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Concretely, what interesting changes did it make to achieve such a significant improvement?

A lot of it was beyond me, but this was all the branch names for all the stuff it tried, most of it unsuccessful of course. About 10x perf improvement came from architectural changes, and then 2x from micro optimizations.

https://pastebin.com/eac0SAYg


If you enjoyed this, you might like Mind Chess, which can be played without a board and pieces [1]:

Consider Mind Chess. Two players face each other. One says "Check." The other says "Check." The first says "Check." This continues until one of them says, instead, "Checkmate." That player wins -- superficially. In fact, the challenge is to put off checkmate for as long as possible, while still winning. This may be better stated: you truly win Mind Chess if you call "Checkmate" just before your opponent was about to.

[1] http://www.eblong.com/zarf/essays/mindgame.html


Which reminds me that I just lost the game.

I also lost the game not too long ago, but before that, I think I didn't actually lose it for a decade of more? And losing it wasn't even because it was mentioned anywhere, I genuinely just thought of it by myself, after forgetting about it for so long.

So my sincerest apologies if my comment just made any readers lose their long streak in the game.


Damnit, I am pretty sure I had a few-year-streak going until just now. Welp, off to the grind again, I suppose.


I've lost it a lot lately, for some reason, after what I suppose was my third multi-year victory streak.

Like, five or so losses this year.


Same here, oddly enough, and every time besides this one was without anyone else mentioning it.


I think once you lost the game once, it's much easier to lose it again relatively shortly after. It takes some long term distraction (and nobody mentioning it) to forget about it again.


Yep, just lost after I think >5 years. But not because of your comment, because of GP comment.


damn. multiyear streak ruined. i even managed to forget i was playing.

i just lost the game.


Nah, I won't be fooled again. I won a long time ago and never looked back.

https://xkcd.com/391


Wow maybe 10+years running here since i lost last..


Damn!


And if you like Mind Chess, you might enjoy Mornington Crescent, which has a similar flavor to it! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lziCsPmlbZI


Absolutely! Visualising a long string of opponents saying 'Check' to each other until one calls the checkmate reminded me of when you and your opponent both take the classic dub-Victoria understrategy and repeatedly 'Parsons Green' each other. Such memories!


Sounds like a dating game. "Delay texting her back or expressing your feelings as long as possible, until just the moment before she will give up on you"


If you want it, i made a digitally playable Mind Chess, so you're less dependent on the honor system https://jasperblank.com/mind-chess/

Speaking of games without pieces, it's hard to develop one for only 2 players, but I've tried: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43110448 (yes that is my alt account, sorry but I forgot my password)


There's a fantastic game like Mind Chess and Rock-Paper-Scissors called "Hand Cricket". It is like cricket, but played by showing a number with the fingers of your hand. (Showing just a thumb is 6, folding all fingers is 0, and 1-5 is 1-5 fingers as usual).

Both players play a number simultaneously. If the numbers are the same, the batting player gets out. Otherwise, whatever number the batter showed gets added to their score. The innings continues till the batter gets out. And then the roles reverse, the other person becomes batter.

After both innings, the person with higher score wins.

It's spooky because you have 7 different choices for each ball but people still get out rather quickly.


This sounds like an inferior, diminished version of Mornington Crescent.


Wait, how is the "put off checkmate" objective scored? Turns before checkmate? Or what?

Is it just a joke?


The sibling comment proposed a possible scoring mechanism which might result in enjoyable gameplay, but I think the bigger point (for me, at least) is the Mind Chess represents a reducto ad absurdum of the strategy game genre. It eschews as many rules as possible, leaving you only with the goal of knowing your opponent's mind. So Mind Chess is more of a thought exercise.


It's similar to the 2-minute version of Diplomacy - get everyone together and the second sneakiest bastard wins; because nobody will let the sneakiest bastard win.


The Search for the Longest Infinite Chess Game

https://youtu.be/b-Bb_TyhC1A


I have never played it, but I could imagine a scoring mechanism that would make it interesting, and perhaps is implied by the rules:

The score value starts at 1. Every additional "check" multiplies the score value by 2 (so 2, 4, 8, 16...). The first player to say "checkmate" receives the score. Track your summed score between games; the player with the highest overall score at any given time is "winning."


Isn't the optimal strategy just to say "checkmate" immediately? That dominates anything else.


I think to have any chance of making this work, you’d need to have a community of players in a tournament. Everybody gets to issue some number of challenges, and the winner is the person who accumulates the most points over the course of the tournament. I think you should only get points based on the length of games you win.

