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.
Alcohol really does not help me with code either (except maybe a relaxing beer), but Marijuhana works(occasionally). But you really, really need to do the sober clean up part. Otherwise it becomes a mess.
I cannot work while stoned - velocity drops to a crawl, and any complexity becomes overwhelming. And dealing with colleagues becomes much more difficult.
I can code with a few drinks in me; in fact the activity of coding seems to reduce the amount I drink (I'm a functioning alcoholic).
It's decades since I drank during working hours. In my early career in the City, it was the custom to drink at lunchtime. Those days are passed.
Oh the Ballmer peak definitely exists for POCs, school work and side projects. A couple beers in and then you lose the fear of doing something stupid and start cranking out code.
Not sure about producfion code though, the values are different
Sort of a guilty secret but I used to save POC work for right after a company talk or party and a few beers. I could spew out a few hundred lines of code that was a bit messy but was got the job done. I’d go over it and clean it all up the next morning. Almost always an incredibly productive exercise for me but ymmv.
I’m sure this is a general comment on the electoral college, but it’s always bothered me that criticisms of the electoral college (generally made by Democrats, since they are negatively affected at the national level) tend to completely ignore the fact that a huge portion of people are disenfranchised in nearly all states. I imagine that Republican voters in California feel just as frustrated about their electoral votes going blue as Democratic voters in California are about the relative value of their electoral votes (which they get to control completely).
The focus is on the national outcome so much, that actually enfranchising voters is seen as a problem. And unlikely other ways of suppressing and disenfranchising voters, it’s perfectly fine to discuss and strategize around this.
Personally, I’d much rather see states send proportional electoral votes than a national popular vote. Perhaps that can fix the problem here? Give the counties to Idaho, but on the condition that both Oregon and Idaho assign electoral Nebraska-style — everyone is enfranchised, and you have an outcome (from those states at least) that is practically guaranteed to be representative.
The electoral college was not originally winners take all.
The problem is that going proportional only works out for the states if everyone is doing it, otherwise a massive winner takes all state is that much more important to swing.
> The problem is that going proportional only works out for the states if everyone is doing it, otherwise a massive winner takes all state is that much more important to swing.
It completely depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to enfranchise all of your citizens, then going proportional is great. If your goal is for your state to pick the winner, then it doesn't. But the first one seems more important to me, so I think going proportional is beneficial even if not all states are doing it (and some states do it already).
The problem is not that the state doesn't pick the winner, the problem is that it disadvantages the winner of that state immensely.
If in some hypothetical election state A goes 15/10 for candidates X and Y but state B goes a full 20 for Y, then it the majority opinion of state A got screwed over and B hands the election to Y.
"The majority opinion of state A got screwed over" => the state didn't disenfranchise the minority in favor of the majority? It's funny to say that you "got screwed" by having your vote count for only your vote. The reality is that the minority in large states are the ones getting completely screwed today, and that a proportional system would result in a more fair outcome. That only "screws over" the majority voters in the sense that it takes away their privilege that they enjoy today.
Yes, other states would continue to "screw over" the minority, but that's hardly an argument in favor of you doing so given that the whole argument against the electoral college is a moral one (one citizen, one vote). The ol' "everyone should be moral, but I will only do so if it doesn't disadvantage my majority" isn't a great look.
If we all agree that a national popular vote is the ideal because every single vote counts, then surely a proportional electoral vote is an improvement over winner-take-all per state. The only reason to say otherwise would be that it doesn't produce the outcome that you want. (Which is why I find the electoral college arguments somewhat cynical -- they seem to be interested only in that aspect.)
well, not really. people would like EC vote outcomes that come as close as possible to the popular vote as possible. In that regard for the past 250~ years a EC winner who didn't win the popular vote only happened 5 times, and it didn't happen at all for 112 years.
A weird halfway proportional reform, if anything, would probably take elections farther away from representing the popular vote outcome. And ultimately, that's what matters, because the entire point of voting is that more votes are supposed to result in greater say.
I think we’ll just have to agree to agree. I don’t think the outcome of such a change is really knowable, especially since it can change voting behavior. In any case, the argument that the current apportionment typically produces a matching result, and that’s it’s possible a proportional allocation by some states could produce a worse result in some cases (and a better result in others) isn’t a compelling reason for me to ignore the moral argument, if indeed the moral conviction is genuinely held. (But I don’t think it often is, which is my original point.)
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.
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.
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
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/
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.