Hello. Hope you’ve had a nice weekend. Enjoy the week!
Articles to Read.
Chess's cheating crisis: 'paranoia has become the culture'
In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent of “doing pipi in his Pampers”.
These incidents may sound extreme but they are not isolated – and they have all taken place online since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Chess has enjoyed a huge boom in internet play this year as in-person events have moved online and people stuck at home have sought new hobbies. But with that has come a significant new problem: a rise in the use of powerful chess calculators to cheat on a scale reminiscent of the scandals that have dogged cycling and athletics. One leading ‘chess detective’ said that the pandemic was “without doubt creating a crisis”.
Chess.com, the world’s biggest site for online play, said it had seen 12 million new users this year, against 6.5 million last year. The cheating rate has jumped from between 5,000 and 6,000 players banned each month last year to a high of almost 17,000 in August.
—
It has been a big year for realizing the limits of technology for interacting with people. Gamers have known this for a long time. Lag, disconnections, and coordination issues were problems in gaming since the start. There is a platform that has gone a long way in solving those problems: Discord.
Discord allows people to talk and chat online. Servers are created by anybody to talk about anything, usually, it is a friend group or a shared interest. They contain chat channels (kind of like Slack) and voice channels that are always on and allow people to join and leave whenever they want.
The competition between internet communication platforms is fierce. Discord wasn’t early to voice channels or group chats. They weren’t unique for targeting their offering to gamers. Other platforms have the same features as them. Yet they are a multi-billion dollar business. How? To borrow an idea from Sarah Tavel, they built a 10x better product AND capture more value from it.
—
America's true unemployment rate
A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with "Axios on HBO."
Why it matters: The official unemployment rate is artificially depressed by excluding people who might be earning only a few dollars a week. It also excludes anybody who has stopped looking for work or is discouraged by a lack of jobs or by the demands of child care during the coronavirus crisis.
If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it's 59.2%.
By the numbers: In January, when the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%, the true rate was seven times greater — 23.4%. That's according to new calculations from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, founded by Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.
The recession made everything worse. Only 46.1% of white Americans over the age of 16 — and a mere 40.8% of Black Americans — now have a full-time job paying more than $20,000 per year.
—
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start.
Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.
Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits at work here are not very deeply rooted.
—
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they’d write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who’ve worked it out.
The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and in helping our fellow professionals to improve their craft. However, it’s also very difficult and inefficient to apply, in addition to being entirely unnecessary. In the common parlance of our industry, “discipline doesn’t scale”.
—
There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced.
The half that was being graded on quantity ended up producing higher quality pieces.
By iterating and learning from their mistakes they actually ended up producing better work than the students that only had to produce one piece.
Quantity leads to quality.
┄
More to Check Out:
- I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps. This is my story.
- The World Needs Nuclear Power, And We Shouldn’t Be Afraid Of It
- Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?
- Origami Simulator
- Nearly 12 Million Square Feet of Vacant Office Space in S.F.
My Update:
Moving to Santa Monica in 6 days!
If I had more time, I’d write more.