>Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.

it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.

I have PhD in algorithmic game theory and worked on poker.

1) There are currently no algorithms that can compute deterministic equilibrium strategies [0]. Therefore, mixed (randomized) strategies must be used for professional-level play or stronger.

2) In practice, strong play has been achieved with: i) online search and ii) a mechanism to ensure strategy consistency. Without ii) an adaptive opponent can learn to exploit inconsistency weaknesses in a repeated play.

3) LLMs do not have a mechanism for sampling from given probability distributions. E.g. if you ask LLM to sample a random number from 1 to 10, it will likely give you 3 or 7, as those are overrepresented in the training data.

Based on these points, it’s not technically feasible for current LLMs to play poker strongly. This is in contrast with Chess, where there is lots more of training data, there exists a deterministic optimal strategy and you do not need to ensure strategy consistency.

[0] There are deterministic approximations for subgames based on linear programming, but require to be fully loaded in memory, which is infeasible for the whole game.

It's interesting that the only time Facebook seems to want to offer you any kind of emotional experience is when you're trying to leave the site, and the experience is designed to be a negative one, rooted in guilt.

Maybe they're not working hard enough. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan both said they were the first to the gym and the last to leave. My point here is simple: there are no shortcuts to success (other than rare exceptions).

Saying someone was just a "supremely lucky flipper of coins" always seems like a cop out to me. It's not so much the fact that he was right but the reasons he gives for being right. He gives very good explanations for his reasoning and it was sound. Explain how his reasoning was not sound and then you can make statements about how he was just "super lucky." Otherwise you're just guessing about how lucky he is and that doesn't really help anyone.

Every time I read an article about how great failure is I want to scream ONLY IF IT LEADS TO SUCCESS. and the only way to know if it does is retrospectively. I think the bigger take away from these article is really keep trying.