quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Thanks, that is a good point.
(Also, I am pretty sure that compiler developers who use undefined behavior that way to 'optimize' code will go to hell eventually, but that will not help me if I am stuck debugging such a thing.)
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
Assuming that Mary runs on wetware, I think there are different levels of understanding. As a neurologist, Mary could do a PhD on pain receptors, yet she would still experience something new if she got her first kidney stone.
However, that thing would not be knowledge as such, and indeed an experience available to most vertebrates. This seems to be one of the cases where the mystery goes away if you taboo the words "learn" and "experience", and instead talk about "intellectual understanding" and "have the stimuli fed into your animal brain".
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
I am a non-cognitivist, so I am further on board with you than most. IMO, there is no fundamental moral truth which can be found like we found the Higgs, instead moral statements are simply utterances of preferences.
Still, we can very much debate the relative merits of various axiomatic systems in mathematics even though at the end of the day, the Axiom of Choice is not something which will be found to be true or false, ever. a+b=b+a will for example lead to lots of (but by no means all!) fertile lands, while a+b=b+a+1 will not lead anywhere interesting.
Mathematicians can and do debate the merits of various axiomatic systems, rather than being born fully subscribed to ZFC and nothing but ZFC or whatever.
Likewise, few people are 100% utilitarians who can spell out the terms of their utility function, or are 100% Kantians. Debates between people who follow an informal mixture of various moral theories can be fruitful. ("Oh, that theory says [bad thing]. Probably not as good a theory as I thought, then.")
Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap.
I was not aware of this theory, so I looked it up on WP.
Of all the attempts to escape the consequences of the Bell inequality, this seems the most pathetic by a mile. Where the simulation hypothesis assumes that we are inhabiting a video game, superdeterminism basically assumes that we are watching a movie.
Basically
The universe is conspiring to railroad you into only taking the measurements which would not contradict the Bell inequality. That U-238 nucleus whose decay will feed into your random number generator is woo-entangled with both your measurement procedure and the particle you are measuring (because all was one in the Big Bang), and will decay exactly so that the universe can continue to gaslight you about EPR.
This makes homeopathy almost respectable by comparison. Hell, even "Quantum mechanics is a Jewish conspiracy to confuse good Aryan physicists, and every time someone 'confirms' QM what is happening is that Mossad breaks into their lab and manipulates their equipment" seems slightly less bizarre -- and a lot more falsifiable!
Occam's razor says that there are no hidden variables, and if you measure the spin of a particle in superposition, you will find yourself either occupying a world where you (which does not specifically mean a conscious observer, for the saner interpretations) measured up or down with a probability corresponding to the relevant amplitude squared. The universe does not really care if you frame that as Copenhagen or Many Worlds or whatever.
Also, quantum noise seems a poor source of free will. If you have two chatbots, one running on a pseudo-random number generator, and one with access to a QM entropy source, it seems you can well claim that the first chatbot lacks free will because you can independently compute its output, while claiming that the second chatbot has free will just because you do not know what random choices it will make seems silly. There is a reason why some people dream up silly elaborate theories of the brain as a quantum computer. Determinism implies no free will, but indeterminism does not imply free will.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
potentially correlated preferences
Definitely this. Epstein was into very young girls, which likely means he was into innocent virgins, "I did not even realize men could be attracted to me", cute panties with animals printed on them etc.
Anything which signals "I know how to make myself attractive, get laid and have had a lot of sexual experience" would likely not be his kink.
I do not think we can learn a lot from his preferences, especially compared to observing what porn gets produced, which directly tells us the preferences of men who pay for porn, which is still not a great but a much better sample. Empirically, both the "young, cute, innocent" niche and the "oversexed slut" niches exist, plus a ton more besides.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I don't think the current Democrats will waste much time on defending Clinton.
I mean, it is known that he was fucking around. Few Americans would have trusted him with their 16yo daughters even in the '90s. And especially with Hillary gone from the political stage, he serves no purpose for the Democrat party.
"Yes, we ran a sex pest presidential candidate who probably fucked underage girls in coercive settings in 1997. The GOP ran one in 2024, so by all means let's talk about why this is bad."
quiet_NaN
1d ago
It was clear that nothing much would come of it.
If there was solid material evidence that Trump had fucked 13yo's, then the Biden administration would have gone after him. They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).
Still, Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, which played well with his base but was an unforced error on his part given how much he hung out with this guy. Likely all the photos of him hanging out with Epstein were already leaked, as was his creepy-as-fuck birthday card.
