Viewing profile — slphil

Wrong shooter, wrong targets. Not allowed to talk about that.

I enjoy many chess variants. Atomic chess is quite fun (in 2012 or so a friend and I created an opening book to find forcing lines for White, where Black must know the correct line…

Unfortunately, a lot of strong chess players do not enjoy playing Chess960 because we've already invested hundreds of hours into learning openings and how those openings transition…

To the contrary, many chess players are opposed to the increasing computerization of the game. Computers have already devastated opening theory (by finding solutions to difficult l…

It's only tedious for brand new players, who should get over it and do it anyway until it is natural.

I am a chess professional, although more as a teacher than a player, so I have a lot of experience in this field. As caro_douglos pointed out, it slows down the initial reaction to…

This makes no difference. Players are required to keep notation in tournament games, and the use of external software (like what is used at the top boards at some tournaments) does…

I own Wasteland 2 but I haven't been able to make myself play it. It's my own failing, but it's just so old-school. It's very hard to find a game that keeps old-school charm withou…

I have bad news for you: Fallout 4 is an incredible game the first time, but the second time through you notice that the game has very little depth. I had a blast the first time, b…

It's important to point out that he was basically emotionally abused by researchers (apparently paid in part by the government) and never really recovered from it. Also that his ma…

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world (although not the most common first language) and is the lingua franca of the Internet. While language mistakes shouldn't be…

This was genuinely painful.

I'm not sure where you got that impression. The lowered attendance rate of in-person chess clubs is more than made up by the enormous amount of chess played online, high-level prof…

The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every so…

I don't quite agree, but I see where you're coming from. Instead I tend to see them as being just different behaviors, with bystanders (clueless rubes and cynical manipulators alik…

You are willfully missing the point. Animals have instincts. The complexity of humans does not make them an exception to this rule. There are in fact large amounts of brain functio…

As was pointed out in an earlier comment, 2001 really only got the economics of space travel wrong. It's possible that we could have done it, technologically speaking, but that it …

I think what he's trying to express is that patent law shouldn't be bound up in concerns of party policy. Once something becomes part of the polarization, it's over.

Compatibilism isn't simply a language game. The "free will" question has centuries of ethical baggage attached to it that are critical to a functioning justice system, among other …

At risk of violating some HN etiquette about memes, "pro-tip" is a word of fuzzy and common meaning since it was memed back in the ancient era of memes ("Pro-Tip: To defeat the Cyb…

Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive suc…

Defense and infrastructure are inherently the responsibility of the state. I'm not a small-government libertarian. Market forces should be used here whenever possible (military-ind…

This isn't true. Hunter gatherer life is nearly universally harsh and violent. I posted an article on this in the same comment thread. Modern humans are miserable, for sure, but ol…

I don't know any other hypothetical building blocks for complex life. It could possibly be the case that the alternatives are too unstable and that alien life would be made of some…

Healthcare is an obvious exception, and religiously fundamentalist capitalists won't admit to that, but the reason is simple. Healthcare has virtually infinite demand, and the dema…