FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
And like everybody in cycling loves to repeat endlessly: "It never gets any easier, you just go faster".
I've always put it when talking about rock climbing with fresh gumbies: You will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck now, it'll just go from feeling like you can't do anything, to feeling like you should be able to do more by now.
I don't particularly have an opinion on optimal cadence, but I know that it's bad that I can't keep a higher cadence for any length of time. Like how I might not use a certain guard or submission in BJJ a lot, but if I can't do it at all that's bad and I should work on it.
I might ultimately land on a lower cadence-higher gear preference, I'm coming into this with (by cycling standards) a fat ass and tremendous max strength and shit endurance, but I'm pretty confident that working on increasing cadence a bit will pay some dividends.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
I would at least hem and haw about this a little. One thing that stood out to me when I came to cycling from other sports was that being a bit of a princess about fit and contact points paid off on long efforts.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised how little irritation I had after 50 miles, I wasn't super comfortable by the end but bib shorts+moisturizer+new comfortable seat worked pretty well, and I was fine the next day. I'll definitely take your advice to keep looking for room to optimize though!
What I'm talking about it more, the first hour I was singing along to my music choices, the second and third hours I was listening to Darryl Cooper give me the other side on Adolf Hitler and fascinated, and then the last hour I kept looking for a podcast to hold my attention.
If I get a chance to ride my neighborhood on a nice day, I basically want to just work on hills, because I suck at them to a degree I find embarrassing, and getting better at them will open up more rides around my home. Oddly, given the autism, I hate overly complicated metrics in workouts. I nearly always gravitate towards simplicity and effort over metrics. Lifting I'm either doing some variation of OLAD or Bulgarian styles, or I'm doing a Smolov style focus on one lift. Climbing and BJJ I just go out and do it. I think cycling has appealed to me for a similar reason, that at least to start all I needed to do was roll out of my driveway and I'd be at the bottom of a hill and need to make my way back.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
I guess sustained power is the problem in that I don't actually care how I get there I just want to sustain speed. But 1) I've read that 80-90 cadence is typically the recommended sustainable endurance pace, I'm closer to 60. Even if I ultimately settle at 60, I feel like not being able to sustain 90 is probably bad for reasons too stupid to even understand; 2) I struggle on steep climbs, where I feel like downshifting and pumping at a higher cadence is probably the answer, as at a lower cadence I get bogged down.
I've tried a variety of bikes and somehow land at nearly the same speed on the same courses, so I'm the problem.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
I would guess it saves time and effort, especially when we know that Elon has put a target on keeping Grok ideologically in line with his specified views. It's probably easier to tell Grok to stick to privilege Grokipedia as a source, then edit Grokipedia or mess with the program producing it where necessary, than it is to actually figure out how to get Grok to toe the ideological line while pulling from largely ideologically opposed material.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Strangely, it seems that the New York Yankees article is essentially completely identical to the Wikipedia article. Like the entire thing.
It's not though. Look at the Wikipedia article, Wikipedia is 25 pages long, Grok is half that. It goes from the general overview at the top to a narrative history of the team. Where Grok jumps right to "distinctions" which it steals from Wikipedia but organizes differently. The paragraph is taken word for word from Wikipedia, but it uses it in prime real estate. If I look up the New York Yankees and want to learn about the team, I want to go through the team history, learn about Ruth and Dimaggio and Mantle and Jeter and Judge. It's a perfectly appropriate fact to include on page 14, as Wikipedia does, right before you get into the sections that are just lists of things. Grok puts it on page 2. This is an important editing decision! Organization is content.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
... Oh no, it's just conservapedia...
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Step two in the path to a Century Ride is completed, I made it 50 miles on Saturday morning. The final ten miles were definitely a different animal compared to the prior rides I've done, I don't think I technically "bonked" or whatever the preferred technical term is, but I was definitely on the struggle shuttle. Near the end of both rides, I start adjusting constantly. Jacket on-jacket off, different handlebar positions, saddle postures, different podcasts or audiobooks. I feel like I just can't get comfortable, which makes sense at that point, but I need to work on ignoring the discomfort and just locking in, there is no combination of things that makes riding a bike that far comfortable.