The Democrats forcing the DOJ to release the files was just them cashing in on that. It was clear that either he would have to release the files with him being in them, or redact everything which mentioned him. Both would harm him, somewhat. Unsurprisingly, he did not want the photos of him and Epstein going through the press again, so he redacted everything. But less than 5% of the electorate is going to take that as "this proves that he did not know Epstein".
quiet_NaN
1d ago
You are correct.
I would still say that in C, under a few circumstances you can depend on a null pointer access crashing, e.g. if all of the following apply:
(1) You are in standard userland where nothing is normally mapped to 0.
(2) You know that your code will not be run in other settings (for example, you are not writing a library).
(3) You are not handling untrusted data.
(4) You are not in a privilege elevated mode (like in the kernel)
Then you can usually count on getting a segmentation violation for null pointer access, so that failing to do
if (!ptr)
abort();
will be of limited badness. (Given all these caveats, it is probably less bad
Compare and contrast with another source of undefined behavior: out-of-bounds array accesses. These will typically not cause segfaults, but will instead silently corrupt program data and flow, often leading to arbitrary code execution if exploited. It is the difference between getting killed from smoking and getting killed from smoking while filling up your gas tank.
Now, you could make the point that anyone treating a segfault as a safety net (instead of ruining one's day as much as one's car airbag firing) should not be programming with raw pointers, and I might even agree. In my defense, my baseline is physicists who self-taught C while programming with ROOT, and most of whom have no business coding in any language unsafer than Python, who still happily use C arrays and for whom a segfault on every third compile is just normal.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would argue that while null pointer dereferencing (at least in userspace) is bad, it at least of bounded badness, because it invokes well defined behavior, just like an integer division by zero. You could say that any language with runtime errors (or even any language where you do not have to prove the correctness of your program) qualifies as 'trust me bro', but that is very distinct from a memory-unsafe language.
Central examples of memory troubles, such as use-after-free or out-of-bounds accesses are much more evil because they do not invoke well-defined failure modes. Often, they lead to arbitrary code execution.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Every language in which you can say the compiler/runtime - just trust me bro I know what I am doing will devolve into just trust me bro language. This is why you don't have trust me bro sections.
There is a name for a language which does not have 'just trust me bro' sections. It is Java.
If you want to do anything interesting with hardware or squeeze out optimal performance, you will sometimes end up in situations where you are making assumptions which can not be verified by the compiler, which generally is ill-equipped to verify arbitrary mathematical proofs or parse hardware specifications.
Ideally, a language would allow you to specify hardware behavior and include a theorem verifier which you can use to prove that because two variables are co-prime per your precondition, your divisor can indeed not be zero in the next line. Instead, you have unsafe blocks.
Of course, some lazy programmers will decide that unsafe blocks are the path of least resistance. Probably when C came out, some asm programmers decided that they could code "C" by just using inline assembly for everything. If you want to protect a programmer from harming themselves, you need to place them in a safe padded cell like Java does.
The use case of Rust is when you have someone who is actually willing to work with the borrow-checker and only use unsafe in the places where that is not possible. This will make it much easier to audit the code. Imagine having to verify the stories of two suspects. Suspect "Rust" provides you ironclad, notarized evidence for 90% of his claims, while 10% (the unsafe stuff) is unsupported by evidence. Suspect "C" provides you no evidence for any claims. To make sure that their story checks out on a similar level of confidence, you would likely spend 10x as much work on subject "C" (or possibly more because the unsafe code blocks can interact.)
Btw - both C and C++ are quite memory safe if you don't try to be clever.
For C, that is a ridiculous claim. You might as well say that the Taliban regime is great for women's rights as long as the woman is willing to submit to her husband and not voice controversial opinions.
Sure, there are plenty of programs in C which are obviously sound. But not every problem is easily transformable into such a program. "Don't be clever about memory management" is not actionable advice if you need to share data with indeterminate lifetime between multiple threads any more than "try to be straight and submissive" is actionable advice for an Afghan butch lesbian.
Array accesses in C are memory unsafe as fuck. Unlike for C++ (_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS), the best way to do safe array indexing in C boils down to "wait for clang to implement -fbounds-safety".
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Hey, C combines the power of assembly with the elegance of assembly, as the joke goes.
Python has completely different problems. On the one hand, the duck typing means that erroneous assumptions about types may go undetected for a long time before blowing up in a completely innocent part of the code. (As far as a weakly typed piece of code can be innocent, that is.)
