benmmurphy
7hr ago
I'm not sure what should happen to Kramnik. The FIDE handbook has a section on false accusations:
https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/ACCRegulations.pdf
Reckless or manifestly unfounded accusation of chess cheating is a serious violation of the requirement of fair play. False accusation in chess is an abuse of freedom of expression that is prohibited by the FIDE Ethics and Disciplinary Code.
FIDE did investigate Magnus Carlsen over a similar complaint in relation to his activity with Hans Nieman. But found him not guilty except for a charge relating to his withdrawal from a tournament which I believe is not allowed without good reason. I think Magnus was able to avoid sanction because it didn't make a direct accusation but I suspect Kramnik has walked closer to this line even though he will claim that he is just asking questions or looking at statistics if he is ever challenged.
The other problem I see is this starting to normalize suicidal threats. David Navara made a blog post that can be uncharitably summarized as 'do something about Kramnik or I'll kill myself'. However, I do urge you to read the whole blog because I think the situation is much complicated than that and I think its very difficult for someone in his situation to express how he feels without it coming across as a suicidal threat or emotional manipulation (https://lichess.org/@/RealDavidNavara/blog/because-we-care/fauAwr9r). He even has this to say:
I want to stress that I firmly believe that a suicide is a wrong decision in a vast majority of situations, including mine one. I do not write this to criticize people who were desperate and saw no other solution, I just stress this to discourage depressed people from damaging themselves in an irrevocable way. The human life has a great value. It is a gift and gifts should not be given back.
benmmurphy
7hr ago
i'm actually wondering whether if a lot of these drama events are actually real or if they have are wholly faked or pre-planned to generate content. one hot tub streamer Amouranth appears to have generated a fake abuse story with the co-operation of her husband.
Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky died at the age of 29 after an apparently weird stream (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mzo3JHvg-iw). There has even been a Tyler Cowen 'Straussian post' that may been in reference to his passing where Tyler references negative social contagion (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/why-live-how-suicide-becomes-an-epidemic.html). This follows an ongoing controversy where former world champion Vladimir Kramnik has either inferred or accused Naroditsky of cheating in online chess. There is no doubt that Naroditsky is a very strong chess player. He has strong over the board results where it would be difficult to cheat and also recently beat Anna Cramling blindfolded in a bullet match where he gave her time odds. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=rmLDo3SKUo8). Anna Cramling is not a top player but she is still very strong and I think this is vivid proof for non-chess people that Daniel is a strong chess player.
Kramnik has been inferring or accusing people of cheating based on their online performances in chess.com titled Tuesday events where there are cash prizes or their other games on chess.com where they have made large win streaks. In chess there is a big problem with online cheating because for strong players access to a computer evaluation of the position after their opponent had made a move would be a large advantage according to Magnus Carlson (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VcbHmHHwlUQ&t=345) and it would be very difficult for an anti-cheat system to detect this. Maybe it would be possible to correlate move time with change in evaluation to try and detect such a cheat but I suspect it would be a very noisy signal. But strong players have chosen more greedy approaches to cheating where they will play moves supplied directly from a computer engine and chess.com have some statistical methods where they are able to detect this cheating and have banned FIDE titled players for this.
There has been an outpouring of support for Daniel because he is well liked in the chess community because of the education content he puts out on youtube and his wholesome persona. Also, people feel that Kramnik's allegations against him and other people in chess have been unfounded. This includes allegations against GM David Navara (https://lichess.org/@/RealDavidNavara/blog/because-we-care/fauAwr9r) who claimed in a blog post he had suicidal thoughts due to Kramniks attacks.
Kramnik's allegations against Naroditsky also included a 'speed run' match where Naroditsky played weaker opponents on chess.com to produce educational content. In this episode Naroditsky opened a computer engine to start evaluating the game before it had ended while his opponent was stalling (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mzo3JHvg-iw). Daniel left this comment in the video explaining the situation:
Hey folks,
I'd like to address several comments that pointed out my use of the engine to analyze the opening from the second game while it was still ongoing, around the 25:00 mark.
