This is a follow on from this event a little while back: ‘Reckless’: Man pretending to be injured on motorway overbridge arrested.
Back in April, I spent some time looking into a fledgling charity called the Suicide Reduction Trust (SRT). It had caught my eye after a reader tip-off about a TradeMe listing they believed might be a scam. The listing advertised a raffle with the prize too good to be true: a free house. And not just any house, a $2m Auckland mansion, along with cash for furniture and a brand new Tesla to boot. The raffle was advertised as raising funds for the SRT, which had launched shortly before the win-a-house promotion. While TradeMe pulled the listing, telling The Bulletin that it went against its rules, the raffle was legitimate, as Stuff’s Tony Wall reported at the time. But who was behind it and why?
A couple of weeks ago, an email arrived in The Spinoff inboxes with a provocative and, to be frank, shocking subject line: “Auckland lawyer hangs himself on Auckland motorway overpass.” It was from Jaques, criticising the media for failing to cover his new charity. The body of the email clarified this was simply an attention-grabbing stunt. “I’m going to do you a favour and give you the newsworthy clickbait you so badly desire and this morning I’m going to hang myself from an Auckland motorway overpass and you’ll have the story you really want,” he wrote. A few hours later, reports started to emerge of a man dangling from an overbridge, attached to a harness, causing delays to shocked rush hour commuters after two lanes were closed by emergency service. Newshub reported that Jaques was throwing leaflets at the speeding traffic below. He was later charged in relation to offensive behaviour and endangering transport.
Jaques acknowledged it could have “a profound impact on the Trust’s reputation and way of operating” and said “he may have in fact caused more harm than good”.
My favourite was that I enabled TOTP for Facebook, but for years they would also SMS a code as well. So the benefits of TOTP over SMS were eliminated. I don’t think they do that anymore, but I don’t log in to Facebook very much so maybe they do.
Chess is an interesting game for so many reasons. There’s a story told as a sign of the power of AI (and perhaps a warning), where for years Stockfish was this chess engine that could beat all others (by this time, maybe 2010?, humans had no hope). Then one day Google (technically a company Google bought) came out with this neural network AI AlphaZero that was beating Stockfish within a few hours of training, despite never being told anything about chess. It was simply given time to play games against itself until it worked out how to win.
My understanding is that Stockfish later adopted a neural net and is once again the best, but it is a pretty impressive story.
Chess is also interesting because it may never be considered a solved game. They are more moves possible than there are atoms in the observable universe, and it’s not even close.
Facepalm. Kind of like someone I know who has a good lock but leaves the key under the mat!
Yeah stockfish is a neural net now. I play it when I’m off grid and surprisingly playing it for a week or two tends to temporarily improve my game. The trajectory is pretty interesting eg the Mechanical Turk (a “machine” that was really a human) and Deep Blue (that really was a machine but Kasparov suspected it of being a human).
I didn’t know that but it makes sense.
That’s what I love about chess, the rules are so simple but even a terrible low level player like me can be really surprised and have interesting games - but so can the great masters. And you’ll see a neat move online and they’ll be like yeah so & so played this in 1850 and caused a sensation.
I kind of wish now that I never stopped playing it as a kid. I loved it when I was little but the “big boys at school” put me off it when I was about 8 and I assumed you needed to be especially brilliant at maths to do okay but you don’t really. It’s more about pattern recognition and all kinds of devious plots.
Oh I’d forgotten about the Mechanical Turk!
That “so & so played this in 1850” is also what puts me off it sometimes. I play a bit (on my phone, no one to play it with IRL), I’m not that good, and I feel like getting better involves memorising the right moves. Especially getting into a good position early game. I don’t really have the time, and even more so I don’t have the will to memorise things.
I don’t have the capacity for a lot of memorization either so I play openings that don’t have much “theory”/memorization, like the london system (unlike normal openings, with a system opening you more or less play the same moves no matter what), or weird openings. That we we get off book and into having to think for yourself more quickly.
I just play against humans on lichess, with a time limit like 5 or 10 minutes.
Maybe I should try an opening system like that.
I get bored easily so don’t really play online against other people because I don’t want to be the guy that quits when he’s losing, even though I definitely quit when I’m losing against the computer.
I don’t think anyone minds the other person quitting as long as they hit the resign button. A lot of people quit when their queen dies. Also there are thousands of players so it’s quite rare to even play the same person again.
I’m so bad at chess that I’m pretty sure some of my opponents quit when their mum calls them for dinner. 😃 (after you play a few games to calibrate it matches you with people at the same skill level).
Haha well my other reason is that I don’t want to quit but I have a kid wanting attention 😆
Maybe the social interaction just gives me anxiety 😆
Back when we had a cat I used to play agario and then slitherio and I swear about 30% of my in game deaths were from the cat wanting attention! Would be way harder with kids!
That’s the other thing about chess being all ages tho, you can turn off the chat altogether on the big chess sites and they also have a button (automatic “good game” on chess.com, my favourite site lichess.org has buttons for hi, good luck, good game, gtg and bye). Also no one talks at all in most of the 1 to 3 min speed chess.
Sheesh I’m beginning to sound like some kind of shill for Big Chess.😄
Edit; wait, how do I stop it autolinking?
Haha maybe I’ll get there one day, once I get over my imposter syndrome. I’m playing chess, but I’m not a chess player, so what business do I have playing against real people 😅
To my knowledge, you can’t!