More critically, it is slow. Reading a field of an object, or calling a function defined in some global scope, both require a lookup in a hash maps, where in C they former would be pure pointer arithmetic and the latter would be resolved by the linker (or earlier) and turned into a constant runtime statement.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Don't tell me, tell GWB:
With the exception of non-self-destructing anti-personnel landmines, the United States has landmines available for use worldwide
Still, in that text the duration is given as "as much as 15 days", no idea why WP turned that into two days. In many tactical contexts, "we will just wait for two weeks until the mines explode" is not a feasible option.
I agree that there are many situations where the militarily optimal threat duration of a landmine is "at least as long as the conflict duration".
I do not think that the treaty restricts countries that much at all, after all, plenty of them are simply not signatories. On the other hand, I think a world where a random African country does not stockpile a few million dumb mines which will be indiscriminately deployed in the next civil war and then claim lives over the following decades seems strictly better than the alternative.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Manufacturers of prosthesis, rejoice!
Anti-personnel mines are making a big comeback in Europe, with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty. Poland has now decided to deploy millions of mines on its eastern border. Ukraine is of course in breach of that treaty, but as a non-signatory I do not see that Russia would get to whine about it.
On the one hand, I will concede that the Ottawa Treaty was always lacking support from the superpowers, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention. Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
The position of the United States is that the inhumane nature of landmines stems not from whether they are anti-personnel as opposed to anti-vehicle but from their persistence. The United States has unilaterally committed to never using persistent landmines of any kind, whether anti-personnel or anti-vehicle, which they say is a more comprehensive humanitarian measure than the Ottawa Convention. All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours. While the self-destruct mechanism has never failed in more than 65,000 random tests, if self-destruct were to fail the mine will self-deactivate because its battery will run down in two weeks or less.
I do not think that the US argument is without merit, and if they had pushed for a treaty exemption for mines whose design had been approved by international experts so that they explode within 48 hours, that would perhaps not critically weaken Ottawa. The problem is that the military incentives do not lie that way. Obviously there are situations where it will be advantageous for a mine to remain dangerous years after they are placed. And anyone producing short-lived mines can easily switch to producing cheaper long-lived ones by just getting rid of the timer. I wish I could say that I believed that Trump would say "unfortunately, the US unilaterally committed to never use persistent landmines under Clinton, so we will not do that", but realistically he will just say that this was Bad Radical Leftist Democrat policy and ignore it. So "no anti-personnel land mines" seems like the obvious Schelling point for an international agreement. (Anti-vehicle mines are a lesser concern, either they are planted on roads, where they are easily discovered (one way or another), or they are planted offroad, where the chances of civilians triggering them are much slimmer. Lots of kids play in the woods, few kids drive jeeps through the prairie.)
Personally, I would prefer for Poland to start a nuclear weapons program to them relying on landmines.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Only a few months ago Operation Midway Blitz commenced
Holy shit, that is the real name of that operation. It sounds like something a ten year old watching a Marvel movie set in the 2nd world war would come up with after five minutes of thinking. I wonder how many enemy aircraft carriers ICE has sunk so far, and how many illegals they have killed with V2's. And what is the next name in the pipeline? Operation Stalingrad D-Day perhaps? Or will they go straight to Operation Alderaan?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think he totally has a filter. If he had made equivalent comments about the Christian Right, he would not have become president. Instead, he is selectively applying his filter based on his IFF system. People and groups who are helpful to the MAGA cause do not get his broadsides, but those who are not get whatever he can come up with in his rants.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
warrior
Semi off-topic (but CW):
The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic.
a warrior is an individual who wars, because it is their foundational vocation, an irremovable part of their identity and social position, pursued for those private ends (status, wealth, place in society). So the core of what it is to be a warrior is that it is an element of personal identity and also fundamentally individualistic [...].
[...] So the core of what it is to be a soldier is that it is a not-necessarily-permanent employment and fundamentally about being both in and in service to a group.
Warriors came from a specific class of people, those whose lives were dedicated to violence – not violence for a specific end, but often just violence for violence’s sake. Warrior classes were – and are – often propped up on the backs of the people, the people they are supposed to be serving. They are supported by the state, segregated into a specific class, and essentially become diametrically opposed to a democracy – since democracies do not easily finance the exorbitant cost of keeping up a bunch of entitled elites.
