Questions for the FG about the organization of the election

[hgm]

Okay so I can accept everything you said here, even if I disagree with some of it, but NOT if you simultaneously believe that Viren should be subject to additional scrutiny over his name. The two seem to be contradictory. Now it is Chris that has been making an issue of an "unusual" sirname, not you. So I guess I would like to know your opinion on the matter?

The "evidence" that Viren is using a false name is that his last name is not one that any of you have encountered in your travels.
The "evidence" that LazySMP is using a false name is the testimony of many users that are well established here.

I don't think its possible to coherently believe that the "evidence" against Viren is more pressing... unless it is indeed as I have stated I believe, which is selective moderation against opposition. But, perhaps you don't believe this, and therefore we are all good, and I understand your views.

To see things in the right perspective, first a few remarks:
- Expecting consistency between my moderation policy and rules for an election the organization of which I am not involved in is highly unrealistic.
- The theory that Chris would make an issue of this to selectively exclude someone who was already excluded by rules that were already in place before the name issue came up is silly.
- Moderation is interference with what people post here, and a different issue from whether their opionion is taken into account by the FG. Neither of the involved persons suffers any moderation because of their name; their postings are judged w.r.t. the charter in exactly the same way as those of anyone else.

Now my take on the naming issue itself: there are really two issues here:
- whether a name is fake
- whether a name is 'disruptive'
These are independent: names can be disruptive whether they are fake or not. There is some correlation, though; naturally disruptive names are rare, but people choosing fake names often do this for the very purpose to disrupt.

Names can be intrinsically disruptive because they are offensive to religious, racial or other groups, such as G*ddammit, N****r, Motherfucker, Adolf Hitler... Or they can cause confusion by suggesting an authority / importance to the opinion of the carrier that he really does not have, such as Magnus Carlsen or another well-known GM. Or they can be so strange that the overwhelming majority of readers would classify them as jokes, giving others the idea that they would be allowed to use the full names for joking too. Names can also be relatively disruptive, when multiple persons would carry the same name without being associated with a well-known authority; this causes confusion as to who says what.

In this context I consider the name 'Peanut' disruptive, but the name of a fictional charater in an obscure TV series that 99% of the readers would not even recognize as such not. None of that has anything to do with the names being fake or truthful. So it also is of no relevance to how many people do point out that a name is fake, because I wouldn't attach any consequences to the name being a fake.

[chrisw]

What is it you're supposed to have done wrong? Sorry, I mean more precisely, what do they say you have done wrong?

To be honest, I don't know what I have done wrong. I just created a PR to enable Exception Handling in Stockfish.

Not what I was asking you. I asked you to put yourself in the shoes of the accusers and write what THEY thought you had done wrong.
Just asking for your view on what they are complaining about.

[LazySMP]

@chrisw Sorry, no. I cannot do what does not belong to me.

[mar]

To be honest, I don't know what I have done wrong. I just created a PR to enable Exception Handling in Stockfish.

SF uses manual memory management for TT so enabling exception handling would only pollute the binary with unwind tables
your PR tries adds baggage that nobody actually needs

seems like the motivation is clear here: to annoy the maintainers, then play dumb/victim

[chrisw]

To be honest, I don't know what I have done wrong. I just created a PR to enable Exception Handling in Stockfish.

SF uses manual memory management for TT so enabling exception handling would only pollute the binary with unwind tables
your PR tries adds baggage that nobody actually needs

seems like the motivation is clear here: to annoy the maintainers, then play dumb/victim

In the alternative, he’s learning slowly how to write programs, learnt something new that day (exception handling under Python), assumes because he just learnt it, it must be something new, and pedantically offers the idea to the group he wants to have a social relationship with. It is possible to be both well motivated and incredibly annoying at the same time. But still begs the question why should he be moderated in talkchess?

[chrisw]

@chrisw Sorry, no. I cannot do what does not belong to me.

Okay, so they’ve got an empathy problem and so have you. You’re difficult to deal with and they’re crap at dealing with people in general. Hence one huge pointless fight which nobody can win.

