J8y

"Wish servers" 💀

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

"Not a happy marriage." @jsnover on why .NET and Windows have never gotten along. This clip has Bill Gates' obsession, the Longhorn disaster, Dave Cutler's backup tapes, and the day Notepad ballooned from 15KB to 15MB.

@Tankslider I think a dicky rear ride height sensor is pretty normal for men of our age.

@JoeBaguley Such a nice place to be. I've got a slightly dicky rear ride height sensor that I need to replace... but otherwise. 🤞 Made light work of this today

In cheap L322 news, I've probably spent the same again on it in bottom arms, bushes, alignment, servicing and tyres. Absolutely love it. Fingers crossed that continues.

@Tankslider Would still have another one though…

@Tankslider What's funny is how I instantly recognised that bonnet release catch. Nearly wore mine out on my 2002 BMW M62 engined version towards the end!

This is a thoughtful post. Instead of just building next-level RPA (which was a horror in and of itself as a concept) with Agentic AI, we will need to rethink the whole architecture and interactions. This is fun.

That iPhone video is the farthest a consumer smartphone has ever been from Earth. Roughly 250,000 miles away, handheld through a docking hatch window, at 8x zoom with no modifications. Apollo 8's Earthrise was shot on a Hasselblad 500EL that NASA had torn apart and rebuilt. Custom lubricants that wouldn't off-gas in vacuum. 70mm Ektachrome film. A 250mm Zeiss Sonnar lens on a bespoke camera body with motorized film advance. 1968 peak-of-engineering, purpose-built for one job. Reid shot his version on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. 200mm equivalent focal length at 8x. f/2.8. The same phone shipping to Apple stores this week. The 8x view looks close to the human eye because the tetraprism folds the optical path inside a sensor the size of a fingernail. Apple spent a decade compressing what used to require a 250mm Zeiss barrel into 4mm of stacked glass plus computational denoising. The four astronauts went 252,756 miles from Earth. The device that documented the view sits on your nightstand.

@simon_kirkby Absolute shocker

@JoeBaguley That is less than 5 miles from my house. And the driver of the LR was thrown and broke his spine.

Woah.

@bensthinks Ah - only there today…

@JoeBaguley Tomorrow. Maybe see you there!

@bensthinks Agreed! You at Goodwood today BTW?

@JoeBaguley I’m amazed the rollover protection held up on that Defender. It always felt that that was a weak point

Next week I'll be enroute to Ukraine with this stuff. We've some way to go - please help Jack and I #info" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">donorbox.org/jamesandjack#i…

@Alanpage190 @Tankslider Biathlon of Foolishness must help with that massively…

@JoeBaguley @Tankslider Man alive! In the new DRABCDE model E stands for Exposure....let's keep it to the bottom of the list can we please!

Hey @Tankslider , we should ask if they can do Anglesey in November... ;-)

This is my favourite photo taken by Artemis II so far.

Ahora sí hablemos en serio de la foto. Este es un trino para interesados en fotografía, astrofotografía y el que quiera ¿Por qué esta foto es increíble? Algún conspiranóico, dándoselas de suspicaz, preguntó que por qué esta foto tomada por el comandante del Artemis II se veía más opaca que la foto tomada por la tripulación del Apolo 17 en 1972. Bueno. Acá viene lo emocionante. Esta fotografía hubiera sido imposible tomarla con una cámara análoga; y no cualquier cámara digital puede tomarla. El archivo original de esta foto está disponible para su descarga en la página de la NASA. En las propiedades del archivo se puede ver con qué cámara fue tomada y los ajustes de exposición que se usaron. Hasta el serial de la cámara. Esto, primero que todo, garantiza que la foto que estamos viendo no fue creada digitalmente, ni con IA, sino capturada por una cámara real por un humano. Sé que no es suficiente argumento para los conspiranóicos, pero ni modos. Esa que está ahí es la Tierra. Ahora sí lo interesante. ¿Por qué se ve como más opaca que la del 72? porque resulta que en la cara de la tierra que vemos en esa foto, está de noche; si hacen zoom pueden ver el brillo de la iluminación nocturna. Pero ¿cómo, si es de noche, puede verse como si fuera de día? Porque la foto se hizo con un altísimo ISO de 51200! El ISO es la sensibilidad del sensor a la luz. Con la mayoría de cámaras digitales, con ISOs de más de 6400, el ruido es tanto que la foto se ve prácticamente ilegible. Pero la cámara que tiene el comandante Reid Wiseman es una NIKON D5, que no es una cámara muy nueva; tiene 10 años de haber sido lanzada. Pero su sensor es reconocido por garantizar una calidad decente de imagen con ISOs altos. Y eso, para los que siempre preguntan cómo se hace una buena foto del cielo, es fundamental ¿Por qué? Pues para poder tomar fotos de los astros sin tener que bajar mucho la velocidad de exposición. Porque si bajas mucho la exposición apra que entre más luz, queda capturado el movimiento de los astros y de la rotación de la Tierra, cuando estás en la Tierra. Así que un iSO tan alto hizo posible que Wiserman pudiera disparar a una velocidad de 1/4 de segundo. Que es baja, pero no tanto. Es digamos, el límite para la astrofotografía. Por eso esta foto tiene ruido, porque de todas formas es un ISO altísimo. Pero lo que más me emociona a mí, es que la tomó con un lente 14 -24mm F2.8. Es decir, en terminos coloquiales, que esta foto no tiene zoom. Para que lo dimensionen: cuando uno quiere tomar una foto de la Luna desde la Tierra que salga así de "cerca" tiene que usar un lente de unos 400mm de distancia focal. Wiserman usó un ¡gran angular de 22mm! Es decir que él estaba viendo la Tierra asi de grande frente a sus ojos. Porque la foto no fue recortada en edición y eso lo sabemos porque en las propiedades del archivo siempre aparece cuando una foto fue editada. El archivo está limpio, tiene la resolución original de la cámara. La tierra era inmensa frente a su mirada. Hermoso. Pero para mí lo más mágico de esta foto, incluso más que las auroras boreales, es que se ve como la luz de sol, que está del otro lado de la tierra, ilumina nuestra atmosfera. Y eso es magia pura, porque esa atmosfera tiene una composición milimétricamente perfecta para permitir que la vida, tal y como la conocemos, sea posible. Esta foto, es un regalo precioso para la humanidad. Les dejo al link para que descarguen la foto en alta resolución y el pantallazo de las propuedades del archivo.

@JoeBaguley @EurostarUK YES!!! Been banging this drum for years and no one paid attention! A perfect way to get work for 2hrs (Paris) or 5hr (Amsterdam) ruined by a tin cage that blocks signals.

@JoeBaguley @EurostarUK I am in 100% agreement, normal trains are bad, these are impossible. Such a missed opportunity to make a great journey very productive.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the @EurostarUK trains are in fact Faraday cages. Terrible cell signal on them every time. WiFi on them is worse as is just a shared cell connection! Any other train, fabulous signal. Makes working on it rather tricky sadly…