Round 5

One important piece of information is that Magnus Carlsen has confirmed (once again) that he has no intention to play the Candidates, so the other three semifinalists, including underdog Nijat Abasov, should be directly qualified for the Candidates.

Link to the document (which is also linked in the article).

The article has a couple of inaccuracies and unjustified assumptions:

First of all, there is no Men’s category in chess, only Open and Women’s. The Open category is, as indicated by its name, open to everyone, men, women, cis, trans and anyone else, and it is not unusual that women compete in it (the most prominent case was Judit Polgar). This new FIDE document doesn’t change that, so a trans person is allowed in competitive play, contrary to what the title suggests. The Women’s category is restricted to only women, and this document explains how these restrictions are applied to trans people. Note that the existence of a Women’s category is controversial on its own.

Similarly, there are not Men titles and Women titles, only General titles (Grand Master, International Master,…) and Women titles (Women Grand Master, Women International Master,…), with the Women titles having lower requirements (again, very controversial). All the top women players are GMs, not WGMs. The FIDE document states that trans men will have their women titles abolished (unless they transition back), but they retain their general titles, and in case they don’t have one, their women title will be transferred to the general title of the equivalent level. The article incorrectly states that trans men “are set to be stripped of any titles if they were won pre-transition”.

Now, to the meat of the topic: the eligibility of trans women for the Women category:

Article 2.3 states that any person who has legally transitioned can certificate so to their National Rating Officer to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Once that that change in the database is done, trans women are restricted from Women events until a decision is made by FIDE Council “at the earliest possible time”. In these cases where the transition is backed up by legal documents, the decision by FIDE should be a formality and take little time.

Of course, this is only possible for countries who recognize gender changes. In case the National Rating Officer rejects the change, article 2.4 allows an appellation to the FIDE QC, and after that to the FIDE Council. In these cases the decision by the FIDE Council may take up more time, and FIDE sets a deadline of two years for that decision (but it doesn’t mean that every case will take two years).

And finally, just to be clear, all of this only applies to trans players who need to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Trans players that always have played under their post-transition gender, or that have changed their gender before this regulation, don’t need to go through this process. This is the case, for example, of Yosha Iglesias, the player mentioned in the article, and that is listed as female in FIDE’s database, and consequently she can play in any Women’s event she wants.

All in all, I think there is much unnecessary red tape, especially for the trans people more at risk, those who live in countries where they are persecuted. And that the excessive red tape is most likely based on transphobia. But the situation is not as extreme as many other sports that have directly banned the participation of trans players.

Antichess, the truly anarchic variant, where en passant is really forced

You still haven’t addressed my point. Do you think it is desiderable that homosexual people are beaten to a pulp? Is a YES/NO question, it shouldn’t be difficult to answer.

Whatever, I copied your whole paragraph in another comment, and the context is pretty clear for anyone who cares to read it. I didn’t claim that you personally were threatening to do the beating, only that you thought that the beating was desiderable for the “program of western civilization”. If you really don’t want homosexual people to be beaten to a pulp, then you should seriously reconsider how you express your ideas.

You are longing for the times when “Homosexuals were regularly taken outside and beaten to a pulp”. Isn’t this hateful?

I don’t usually go to through other people’s comment history, but this one is a goldmine

“It made sense back when everyone was, more or less, on board with the program of western civilization. We may not all have been Christian back then, but almost all of us were, and everyone supported Judeo-Christian values without question. Homosexuals were regularly taken outside and beaten to a pulp, so it was extremely rare for anyone to think such behavior was acceptable. At this point we need to ask ourselves what the purpose of freedom is. Are we a free people so we can exercise perverted pleasures of the flesh, the slaughter of innocent babies, and genital mutilation of children without their parents knowledge? If you answer “yes”, you just might be repeating the whisper of a demon.”

“woke neo-marxism claims that any normal person is bad. That means its practitioners openly discriminate against conservative white Christian men, especially if they practice heterosexual behavior in a traditional marriage.”

“Ironically, secession is about the most American thing we could do at this point”

Then, we’ll wait for that random-ass user to actually subscribe to any new sub/community over there, which they’ll only do if it’s any good

[citation needed]

“Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk”

Spoiler: They can

[Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience

Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.

Google got into the Linux space

Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).

But they won’t be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.

I don’t think Facebook really cares about attracting the current Mastodon/Fediverse users to their new social network. I think they have chosen ActivityPub for two reasons:

1. They want a product to compete against Twitter. And with Musk rapid enshittificating it, they need to act quick. ActivityPub is open source and proven to work, so Facebook has less work to do, and can release their new product sooner.

2. The main downfall of Twitter is advertisers leaving the site because they don’t want their ads next to hateful comments that are now allowed under the new management. But this is a problem that can be neatly solved with defederation! Each advertiser can have their own instance (instance-as-a-service provided by Facebook), and they have more granularity in decided in which parts of the network they want to participate, and which parts to defederate. Sure, we the original denizens of the Fediverse will defederate from anything Meta, specially from ad instances. But most of the users of this new Meta-fediverse will remain in their Meta-approved instances, oblivious to the world outside them.

Off-topic, but I love ntfy! It’s super easy to use to send notifications from a script or program anywhere

I’m not really familiar with the problem of voter ID laws in the UK. Here (Spain) showing your ID is mandatory to vote, and nobody think that’s a problem (but we need ID for basically any paperwork, so it isn’t an additional burden). Afaik, the problem in the USA is that it is quite difficult to get an ID card, and intentionally so for certain demographics. Is it the same in the UK?

In case you didn’t know, the automated poop emoji is a reference to this