"Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure."
What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?
Puzzles are great for learning tactics, but eventually you need to learn some strategy and positional play. You'll need to read a book or two for this. And don't forget endings!
Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr.
However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.
They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.
I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that owning chess.com is 99% of their success if it's not great at the game or great at the engineering aspect.
The game reviews are really nice to quickly see the key points of the game. Plus the UI all over is better than Lichess. That and network effects explain the rest.
Yeah, I am with you on this. It isn't even the case that Lichess UI is simple because it lacks advanced features, it just straight up feels more intuitive and way more pleasant to interact with. Chess.com UI reminds me of overcluttered websites from late 2000s/early 2010s.
Pure anecdata, but I only know one person irl who prefers chess.com, and I never managed to get a straight answer from him as to why, other than "i just play there and like it more, maybe i will check out Lichess at some point, idk."
Could easily go into a very long list of reasons as a long-time app/UX developer, but playing against the computer is a good starting point: on Chess.com as a beginner I was immediately able to play against a wide variety of AI's, each is given to you by their ELO strength, and they are tuned to have different personalities so you can practice against the different types. This is so much better than Lichess where you literally choose "Strength" 1-8 (no idea what that means) and it only then clarifies "Stockfish 14 Level 8"... ok? And after the game, analysis and review interfaces have so many more helpful things for understanding the game, seeing threats, etc. Maybe if I was already very experienced with Chess I'd not mind so much. But this is just one example of many I found as I tested both a couple months ago when I was starting.
On Lichess the puzzles are less well organized and explained, the Lessons interface is arcane and much less polished in terms of content overall though there are gems if you hunt and eventually figure out the UI, and online play is likewise has a lot of small things all over that make a big difference.
Worryingly, I disagree with your opinions despite your credentials. There's no accounting for taste, but then of course, all the carefully designed interfaces I don't like were made by people who thought they were great.
Some of the UI is really tiny on the smart phone version of the lichess app is my only complaint against their UI vs chess.com. As far as I'm concerned though they both could use a good designer. Neither of them are very good.
Besides that I tend to use, and pay for, chess.com more for their other features than for anything directly UI related. Their puzzles are better. I think their post game analysis is nicer to use, the way they do analysis in general is easier to use than lichess I think. They also have a lot of learning material.
As far as playing games go, I have friends who use both and therefor I play on both. It's about the same as far as I'm concerned.
In retrospect UX rather than UI would have been better in my post as I agree with this mostly (and I'd love a chance to redesign either app, that'd be a joy).
Thank you for mentioning this, it’s a very interesting thought actually.
For the uninitiated, the idea is that a product needs good engineering + good marketing to be successful. Products with only one of them will fail. The idea of Berkson’s fallacy is that even though it seems that good marketing is negatively correlated with engineering (and vice-versa) it’s actually because the baseline level of engineering and marketing is low, and products which happen to excel in one don’t need to excel in the other.
this is a sad fact of life. a great project in terms of engineering can be beaten by a job that is just a wordpress page but great in terms of marketing.
> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.
Black and white thinking that leads people to decry "elitist thinking" is exactly a signal of a person I never want to work with, because such un-nuanced understanding of tradeoffs required to work on professional projects is demonstrably beyond their current understanding of things that do exist for good reason.
"Hacked together" is the software equivalent of fixing things with duct tape. It sounds cool and fun, and is fun to do for your own playthings, but it is a terrible mentality for developing solid projects.
That was more a commentary on hate-the-game not the playa. Lots of smart and talented people in the field, yet software coming out the door routinely has egregious usability and performance defects. Bizarre prioritization of features that are dictated by anything other than end-user needs.
Edit: remove the dig at management which is too easy a scapegoat to explain all ills
Most competitive sports & games are much more cruel than chess, but chess is still very cruel. Can you imagine achieving recognition or winning money as the 3000th best Fortnite player? Or the 3000th best League of Legends player? If so, you'd be winning on personality during streaming but certainly not on competitiveness.
"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet".
I'll admit it, I subscribe to chess.com. I pay $31 / year.
I mainly joined for the unlimited post-game analysis and puzzles. I also like the app, it's fast and intuitive. Lichess is great too, nothing against them.
I did not realize lichess was so much better. I just switched. The UI was a little off putting for some reason when I first started getting into chess.
I prefer their analysis over lichess’s and I think they are a lot more feature rich. Also, I think the company in general is pretty good at chess? I’m an 1800 elo player for reference.
I signed up to a chess.com membership a long time ago because the puzzles were behind a paywall and at the time lichess didn't have a puzzle rush mode. lichess now has similar puzzle modes to chess.com but it wasn't always like this.
