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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Not the guy your responding to and I 100% get your frustration, but I want to provide a little anecdote.

    Back in November, I built a new desktop to replace my 7 year old one and put OpenSUSE on it. No matter what I tried, I could not get either Bluetooth or WiFi working. I tried updating drivers, restarting controllers, reinstalling the OS, replacing the OS with Mint. Nothing worked.

    I did a lot of searching over the next few days, and it turned out that my motherboard was so new that it’s built in WiFi chip did not have Linux drivers yet. Like at all.

    Most products aren’t created with Linux in mind, so compatibility isn’t a concern. It’s up to the community to create patches & drivers to make things work, and it can take a bit to get things working.

    I’m genuinely sorry you had the experience you did, but I hope that if you do return to Windows that you’ll give Linux another try in the future. Search your products to see if others have had issues, along with potential solutions, before you dive in.



  • A really good way to do linux is to play around and break things, but to have a backup you can restore from.

    I don’t know about other distros specifically, but Mint comes shipped with Timeshift, which is easily configurable and can be set up to include your home directory. Make a backup on an external drive every now and again so that if you break everything, you only lose a bit of work instead of all of it.

    Search engines are your friend. If you want to do something, look it up first (ex/ “How do I [x] on linux”) and read some of the answers. Don’t just go with the first option you see, and if it looks decent but you don’t understand it try looking up the commands it uses to find some documentation.

    Learning linux isn’t something you can do as passively as you can with Windows, so take time to really try and learn things you’re looking to do.

    And a good rule of thumb is that if you think your system should be able to do something, it probably can.












  • Just responding to the last one, it was that easy and that’s why nowadays the entire premises is swept for any potential aids before the tournament (I.e. the day before, go through every space and make sure that nothing is hidden), the player bathrooms are separate from everyone else’s so that no one can sneak in to place something there without going through player screening, and everything you carry into the match is thoroughly inspected to ensure it doesn’t contain a chess computer (to the point where they will check people’s lipstick).

    The reason the butt plug theory gained so much traction is that with the current security, there’s only one check to stop it (the metal detector), the cheating method itself is theoretically sound, and its attention grabbing enough as a concept.

    Much as with anything competitive, it’s an arms race to gain a leg up before the advantage is neutralized so I’m sure that someday we will see a genuine case of butt plug cheating or security measures put in place to specifically prevent anally assisted gameplay


  • While 6 bit encoding is definitely a more efficient way to transmit the data, when it comes to stuff like this transmission speed is rarely a consideration. In high profile tournaments, players may have several hours each during a game (for example, the game in which Niemann is alleged to have cheated used a time format of 2 hours for the first 40 moves, +1 hour upon reaching move 40, and +30 seconds after completing every move after the 40th. Across 2 players, and assuming they make the 40th move, that’s a 6 hour game total).

    So when it comes to things like this, the main considerations are accuracy in transmission and comprehension of the message. If the player has to compute from binary to the board (which is an albeit really easy skill), there is still a chance that they can misinterpret the data. For this reason, most formerly caught “at the board” cheaters have used the simple “count columns, count rows” method.

    More complex cheaters (who do not use an accomplice) have in the past gone to the washroom to find a stashed chess computer, plug in the position, see what the computer thinks, and come back.

    Even amongst some top players, it’s not uncommon for someone to play a move and then go to the washroom for up to 30 minutes and come back to see how their opponent responded. I mention this to further emphasize that 1) spending a really long time not making a move is relatively common and 2) while most cheating does occur in longer periods of thought, that in itself is not an indicator for cheating.

    As for your mention of sending information, it can be a lot simpler than what you proposed. Since this method requires a relatively unrestricted view of the board, it is more than likely they will also be able to see the player, making physical signals a far easier method of communicating “HELP!!!” than becoming a kegel master. You could organize before hand something like “if I run my left hand through my hair and shake my head, I need help”, and upon seeing this the accomplice could transmit the piece location.

    And my theory about the butt plug being able to be smuggled through a metal detector is not based in a proven fact, but rather the assertion that if you could get one through a metal detector, which may or may not be possible, there would be no other checks in place to prevent a player from entering a hall with one.


  • I find that the overthinking can be fun, but the most common cheating method is to simply relay the position on the board that contains the piece to move.

    For example, let’s say that the best move would be to move a pawn on b4 (same column as White’s left most bishop, in the 4th row) a signal would be transmitted of two short “signals”, a long pause, and then four more short “signals”. Thinking in Morse, this would be “…/…”.

    This tells the cheater that the correct move is made by the piece in the second column, fourth row, and thats usually all a top level player will need. They can stop calculating any move that isn’t from that piece, and there’s usually one move that is clearly better from that pieces immediate moves. The difficult part is now finding which follow-up moves are the best and how to punish your opponent for not playing them (which they would have been doing anyways, just with many more possible start points)

    This method has been used in the past with a device that will send a non-painful but noticeable electric shock to a player (usually on their thigh), and because these individuals got caught there are now methods in place at top level tournaments to try and prevent external cheating devices from entering the playing hall (ex/ they pat you down to try and feel something rigid on your leg).

    Thats where the butt plug theory comes in; it could theoretically pass through a standard metal detector, a security guard isn’t going to check your prostate for cheating devices, and it can still theoretically be used to communicate via 0s and 1s.