The closest we have to a separate warrior class -- people who see themselves as permanently apart from the broader society, for whom to engage in violence is a fundamental part of their identity -- these days are probably criminal gangs (or especially corrupt police departments, if there is a difference).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I would say the blame for the 2nd Iraq war lies squarely with the US electorate who voted for GWB because they were fed up with Clinton getting BJs.
Of course, I also reject the OP's framing that one should consider the net worth of each minority and get rid of the ones who turn out negative. Presumably, most of the Motte would consider it deeply unfair if someone opined that it is fine to treat men as violent criminals, because the vast majority of violent criminals are men. Likewise, the fact that most of the people who lobby for Nethanyahu's vision of a Greater Israel are Jews does not mean that we should oppose Jews because they are Jews.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
I shall support no such thing, because "living in a low crime society" is not the whole of my utility function. In fact, there were plenty of dystopian low-crime societies.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should realize that @FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well. Probably a White guy with a close relative with a history of violence is more likely to commit violence than your average US Black, so we should surely get rid of him as well. Low education attainment is probably correlated with a genetic predisposition, do we really want to keep such suboptimal citizens in our brave new world? And in the long term, East Asians have great work ethics and are a lot less unruly than Whites often are.
Liberal Jews have long recognized that the best way to safeguard their safety in the West is to support a general principle of tolerance, rather than relying on the public perception of them being a net positive minority, which can always flip with another Epstein or SBF.
Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire.
Why do you think that is a bad thing? After all, the PRC has plenty of advantages from your perspective. A clearly dominant culture, fewer ethnically undesirables, no woke snowflakes crying genocide when you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette, strong leaders making decisions with the long term interests of the state in mind rather than trying to win the next election. The PRC conquering the US, wiping out the present population and settling Han Chinese there is perhaps the likeliest way to end multiculturalism in the US.
An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright
While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
If you want that in Europe, you hire a contractor. If you are unhappy with your plumber or gardener or sex worker, you can just hire a different company for the next job. Likewise, if you want to lease your property to tenants without being bound by too many legal safeguards, lease office space to companies.
But where humans are concerned, most societies recognize that just allowing total freedom of contract will lead to bad outcomes, because very often one human party will have a significant disadvantage during negotiations. In most places, selling your kidney or signing a contract which will put you into debt slavery if certain conditions are met is simply legally void, because if it was not there would be desperate people signing such contracts and ending up enslaved. Likewise, it is very rare that a prospective tenant can write the terms of a rental contract, because the landlord likely has a dozen alternatives lined up, while the tenant does not. The same goes for employment contracts.
And it is not like the US is some anarcho-libertarian utopia for employment, either. There are plenty of rules and regulations. You can't just put into contract that higher exposure limits for carbon monoxide will apply. You can't -- at least in theory -- fire an employee for not giving you a blowjob. Or fire all of your employees matching some protected characteristic. I imagine many states would forbid you from firing women for becoming pregnant, too.
The main difference is the burden of proof. In Europe, we have a whitelist of reasons to fire someone, while the US has a blacklist blocklist of reasons for which you can not be fired.
Now, I am sympathetic to arguments that these rules have adverse side effects. But simply arguing how unfair it is that you have some obligations towards someone with whom you have traded paychecks for labor for a decade is not going to convince anyone.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline
Based on priors, that sounds like a bullshit job. Charitably, it means "this company needs investors who want some technobabble about AI", less charitably, it could also reflect on the company as a whole.
Now, there are some jobs with the title 'head of AI' which are possibly not bullshit. FAANG-level companies can have serious AI departments without being AI companies. Given that Cline does not have a WP page, I am inclined to believe they are probably slightly smaller than Google.
Basically, if your job is to be the poster boy for some startup which needs to fool investors into thinking they are innovating AI stuff, you probably want to be careful about what you say online under your real name, because you are easily replaced.
By contrast, if you are an engineer who is deeply involved in what the company is doing, your company likely has some reason to not fire you when the first angry mail comes in -- always depending on the size and culture, of course.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
It depends how you feel about Global American Empire of Rules Based Order.
This seems an oversimplification. In my mind, a rule-based international order became beneficial around World War one, when it became apparent that large-scale conflicts between industrial powers were now massively net negative.
The US co-opted that concept in their hegemony. Never completely, as the Western hegemon there was always an element of "rules for thee, not for me". Still, the US empire was build partly from soft power (with some chunks of colonial conquests, of course). But at least in Europe and parts of Asia, the deal that they offered (free trade, at least some token effort towards democracy, refraining from breaking the pax Americana and accepting McDonalds) was pretty sweet compared to what other superpowers had offered, historically.
