https://www.newsweek.com/i-couldnt-play-rules-so-i-became-en...

It's kind of a sad read. He would benefit a lot from getting outside the startup bubble and talking to some people who do useful work for a living instead of riding internet fads and growthmaxxing via viral social media posts.

Edit: Summary for anyone who didn't follow this saga at the time: https://www.ignorance.ai/p/the-fable-of-reflection-70b

Shumer is at best a fool and at worst a con artist.

Note that nothing about that depends on it being a local or remote model, it was just less of a concern for local models in the past because most of them did not have tool calling. OpenClaw, for all the cool and flashy uses, is also basically an infinite generator for lethal trifecta problems because its whole pitch is combining your data with tools that can both read and write from the public internet.

Your memory of the discourse of that era has apparently been filtered by your brain in order to support the point you want to make. Nobody who thoughtlessly adopted an extreme position at a hinge point where the future was genuinely uncertain came out of that looking particularly good.

Using Octave for a beginning ML class felt like the worst of both worlds - you got the awkward, ugly language of MATLAB without any of the upsides of MATLAB-the-product because it didn't have the GUI environment or the huge pile of toolbox functions. None of that is meant as criticism at Octave as a project, it's fine for what it is, it just ended up being more of a stumbling block for beginners than a booster in that specific context.

Edit: Even lower-level cheated games are rarely 100% accurate for the whole game, cheaters usually mix in some bad or natural moves knowing that the engine will let them win anyways. That's why analysis is usually on critical sections, if someone normally plays with a 900 rating but spikes to 100% accuracy every time there's a critical move where other options lose, that's a strong suggestion they're cheating. One of the skills of a strong GM is sniffing out situations like that and being able to calculate a line of 'only moves' under pressure, so it's not nearly as surprising when they pull it off.

The way people cheat online is by running a chess engine that analyzes the state of the board in their web browser/app and suggests moves and/or gives a +/- rating reflecting the balance of the game. Sometimes people run it on another device like their phone to evade detection, but the low-effort ways are a browser extension or background app that monitors the screen. The major online chess platforms are constantly/daily banning significant amounts of people trying to cheat in this way.

Chess.com and Lichess catch these cheaters using a variety of methods, some of which are kept secret to make it harder for cheaters to circumvent them. One obvious way is to automatically compare people's moves to the top few engine moves and look for correlations, which is quite effective for, say, catching people who are low-rated but pull out the engine to help them win games occasionally. It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good. Engine analysis can still catch high-level cheaters, but it often takes manual effort to isolate moves that even a world-champion-class human would not have come up with, and offers grounds for suspicion and further investigation rather than certainty.

For titled events and tournaments, Chess.com has what's effectively a custom browser (Proctor) that surveils players during their games, capturing their screen and recording the mics and cameras that Chess.com requires high-level players to make available to show their environment while they play. This is obviously extremely onerous for players, but there's often money on the line and players do not want to play against cheaters either so they largely put up with the inconvenience and privacy loss.

Despite all of the above, high-level online cheating still happens and some of it is likely not caught.

Edit: More information on Proctor here: https://www.chess.com/proctor

JS does not have a straightforward equivalent. The old and deprecated `with` keyword might seem similar but it's only a surface resemblance as it does not perform the return-value threading that makes the above pattern useful, it was meant for methods that mutate object state. There's a TC39 proposal[2] to add a pipe operator that would accomplish a similar thing to threading macros via an infix operator but it's still a draft.

[1]: https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros

[2]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator

It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.

Otherwise, the existence of a file or folder with the same name as your task ("test", for example) will stop that task from being run, which might be very annoying if you're using the Makefile as part of a script or CI or something where you won't notice the "Nothing to be done for..." message.