gautamnarula

As a Magnus fan this saddens me, but his reasons are understandable: you've got one life to live and he doesn't enjoy spending a quarter of it preparing for these grinding, stressful matches. After five consecutive wins, including a crushing win less than a year ago, and 10 years as world #1, by a considerable margin for most of those years (the gap between him and #2 right now is the same as between #2 and #9, and this is the smallest gap it's been in some time), I think he can make a credible case that he has nothing left to prove and trying to get a 2900 rating is more interesting.

On a related note, my suggestion for an updated WCC format:

We should move away from all classical chess. Yes, that's the tradition that's been going for 150 years, but today so many of the biggest events are rapid and blitz (online tour events, Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz events, World Rapid & Blitz Championships, not to mention two of the last three world championship matches being decided in rapid tiebreaks and many of the biggest classical events decided in rapid or blitz tiebreaks). So I believe the "World Chess Champion" should be the person who demonstrates mastery in a blended format of all three, to represent the importance of all three.

The rapid, blitz, and classical portions all have equal weights (18 points)by following in the footsteps of the Grand Chess Tour Rapid and Blitz events where rapid games are worth 2 times as much as blitz. I suggest 6 classical games, worth 3 points each (1.5 for a draw); 9 rapid games, worth 2 points each (1 for a draw); and 18 blitz games, worth the traditional 1 point each (0.5 for a draw), with the cumulative score determining the winner.

I strongly recommend people avoid health products (supplements, vitamins, etc.) and electronics from third parties on Amazon for this very reason. It's worth paying extra to get these kinds of goods from a retailer that works directly with the manufacturer or authorized distributor so you know you're actually getting the real thing.

This jives with what I observed as an intern some on an AWS team some years ago. The oncall rotations seemed absolutely brutal and the engineers were so busy and stressed out fighting fires that they barely noticed my existence (which I was okay with) and the tech debt kept accumulating between because between new feature launches and firefighting there wasn't much scope for anything else.

My intern project was a fairly no brainer tech debt item that automated a lot of the deployment process and saved our lead engineer several hours a week in babysitting deploys. I resolved to never work on a cloud infra team after that -- while the internship was fine, being a full time engineer seemed absolutely miserable.

Reminds me of Hemingway's "Write drunk, edit sober."

Add that to the ever-growing list of reasons to get rid of the Electoral College.

For the "keep it fresh" part, I use Fellow Atmos containers for my beans (I'm sure there are other options too). They allow you to pump out the air by twisting the lid back and forth. I live by myself and only drink 2-3 cups of coffee a week, so it's been useful since a standard 12 oz bag lasts over a month for me.

I can +1 Sceptre. I got a Sceptre 65" 4k dumb TV on sale for $320 last year and have been happy with it. I hope I never have to join a smart TV; my experiences with them have been almost universally bad.

Any recommendations on whom to follow on that front?

I have the Sceptre 65" "dumb" TV recommended in this article and have been really happy with it. I also got it on sale last year so paid only ~$350 for it-- wait until Black Friday/Cyber Monday if you're looking to get one. I got a Roku to stream with and have been pretty happy.

Meanwhile my family members all have Smart TVs, and have dealt with terrible firmware that makes streaming a real pain and slow boot/startup times, not being able to stream Disney+ for a while because the manufacturer wouldn't update their firmware for a long time, of course the general privacy/spyware, and I think even ads pushed through onto their TVs.

I hope dumb TVs continue, otherwise I fear I'll be forced to "upgrade" to a Smart TV once this one needs to be replaced.

Mine is www.gautamnarula.com (or, if it's easier to remember, www.gautam.city, since my name is pronounced "Gotham"!).

My elevator pitch: I'm curious about many different topics and have had some unconventional experiences, and I share them through writing. A reader would hopefully learn many interesting things along the way.

For example, my most recent post was a photo-essay showing what lockdown life is like in NYC, America's coronavirus epicenter: https://www.gautamnarula.com/new-york-in-the-time-of-coronav...

My most popular post (hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million views) is a step-by-step guide to rapidly improving at chess: www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get-good-at-chess-fast

Here's a preview from a book I wrote about my friendship with a well-known death row inmate: https://www.gautamnarula.com/remain-free-preview-ii-death-ro...

A surprisingly popular one was the post I wrote as a sophomore in college on creating a multiplayer Elo-based rating system. This post actually got me a great job several years later! www.gautamnarula.com/rating/

Another post about meeting a surfer who helped me rethink what was important to me: https://www.gautamnarula.com/what-javier-taught-me/

The parent link has a link to a list of papers[1] that answer this question in the affirmative:

For example, "Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population" [2]

It's also worth noting that many people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, so wearing a mask, even a homemade one, could reduce the spread to other healthy people.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/

This is a good point. How many people who got in a car accident might die when they otherwise wouldn't have because all the ICU units were taken up by COVID-19 patients? How many people will succumb to an infection they caught in the hospital because there wasn't enough PPE?

