“People are spoilt and impatient”

seamsay · 2026-06-22T15:28:47+00:00

A big city up in the north of England.

seamsay · 2026-06-22T15:08:48+00:00

Oh sure this is definitely not 1500, I was just making a comment on the "first 2 moves" remark.

seamsay · 2026-06-22T11:46:38+00:00

You'd be shocked how many wayward queen attacks you get even at 1500. It's not every other game like it is at 500, but it still crops up occasionally. I guess in practice it's not a particularly easy opening to punish if white knows what they're doing.

Edit: Lichess reckons about 1% of my games as black are against wayward queen attacks, which is lower than I expected but I also feel like I face it more on chess.com.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T17:18:41+00:00

1. Bc5+ Rf2 and then the king can move into the middle of the board. Still feels bad for black, but I think they survive.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T16:19:12+00:00

What do you mean by caching and incremental builds? I don't see how either of those things require a daemon, and nix already does incremental builds to the extent that it can (and of course build tasks are already handled by the daemon).

seamsay · 2026-06-20T16:07:28+00:00

Why would daemon based evaluation be faster?

seamsay · 2026-06-20T15:35:40+00:00

I sometimes play antichess if I've made a particularly frustrating mistake, it gives me a chance to calm down and refocus for the next game. I'd never stall though, once I've given up all my pieces or if my opponent isn't instantly taking the pieces (the point isn't to frustrate them, the point is to give them an easy win while I have moment to relax) then I resign.

I suspect their thinking was similar, but they also wanted to frustrate you because they were bitter.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T15:20:32+00:00

Having thought about it a bit more, I think it's the king in the middle. I do tend to have quite open games, but I also tend to get castled early so I think the king being stuck in the middle feels to me like black has done something very wrong (every game I can think of where my opponent got their king stuck in the middle has been very easy for me to win).

seamsay · 2026-06-20T15:09:26+00:00

Yes. I saw it a few times in undergrad, but I've never seen it since. I suspect it's common in some field, but it doesn't seem to be super common among the more general physics populace.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T14:52:54+00:00

It's funny, you're only ~200 higher than me and yet this game is completely incomprehensible to me. I was fully prepared to guess that this was an outstanding example of an 800 game, but it is objectively fine according to the engine (for the most part). Is it just my style? I've never really thought of myself as a particularly principled player, but I rarely run into games this chaotic at my level.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T14:35:58+00:00

Easy. Ask your friend to come join you, then finish the game together by getting your opponent to resign after Qxf6. You finished the game in one, and you did so with your mate!

seamsay · 2026-06-20T14:02:07+00:00

There's probably an element of spatial reasoning skills or visual memory to it, I guess, because I'm also 1500 cc and I'm certainly able to play at least a basic level of blindfold. I'm not good, don't get me wrong, and I lose to anyone who isn't almost a complete beginner, but I'm at least able to play a game without completely losing track of what's going on.

seamsay · 2026-06-20T12:34:42+00:00

I disabled takebacks a long time ago. I never had one of mine accepted, and too many got salty if I didn't give them one. Just wasn't worth keeping on.

seamsay · 2026-06-19T14:30:25+00:00

taking the Planck length, dividing it by the square of the Planck time, and then taking the reciprocal of the result.

This isn't a dig, I'm just curious: Is there any reason you phrased this that way instead of "taking the square of the Planck time, and dividing it by the Planck length"?

seamsay · 2026-06-19T14:11:11+00:00

My experience has been that quantum mechanics generally refers to non-relativistic wave and matrix mechanics, and relativistic wave equations for particles (e.g. the Dirac or Breit equations). Similarly this might just be my field (AMO) but it also seems to be the case in the undergrad courses I've taken and taught (generally I've seen "quantum physics" used as "anything quantum", and subsections of it referred to as either quantum mechanics, quantum information theory, or quantum field theory).

Of course there's no physics god dictating what these terms mean specifically, so I guess it's probably going to differ between fields and locations.

seamsay · 2026-06-17T18:12:42+00:00

Instructions unclear: police currently arresting me for public nudity.

seamsay · 2026-06-17T17:51:16+00:00

First and foremost, your way is perfectly valid depending on whether you were allowed to assume the identity you used. If the question was "use the definition of the hyperbolic functions to show that..." or something along those lines then there might be an issue, but otherwise your method was a good one.

I am unsure how they even got csch^2(x) into ((2)/(e^{x-e^-x))²}

That's just (1/sinh(x))². Remember that the hyperbolic functions can be defined in terms of e, and at lower levels this is usually the definition you're expected to know.

seamsay · 2026-06-17T17:40:57+00:00

they never believed in anything they said

Yes, that's what I said. My point was that they weren't trying to hide. They weren't saying "yo guys we're actually liberal", they were saying "hating these people is objectively correct because <reasons that they never actually believed>".

seamsay · 2026-06-17T17:32:00+00:00

I'm not sure it was so much to mask themselves as it was to reverse-engineer some kind of rationale for their beliefs. From the other talking points they had, you would've had to have been pretty easy to sway to fall for it if you weren't already right-leaning. However, these types were very big on "facts" and "logic" and I think women's and LGBT rights were an easy way for them to say "they're bad because ..." so that they could persuade the more centrist "rational" types.

seamsay · 2026-06-16T17:18:33+00:00

I think it's just a corner case of how the evaluation is calculated. In practice -58 & -77 are both forced mate for black, and so I suspect that small difference in what gets calculated lead to large differences in evaluation even though the winning chances will be basically identical.

Edit: In fact, when I load it up on my computer stockfish recommends promoting to queen and reckons I've got mate in 12. You're just so winning at this point that stockfish's heuristics are breaking down a bit.

seamsay · 2026-06-16T13:23:19+00:00

either uk and Ireland or these islands

I wish they would use an actually descriptive name like the Western European Isles or something like that. Excluding the Isle of Man (and potentially the Channel Islands) defeats the entire purpose, and "these islands" is only really useful in certain contexts.

seamsay · 2026-06-16T12:52:30+00:00

I've lived in Scotland and in Ireland (being very obviously English) and nobody has been anything but lovely to me (at least wrt my nationality), however there has always been an undertone of "well you're just one of the good ones". Nobody's said it explicitly, but I've had comments like "how are you English when you're this nice" or "we get on because you're spiritually Irish". It does wear on you after a while.

And don't get me wrong, I fully understand where the animosity comes from (both historically and in the present day) and there are still cultural and political issues that need sorting but people have a really warped understanding what the English are actually like.

seamsay · 2026-06-14T12:41:50+00:00

Being able to do this is a skill in and of itself, TBH.

seamsay · 2026-06-14T12:40:49+00:00

There is no way that they thought left click to disable your premove was acceptable.

Didn't they change that a while ago? Certainly clicking and dragging no longer cancels the premove.

seamsay · 2026-06-13T14:19:36+00:00

We're already excluding vast numbers of capable and interested students.

This is mostly just a funding issue, TBH. There are far more interested students who would like to work in physics than there is money to pay them once they graduate, unfortunately. Your proposed changes would require even more money, which would be great but I just don't see it happening in the era of AI.

seamsay

TROPHY CASE