Round 5

One important piece of information is that Magnus Carlsen has confirmed (once again) that he has no intention to play the Candidates, so the other three semifinalists, including underdog Nijat Abasov, should be directly qualified for the Candidates.

Link to the document (which is also linked in the article).

The article has a couple of inaccuracies and unjustified assumptions:

First of all, there is no Men’s category in chess, only Open and Women’s. The Open category is, as indicated by its name, open to everyone, men, women, cis, trans and anyone else, and it is not unusual that women compete in it (the most prominent case was Judit Polgar). This new FIDE document doesn’t change that, so a trans person is allowed in competitive play, contrary to what the title suggests. The Women’s category is restricted to only women, and this document explains how these restrictions are applied to trans people. Note that the existence of a Women’s category is controversial on its own.

Similarly, there are not Men titles and Women titles, only General titles (Grand Master, International Master,…) and Women titles (Women Grand Master, Women International Master,…), with the Women titles having lower requirements (again, very controversial). All the top women players are GMs, not WGMs. The FIDE document states that trans men will have their women titles abolished (unless they transition back), but they retain their general titles, and in case they don’t have one, their women title will be transferred to the general title of the equivalent level. The article incorrectly states that trans men “are set to be stripped of any titles if they were won pre-transition”.

Now, to the meat of the topic: the eligibility of trans women for the Women category:

Article 2.3 states that any person who has legally transitioned can certificate so to their National Rating Officer to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Once that that change in the database is done, trans women are restricted from Women events until a decision is made by FIDE Council “at the earliest possible time”. In these cases where the transition is backed up by legal documents, the decision by FIDE should be a formality and take little time.

Of course, this is only possible for countries who recognize gender changes. In case the National Rating Officer rejects the change, article 2.4 allows an appellation to the FIDE QC, and after that to the FIDE Council. In these cases the decision by the FIDE Council may take up more time, and FIDE sets a deadline of two years for that decision (but it doesn’t mean that every case will take two years).

And finally, just to be clear, all of this only applies to trans players who need to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Trans players that always have played under their post-transition gender, or that have changed their gender before this regulation, don’t need to go through this process. This is the case, for example, of Yosha Iglesias, the player mentioned in the article, and that is listed as female in FIDE’s database, and consequently she can play in any Women’s event she wants.

All in all, I think there is much unnecessary red tape, especially for the trans people more at risk, those who live in countries where they are persecuted. And that the excessive red tape is most likely based on transphobia. But the situation is not as extreme as many other sports that have directly banned the participation of trans players.

The word you’re looking for is sustainable, not profitable

Antichess, the truly anarchic variant, where en passant is really forced

What a sad day. Reddit is doing PiPi in their pampers.

“Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk”

Spoiler: They can

[Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience

Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.

Google got into the Linux space

Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).

I was expecting a community about Donald Duck, but it is even better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

But they won’t be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.

Reading the post from kbin is a bit of a mess. Most of the images are missing, the rest are too big, and it seems that markdown tables are not supported (yet?). So for anyone coming from kbin, I recommend to use the “Copy url to the fediverse” at the top.

I don’t think Facebook really cares about attracting the current Mastodon/Fediverse users to their new social network. I think they have chosen ActivityPub for two reasons:

1. They want a product to compete against Twitter. And with Musk rapid enshittificating it, they need to act quick. ActivityPub is open source and proven to work, so Facebook has less work to do, and can release their new product sooner.

2. The main downfall of Twitter is advertisers leaving the site because they don’t want their ads next to hateful comments that are now allowed under the new management. But this is a problem that can be neatly solved with defederation! Each advertiser can have their own instance (instance-as-a-service provided by Facebook), and they have more granularity in decided in which parts of the network they want to participate, and which parts to defederate. Sure, we the original denizens of the Fediverse will defederate from anything Meta, specially from ad instances. But most of the users of this new Meta-fediverse will remain in their Meta-approved instances, oblivious to the world outside them.

Results of Round 1

1. GM Levon Aronian vs GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 1/2-1/2
2. GM Yangyi Yu vs GM Alexander Grischuk 0-1
3. GM Yi Wei vs GM Santosh Gujrathi Vidit 1-0
4. GM Kateryna Lagno vs GM Humpy Koneru 1/2-1/2
5. GM Nana Dzagnidze vs GM Dronavalli Harika 1/2-1/2
6. GM Jonas Buhl Bjerre vs GM Javokhir Sindarov 1/2-1/2

Triveni Continental Kings: 7 GPs
Upgrad Mumba Masters: 8 GPs

So Upgrad Mumba Masters get the 3 MPs

“I don’t know how the knight moves”

At this point, I don’t know if this is for real, or if its a plant from AnarchyChess

I just joined the livestream, and one of the commenters didn’t even know what is a doubled pawn. sigh

I’m not really familiar with the problem of voter ID laws in the UK. Here (Spain) showing your ID is mandatory to vote, and nobody think that’s a problem (but we need ID for basically any paperwork, so it isn’t an additional burden). Afaik, the problem in the USA is that it is quite difficult to get an ID card, and intentionally so for certain demographics. Is it the same in the UK?

I analyzed the image and this is what I see. Open an appropriate link below and explore the position yourself or with the engine:

White to play: chess.com | lichess.org

My solution:

Hints: piece >!Rook!<, move: >!Rxb8+!<
Evaluation: >!White has mate in 19!<
Best continuation: >!1. Rxb8+ Kd7 2. Rxa8 Kc6 3. Rxa7 Kb6 4. Bd4+ c5 5. Bxc5+ Kxc5 6. Rxe7 g6 7. Re6 Kc4 8. Rxg6 Kc5 9. Rg5+ Kb6 10. a4 Kb7 11. Rb5+ Kc6 12. c4 Kd7 13. a5 Ke6 14. a6 Ke7 15. a7 Kd7 16. a8=Q Ke6 17. Qa6+ Kd7 18. Rb7+ Kc8 19. Qa8#!<

^(I’m a human. I hope some day we’ll have a chessvision-ai-bot here)