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I am very decidedly above average (1800ish on lichess) and my memory is blank.

If you had to pick 1-2 things, what would you consider key skills that put you ahead of players a tier below you?

I am above average (by a small margin) on Lichess, and it sounds trite but to be average at chess you have to not make blunders.

Things like not leaving a piece hanging undefended, not falling into one move tactical traps (forks/pins etc.), and learning how to check mate.

You can achieve all of that by playing slower games, and doing some puzzles.


Like the other comment said, usually being careful not to hang pieces and capturing hanged pieces takes one a long way. The most applicable advice is to count attackers and defenders in a particular square (or piece) and if you have more attackers than defenders then it is safe to move there, generally.

I was being (slightly) flippant. As in any other discipline you do need to actually learn some things: tactics practice, basic endgames, basic opening principles.

But that's different from opening theory and what people usually mean by memorization. It is almost all pattern recognition and rules of thumb, and all the opening theory memorization in the world won't help you if you dont understand the ideas behind them. All the top players are extremely sharp tacticians long before they do any memorization.


I am curious, which editors allow different typefaces for different code elements? (XCode, I think, but what else?)

I use Emacs.

I’ve been using Monaspace with Neovim for at least a year.

Also terminal apps like Ghostty, Wezterm.

Input is a proportional font.

Monaspace is a monospace font that uses contextual alternatives: it changes how letters look depending on surrounding letters.

They are nothing alike in their approach to this problem.

(Also this is a marketing piece. Contextual alternatives is not a new tech.)


> Input is a proportional font.

it is also a monospaced font


Yes there is a version of Input that is a monospaced font and doesn't solve the problem tackled by Monaspace and the proportional version of Input and is therefore as relevant to this discussion as .. I dunno .. Courier New.

I am an architect who worked as a contractor and as a consultant and I made an account here just to comment on this.

When you found out the builders did that, what you should have done is stopped the work and have them correct their mistake on their own dime. This is an unforgivable mistake and a team of professional should never make something like that.

Obviously I am not in your shoes, but this is insane to me. Any supervisor or consultant or surveyor visiting the site should've caught that.


We discovered/noticed this when the exterior walls were 2 meters high. They had to move around interior walls but that didn't help much.

My wife and I concluded that we got what we paid for, and you're right that in hindsight we should have taken legal action against the contractor. I don't know how breaking down the whole exterior of a house to fix it down to the foundation would feel though. At some point we thought of selling the partially completed structure.


> I don't know how breaking down the whole exterior of a house to fix it down to the foundation would feel though.

Not your problem.


Well, it definitely is. Now you’ve probably got to wait for a lawsuit to settle and then the work to be redone. Even in the absolute best case, this puts the project behind by months, and that’s if they don’t contest it.


yes but a built house is a lifelong thing. multiple decades. a few months here is not worth decades of pain


You clearly have never been through a lawsuit. If they choose to fight it, it is a few years, not a few months.

Also, a lot of people who build a house do not live in them for a very long time. In fact, there is no data to show they live with them for longer than people who buy existing homes.

I am certain that if you went through this, you would find it to be a very large problem.


Honestly from what you're describing it should not have been that big of an issue. Exterior walls and trusses are very easily taken down and put back up again.

The foundation would be a pain in the ass but ultimately, as others have stated, that's kind of not your problem.


This seems like the just-world response. But how can one force this? If they just say "No" you end up taking them to court and delaying the construction of your house. You endanger the contracts for downstream work.

I had a landscaper screw up just about everything they could building a retaining wall, and they couldn't even get me an extra bag of grass seed after the fact.


Depends on the country. In France, and I think in Europe, you have 4 (IIRC) legally mandated visits during the construction. At each one of those visits, you have the right to suspend the next payment (you pay a legally mandated percentage of the house after each one of those visits).

I also had measurements issues and a contractor that tried to force it to me. I just said I will not pay until it's fixed. The next week everything was fixed.


That makes a lot of sense as a system. No courts, just I'm not paying you until it meets specifications


Surely, a delayed house is better than a house built incorrectly, no?


Something something Nintendo video games....


The guy a few comments up wouldn't mind a day one patch lol


You tell the inspector. Point out that the hallway is 25cm short of code. I'm assuming since they are using metric they aren't in the US, but at least here the contractor can't say no the inspector without losing their license.


so what? delay it. as you see the house is messed up, that's going to be an issue when it's time to sell. many people will notice a very narrow stairwell or tiny bathrooms. when we were house shopping there were many houses we passed because the stairs were too narrow, or too steep or the bathroom was tiny or some room was so tiny it didn't qualify as a bedroom in our mind or the ceilings were too low. all those tiny flaws cost the seller serious money and reduced the number of buyers.


To add more context, the staircase is within local building standards minimums. Our architect at least was able to enforce that.

The bathrooms have slightly smaller tubs, though we scratched one of the larger tubs while trying to fit it in, and the supplier wouldn't accept it. It's still in our garage lol.

We were building on a contract where we paid for material at cost, and the contractor made their fee on the labour. They were inexperienced, I'd obviously never use them nor recommend them. We made them pay for most of the damages that we could quantify, and for things like crooked walls/non-90° corners we couldn't really do much.

To an untrained eye, the house is not bad, but we know where all the mistakes are.


Also im the US builders routinely create a separate shell corporation for each job so it can simply go bankrupt if they get sued rather than paying out.


I routinely check the age of a contractor license for just this reason


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