marcusbuffett

Ah this is a great find, the bullet chess clock. It's partly inference time before the intentional delay, and partly the animation of the move counts towards the bot's time. Should be fixed now though.

Fixed the premove thing too, I think.

http://chessbook.com/training-games is the direct link, for usual Chessbook users it's still gated behind an early-access flag since I'm still working on the UX of playing the bot.

Here's a previous post outlining more about how the model works, whereas this post is more about how well it has turned out.

https://mbuffett.com/posts/chess-move-prediction/

Do you find the bots on chess.com play human-like chess? I'm not sure what they're using under the hood but I assume they've also put some effort into this sort of stuff.

Yeah the intention is to make them available on my chess site eventually (Chessbook). It's in very early alpha though, so it's breaking constantly as I tweak things and try playing against it with different configurations.

I used this for spaced repetition for opening training on Chessbook, can vouch that the Rust package is excellent. Easy to use and immediately lowered the training load on our users while keeping retention high. FSRS is awesome.

I strongly recommend "A Philosophy of Software Design". It basically boils down to measuring the quality of an abstraction by the ratio of the complexity it contains vs the complexity of the interface. Or at least, that's the rule of thumb I came away with, and it's incredible how far that heuristic takes you. I'm constantly thinking about my software design in these terms now, and it's hugely helpful.

I didn't feel like my code became better or easier to maintain, after reading other programming advice books, including "Clean Code".

A distant second recommendation is Programming Pearls, which had some gems in it.

Yeah as someone working on educational software, anything hand-rolling their own SRS is a pretty big red flag. Beating FSRS is going to be next to impossible, especially FSRS with parameters optimized from your users’ review history.

Yeah this is a good shot at using existing verbiage, better than the candidates I came up with at least. Still not entirely self-descriptive, and has some overlap with usage in other parts of the codebase, like in data processing and user onboarding, but maybe that's a fine trade-off to make in order to use a normal word. I'd be equally fine with them being called "steps", but now I'm attached to my Keps :D

Oh god yeah I’ve been in this situation too. Working at Apple it was like “is everyone in this meeting cleared for Tigris?” And you’d be like “I don’t know, what the hell is Tigris”, and then it turns out after you check your clearances it’s just iOS 13, which is obviously no mystery that after 12 there will be a 13. Just call it that!

Nothing was named according to what it did either, I think our deploy tool was Carnival? Just codenames everywhere

It’s one made-up name in a 30,000 line codebase. I think if anyone else ever works with the project they’ll have a lot harder things to catch up on than this convention

I gave this a spin, this is the best iteration I've seen of a CLI agent, or just best agent period actually. Extremely impressed with how well it did making some modifications to my fairly complex 10,000 LOC codebase, with minimal instruction. Will gladly pay $99/mo when I run out of credits if it keeps up this level.

Yeah I'm also sick of seeing articles cite this mythical trade-off, where any increase in programming output must be correlated with being a bad team member, churning out bad code, and generally being a pain to work with.

Anyone that's worked with engineers can tell you that there are simply some people getting more done than others, in the same amount of time. Are there people producing bad code? Yes. But I don't think output is inversely correlated with code quality. In fact the people I've worked with that have the most output, also had some of the highest quality code. I've never experienced this mythological 10x rockstar figure that works alone creating impossible to maintain systems, and I've worked closely with dozens of engineers. He probably exists somewhere, but not with the sort of prevalence that justifies every programming productivity article ripping on his archetype.

No I actually do mean the feedback you get as a developer when you realize which “bad” decisions actually end up being tech debt and which were totally fine and just saved time

That was more of a subtle joke than anything substantive. I think JIRA is probably fine as long as it’s not like a religion

These seem just as abstract as mine, if not more so, plus at least I provided examples where I could. Feels weird to criticize my post for general advice + examples, then come up with your own general advice without examples.

Also this was just an analogy I know, but doctors definitely don’t hurt people for years while trying to save them, very different profession from ours, if anything doctors earlier in their career have been shown to have better results.

I think Ozempic cost somewhere around $3 billion to research and develop. What’s the steel man argument for how we could charge the same for the drug in America, and fund future research with the proceeds? I don’t want to be paying $800/mo for my drugs, but if the alternative is that everyone is paying $5/mo and there’s no hope of recouping the R&D costs, then we just won’t get biomedical breakthroughs like this at all.

I think it’s easy to look at places in Europe that get drugs virtually for free, and want to be like that, but the US despite being 1/20 of the world’s population, funds something like 80% of the biomedical industry, due to our lack of price controls.

There’s so many areas of medicine where we don’t see progress because the ROI just isn’t worth it. Do we want to risk making all medicine like that?