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beyondCritics

119 karma · joined March 8, 2017

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beyondCritics··on It's OK to compare floating-points for equality
There is plenty of demand for so called "secure code", where such coder arrogance will not be tolerated. Trust me on that, I know it.
beyondCritics··on It's OK to compare floating-points for equality
If your code may be compiled, to use the Intel x87 numerical coprocessor, an important issue is the so called "excess precision": Different values on chip can collapse after being rounded and stored to their memory locations, invalidating previous comparisons. Spilling can happen unexpectedly. Note that Intel calls the x87 "legacy"
beyondCritics··on War prediction markets are a national-security threat
In order to demonstrate something exceptional, you have to establish a baseline. This baseline is called the "null hypothesis" in classical testing.
beyondCritics··on War prediction markets are a national-security threat
Statistical clueless amateurs found something they did not like, but of course were unable to convert their suspicions into something sound. They do not even think about it. Nevertheless a big sensation was anounced. I am tired of this.
beyondCritics··on The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)
Just HI slop. Ask any decent model, it can explain what's wrong this this description.
beyondCritics··on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
They must love dogs really deeply to go to such length to rediscover them.
beyondCritics··on Partial 8-Piece Tablebase
>However when “few enough” pieces remain on the board (in the endgame), the number of possible game states is small enough that it’s possible to brute force solve the game from each state by enumerating all possible moves and resulting states so as to find the absolute optimal move for any given board position

You can basically never do that, even in the endgame, since you get always exponential blow up! Furthermore with less pieces on the board, they hamper each others movement less, therefore the branching factor really goes down only slightly. If you want to compute all mate-in-n positions, you discover the theoretical values in tiers, by unmoving each tier twice: If you know all mate-in-0,...,mate-in-n positions, unmove the mate-in-n set for the defender and filter out results, where he can avoid moving into the union of the known tiers. Then unmove for the attacker, to find mate-in-(n+1). Repeat until convergence. Repeat the whole process for the left over positions, to find more theoretical values.

beyondCritics··on Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite
They are giving their stuff away for free, hence they can do whatever they want. It goes without saying, that spiritual teachings are not there to create quarrel and division.
beyondCritics··on A Cheat-Sheet for Helix
Beautiful cheat sheet for the modal editor helix
beyondCritics··on My dad could still be alive, but he's not
It is terrible to lose a relative in young age. But at least 80% percent of all heart diseases are known to be fully avoidable. The risk factors are known for ages and as matter of fact every adult is fully responsible to care for his own health. The right thing to do, is to watch out for a healthy diet.
beyondCritics··on My tutorial and take on C++20 coroutines (2021)
>... I sadly found the explanation of coroutines utterly incomprehensible. Same for almost every other explanation I found on the web.

Nice to see a mirror of my experience.

beyondCritics··on Was the UFO explosion in the 50s a wave of extraterrestrial surveillance?
For the records: I'm taking it very seriously and had this book in mind: Elizondo, L. (2024). Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's hunt for UFOs. William Morrow. The tone is very dark though.
beyondCritics··on Was the UFO explosion in the 50s a wave of extraterrestrial surveillance?
For the informed nerd (e.g. read Elizondo first or Greer, Bledsoe) it should by now be established, that we have a serious UAP problem. Hence it's a good thing that all the incidents that were previously ridiculed and downplayed are now one by one reconsidered.
beyondCritics··on System.LongBool
Turns out that old versions of Visual C++ used their own typedef of bool as int: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4897844/is-sizeofbool-de...
beyondCritics··on The Blender Question Everyone Gets Wrong [video]
IT professional were asked to think out of the box. Big mistake...
beyondCritics··on Is pawn promotion to rook or bishop something that is seen in play? (2012)
There is also nice discussion of the beautiful and practically relevant "Saavedra position", which does have an under promotion to a rook. https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess/saavedra.htm
beyondCritics··on Is pawn promotion to rook or bishop something that is seen in play? (2012)
Tim Krabbés blog is recommended for this type of question and in general: https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/minor.htm
beyondCritics··on When Bruce Lee trained with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
>Bruce helped the young athlete understand his movements in a way that seemed to decelerate time. “Bruce showed me how to harness some of what was raging inside me and summon it completely at my will. The Chinese call it chi; the Japanese, ki; the Indians, prana—it is the life force,” he said. “I was quite amazed to find, after working with Bruce, that when I really had my presence of mind, when I did control my life force, that’s what I saw, things coming at me in slow motion with plenty of time to get out of the way.