I like the concept of a RBO. It tremendously improved the quality of life in Europe, compared to what we had before. I see the US as a somewhat ambiguous ally to the RBO, though. In Europe, they did good, elsewhere they often made big messes by ignoring the principles of the RBO (say, GWB in Iraq). My overall impression is that most of their gambles to ignore the RBO did not pay off. The key allies of the US are for the most part not countries they conquered and turned into colonial puppet regimes, but countries whose alliance they secured through a soft power approach (which includes the former Axis powers, of course).
I would like to see a future where wars of conquest do not pay for themselves, neither for the US, nor for anyone else. One way to punish defectors is to arm their victims, so that they will not gain a quick, painless victory. From this (admittedly cynical) perspective, the Ukraine war has been a great success: Putin's "special military operation" has been turned into a long war of attrition, caused a depletion of his Soviet stockpiles and so on.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I do not think intent is likely. At the end of the day, the FBI is still full of cops, not woke anarchists. Who cares about how many non-MAGA bombers are at large in DC, the Democrats being able to vaguely blame Trump for them is worth much more than the credit any of us might get for catching them was likely not a common sentiment in the FBI, ever.
The performance of the Secret Service protecting the US president is something which is hard to judge. I mean, they failed with Kennedy, obviously. But it is hard to measure performance from these rare events. Could be that a rock saying "nobody is gonna shoot the president" would perform equally well, or that they are ten times as effective as thwarting sniper attempts as the Swiss Guard is, or that any local SWAT team could do their job at the same performance level.
If Trump is unhappy with how they do their job, I think he has a lot of leeway as the head of the executive. If he wants to be protected by some MAGA militia cosplayers instead, or by navy SEALs, or by Syrian mercenaries, or by new ICE hires, he most certainly has the funding and the authority to make that happen.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
If he was, he did a really bad job internalizing the moral lessons from MLP.
Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned that it is very bad if some pony places pipe bombs in Canterlot. It makes other ponies upset and even angry, and is quite dangerous, because they might hurt some pony when they explode.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning.
Agreed. While the election denial from the left has not infected the upper echelons of the dems as much as it has infected the GOP, I am still disappointed with a lot of people from the tribe I feel less alienated from claiming that Trump and Musk had somehow 'rigged' the election. Like, come on. Not every tactic is worth stealing from your enemy. Should I mentally prepare for president Newsom to bomb shipwrecked sailors, lead trade wars, deport illegals to foreign megaprisons, and accept fantasy prizes from corrupt sports officials, or can the SJ crow perhaps take a principled stand that some things are both bad if Trump does them and if they are doing them?
People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory.
That is not my main problem. The truth is the one asymmetric weapon which humanity has. Once you give up the notion that both sides should be able to form agreements about at least some observations in the world, you are conceding victory to whatever side has the fewest truth-related scruples, or which gets favored by random chance. I am not saying that this will inevitably lead to one side slaughtering the other after convincing their followers that their enemies are not really people (though that is definitely a possible equilibrium), but our ability to collaboratively form complex, useful models of nature to our shared benefit is one of the things which sets us apart from the other apes.
As a toy model, assume that every person has a cynicism slider in their brain. At zero, they behave like a person who is not aware that people sometimes lie, believing everything, at one, they totally discount the possibility that someone could try to cooperate them to improve their world model. Obviously neither extreme is a stable equilibrium for society.
But you can have societies where most people agree that most people lie most of the time, and societies where most people agree that most people are honest most of the time. And the latter kind will be much better at collaborating in collective truth-seeking than the former.
So whenever someone conspires to get the public to buy a simpler version of events than what really happened or knowingly pushes a false conspiracy narrative, they will (in expected value, at least), move people's cynicism to a higher value, which seems bad.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
That's quite a bit more than three bits. Two for direction and three or four for the piece.
If you want perfect information, yes. But to gain an edge you do not need that. Enumerate all pieces by their starting row from 0 to 7. Have the oracle figure out what a player with a given rating would would move each piece.
"If I tell this player to move the their queen (or queen's pawn, if that looks more plausible for them), does this have a better expected outcome than if I tell them to move their light-squared bishop (or its pawn)?"
Again, this has limitations. The player needs to be a fairly decent chess player. And a decent chess engine would still totally crush them, because the cheating player would be limited to fairly obvious moves. "Sacrifice your queen here for a decisive advantage ten moves down the line" is not a strategy you could communicate in three bits.
