This was a while ago, he recently put out a ton of new tutorials for Godot 4, good stuff for quickly getting your hands dirty. You're beyond that point I'm sure, just throwing them out here for anyone else looking for nice intro content.
Thank you for the link! I didn't make the linked example -- my work is MUCH simpler than that. :D This was what someone else built and packaged and convinced me that this performance is finally rivaling the Flash experience that I've been missing for so long.
I would say Heartbeast's courses are overall much better than your typical tutorial content, primarily because they are structured and built like courses rather than tutorials. I paid for a couple of his courses a while back after doing one of his free ones and do not regret it, they were excellent.
If people like Gotham/Nakamura/ChessBrahs aren't your style, ChessNetwork is calm and straight forward without all of the youtube/twitch "entertainer" personality I find grating.
ChessBase is selling this Stockfish clone for
€99.90. They have also disabled comments on all of their articles so far about Fat Fritz 2. Not a good look.
Thanks for the link. That git diff is absurd: 9 changed files with 21 additions and 30 deletions[1]. It really is just Stockfish using different weights and changing the name... The fact this Albert Silver fella did the same with Leela Chess Zero two years ago is even worse, no remorse!
They are a sketchy company, from the over-zealousness to defend their "IP" to the price they demand for their yearly software, to the creepy vibe their articles about young female players have. So no sympathy from me, go stockfish.
Im looking at the diff, they doubled the size of NN and added themselves as additional authors in addition to the original authors and released source when requested. I.e. they gave credit to original devs, I don't understand where they violated anything. NN weights is data not code.
I have the exact same problem. When I know what needs to get done, even if it's tedious, it's not so bad to put my nose to the grindstone and work through it. But when I'm not sure how to approach a task, suddenly every distraction in the world is more appealing.
You often see the suggestion to break up big tasks into smaller, baby step chunks to avoid this analysis paralysis. Doesn't help when I'm not even sure what to do yet.
I struggle with this too, and two things that help me are:
1) Start screen recording software and dictate your thoughts as you go through the research/brainstorming phase. Don't often go back and view the recorded sessions, it's the act of recording and speaking out loud that helps.
2) Comment driven development. Stub out functions just with comments, write deeper comment blocks inside a procedure where you have a rough idea of what needs to happen. I paste in table and API definitions as comments too, to avoid having to flip to a different screen which inevitably leads to distraction. Once the program is completely laid out in comment form, and compile/runs with just "STARTING" and "STOPPING" displaying, then I start implementing what's in the comments outside-in (from highest to lowest level). I run the program frequently while doing this, each successful compile/run is a small dopamine hit. As I'm going through, remove any comments that are duplicated by code - all that should remain are comments explaining "why".
I also the second approach a lot and it's helped my focus immensely. Sketching things out in comments and detailing / changing as you go along first helps curb that initial perfectionism of feeling like you need to write the right code on the first try. YMMV, of course, but worth trying out.
Your advice about comment driven development is similar to how I felt when I first started writing unit tests. I'm not even very good at them yet, but trying to write the tests before the code exists is immensely useful in trying to work out what I want that code to actually look like. Before tests, I would often stub out functions with console logs before writing the body, just to get the high level structure worked out before I got lost in the details.
There's probably a few different methods to do this (some of my friends swear by pseudo code, others have personal white boards) so it might be worth trying a few different approaches to get over your writers block more consistently.
Thanks for this comment -- I'll put the second strategy in effect (the first one perhaps I'll leave for later as I currently work in an open plan office).
I wonder if this "comment driven" strategy has potential for applying NLP+code generation. I'm sure this is a common enough thought but I'm not aware of the research, does anyone here have pointers?
What I mean is: use NLP to extract intent (where feasible), and then offer possible implementations of the intent.
That second approach has been crucial for me when I start large projects. I usually use a mix of comments, pseudocode, and semi-correct actual code, then go back and fill everything in one-by-one.
From my experience, try having enough projects in your belt that at least one of them has something actionable to do, and work on that while you ruminate on the other problem for a few days/weeks/months. Don't worry about getting anything done soon, prefer getting them done correctly and pick something else up when you get stuck. Also, don't forget that "staring into space for an hour while you think about a problem" is also a valid form of working.
Unless you are rich enough to have chosen it, or maybe a prisoner, you always have more than one thing to do. Laundry, groceries, complex engineering, it all needs to be done.
I think our minds evolved to track all these things and, probably in a time sensitive way more than projected future value, to prioritize them. For this reason, I think having multiple projects is the natural state as the mind is optimized for this. So maybe this is the "best way" and explains a lot of the strange ways in which putting a problem aside can help solve it.
I like to work like this as well. Which is why a lot of technical tests seem quite nonsense. For complex problems I have stuff running in the background of my head for a day or two, weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of the various options. The best solution usually becomes apparent at some random time, like when I am cooking dinner, not concentrating on it for 5 minutes after first seeing the problem. And as you say there is usually plenty of other work that needs done in the meantime.