Chess.com strikes me as a domain squatter who decided to try to make something of their site instead of selling it off once it was popular. Kudos to them, but at the end of the day they’re still domain squatters.
Tell me you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme without saying that you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme.
Yeah, I'm not buying this. For three years China has desperately been searching for an animal reservoir for the virus. They have found nothing at all. This report wants me to believe there was one infected animal at the market and that was it?
Or is it more likely that the lab, which had numerous coronavirus samples, did gain of function research and had a history of accidental leaks, was not involved at all?
This is a surprisingly good article. Most of the time when the mainstream press covers the chess world there are just too many inaccuracies in the reporting.
By 'vibe' I mean a ton of statements that sound likely to be false or at least would surprise me if they were true that aren't backed up when you look closer. The fact that the information is surprising isn't bad itself, but it spikes curiosity - then when I look deeper there isn't much actually there to support the surprising claims and what is there has a ton of issues.
There's a lot of 'wow, isn't that interesting' talk and deference to authority on an 'important' issue, but little talk of the actual mechanisms of how things work, little consideration of obvious counter examples that could be an explanation (like the one in my comment).
The sense is that the argument is driven by motivated reasoning instead of trying to understand what's true. Basically starting with a position and forcing the data to fit your pre-existing position.
It feels like I'm being conned by someone making up bullshit for status or some other agenda (maybe just sunk costs into an existing theory). Often bullshit and complex interesting topics can sound similar at first and it's helpful to have some sense for telling the difference. Otherwise you wander around impressed by 'energy crystals' and worried about 5g.
Walker has clearly made a huge name for himself and sold a significant number of books by skewing the evidence to make his thesis sound more substantial than it is
It's less about the specific content, and more about continuing to push something without good science behind it.
For example: I think X is true, I cherry pick data to back up X and publish a book on it. This book gets a lot of attention and is good for my career, but it's based on bad science and misleads people. This is a theory I identify myself with along with my success and my own career, if its ideas are invalidated that reflects negatively on me and my abilities (and potentially the ability to support myself). There's an incentive to rationalize or continue pushing the bad science which slows down figuring out what's really true. This has happened a ton of times throughout history.
In this specific situation the benign case is people sleep more and it doesn't matter (or it helps), in the pathological case people are anxious about their lack of sleep and it negatively effects their life or they sleep more than they personally need and it turns out over-sleeping is co-morbid with depression and causes other issues.
In the general case popularizing bad science has knock on effects that make it harder for people to get funding to study ideas the contradict the popular, but incorrect zeitgeist of what's commonly thought to be 'true'. It can also lead people down rabbit holes that can take a long time to crawl out of and make it take longer for people to understand what is actually true.
You can't just hand wave this away by saying "I know X is true, therefore it doesn't matter if the data is a little problematic. X is true and it's good for people to know that". A lot of times X turns out not to be true, not to be entirely true, etc.
I don't know if you can call it an agenda but I think there's something like a 'wellness' or moderation bias in these fields. The idea that you need to balance out hard work, slow down, and so on.
For example, as it turns out there is little evidence that stretching actually does anything, yet a lot of experts used to recommend it for decades. Same with nutrition, 'balanced diets', workouts at low heart rates and so on.
What do you mean that stretching doesn't do anything? Any links to such evidence? It's a pretty simple experiment to stretch every day for a month and measure your flexibility gains, so that's quite a bold claim. Do you mean it has no direct impact on your health?
it actually has negative impact on health and injury in people who do static stretches in particular is significantly increased. (as is in people with high levels of flexibility in general)
Nowadays stretches as a warmup are not recommended any more.
I get the “vibe” because of the misuse. I regret using the colloquialism since people seem to have such a strong reaction to it. I just meant my skepticism went up from what I was hearing.
In fact there is opponent reading (literally) in Blackjack. The opponent (dealer) must check his hand for blackjack, if the dealer's upcard is a 10 or an Ace, after having dealt the initial two cards to every player. "Hole peeking" is a technique where a teammate stands behind the dealer so they can see the hole card when the dealer checks for blackjack. They then signal this information to the player so he knows the value of the dealer's hand. Hole peeking used to be so common that casinos now have card readers built into the blackjack tables so that the dealers don't have to expose their hole card to check for blackjack.
It is/was also possible for a player at the first seat of the table to see a sloppy dealer's hole card when checking for blackjack. This is called "first basing" while using a teammate is generally called spooking.
As I remember the book it was the humans probing the neutron star with something (x-rays?) in order to survey/study the star that triggered the evolutionary advances in the cheela. So no, it wasn't curious timing, the humans precipitated the rise of the cheela.
Great book btw, hope I'm remembering it correctly.
What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?