sodic

I think the difference is that, in the table tennis example, it happens unconsciously and you can't help it. But you're right, it likely happens in most sports.

The mixed boys/girls classes example is, as you said, deliberate. And I too remember holding back on purpose in such situations when I was a kid.

With the arcade, no one was deliberately holding back. I'm sure of it.

I have a similar story, but perhaps even stranger.

I work for a startup. We often bring a wooden arcade with us to conferences as a marketing gimmick.

The arcade runs a single side-scrolling video game. You're running from a monster and dodging obstacles. The goal is to survive as long as possible, and your result is measured in meters.

There are always a few competitive guys who spend the entire conference taking turns to play it. And every single time, the same thing happens.

Say the current high score is around 200m. Everybody fails somewhere around that number: 190m, 186m... Maybe someone manages 210m. And the high score moves up at a snail's pace.

Then, a new guy shows up and gets something like 500m on his third try. From their next turn on, everybody easily does 450 or more, even though they were struggling to get past 200 just one turn ago.

What makes it stranger is that the game is dead simple. It's not like the new guy discovered a move that unlocked this capability. And it wasn't a lack of motivation either - they'd all been playing for an hour already. They just started performing better after seeing it was possible. There has to be a name for this phenomenon.

You could, but that would just dodge the problem they want to solve.

They're not actually interested in determining who goes first or anything practical like that. The article even implicitly admits as much. After all, you could just use normal dice and roll again on ties or, like you suggested, come up with an extra protocol built on top of them.

"We want dice that determine who goes first without a tie" is just a catchier way of saying "We want N dice that all have the same probability of showing the higher number but zero probability of a tie," which is an interesting mathematical problem.

> I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.

I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?

P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)

> TS is very AI-native, to the point I'd agree it's near magical in terms of contracts.

I agree. Not only that, I feel like TypeScript is currently the only popular high-level language with a type system capable of communicating all meaningful information. It seems to have hit an LLM sweet spot.

Looking at other candidates:

- Rust is popular and has a powerful type system, but it forces you to program at a level that's lower than necessary for most projects, hindering usability.

- Go is much more usable and very popular, but its type system can't communicate much.

- Haskell has an excellent type system, but it's nowhere near popular enough, and its usability suffers due to esoteric constraints (laziness, purity).

- etc.

I don't know the recent developments in Python's and Ruby's type systems. They may be able to compete these days, but they were nowhere near TS's level in terms of contract a few years ago when I last tried them out.

And I admittedly have no idea what's going on with C# and Java, but I'd love to hear about it.

This looks like a compilation of emails made available through various court cases and leaks over the past 15+ years. Each conversation lists a source (look for small text after all the messages). There's a bunch of different sources.

As to why it's relevant now - I don't think it is. It's likely just a spin-off of similar renders that started popping out in relation to the Epstein files.