First, and most importantly, having an engine running during a game is against the rules, end of story. It was wrong and I unreservedly apologize to my opponent and to any viewers who felt uncomfortable during that segment. After capturing my opponent's queen, I fully expected resignation any moment and got impatient. It goes without saying that one's status or title should never put them above justified criticism. I am sorry and it will not happen again.
However, I'd like to strongly request that you take the context into account and treat it charitably. The speedrun series is educational in nature, and as such, my priority at every moment is to maximize the instructive value of each second. I was up a full queen and minor piece, and was looking at the opening (i.e. the unrelated position after a few moves) in the hopes of shortening the post-game analysis. In the moment, I thought it obvious that in the context of the series it would not be interpreted by anyone as deliberate cheating. I think that anyone with a modicum of discernment can see that I had zero intention of "normalizing cheating" by suggesting that using an engine during a competitive game is in any way acceptable. It is not. And anyone who has watched even a tiny percent of my YT or stream content can agree, I hope, that I have consistently advocated for fair play in chess, and have tried to foster a community that prizes honesty and integrity as we all strive to become better at chess.
My priority is, and always will remain, to put out educational content that helps people improve at chess. I try to lead by example, but I am not perfect. Thank you for taking this into consideration, and my deepest gratitude to y'all for your support, kind words, and stories of success. I am honored and grateful to play a part in your chess journey.
Chess.com where these games were played has made some effort to legitimise speedrun accounts. Normally, such a thing would be considered a fair play violation due to smurfing but chess.com has an official way to register a speedrun account and anyone who is queued against a speedrun account would have their rating points refunded. Potentially, chess.com could have gone further and made queuing into speedrun accounts an opt-out preference and made it clearer what fairplay rules speedrun accounts could violate. For example, I'm currently enjoying a series on the sicilian dragon from a GM but when the opponent makes a mistake the GM will ask the live stream audience what is the move to take advantage of the mistake. This makes a lot of sense from a teaching point of view but is a technical violation of the chess.com fairplay rules that bars outside assistance.
Kramnik is now claiming he has contacted the Charlotte police department with new information about Daniels death (https://x.com/VBkramnik/status/1981257207917187291)
I have contacted the Charlotte police Department and asked them to investigate the death of Daniel, providing them some additional info . Hope will be done, and real truth about the curcumstances and cause of this tradegy will be revealed, despite all attempts to hide it
I'm not sure what information Kramnik has shared but there seems to be a conspiracy pushed by Kramnik aligned people that there is some kind of 'chess mafia'. I assume this is based around chess.com, the Charolette chess center and a bunch of popular streamers that work with chess.com. Previously, there was a character called 'ChessBae' that was able to use money and chess.com connections in order to exert influence on chess streamers (https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/oios3j/chess_the_rise_and_fall_of_chessbae_the/) so it is not completely far fetched. However, Kramnik has a history of coming up short when it comes to his accusations so based on past performance Naroditsky death will probably turn out to be unsuspicious.
benmmurphy
5d ago
AIPAC's success could also just be a relic of the cold war. it looks to me like the west backed Israel and the Soviets backed a bunch of other states/organizations in that region and this also why now we have a lot of support on the left for Palestine. Some of the Palestinian organizations were explicitly Marxist/Leninist and also hooked up with revolutionary Marxist organizations in Europe to commit operations. It seems like this was a big thing in the 60s/70s.
Both Israel and Palestine today receive a lot of support from the left for Palestine and the right / (institutional left) for Israel because of inertia. Probably a lot of people don't know really why are they giving support to Israel or Palestine because the inertia from the Cold War is so large. There would have been massive propaganda efforts by both the Soviets and the US mainstream to push their sides point of view and is likely still having a large effect today.
benmmurphy
11d ago
it could well be similar to how the dot-com investments worked out. lots of duds and even scams but on average i think the return on investing during that era was good and what it ended up producing was good. the problem is all of this is very risky and there is going to be a lot of failed investments in order to have some big payoffs. and of course the big players and everyone who thinks they have a chance is going to try and get the government to step in to subsidise their losses. but that doesn't mean the idea of AI is terrible or that we shouldn't be doing it.
