> Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics

That is true for an engine.

Meta-games around studying your opponent, specific match preparation and all those game theoretic stuff are so pervasive people claim they are 'killing' chess at top levels. Anyway, for humans, chess at high levels of mastery is a striking display of bootstrapping some insane cognitive machinery around memory, processing speed, 'expanding' working memory via understanding:

[0] Alekhine blindfold simultaneous vs 32 opponents: https://www.blindfoldchess.net/assets/images/alekhine-excerp...

[1] Reingold, Charness, Pomplun & Stampe (2001), "Visual Span in Expert Chess Players": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11294228/

[2] Connors, Burns & Campitelli (2011), "Expertise in Complex Decision Making: The Role of Search in Chess 70 Years After de Groot": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1551-6709...

"Can you stack your family?" - Michael Falk, The Onion

Dynamic programming. Although if you don't know the distribution of how the bets will look beforehand, there's no real optimal strategy. Think you see first bet has 99% chance of giving you x2. Do you bet everything and take it? It could either be the worst bet of the 20 bets, in which case you just took 1% chance to lose everything unnecessarily, or it could have been the single bet that would be winning money, in which case betting it all would be the only strategy that could win.

We're in such a bull market, even shortages grow.

I'd refine it as 'If feasible, try fixing your diet before going for pills'. The body is adapted to function within a healthy nutritional range. If your diet falls outside that range, it's expected that your body won't function properly. If problems persist despite a good diet, then pills become a more reasonable option.

Humans are very inefficient when it comes to navigating the web, but also take actions pretty fast when completing forms. You don't really need advanced ML to see bots spend two seconds to read a full page, then spend 10 seconds just to click two buttons a human would click together in under 2 seconds. The amount of sophistication in bot detection peaks at about 'if user searches 20 queries in less than 5 minutes on our search engine and uses incognito, CAPTCHA them'.

Because of this, perfectly mimicking humans is not a good goal for a bot (as it is the case for AI in music), because they would become very inefficient, at least latency wise (throughput could be engineered around by scraping many unrelated webpages in parallel).

You can't reasonably expect generic ASR to infer tmux from "tee-mucks". "tee-em-you-ex" works reliably if you're ok with capitalisation for your use case.

How is anyone making money from courses if dabeaz isn't? He's got the word of mouth going on, celebrity status in the Python world, world-class courses, it doesn't make sense to me. I'm not asking rhetorically, am truly curious about what's going on.

When on Speaker/hands-free mode, it just closes screen. They assume you wouldn't press lock button while against your ear, because it closes the screen automatically. The problem is that there's some bugs that keep the screen open sometimes, or you may use it in a quiet room as if it were on hands-free.

I appreciate this reply. Even as a technical reader, these concepts are somewhat tricky to follow. In my opinion, this is more of a foot-gun than a feature. A user cannot know whether the screen is closed or not while it is next to their ear—and it’s possible that related inconsistent detection isssues sometimes automatically close the screen when the phone is not against the ear.

I usually view it the opposite way from the article's perspective. There's surprisingly little detail we rely on, yet things work out somehow.

There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the article (3 decomposition steps, as compared to thousands). If I were to never interact with reality and rely on pure reason alone, I would expect nothing humans ever do to work.

Abstraction and exploration are unreasonably effective.

"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.

"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.

Were 8 billion people all working toward more detail? Isn't civilization also the process by which detail is pruned, compressed and made into abstractions small enough for one mind to use?

Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.

It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.

Markets and evolution are both knowledge processes. I think you would enjoy Donald Campbell's essay on evolutionary epistemology from 'The Philosophy of Karl Popper'.

Parent's comment is observing a prerequisite to markets, humans are the only animal with global markets and biological selection happened to produce the kind of creature that can stabilise around markets.

It's also selection that produced the current form of markets themselves. The world could have been otherwise; our current markets are contingent selection products, not analytically necessary institutions, and not guaranteed to be the uniquely best mechanisms for producing abstractions and tools.

Selection pressure in general. It's not market forces that decide military viability of one empire over another but it's not biological evolution either.