Quite amazing to see that "French social security / pension contrib" are almost the same as their total server costs, and there is loads of them.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
True
However a french chess streamer I follow had an interesting take: since Lichess is all free, all the content is computer generated, or low quality. Apparently, some content even was just stolen content from other paid platforms. His take is basically that Chess.com gives out money to many chess actors (teachers, coaches, book writers) while lichess is not helping the whole ecosystem make money. Anyways competition is good.
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Magnus has said multiple times in the past - through the predecessors he owned or was involved with that he is not involved in the business side much at all; he's mostly an investor and a promotional actor. Of course they didn't do this without his agreement. He's always been a fan of Lichess too and played lots of their tournaments.
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.
Magnus "drives meaningful outcomes" because he's really good at chess and members of the public enjoy watching him play, so various chess-related businesses will pay him money for sponsorship. How do you propose to "not allow him" that influence? Ban all use of people's names in marketing and products?
Thank you being a rare sensible voice on this topic. The fanboyism of chess fans is insane these days. I get that the average age of chess fans these days is very low, probably 14 or so, but it’s still pretty annoying.
I love Lichess more than anything, and I hope this brings a lot of donation to them that they can use independently, and that the Lichess brand does not get subsumed by Take Take Take and their corporate money.
Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
It also seems to have significantly better availability than chess.com, where I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history due to what I can only assume is a server restart.
Lichess has been absolutely fantastic platform. AS a chess enthusiast as an engineer of a chess website me and some others are building (shameless plug, https://chess67.com), they are the only platform I have worked with where so much is so easily accessible in terms of their APIs.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
Yeah that’s a really interesting point. The openness is mainly what makes Lichess so powerful for organizers and developers.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
Love Lichess. These days I haven't been playing very much but always watching chess streaming commentary. So I was surprised when I saw Take Take Take had a launch party Monday but no stream on Tuesday (getting dumped by chess.com). I never play chess on a phone but I was curious to see how Take Take Take might be incorporating LLM for English language explanation. Last fall I did a sort of proof of concept of this, not nearly fleshed out like the TTT app.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things:
(1) Bring more people to Chess,
(2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Love lichess - I downloaded their chess puzzle database and built a simple app for my son to learn mate-in-3 puzzles. They are amazing and deserve all the love!
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
For anybody who watched the new chess documentary on Netflix about the Magnus vs Hans drama, you'll remember how pissed Magnus and his dad are at chess.com, which is what makes this partnership interesting to me. (Magnus is a TTT cofounder)
Huge respect to Lichess. Open source, no ads, super clean interface and super functional website. Chess.com is a pain to use compared to it.
All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
Their lead developer is paid $72k/yr, and mobile developer $49k/yr.
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
Can you explain what is interesting in those salaries?
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Could be part time
4 replies →
100%. Beautiful property. Thank you, Lichess, for everything you do.
Quite amazing to see that "French social security / pension contrib" are almost the same as their total server costs, and there is loads of them.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
It's truly phenomenal.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
True However a french chess streamer I follow had an interesting take: since Lichess is all free, all the content is computer generated, or low quality. Apparently, some content even was just stolen content from other paid platforms. His take is basically that Chess.com gives out money to many chess actors (teachers, coaches, book writers) while lichess is not helping the whole ecosystem make money. Anyways competition is good.
1 reply →
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
> I do feel a bit bad for chess.com
I'm sure they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
> I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I also hope they manage to avoid becoming dependent on whatever this deal grants them.
They have a choice: study chess and beat Magnus. Until then I will care about Magnus (and lichess) more then those businesses.
The best thing they did was that they bought an amazing domain name.
> FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims
FIDE and chess.com did behave pretty shitty sometimes and I think its good Magnus is in a position to counter them a bit.
I don’t. Everyone ends up affected by the whims of a celebrity in this case.
Magnus has said multiple times in the past - through the predecessors he owned or was involved with that he is not involved in the business side much at all; he's mostly an investor and a promotional actor. Of course they didn't do this without his agreement. He's always been a fan of Lichess too and played lots of their tournaments.
Business is business. Non-competes expire. Don't waste your feelings on chess.com.
From TTT:
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.
Magnus "drives meaningful outcomes" because he's really good at chess and members of the public enjoy watching him play, so various chess-related businesses will pay him money for sponsorship. How do you propose to "not allow him" that influence? Ban all use of people's names in marketing and products?
2 replies →
Well for the chess world, open source world (BDFL), etc probably okay. For real world governments...
Thank you being a rare sensible voice on this topic. The fanboyism of chess fans is insane these days. I get that the average age of chess fans these days is very low, probably 14 or so, but it’s still pretty annoying.
I love Lichess more than anything, and I hope this brings a lot of donation to them that they can use independently, and that the Lichess brand does not get subsumed by Take Take Take and their corporate money.
Lichess is incredibly well optimized [0] (and an amazing public service). I'm sure that this is very cost effective for TTT, so a win-win.
[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
4 replies →
It also seems to have significantly better availability than chess.com, where I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history due to what I can only assume is a server restart.
Such service should be using anycast based globally distributed server cluster for lowest latency to their user.
OVH does not have that many availability zones or regions either
Saving money is a good thing but QOS also matters.
Lichess has been absolutely fantastic platform. AS a chess enthusiast as an engineer of a chess website me and some others are building (shameless plug, https://chess67.com), they are the only platform I have worked with where so much is so easily accessible in terms of their APIs.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
Yeah that’s a really interesting point. The openness is mainly what makes Lichess so powerful for organizers and developers.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
Love Lichess. These days I haven't been playing very much but always watching chess streaming commentary. So I was surprised when I saw Take Take Take had a launch party Monday but no stream on Tuesday (getting dumped by chess.com). I never play chess on a phone but I was curious to see how Take Take Take might be incorporating LLM for English language explanation. Last fall I did a sort of proof of concept of this, not nearly fleshed out like the TTT app.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Lichess, you guys rock.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Keep on the amazing work,
Love lichess - I downloaded their chess puzzle database and built a simple app for my son to learn mate-in-3 puzzles. They are amazing and deserve all the love!
Love Lichess.
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
For anybody who watched the new chess documentary on Netflix about the Magnus vs Hans drama, you'll remember how pissed Magnus and his dad are at chess.com, which is what makes this partnership interesting to me. (Magnus is a TTT cofounder)
The free open source model does have its competitive advantages!
Big fan of Lichess here. Such a great and underrated service.
This is huge, congrats to the lichess team.
Well... some people buy debrid subscription for 3 USD/month on the high seas...
Just came here to say that Lichess is amazing. Love it.
As it happens "Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement" is also OpenAI's modus operandi when it comes to the publishing industry.