benmmurphy
12d ago
this is similar to what o'keefe was doing with his 'stings'. basically getting left aligned people to confide to him or his operatives like a friend.
benmmurphy
14d ago
it could also be you have a bunch of bad options for the TCP connection. tho, i suspect iperf would should have good defaults. a common problem with TCP application is not setting TCP_NODELAY and be a cause of extra latency. the golang language automatically sets this option but i'm sure a lot of languages/libraries do not set it. you can also have problems between userspace and kernelspace (but maybe not at this speed?). like if you can only shift 200 Mbps between the kernel and userspace because of syscall overhead on a single thread and in the multiple stream case you are using multiple threads then maybe that is why the performance improves. also, if you are using multiple streams you are going to have a much larger max receive window. there is some kind of receive buffer configuration (tcp_rmem?) that controls how large the receive buffer is and the thus the receive window. its possible this is not large enough and so using 10x connections means you effectively now have 10x the max receive window. also, there is tcp_wmem configuration that controls the write buffer in a similar way. cloudflare has an article on optimizing tcp_rmem https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/ which shows their production configuration.
it also might depend on what you mean by 'faster' or what you are doing. but if you are multiplexing streams inside of TCP like HTTP2 then this can be slower than separate HTTP/1.1 streams because a single missing packet on the HTTP2 TCP stream will block all the substreams whereas a single missing packet on a HTTP/1.1 TCP stream will only effect that one HTTP/1.1 TCP stream. by 'block' i mean the data can't be delivered to the application until the missing packet arrives. the data can still be buffered in the OS so you can imagine if you were just looking at a very large transfer with a very small amount of missing packets and you were only worried about the overall transfer time then this is not really 'slower'. but if you are very worried about the time it takes for small amounts of data to reach the other side then this can be 'slower'. a good example of this would be some kind of request-response protocol.
benmmurphy
17d ago
A weird thing I've noticed is if you link to chess.com in a youtube comment then your comment well be automatically deleted. Also, the next level of weirdness is I posted a link without the domain and only the path and youtube also deleted that comment. But I suspect this is probably some automatic comment deletion evasion logic and maybe if I didn't make the first comment the second comment would have sailed through. The weird thing is chess.com is a large commercial entity and apparently they haven't tried to sit down with youtube and fix this. So I presume chess.com must have done something very naughty to piss off youtube into censoring all their links.
Also, this is super annoying when you want to link to games in youtube comments.
benmmurphy
18d ago
The post is interesting because they have titles like: 'We need to kill the "coding" concept' but are part of the blueksky zeitgeist that is anti-LLM. If you really hate these 'man-children' maybe you should be pushing the boundaries of LLMs in order to replace the need for people who type arcane runes into the machine.
benmmurphy
18d ago
he showed the collar on stream and claimed it was only had vibrating functionality (https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1o1r33t/labased_streamer_shows_off_his_canine_companions/) but now people are accusing him of using electric tape to cover the electric contacts. https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1o1waqw/bro_gave_0_effort_in_putting_on_that_tape/
benmmurphy
19d ago
In the UK there has been a push to pass law to ban conversion therapy but I think there was some trouble because people were worried that if someone talked to someone about gender dysphoria then that could be considered conversion therapy. Unless the law explicitly bans only conversation therapy in 'bad' directions then there is always a risk that a person doing conversion therapy in a 'good' direction will become a victim of the law. Baroness Burt the sponsor of the bill had this to say:
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/LLN-2024-0004/LLN-2024-0004.pdf
Of course, it’s important to differentiate between psychological practice or religious advice and conversion therapy. A therapist, for example, who is exploring gender dysphoria with a young person in good faith—with no predetermined goal to change how that young person ought to be—shouldn’t be penalised. That’s why my bill would require the police to demonstrate both action and motivation when attempting to prosecute in relation to this offence.
benmmurphy
19d ago
Somehow this reminds of one of Kulak's posts on his blog about how different cultures treat animals differently. This is much more frowned upon in Western culture but maybe in other cultures this is not such a big deal.