But it would probably make the cheater significantly stronger.
I do not have a good example for a channel which can communicate three bits but not five, though.
Remember, the player can't run advanced signal processing algorithms to dig out hidden information from below the noisefloor and is presumably surrounded by "hostile" actors who are on the lookout for any such information.
Sure. On the other hand, humans are also really got at filtering out irrelevant information. Luckily, sound is rather obvious (especially if your baseline is complete silence instead of what you get in a football stadium), and players do not have a lot in their field of view which can be controlled by third parties.
My gut feeling that the optimum for in-person cheating would be to have a computer implanted into your body. Some 28 years after Deep Blue, a chess engine which could defeat mere humans should fit in your guts. A bidirectional connection with a few baud should be well within technical reach, you have all sorts of nerves just waiting to be tapped. Unless you are checking if your cheater is sleeping with a Qi charger on their belly or put them into an imaging scanner, you are unlikely to catch them.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
For prize events chess.com has a special anti-cheating software called 'Proctor' (https://www.chess.com/proctor) which it can require competitors to install and run on their machines.
Obligatory xkcd. If you want to have a chess match without cheating, place the participants and a referee in a bug-swept, sealed and EM-shielded room, take a video and release it after the match has finished. Then put all three of them into an MRI.
For a cheap, low stakes solution, contract a notary to set up a device prepared by the org holding the competition, and observe the participant during play, and publish it with a three move delay.
It's possible that chess.com still required a live feed of multiple camera angles and a screen share and this would have made it almost impossible for someone to cheat.
This seems to be a lack of imagination on your part.
A move can be described within 12 bits even if the player is barely aware of the rules. For an actually good player who can form a list of likely moves, even an advice of just three bits ("move left rook") per move would likely put them on a superhuman level.
There are a ton of ways to inconspicuously encode that information. Background noises from outside. Low intensity lasers selectively emitting light to where the cheaters eyes are, but not where the cameras are. Good old RC vibrators in bodily cavities.
Nor is it hard to get the game state to the chess engine. If you are broadcasting live, you just grab that. Otherwise, anything in a player's home can be a camera capturing the screen.
Anti-cheat spyware can at best show the lack of any known cheating software solutions. The idea that it could show any compromise by someone who has full hardware access and a freedom to chose whatever components they want is laughable. With a budget of 100k$, the modification of a computer monitor to copy the video stream, extract the chess board and modify pixels to indicate a move seems within reach. If you mandate that the player captures the output of their monitor on camera at twice the monitors resolution, this just means that the player will need to bother to add hardware to the camera to redact clearly defined patterns.
If you can become a successful streamer by playing online chess, then there will always be people for whom a bit of technical sophistication to get an edge is worth it.
So all the fierce fighting between Trump and the Democrats is just kayfabe, then? Harris and Trump were laughing about the electorate seeing them as opponents while raping some kids?
And why would a cabal of kid-fuckers end up in charge, anyhow? Unlike being a lizardman (possibly), being a pedophile does not convey an intrinsic advantage at winning primaries. You could perhaps convince me that being a child-rapist is the kind of dirt which will keep a politician firmly in the hands of his blackmailers, who might therefore favor him over less controllable candidates. But such blackmailers would want to compartmentalize their assets, having them all go to Epstein parties seems terrible opsec.
Or it could be that child rapists pursue political careers at higher rates than baseline because they hope that political influence will shield them from law enforcement. But this would be stupid, because being a politician also means that a lot of people will dig for dirt on you, and they do not know if some elite pedo cabal even exists.
Even more if you consider that even Epstein himself was not into 6yo's, but rather girls at puberty. In any country in which you have extreme poverty, you will also likely find underage prostitution. Plenty of these countries are also corrupt as fuck and will likely have little moral outrage over tourists fucking slum girls. Nobody is running for Congress to fuck 12yo's.
Then there is the fact that such a conspiracy would require some way to disincentivize defectors. Probably one in ten politicians would have a late onset of conscience on their deathbed and be willing to spill the beans to make amends.
Or the thing that they did not make a very good job of covering up Epstein. Do you think every last cop who was investigating him was in the pedo cabal? If not, how did they make sure that none of the cops would leak incriminating videos of senior politicians raping kids, especially once they found out that their case would not go anywhere? Whistleblowers have martyred themselves to get much less juicy stuff out to the public.
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