While not a direct fatality of the viruses, these cases should be estimated to see its total mortality impact.

I've seen 24 hours on cardboard[1]

The best appears to be copper, which is 4 hours[1] which is why I bought some copper tape online and wrapped shared touch surfaces in my apartment with it (though be careful to avoid getting cuts when you grip it).

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8116090...

I've started wrapping shared touch surfaces (doorknobs, handles, etc) in my apartment with copper tape. It's pretty cheap ($12 for 66ft on Amazon). You do need to be careful about gripping the surfaces though, because the sharp edges in the copper foil can cause small cuts which would actually make you more susceptible to viral infection.

Twitter is currently profitable, and has been since sometime in 2018.

To your bigger point, I actually think nowadays we're finally seeing fewer "me too" type companies--fewer knockoff social companies (early 2010s), fewer "Uber/Airbnb for X" companies (mid-2010s), fewer hot air crypto companies (late 2010s), etc. Granted I'm seeing a proliferation of "AI" companies so that isn't to say that hype is dead, but I'm hoping we'll see something new and innovative over the next few years.

My evidence is mostly anecdotal too, but I have some insight into the new grad perspective both from being a recent new grad and running a site that aggregates new grad tech jobs [1].

Google is still pretty popular among new grads. Of the "Big 4" (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), Facebook seems to have taken the biggest hit reputationally, but is also still popular. Amazon is less popular due to the perception of its work culture and not being as engineering driven/having as high an engineering bar as Google/Facebook, but is also a popular choice.

I'd say the most popular are "unicorns" that are know for having a good culture, strong engineering, and a promising financial trajectory; Stripe and Airbnb are the two that most quickly come to mind.

[1] www.newgrad.tech

I don't like/didn't like this practice from DD (I think they're finally phasing it out after much criticism), but it worked exactly the same way tipping at restaurants works, so that is a precedent they can call upon as well.

>There is no big picture. There is only hill climbing and getting stuck on local maxima constantly.

This really nicely describes why I think so much software becomes bloated. You see this with startups all the time--at first the product is hacky/clunky/lacking features, then after some time and love it does a small set of things really, really well and is truly a joy to use, and then later on it becomes slow, bloated, and trying to do far too much and ends up doing many things unremarkablely rather than a few things well (the opposite of "half, not half-assed").

I think that last stage happens when you have individual teams A/B testing new changes independently and hacking on each new piece without much thought to the overarching cohesiveness of the product. All the incentives naturally align toward this too, so it takes some really strong leadership to prevent it and have a broader product vision that supercedes all the local optima of each individual team's features.

(As a side note, this also often happens when the software/startup needs to be monetized)

Uber's greatest contribution has been losing so much money/having their share price performing so badly that SoftBank, and by extension the Saudis who poured money in the SoftBank Vision Fund, is hundreds of millions of dollars underwater.

That was also in 2008, when the majority was opposed to same-sex: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/change-doesnt-usually-c...

The link only goes to 2015, but polling had already changed 15-18 points in favor of marriage equality by then. California had 48% vote against prop 8 in 2008, which was still ~8 points above the national level of support for same-sex marriage.

It's also worth noting that "super liberal" MA, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2004 via a state Supreme Court decision, failed multiple times in its legislature to ban it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Massach... and multiple opponents of it were defeated in elections and replaced with proponents.

In that specific case, it's hard to justify taking Acela over a bus. Acela is at best an hour faster and something like 4x the cost (or more) It is certainly more comfortable, but unless we get true high speed rail that shortens the travel time between Boston and NYC to < 2 hours I can't ever justify personally paying for it. I've only ever taken Acela between Boston and NYC when an organization I was working for was willing to foot the bill.

In Europe, I took trains that hit speeds of 195 MPH for long stretches. That sort of speed would make rail a real viable third way between car/bus and air for long distance travel.

I'm even more surprised it just requires a simple majority and not a supermajority. Seems like it could be really easily abused.

The tl;Dr is that Waymo may make the mistake that Xerox did when it failed to successfully commercialize the GUI-driven PC they created at PARC, while Apple and Microsoft eventually did successfully. The article argues that self-driving startups may do the same thing to Waymo, which has yet to commercialize its (currently superior) self-driving tech.

Not a fan of the clickbait title.

1800-2000 is also not considered master. The official master title in the US is achieved at a 2200 rating.