benmmurphy
21d ago
it could just be 'bants'. maybe he is just venting to a friend and there is some context that is snipped from the conversation that we see that makes it less bad. cancelling him has parallels to cancelling people for having misogynistic/sexist/racist comments in a whatsapp group with friends. there is an expectation of a privacy and lot of it is just people venting or memeing and not being serious.
benmmurphy
24d ago
I think there is a bunch of magic stuff about 'liberalism'
- we settle our differences at the ballot box. instead of killing each other we have a vote and then decide on how we are governed
- even if we disagree with each other we can still trade with each other and be better off!
i feel like we are have been losing 2) for a long time and i guess eventually if we start losing a lot of the benefit from 2) then we might start losing 1)
benmmurphy
26d ago
This might make sense if you have an advantage or think you have an advantage in the realm of ideas. But if you have an advantage in terms of smashing skulls or coordinating other people to smash skulls then I don't think it makes sense.
benmmurphy
28d ago
Harder to be obese when our food is so terrible
There has also been questions about his education credentials as well. I see two extreme interpretations of the current situation. Either he is extremely unlucky and has been a victim of ICE and now the internet sleuths have been activated and is now is whole life is being painted in the worse possible light or he is a serial grifter archetype. Laura Powell has a breakdown here: https://x.com/LauraPowellEsq/status/1971811032235753770
The other weird thing is in that twitter thread from Laura Powell it shows he was married and presumably married to an American for a long period of time. It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.
It's also interesting to read his statement about the hunting rifle while imagining he is either this unlucky victim of circumstance or he is the grifter. He even implies that maybe it was not a case of luck but rather that he had been targeted due to race and that the citation was due to him trying to create a safer situation for the law enforcement officer. His statement could definitely be true. There is no doubt that there are law enforcement people out there that might see you place a rifle back into your vehicle temporarily and then write you up instead of letting it slide. (https://www.yourerie.com/news/local-news/millcreek-superintendent-issues-statement-after-receiving-hunting-citation/)
He also has not made everything up because is is an olympic athlete and did compete in the Sydney 2000 Olympics where is ran 1:52.32 in the 800m qualifier. (https://worldathletics.org/results/olympic-games/2000/27th-olympic-games-6951910/men/800-metres/heats/result)
Some people are claiming he is was able to get a pass due to his ethnicity but maybe he was able to get a pass because of his sporting accomplishments. Maybe the school board thought that employing an Olympian would help inspire kids regardless of his actual suitability for the job itself.
its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Then when a woman purchases the firearms that are used in a capital crime due to this restriction we can give them honorary doctorates.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
isn't this just a muh plaintiffs don't have standing decision. if the plaintiffs weren't looking for relief against future violations from the government but instead focussed on current violations maybe they would have been successful.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
The claim seems to be that Kimmel is not blaming MAGA for the murder, rather Kimmel is claiming that MAGA are trying to claim non-MAGA murdered Charlie. I feel like this is probably the correct strict parsing of what Kimmel said but I wouldn't be surprised if you asked his audience directly after he said this whether MAGA killed Charlie a lot of them would have the impression that MAGA did based on what Kimmel said. This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect. Also, the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker instead of treating the speaker in the most charitable way possible.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
newer iPhones have their bluetooth running when they are 'off' (i think this runs for up to 1 day?) in order to network with nearby iPhones to support the find-my-phone feature. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/
benmmurphy
1mo ago
his twitter is now full of innuendo that he is a special subject matter expert on transgenders
I guess if FIDE has provision for doing something like that, then that a risk a player undertakes when they violate the rules. But I do agree that it is a bit weird to strip people of results like World Champion that have legitimately earned for unrelated unsportsmanlike conduct that occurred at a different time. Stripping people of titles like Grandmaster seems more reasonable because it sounds more like an honorific even though it is purely based on an objective criteria. It does actually look like a strict reading of the code would allow FIDE to strip Kramnik of his World Championship result (https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/EthicsAndDisciplinaryCode2022.pdf). They basically have a bunch of sanctions, and a bunch of offences and there doesn't seem to be any guidance from the FIDE code on which sanctions are appropriate for which offences.
FIDE even has the damnatio memoriae option:
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