Solvers can only solve using restricted game trees. Generally only heads-up pots, for one--multiway solvers exist but they are cumbersome and there's no guarantee that their algorithms converge to any kind of optimal play. And within the heads-up game tree, you still need to restrict the size of the game tree with a limited number of bet sizes. Not really a big deal, but in theory a perfect poker player would have a continuous range of bet sizes available for them to use (eg 1bb, 1.5bb, 2bb, 2.5bb, etc), not just a few discrete ones.

>The other question I have is how do human players adapt to GTO play now? Like in other games, humans have adapted to novel strategies - I'm curious for poker whether there's ways to exploit GTO solvers (ie, if you put your opponent bot on the GTO range and chase the fat tails).

You can't really exploit GTO solvers. But a human player can't play a GTO strategy, it's simply impossible. People can get reasonably good at playing a few of the most common nodes in a low-exploitability way, but beyond that, nobody is placing a perfectly balanced strategy. It's just impossible. The strategies are way too complicated.

>And is the poker community's fair play detection algorithm good enough to catch players who use solvers like chess community - or it's easy to evade by making a few deviations.

The strongest fair play detector right now, at least at high stakes, is the players themselves. Precisely because playing a GTO strategy is impossible, if someone starts playing too perfectly, other regs will notice. And the high stakes community is pretty small too so everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows who knows them or whatever. Those two things combined mean that there's a lot of self-policing.

Also, playing a GTO strategy isn't necessarily always desirable. Equilibrium strategies are fundamentally defensive. A solver will defend at the perfect frequency against a river bet: folding just enough to make you indifferent when bluffing, so that "always bluffing" and "never bluffing" have the same EV (this is technically oversimplified but whatever). But this approach doesn't make the maximum amount of money. To win the maximum, you want to just always fold if your opponent isn't bluffing enough and always call if they're bluffing too much. Of course this opens the door for you to be counter-exploited (if you always fold, they can start bluffing all the time, and vice versa) which is why the solver lands on the goldilocks equilibrium.

In other words, a GTO strategy does not punish frequency mistakes, and Hold 'em is a game of frequencies. Of course a GTO strategy will still win money, because people don't just make frequency mistakes, they also make just straight EV mistakes. So there is certainly some risk of being cheated, sure.

Another thing that disincentivizes cheating a bit is that you have to be extremely consistent with it. In chess, using an engine in just one or two critical spots could be enough to swing a game completely. In poker, because of the imperfect information & randomness, the wins and losses are distributed far more evenly across time. It's not enough to just check a solver a couple times a session if you're bleeding money in the other hands.

Anyway, all of these are real issues, but the bigger issues facing online poker are all just related to game availability and quality: poker sites charging way too much rake, fewer recreational players willing to lose a lot of money online over time, a gazillion legal/regulatory issues that make it hard for people (both professionals and recreational players) to even play online in many places in the world.

Err... I spend quite a lot of time on Reddit as well (including moderating a medium size subreddit) and I can assure you that there are tons of bot posts and comments all over the site right now. If you think this, you're probably not very good at identifying this kind of content.

If, like the vast majority of people, you have never studied math past a college calculus sequence and perhaps a (practically-oriented) linear algebra class, then you are missing some pretty fundamental ways of viewing and thinking about math. The basic mechanisms of algebra, for one: spaces and operations, morphisms, products and quotients... You don't know what a group is, never mind the idea of a group action. You don't have any familiarity with some basics of geometry: the Riemann sphere, Mobius transformations... And you certainly don't know anything about algebraic geometry: what an affine variety is, what birational equivalence is, what a fiber is.

All of these are concepts required to understand this blog post. And it's not just a matter of understanding the definitions of the terms, but having at least some intuition of what they really mean and how they work. Most people cannot go from zero to understanding all of this in a few days or a couple weeks, at least not for any reasonable definition of "understanding". There's too much basic mathematical background that's missing.

There's a huge difference in Spotify for music vs Netflix for TV and movies. Netflix's catalog is absolutely tiny. Spotify's is not.

I also continue to disagree with the idea that Spotify's catalog is only for people with basic or mainstream tastes. This is far too reductive. Like I said above, the vast majority of newly released music is released onto Spotify. For many new or small artists, streaming is the only way their music is released. There is no "somewhere else" to go.

Personally, I listen to a lot of contemporary French indie pop, including a lot of pretty obscure stuff. This stuff is most available through streaming services. To the extent it is available via pirate channels, it's because someone bothered to take the time to rip it from a streaming service. There is nothing which music piracy offers in this domain, and there is a lot that it lacks (both in availability and in all the service factors that make streaming appealing, as I've said--convenience, sharing, discoverability). A further factor I haven't brought up yet is that it just feels shitty and pointless to pirate this kind of stuff when listening to it on Spotify at least provides some benefits to the artists themselves: royalties (tiny as they may be), increased play counts, exposure via recommendation algorithms.

A large fraction of what is uploaded to music piracy sites currently is sourced from music streaming platforms. Not all of it, certainly. A large fraction of the CD- and vinyl-sourced uploads are also available on music streaming platforms too though. As I've mentioned a few times previously, Spotify has a bigger catalog than RED does (even if you ignore all the 0 play AI slop spam that's been flooding Spotify lately).

I would say that the median user of private music torrent sites now is one of two things: either they are there because they want to join other communities for things beside music (TV, movies, video games, anime, porn, whatever), or they are someone who has been pirating music for a long time, probably Gen X, listens to mainly music from 30+ years ago, and has made music piracy a part of their identity and self-perception on some level (you can see a certain sense of smug superiority about it even in this HN thread).

All of this is to say that I think that the comparison to McDonalds or Olive Garden is just way, way off base. Spotify and Netflix do not belong in the same conversation either. Is there some stuff that's not available on music streaming platforms? Sure, it exists. If people find that streaming is not meeting their needs, of course they should look elsewhere. But the picture that is being painted in this thread is simply far off from reality.

I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.

Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).

I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.

If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.

I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.

Certainly in the US everyone uses streaming to listen to music. This random article claimed that 90% of American adults regularly stream music online, for example: https://cybernews.com/news/us-internet-users-music-streaming...

P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.

Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.

The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.

It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.

The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.

The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.

>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.