Huh interesting observation. I wonder if anything in the first two sentences of the article can shed any light.
In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.
Yeah I've definitely heard of people "running (iron oxide) silently in production". Super ambiguous
So you looked up the paper cited in the article, right? Since you understand there are confounding factors right? Since you're a competent and knowlegeable human, right?
Chess.com is super bloated, slow to load, and hard to navigate. There's so much noise on the screen compared to playing on lichess. Features are paywalled. For example if I want to know how the top players are responding to a certain sequence of moves, I can just see that on lichess. Also weird stuff is locked like using your own computer to analyze games. Also if you haven't been to the site for awhile you get a lovely modal again asking you for money. It's not that getting paid for services is bad, it's just awful when there's a better quality free service.
Yes - not only features are limited and paywalled (fine, you need to keep the lights on), but they're nagging you about buying a subscription at every turn (now this feels intrusive to me).
Their UI also feels clunky and dated: kind of like a 90s, or early 2000s desktop app.
They do offer much more features, but most of them aren't even remotely essential to me: like a bazillion of bizarre chess variants (lichess has a few simple alternatives, but no stuff like 4-player chess etc.), or "personalized" bots to play against ("play against Beth Harmon"; it feels very Disneylandish to me), and so on.
This being said, I don't mean to bash chess.com, it has certain advantages, and I do play on both websites. Still, lichess is my go-to, no-nonsense, default option.
The author would find nothing reasonable to object to in your statements. I find this article frustrating because it fails to reiterate a common point bestowed by all self-help pundits worth their salt. Results are highly subjective in many domains. This pseudo enlightened take on interacting with capitalism at large can be concisely boiled down to a simple question. If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
The guy got played by the system and he's mad about it, plain and simple. There's no new information in this article, just a somewhat novel and ironic perspective of how capitalism is a 'terrible' thing. Because we've never read about how people earn money taking advantage of the uninformed before.
In all of my research of self-help it's usually very clearly stated somewhere in big red text 'INDIVIDUAL RESULTS MAY VARY' and somehow this genius missed that. His shortcomings from blindly following in the footsteps of others is now the fault of an entire industry interested in offering perspectives to those who wish to grow.