Seemingly we are learning here something new about Bruce Lee, that outside observers can't understand, most notably western ones. This decelaration of time also happened to me two times spontaneously, when I was attacked on surprise, hence I believe this verbatim. In both cases, that got me plenty of time, to decide what to do and was able to save myself without a scratch. However it never occurred to me,that that had something to do with my Chi force...

beyondCritics··on 0.9999 ≊ 1
The explanation is, that the number is _not_ the infinite string of characters, but the sum of the scaled digits of the string. This sum is defined as the limit of the partial sums. In Germany, you can understand this in high school.
beyondCritics··on 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
I am not sure this is serious though ...
beyondCritics··on Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qJZ1Ez28C-A I had learned about the double slit experiment in school, but in my mind it was something of a theoretical construct. This veritasium video demonstrates, that quantum waves are very real and tangible. This is how physics should be.
beyondCritics··on Boris Spassky: 1937–2025
> It's one of the single biggest misconceptions ever, it gets repeated endlessly

FM Roese here (best DWZ 2399). I agree, figuring or even conjecturing that Fischer overlooked 30.g3 is totally insane. However he also did not saw the theoretical draw, this strikes me even more off. He never opened up about his idea, so in all likelihood he calculated something very stupid.

> if you plug it into an engine, it shows an equal evaluation

They criticized this argument rightly, but many basically repeated your mistake in the process of doing so. All engines use some evolved adaption of iterative refinement, be it either "Iterative deepening" (of an alpha beta search) [1] or "UCT" [2]. If you post computer evaluations you should at the very least give the reported nominal search depth and the engine name and version, otherwise you are just asking for trouble. On computer chess fora [0] they often post the whole log file bluntly.

[0] https://www.talkchess.com/

[1] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Iterative_Deepening

[2] https://www.chessprogramming.org/UCT

beyondCritics··on Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games
Facility score may IMHO be understood as some statistical measure of tactical involvement. It has really nothing to do with the established and important concept of weakness in chess, which looks at significant static features of a position. For example in the position from figure 1, white's pawns on the queen side are all weak, especially c4. Also the black squares around the white king are weak. After 1...exd4 these weaknesses are pronounced sharply. Considering fragility score, I see nothing that points towards these weaknesses. a4 and b6 are not attacked, hence ignored. c4 is attacked once and defended once, but there is no trajectory over it. Weak squares are not considered. If we look at the knight D4, it's BC score may tell us, that after taking it with a pawn, which can be done in two different ways, the bishop e3 is hanging, hence we gain a tempo, which is significant, also f3 is weaker (noise) and bishop e6 is not under pressure any longer. Hardly something which convinces to identify the key moment, but may be useful in a statistical sense. Nevertheless it appears to be an oversold complexity measure.
beyondCritics··on I ask this chess puzzle to every new LLM
1..c1Q?? 2.Ba3+ loses on the spot, hence it is deduced easily that 1..c1N+! must be the best try. Consulting an online table base [1] shows that the resulting position is a ”blessed draw”: White can still mate, but not in time to evade a 50 move draw claim.

[1] https://syzygy-tables.info/?fen=8/6B1/8/8/B7/8/K1pk4/8_b_-_-...

beyondCritics··on Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006)
This reasoning is correct but still has to assume that both indices are non negative, which is reasonable.
beyondCritics··on Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006)
> mid = ((unsigned int)low + (unsigned int)high)) >> 1;

Also not correct if the sum overflows.

beyondCritics··on My Favorite Book on AI
To put it mildly.
beyondCritics··on Carlsen disqualified from World Rapid and Blitz championship for wearing jeans
Tasteful and elegant, but somewhat thought provoking at the same time.
beyondCritics··on Carlsen quits World Rapid and Blitz championship after dress code disagreement
>This rule is new, by the way.

You can't call a rule new, which is nagging them for nearly a decade now:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/dress-code-incident-at-world...

beyondCritics··on An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-exchange markets (2014)
If it would actually work, would you use that service? Or would you feel some kind of unease?
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