[Peter Berger]

Me being a rather focussed, anal guy I am kind of worried about the development of this thread when it is about "Questions for the FG about the organization of the election" but then, I don't have any myself right now - and the thread has certainly developped in an interesting direction.
I really liked this description of Andrew Grant very much when it is about the talkchess population. I think it is very much to the point:
"So you have this partial exodus of chess engine developers from talkchess. What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest, you have the people who are not so active in development anymore but still stick around because it is what they love, and then you also have the trolls."
I'd like to talk the "hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest" for a moment. You'd guess correctly that this would be my very own group .
When it is about the "discord invaders", you seriously underestimate us IMHO. Yes, there might be some of us who have no clue about SPSA, but people who "find great interest" and spend like 20 years on some hobby usually have some general idea, what they are talking about.
Btw - nothing much has changed when it is about the perception of this group during the last 20-30 years. I remember well when I started to send some bug reports to Bob Hyatt. The spontaneous answer always was denial. Being no chessprogrammer meant that you are most likely talking rubbish I well remember how I sent more and more convincing messages and then finally there was some notice in the release notes: "fixed some very minor bug blah blah" . ( and btw, it most certainly wasn't that minor at all ..). The hobbyists with major interest usually became beta-testers back then, who were taken more seriously after some time.
I think that in recent times communication has become just too difficult to give it a serious try. Maybe this would be something for you to consider.
Peter

[jefk]

PB apparently liked the quoted remark:
"What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the
hobbyists who are mostly just engine users"

well i actually found this quite a condescending, derogatory remark, disrespectful,
a typical arrogant narrow IT view. Without 'users' -in general- in this world of IT
applications there would be no need for programmers(*), you know; and anyway,
most of this programming work will be taken over in future by AI.

While this forum ''talkchess'' traditionally has computer chess as focus, this
doesn't mean it should only be for engine programmers; and the latter
category have their sub group programming. This apparent effort by some
engine programmer to hijack the entire forum is ridiculous (while the thread of
lazysmp may be a bit annoying, this is only part of what the forum is all
about; we had some annoying stuff before (cqueen, and after a while
this was solved, no big deal, you can also simply annoy such persons).

Chess is a much broader subject, and so is computer chess. Besides engines there
are GUI's an often underestimated topic, but still getting less attention than
engines. There are hundreds of engines, the top engines all draw against each
other, and for me the topic of engine programming is actually quite boring.
In chess you have otb human chess (incl playing against comps with handicaps)
correspondence chess, problem chess, and much more. There now are extra
subgroups 'chess players forum' (not used so much (yet?)), and Artificial engines
in general; and there still is the General Topics forum.

PS and indeed the talk about lazysmp in this thread (about organization of election)
imo should be moved to another thread; maybe in the programming section.
Just because of this little topic a certain mr AG seems to make a big deal
about moderation policies, maybe just as example, but then extrapolating
and suggesting all kinds of unfair policies; this imo has gone too far, becoming
imo just as annoying as the lazysmp postings in fact. But hopefully after the
election of a new moderator replacing hgm and or another (wishing him
strength) the air can be cleaned again; as written before besides hgm i
suggest/hope one of the the old gang, elected (or not(*)) would remain
as moderator to ensure continuity. (*) if not elected, he still could/should
act as such from the overviewing role of the FG group; but anyway i think
the risk of an entire takeover of a new moderator group here changing everything eg.
in X style (instead of the earlier twitter) is low; seen the list of those with
voting rights, mostly experienced people with a majority not having wild ideas.

(*) and programming itself isn't so special, you know, personally i have
experience with mostly (years ago) Fortran (non-chess) and later some C and C++
(extended modified an engine with permission of the original programmer
and even participated in an engine tournament just for fun); decades ago letting
a computer playing chess was an innovative, interesting exercies, whereby in the
old days still some people doubted a computer could ever become better than a GM;
nevertheless I found the actual programming (and learning more about C++) actually
quite boring, and sometimes actually annoying because of some limitations in/of the
computer language C; intended to learn more about Python but some other priorities got
in the way. Nowadays we know the comps have won, also from superGM's and while
the extra Nnue breakthrough only is relatively recently, there imo is not much more
to be learned; nor gained, in terms of Elo rating. Engine programming has become
a narrow superspecialization, and besides the 'hobbyist' engine programmers (lol)
with ratings eg. 2000 or so, it's only a very small gang still making very small progress
eg. one elo per month; with a lot of online insults and other mayhem being part of
the process, apparently. So i'm actually glad to stay out of this (psychologically) unhealthy
cult, and find playing eg. online chess (and thus learning more and thus being able
to participate occasionally in a human tourn) much more fun; and also more
of an intellectual challenge.

[Rebel]

No worries, we might be the drain of computer chess there are currently 116 users online and the most users ever online was 2105 just recently on October 1.

[hgm]

These could of course all be bots engaged in a DDoS attack trying to put us out of action...