Then the game at least has a chance to develop some mechanics. Players who delayed longer have a chance at winning more points. They also might be challenged more…


Not in an iterated game. If my team agrees we'll never checkmate before turn 5, the game is the same except we start the actual game on turn 5 with a big score advantage compared to everyone else.

You can leave at any time by breaking the rule, but then you will be playing with other people who say checkmate immediately, and that would be much worse.

Being prosocial is in fact a stable equilibrium. As prophecized by gestures broadly at everything.


That would be the equivalent of spawn camping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camping_(video_games)


Isn't that just iterated prisoner dilemma?


It only works if there are more than two players


Give two players cards, "Check" and "Checkmate".

Both players choose a card. Players then in turns reveal their card, and if Check, make another choice. The player first revealing Checkmate wins if their opponent's currently-chosen card is also a Checkmate.


But then this just gives the win to the first person to open their card, since in that round they had both selected Checkmate. Or, you have an incentive to rush to open your card when you know you've selected Checkmate, as you want to be the first one to open.


Maybe I should've worded differently for clarity, the game doesn't go forever:

The player first revealing Checkmate ends the game. They win if their opponent's currently-chosen card is also a Checkmate, otherwise the opponent wins.


In the proposed game above, there is no rounds, just alternating plays, in which you have to select you play before the other player announces their play, then swap and repeat


So both players select their cards, then player 1 announces, then player 2, then select, then player 2 announces, then player 1? This seems a bit limiting, as you can't really select Checkmate on the play where you don't reveal first, because you only stand to lose.


I believe the intended turn order is:

1: P1 selects 2: P2 selects 3: P1 reveals 4: P1 selects 5: P2 reveals 6: GOTO 2

I.e. each player always selects immediately before their opponent reveals.


Yeah, but what stops P1 from DDos'ing and picking checkmate each time?

If P2 picks check the first time, then they're done. At any point after if they pick checkmate, since P1 has checkmate selected they will reveal it and P2 will lose.

It seems like a poorly thought through game...


Because P1 lost on their first turn if P2 wasn’t about to pick checkmate


That assume a rule that wasn't state.

You're assume if someone picks 'checkmate' and the next player picks 'check' the games is over and the checkmate selector loses. I assumed that it means you treat it like 'check' 'check' and continue playing. But neither is actually specified in OPs post.

But let's assume it's your rules. Then winning is easy, just never pick checkmate. Literally never. As soon as your opponent picks it, they lose.

It's a terribly designed game as described.


So is war (the card game), but people still play it

I think the proposed game has that both of you lose, like tic tac toe. The only way to win is to checkmate as described. Although it is a memoryless game as proposed, so all options (restart, continue, end) are indistinguishable. Maybe if you win, you go again?

Anyways, the game seems to be described to be the equivalent to the political doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Also a terribly designed game.


But then you won't know if the other player has selected checkmate when you reveal yours.



Working at the Mind Chess Café is an interesting job.


I did not enjoy this


> Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances.

In other words, men in nursing are treated to the same indignities that women experience in most jobs?


Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.

As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.


> Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men.

I am sure that there's a lot of unreported mistreatment of anyone who represents a minority in a given profession.


Are you saying this should be acceptable behavior? Am eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.


No, that's not at all what I'm saying.

Rather, I am pointing out that irony in the hope that men, dismayed by the treatment of men in certain professions, but find within themselves the empathy to appreciate what women go through and to adjust their behavior accordingly.


You seem to be assuming that the men who exhibit toxic behavior toward women are the same people as those who find such behavior appaling when it’s toward men. Do you have any evidence for that?


Yes, I know many such people personally.


So male nurses should put up with toxic behavior so they can learn “empathy” and adjust their behavior. Sounds sociopathic, don't you think?


I feel that you are deliberately misinterpreting what I said in an effort to fit your own agenda. I never said anyone should put up with toxic behavior. What I said is that men should stop being toxic. That's what "adjust their behavior" means.


To be fair your message sounded provocative and it came through as suggesting that to me too. But i guess this is the problem with text, not easy to deliver the tone


My agenda is against the obviously discriminatory stance that “men should stop being toxic”. It seems like a lot of people “deliberately” misinterpreted you, so maybe the problem is actually you.

Out of that list only sexual advances apply to men. So no its not the same. Having worked in mostly female workplace i can confirm the pissing matches there are on a whole new level.


What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"

Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.


> What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"

I literally have no idea how you could have extracted that interpretation from my comment.


Yes, the main difference being we have no systems in place to deal with that for men. Or, the broader societal context: men have never had a progressive movement.


Speaking as someone who has used both: yes. OBS is a general-purpose recording/streaming system. It gives you a lot of flexibility, but it can take some work to make things look "nice."

