Cheating scandals, Twitter updates, rapid AI advancements, Biden's pardon, Section 230 & more

The recording opens with a joke that seven minutes in, nothing usable has been produced, and a jab that someone's commentary is so negative that even Friedberg is complaining. A speaker then says he is annoyed that his AMA from the other night was not published, describing a packed room that lasted about four hours and felt like the early days of Clubhouse.

Someone who tried to join says the room capped out, and the group treats it as a scalability limit. The hosts trade barbs about who was responsible for scaling problems at PayPal, with one saying they had huge scalability challenges there too and that hitting them when an app breaks out is a "high class problem." Another replies that about two thousand participants is only a trickle.

The exchange ends as a running gag over who can still code. One speaker says he has not written code in 20 years and is accused of lying; he concedes it has been closer to 25, and that the last time was Lotus Notes. A line about letting winners ride follows, and the topic begins.

The host who opens the topic says there have been three cheating scandals, across poker, chess and even competitive fishing. In the fishing case, he says, weights and fillets were found during a weigh-in. He then says viewers want an update on chess and poker.

On chess, he says chess.com has released a report saying a grandmaster has been suspended. In his telling, the report presents evidence that the player cheated in a number of tournaments played for money, which the player denies, and that he had also cheated as a kid. The host describes statistical proof of near-perfect play laid out across hundreds of pages, then asks Saks for his view.

The responding speaker says Magnus finally explained his suspicion of Hans. According to this account, Magnus sensed that Hans was not exerting himself or under stress, whereas top players normally concentrate intensely. The speaker adds that Hans had the fastest rise in classical chess rating ever and had previously been suspended from chess.com for cheating, and that Magnus may have had other reasons he has not fully shared.

The speaker finds the methodology interesting: every game is run through a computer, each move is compared with the best computer move, and a match percentage is assigned. A handful of Hans's games reportedly came out at 100%, which the speaker calls basically impossible without cheating, since top players have never had a 100% game across an entire career.

Another speaker adds that humans cannot calculate positional sacrifices in short lines that pay off much later, and links this to the DeepMind AI that also played chess. His conclusion is that playing perfectly along such lines is only possible by cheating. This is the hosts' reading of the evidence rather than a verified finding.

The comparison figures given are these: a handful of games at 100%, and some tournaments with percentages "in the seventies something plus." By the speaker's numbers, Bobby Fisher during his 20-game winning streak matched the computer 72% of the time, Magnus at his best was at 70%, Kasparov's career figure was 69%, and super grandmasters typically sit in the 64 to 68% range. Another speaker notes that multiple computers are used for the comparison.

One host reflects that this offers a way to assess the greatest player ever, and that the numbers might favour Fisher over Magnus. He argues that tournament levels in the seventies, eighties or nineties would be off the charts, and that if Hans is not cheating he should rapidly become the world number one over the board in the next couple of years, now that anti-cheating technology has been tightened. Another host agrees it will be interesting to watch his career.

One host calls people who cheat in any of these games complete losers. His argument is that trying is a huge part of the human experience, that the point is to be on the field of play, and that taking wins and losses and getting better is the path and the fun.

A second host adds that winning is less enjoyable than the journey because of the pressure of maintaining excellence. He says people who miss this are slightly broken, and asks why there is now a strain of people so lacking in personal responsibility that they brazenly exploit such tricks. A third speaker calls such people sad and pathetic. These are opinions, not findings about any individual.

A host walks through two charts shown on screen. The first shows how quickly the player advanced, which he calls off the charts, and the second his chess.com strength. He says chess.com has become a juggernaut, especially after the HBO series, and that he subscribes and likes to play there.

He says the chess strength numbers look perfect, and that in the last two columns the player is "basically cheating in every game," which he links to Queen's Gambit, a show another speaker calls great on Netflix. He adds that the player said he did not cheat in any live-streamed games, but that the report has disproved this.

Asked how someone could cheat in person, Saks says no one really knows and that he does not want to judge overly before hard proof. He notes the player was never caught in the act, that the computer evidence seems pretty damning, and that he does not know how cheating over the board could be proven without catching it, nor has anyone offered a good theory of how it was done.

Turning to the fishing case, a host says a video shows competitors catching fish and then placing weighted pellets inside the bodies. He adds that chicken fillets and chicken breast were put in as well, apparently so the fish would weigh more.

On poker, the host says people fear that RFID in cards and similar setups could be read to front-run the playing situation and reveal whether one is winning or losing. He asks whether things are so bad that it comes to this, given that the group plays poker themselves. Others respond that it is gross, sad and disappointing.

One host proposes a common thread: cheating may have gone on for a long time, and it is now coming to light because of live streaming, digital imagery and phone cameras everywhere. He wonders how long poker was suspect before live streams, and another speaker recalls online poker cheating through programs that tracked an opponent's hand history, a heads-up display with what he calls superhuman memory for judging bluffs.

A speaker then raises Twitch and games such as Fortnite, where players have been accused of screen-overlay software that guides the mouse to a target. He says eye-tracking software is now being used to check whether a player or the software spotted the target, and others call these aim bots and "reverse" bots. A host concludes that there is far more video and insight now, and that ten years ago there would not have been a big story about it.

Asked for the theme, a host says it is an absolute decay of personal responsibility. In his view people feel there is no downside to cheating, are unwilling to take a journey of wins and losses to improve, and want a quick answer that gets them to an imagined finish line. He says that does not solve any problems and just makes them corrupt. This is his opinion.