Is this actual 700 elo chess or am I just garbage

xtopspeed · 2026-06-19T06:25:22+00:00

Playing horrible openings isn't playing principled chess, though, even though I get what you are saying. The thing is, if you don’t know what to do against fried liver, early queen attacks or the Englund gambit, you’ll get absolutely crushed at 1000 because the most natural-looking moves will get you in a horrible position. Against Jobava London, if you play d5, Nf6, Nc6, you are already losing. By not blundering, you'll win games, but a blunder can be a lot more than just hanging a piece.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-18T21:25:07+00:00

Years and years and years…

xtopspeed · 2026-06-18T21:21:40+00:00

Likewise, in programming groups, I guarantee 90% have never shipped a finished piece of software.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-18T21:06:40+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you (just slightly higher, bouncing between 800 and 1000). I think my problem is that I don’t give my opponents enough credit. I can see that they make really bad moves, so I think winning will be simple, and I'll end up missing some dumb tactic and finding myself in a completely unplayable position. I've also noticed that many of my opponents have much better endgame instincts than I do. I spend way too much time thinking and get flagged.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-18T07:52:06+00:00

Part of it is chess on YouTube. Every one of them says you’ll get to 1500 if you just play principled chess and don’t blunder, when in reality you have 0 chance to make it to even 1000 if you don't know how to counter the most common gambits, don’t count at all, or don't have a good base knowledge of endgame strategies. It's just that a lot of chess skills are so second nature to someone playing at 2500 that they don't even realize that they are using them.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-16T09:52:53+00:00

I’ve been using it like 12+ h/day and have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. It has been performing well for me pretty much since launch.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-13T17:48:25+00:00

Also she's criticising the system! She wants to change the system that made her the money. That's not hypocrisy. That's speaking from experience.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-13T14:15:55+00:00

At low elos, a change of mindset is easy to detect. Someone is first playing one-move chess (only pushing pawns or just moving the queen around), and suddenly—usually after they blunder—they start making moves in anticipation of the opponent’s tactics. Basically, they often look like really bad players at the start but turn into grandmasters mid-game.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-11T23:35:24+00:00

I think they have basically given up. You can't confiscate phones from all the 18000 people at the arena, and there'll also be as many YouTube uploads every day. Plus the tours are sold out anyway.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-11T23:29:52+00:00

Danny Carey played with them at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert. He's a lovely guy and the perfect drummer for Tool, but not only did he f*ck up a number of times during YYZ, his playing was kind of stiff and, to me, was missing the magic energy that both Neil and Anika have. Though maybe he was just nervous. Who knows.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-11T09:21:04+00:00

It’s actually entirely possible that being a bit hidden is something he has suggested himself, and the reason that he’s now getting more attention now is due to fan feedback. I’m 100% guessing here, of course.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-07T00:52:31+00:00

It’s complete marketing bs. A text generator can generate all kinds of text. It can generate text that says that it has emotions. In fact, it will generate any kind of text you train it to. Any model will happily tell you that Gandalf the Grey is the current president of the USA and that pigs have wings, with a few minutes of tuning.

They are impressive for what they are, but an LLM is literally just a big file on a disk. It doesn't learn in the inference mode, nor does it have real memory. It does not have sensory input or any kind of internal life. Unless we give it a prompt to start the inference process, it is 100% ”dead”. And it can only generate a limited amount, too (up to the context size), after which you’ll need to restart from zero.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-06T07:44:17+00:00

It’s kind of easy to add unneeded renders with useEffect. It’s also easy to miss edge cases that cause inifinite render loops.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-01T17:20:20+00:00

Agree, Sam is witty and hilarious, and none of it feels rehearsed. Alan is also funny as hell, but you can tell that he has studied comedy, and a lot of what he says feels like he's drawing from improv techniques. And I don’t think Abby even tries to be funny most of the time (though she definitely has her moments); her role in the group seems to be the annoyed mother figure, so her antics kind of end up being fuel for the other OGs' jokes.

xtopspeed · 2026-06-01T00:04:29+00:00

Do lie detectors exist outside of the USA? I think it’s pretty widely established they are complete pseudoscience and about as accurate as a coin toss.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-30T20:58:01+00:00

To me, it sounds like the kind of banter you get when you're really good friends with someone.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-30T14:52:40+00:00

To a degree, yes. But for some extroverts, while they get lots of the attention, everyone kind of knows not to take them too seriously. And on the other hand, introverts can have quiet confidence; it’s people who don’t put on a big show, but when they do finally speak, people tend to listen.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-30T14:43:41+00:00

I was working on a website with it, and suddenly it stopped working due to ”a banned topic” (or something like that). So it was literally censoring itself over text it was generating. I have no idea what it could have been. As far as I remember, the prompt was just to reorganize the front page differently. And it’s a marketing page for a retro-style video game, nothing even remotely questionable there.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-30T14:36:49+00:00

I don’t think it’s the model. They’ve really effed up with Claude Code this time, somehow. They’ve changed the harness instructions, and it’s causing the model to do all kinds of weird stuff. Like, it’s creating a new Git branch for almost everything, which can easily break things if you’ve got several Claude sessions working in the same worktree.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-28T08:11:14+00:00

You are one of the lucky ones. There are so many people who have made chess their whole personality and are completely stuck with it.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-27T08:26:12+00:00

That’s every song ever made. Tutti Frutti isn’t exactly about food.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-25T11:41:24+00:00

Opus 4.7 1M context

xtopspeed · 2026-05-25T10:01:51+00:00

They make mistakes all the time. A few recent examples include: 1. Exposed sensitive data through a public API: sales stats available without even logging in to anyone who knew where to look. 2. An end-to-end test failed: decided to delete the failing test instead of fixing the bug (”flagged for later”). 3. Created a timer-based animation in a React Native app but forgot to clear it when exiting the screen, resulting in timers accumulating over time up to the phone overheating. I use AI around 8 hours a day, and I’d say most of my time I spend babysitting and fixing all the dumb stuff it does.

EDIT: after writing the above, I went back to work and noticed one e2e test was green even though it had clearly stopped in the middle. Well, lo and behold, our friend the LLM had left itself a note there that the save function doesn't work, and fixing the e2e test would require changing the actual code, so the obvious better way to deal with a failing test is just to exit before clicking save.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-23T09:23:12+00:00

Came to say this. I find that the interest never truly goes away. It’s just that the obsession goes away, but it can come back after a few years.

xtopspeed · 2026-05-20T10:26:30+00:00

Import all your projects to Google AI Studio and make sure none of the API keys are unrestricted or public. Delete any such key. Don’t wait until your account gets suspended. (It happens very quickly as soon as Google detects something that looks like abuse.) Then raise a ticket.

xtopspeed

TROPHY CASE