Screen Studio (and so OpenScreen as well) are "opinionated" and are designed to create aesthetic videos with minimal configuration. They can't do a lot of the things that OBS can do, but if all you want is to record your desktop with a webcam overlay, it's a lot easier.


can it utilize my accelerator or GPU for best performance. and is it support kind of encode like av qucksync?


I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.

Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.

All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia


> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.

Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.


> Author's note: From here on, the content is AI-generated

Kudos to the author for their honesty in admitting AI use, but this killed my interest in reading this. If you can use AI to generate this list, so can anyone. Why would I want to read AI slop?

HN already discourages AI-generated comments. I hope we can extend that to include a prohibition on all AI-generated content.

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.


If the author had also included a note explaining that he'd *reviewed* what the AI produced and checked it for correctness, I would be willing to trust the list. As it is, how do I know the `netstat` invocation is correct, and not an AI hallucination? I'll have to check it myself, obviating most of the usefulness of the list. The only reason such a list is useful is if you can trust it without checking.


How would you know the invocation is correct when written by a human? Don’t humans make mistakes?


Sure, humans make mistakes... but rarely, vanishingly rarely about commands they use often. Are you going to make a non-typo kind of mistake when typing `ls -l`? AI hallucinations don't happen all the time, but they happen so much more often than "vanishingly rarely".

That's why you can't just vibe-code something and expect it to work 100% correctly with no design flaws, you need to check the AI's output and correct its mistakes. Just yesterday I corrected a Claude-generated PR that my colleague had started, but hadn't had time to finish checking before he went on vacation. He'd caught most of its mistakes, but there was one unit test that showed that Claude had completely misunderstood how a couple of our services are intended to work together. The kind of mistake a human would never have made: a novice wouldn't have understood those services enough to use them in the first place, and an expert would have understood them and how they are supposed to work together.

You always, always, have to double-check the output of LLMs. Their error rate is quite low, thankfully, but on work of any significant size their error rate is pretty much never zero. So if you don't double-check them then you're likely to end up introducing more bugs than you're fixing in any given week, leading to a codebase whose quality is slowly getting worse.


If I get that kind of content, my first reaction is to close it, it is kind of low effort content nowadays.

Unfortunely at work it isn't as easy with all the KPIs related to taking advantage of AI to "improve" our work.


I could've done better with research, but this post has been collecting dust in the drafts, so I decided to try my first (and last) time to finish the work I started a few months ago.


Why should you learn anything if you can just use AI to look it up? For fun is one reason.


Does it though? I don't see Canadian or Swiss or Slovak propaganda regularly reminding us that their country's leader is the "greatest ever."


Because some nations are leader-oriented and some nations are system-oriented. Ask any European if they support the state system in their country. Or ask any muslim if their branch of Islam is the best.

Almost all countries in the world will have heavy handed propaganda that their way of organizing things are the best and most fair that could ever exist.


The question was about North Korean propaganda and American propaganda. Both are powerful and hard to see when you are immersed in them. That some countries do not take the same approach makes this no less true. However there are other forms of propaganda. What I did not mention was that I am vegan. Only when you stop eating meat do you see how immersed in it we are. The pervasiveness and shared assumptions are there. Whether it’s who to hate or what to spend money on or what to eat. In the US the real propaganda is the stuff both parties agree on.


Mark Carney's famous speech at Davos was a breath of fresh air compared with anything ever spewed by the deranged current president of the USA. I am so glad I live in the best country in the world with him as prime minister and that we have no propaganda here in Canada. We will do so much better when we enter trade agreement negotiations with that degenerate loser south of the border in the next few months. That guy can't even ties his own shoes because of his cankles, but Mark Carney can tie not only his own shoes but he always wears sensible socks too.

You may have missed propaganda because you missed the propaganda.


I think you will enjoy this: https://youtube.com/shorts/k3nwW40sYkI


Note on Current Status (2025/2026): Microsoft is actively removing this command in newer Windows 11 updates, especially in 24H2/25H2 and Insider builds. If oobe\bypassnro fails, the command is not recognized, or simply reboots without enabling the option, you must use alternative methods.


The command (oobe\bypassnro) still works in 25H2. There was some talk that they're going to remove it, but so far it hasn't happened.


You should check out the Olomouc orloj [1]. Equally technically interesting as the Prague one, but with the added "benefit" of having been adjusted for political correctness under the Communist regime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olomouc_astronomical_clock


Didn't realize the Czechs had so many...The story about the clockmaker on the Prague one was interesting. The king trying to blind him so he could never make another for anyone else...


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