Figuring out how to approach a task is a problem that can be broken down all on its own. Make a list of possibilities (even if they are “dumb”). Work through them. What happens for me is that either one of them is right or (more frequently) I suddenly “get it” and it’s off to the races.
We're all different... I enjoy figuring out the things, but when it's time to start implementing it I've already lost my grit partially and that's when I start procrastinating the most. Once I move past that milestone and start doing the actual work it gets much easier again.
Weird UI effect (I'm using Chrome 59): When the blue loading bar at the top of the page completes, I get popped back to the top of the page, regardless of where I've scrolled to. Bar finishes loading after ~3-5 seconds.
The study was done with rapid games, against computers, where they discarded human losses on time. Not very confident in those results. But hopefully the researcher gets the chance to try and reproduce and use classical time controls, and human vs. human opponents.
I can only imagine the study went like this. They did all these tests and then found that there were no statistically significant improvements after using these drugs. So they said to themselves, how can we tweak the parameters so as to get something publishable? Sure, let's eliminate an entire class of games where our control group does better than the test subjects.
Problem is, the most likely explanation for this is that people on these drugs spend more time thinking, and longer think time naturally is correlated with better results. But that's not how chess is played, else we'd all spend five hours on each move. Chess is about bounded rationality. As a result it looks to me that that they biased the results as to naturally achieve a desired effect.
> else we'd all spend five hours on each move. Chess is about bounded rationality
Without any other tools (as in, pencil and paper to note conclusions), do you really think you could make a more effective move given five hours?
I mean - if the conclusion of the study is actually that use of drugs gave players a larger personal time bounds within which to think up a move, that's still significant.
I don't know about you, but my #1 blocker for productivity is how long I can actually concentrate on something. If a drug lets me focus for 10% longer, even if it doesn't improve my capabilities while focusing, that's still huge.
Edit: But you're not wrong, it does stink of p-value hunting. On the other hand, if your experiment is expecting one correlation, and instead you find another... then the p-value hunting was the correct move...?
There are certainly players who could make a much better move given five hours in a highly complex position (not every move--you'd be hitting sleep deprivation by move 3!). It's not unheard of for grandmasters to spend an hour of clock time on one move, and I bet you money that same player would sometimes go to 2 or 3 hours if they weren't on the clock.
As to visualization without pen and paper, the best blindfold players can keep track of a whole board in their mind, and explore variations deeply without losing track of the current state of the board or forgetting about the key variations they found along the way.
It sounds like you're into chess more than me, so I'm sure you know most of this stuff, I'm just noting it for other people in the thread.
"do you really think you could make a more effective move given five hours?"
I play on chess.com from time to time and I perform much better in games where I have a few days to make a move vs games that are played live with a timer. So for me, absolutely, if I have time to analyze I will almost always make a stronger move. I don't need to write down conclusions, I can just stare at it longer.
> On the other hand, if your experiment is expecting one correlation, and instead you find another... then the p-value hunting was the correct move...?
at best you'd have to make corrections to your p values to account for the fact you're conducting multiple tests. those corrections weaken the results. (i did not check this paper to see if they did the corrections.)
Yes I could definitely make a more effective move in five hours than in four hours.
But the study we are talking about didn't give their players anything near such time, only rapid chess was played, where each player gets 15 minutes for the entire game.
In rapid chess, time management is a crucial part of the game so it is very strange that they decided to eliminate games where a player ran out of time.
Moreover, this is a classic side effect of stimulants, at least anecdotally (not sure what the literature says). You can get hyper-focused on one task or sub-task and lose track of your overall priorities. Although I imagine regular stimulant users learn to compensate for this.
Not exactly. Being hyper-focused on one thing is actually symptomatic of ADHD, and amphetamines like Adderall and Ritalin may exacerbate or mitigate this tendency (as I understand it mainly from personal experience, but also some literature), depending on the individual and external factors.
No, I'm pretty sure being "hyper-focused" is the opposite of ADHD, considering that "focus" and "attention" are synonyms and "deficit" and "hyper" are opposites,
And the effect of amphetamines is improved focus (as well as slight euphoria and wakefulness) BUT one possible problem is that people lose control of what they focus on and tend to get lost in the details. I. e. you start out writing a letter and end up reading about 18th century calligraphy.
"It is typical for individuals with ADHD to say they 1), cannot focus on boring things and 2), can only focus on stimulating things, and that focus is often extreme. Thus it is both a concentration deficit and over-concentration, or generically: "hyperfocus." More concisely, some types of ADHD are a difficulty in directing one's attention, not a lack of attention"
True. Also, people tend to take more time when in losing positions, so it is likely that more of the discarded games than the not-discarded games would have been lost.
It would be very interesting to see a computer analysis of position strength in the discarded games and seeing, where possible, if the ratios of "likely win" and "likely loss" match the games that were finished.
Nice, I made a version of that game myself following the tutorials of https://www.youtube.com/@uheartbeast
This was a while ago, he recently put out a ton of new tutorials for Godot 4, good stuff for quickly getting your hands dirty. You're beyond that point I'm sure, just throwing them out here for anyone else looking for nice intro content.