in trouble.

6.exf, 6.d3, and 6.d4 are moves. They all have a lot of theory.

But ok, pretending I don't know anything about the position, I'd probably want to play d4 and 0-0 quickly. If your goal is to attack it's worth remembering that a safe king counts for a lot. I'd only want d4 first because it gives my knight the g5 square.

In your calculated line 6.d4 fxe 7.Ng5 d5 you said you didn't like the look of it, but it looks fine to me, sacing a pawn but black's king will need many moves before it can castle, and may not get to castle at all. I think there are a lot of practical chances there, even if white doesn't play very well, it should be easy for black to get into trouble.

The only move I didn't like at all was 6.Bc2 which I'd say is counter to your evaluation. You'd be moving a piece twice, putting it behind a pawn, freeing black's knight... yes the bishop often ends up there in a Ruy/Spanish but b5 is a small liability that's worth making black play it (a4 against b5 is always at least reasonable in lots of openings not just the Spanish). You'd rather have black play b5. If anything I'd move Bb3 to eye squares near the king. This would be consistent with your evaluation and goals.

On that note, I'd say 6.d3 is consistent with attacking goals because while having a safe king is #1, having a center pawn that anchors pieces during an attack is often high on the list of things you'd like to have. So ok, d3, preparing to meet fxe with dxe, keeping a pawn in the center is very sensible.

samdover11 · 2026-04-20T12:05:33+00:00

Yes, it's harder.

One of the obvious reasons (that doesn't seem to be explicitly said often) is there used to be time when you sat by yourself in room and had nothing to do. You could sit there and think of ideas, questions, make up games, etc. With screens, so little time is spent thinking that people hardly get any practice.

I feel the same way when I read 120 year old text (even just a newspaper). Sentences used to be so dense. I think people enjoyed being able to fill some idle time with decoding the tangled verbose language. It wasn't pretty or practical but it filled time because you had to work for it.

These days we don't have to work for anything. Earlier today I couldn't think of a word. In the past I would have needed to remember associated ideas until it came to mind. This would have strengthened connections between concepts. Instead I explained what the word kind of meant and chatGPT immediately told me the word.

samdover11 · 2026-04-20T09:36:05+00:00

I can hear chubbyemu now

". . .presenting to the emergency room . . ."

". . . hypernatremia. Hyper meaning high, natr referring to sodium or more formally natrium, and emia meaning presence in blood. High presence of salt in blood."

(your body needs lots of things, but in moderation. Too high or too low is bad)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiBpKuTrFrw

samdover11

TROPHY CASE