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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • AoE2 is one of a small number of video games I can entertain an argument about building an immense skill gulf between average and top tier players, like chess. But the size of that gulf is just incomparable.

    There are approximately as many titled chess masters* as there are total monthly AoE2 players. And truly, the difference between a Candidate Master and a Grand Master is probably as big as the difference between a candidate master and an average player. Grand Masters are just so insanely skilled, they can pull some crazy flexes by forcing their opponents’ moves due to traps they set tens of moves ago.

    I watched a GM streamer playing against his subs, with the rule “no matter how bad you’re losing, you can’t forfeit” so that he could show of these stunts. He was doing stuff like promoting every single pawn to a queen (which gets tricky because when you have 8 queens you have to try to not accidentally checkmate your opponent until you get the 9th). Taking only the pawns from his opponent, and then forcing all of the pieces back to their starting square before checkmate. Forcing an “underpromotion mate” (where you win by turning a pawn into a knight rather than a queen, pretty rare circumstance). Drawing basic pixel art with the pieces on the board at checkmate. And these weren’t all against noob players, some of them were quite skilled or even semi-pro, but to someone at the top tier of chess there is almost no difference between semi pro and beginner.

    GMs are crazy good.

    *All master titles combined, not just GM.


  • I wanna see Elon play a grandmaster and get absolutely memed on. The gulf between the average person and a top tier chess player is probably 10x greater than the gulf between the average person and a top tier gamer, in any video game. Chess just has such a large player base and literally centuries of tactical/strategic development, few games can even claim to have fostered the level of expertise required to be a top player.

    Side note: chess skull is often correlated with intelligence. There might be something there, but at the top levels it’s really just about having played thousands and thousands of games and recognizing patterns between is how often you’ve played. Perhaps some genetal intelligence translates well to chess, but little chess skill translates to general intelligence.

    To quote Paul Morphy, who was a worldwide chess champion at 21 years old but retired at 22: “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”













  • The thing with Debian is that yes, it’s the most stable distro family, but stable != “just works”, especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it’s one of the more painful distros to do so.

    I think fedora is a good compromise there. It’s unstable compared to RHEL, but it’s generally well-vetted and won’t cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.