This time rather than a long ride to a destination where my wife would pick me up, I did it out-and-back, which worked much better. As I wore down on energy, the streets got more familiar rather than less familiar. Which was a good choice, I was more comfortable in the saddle despite fatigue, I knew where I was going and which streets would be safe/efficient. I'm realizing in retrospect that some of the confusion and getting lost at the end of the 50k ride was more related to fatigue than it was to the route itself. And the traffic concerns can easily be lessened by knowing the route better.
It might be too late in the season to practically shoot for the 100km ride this year. I think I have the physical capability to slug it out if I needed to, but the combination of temperature/daylight/location would work out such that I don't think I could do it in the way I want to do it, if that makes any sense. So it's sort of back in the lab for me. I need to increase my speed to hit 100 miles. I did 53 miles in four hours flat, so around a 12mph pace. That would make a 100mi ride way too long to be practical, I want to be holding around 15mph at least, and to do that I feel like I need to be able to hold 18mph for a few miles, which I really can't seem to do right now. My problem seems to be with cadence, I can't manage to move my legs fast enough for very long to sustain higher speeds. I picked up a used Peloton bike for my wife a year back, I suppose I'll use that pretty extensively this winter, they have a lot of rides built around varying cadences, so hopefully that will help. I'm not going to be able to ride my bike outside as often with the shorter daylight hours, but I'm hoping to get out to a bike trail one morning a week and hit at least ten to fifteen miles to keep the groove greased.
My target is right now to try for the 100km in early spring, and if that goes well the 100mi in late spring, or if it doesn't I'll aim to do 100mi next fall. My secondary worry being that I need to do a better job of choosing a route, that the friction is going to catch up with me over the course of a really long ride.
This is more cardio than I've done in years, and that's been good for me, no question about it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Using your Yankees example, this structured reasoning engine would read it, check that all of the basic quantitative numbers are valid, but then "reason" against a corpus of other baseball data to build out something like: Yankees hit lots of home runs in august --> home run hitting is good and important --> records are also important in baseball --> oh, we should highlight this home run record setting august for the yankees!.
What further AI development would avoid is including a record that no one really cares about in prime real estate within the article. That's a cool record, one that a color commentator brings up during the broadcast when watching the game, and afterward gets cited in a quick ESPN or fan-blog article, then totally forgotten until another team gets close to the record and they show the leaderboard during a game. It's not something fans care about on the day-to-day, no Bleacher Creature ever brags about the team holding the monthly Home Run Record.
I suspect the answer is more prosaic: the record setting August outburst was recent enough to be highlighted in one or more online articles, which Grok found while writing the article and included in the data. Where various great things that Dimaggio and Berra did aren't covered as heavily online. An old timer fan is much more likely to brag about Rivera's save record, Dimaggio's hit streak, Berra having a ring for every finger, Ruth being the GOAT, or Judge holding the "clean" HR record. Those would be things to cite in the article over the monthly HR record getting a paragraph.
It's the ability to reason your way to judgment, or wisdom, not knowledge.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
So have you noticed how Police Body Camera footage in controversial cases generally gets released within hours when the footage exonerates the cop, and when it looks bad for the cop it take days or weeks to see it?
Universal surveillance doesn't give "the public" access to the truth. It gives the people who control the panopticon access to the truth, and the power to present it to the public however they choose to present it. A group in which Larry Ellison imagines himself, controlling surveillance tech, not the subject of it. Ellison wants to be the man in the control room full of screens, not the man being surveilled.
When infinite evidence exists, the presentation of the evidence becomes the game. And there are always going to be differences in access to that evidence. We're doing the "don't invent the torture matrix" game here, Palantir is directly named for this concept! The Palantir drives Denethor mad, not by showing him falsehoods, but by showing him truths presented by Sauron, edited by the enemy. The Palantir is dangerous not because it doesn't work, but because unless you have tremendous Power, it will overtake your will by presenting things to you in a persuasive way. And that's the position of power that the tech lords want to be in: able to present evidence to us to prove whatever position they please.
Instant replay in sports has been a mixed blessing. For every obviously wrong call, we get truly ridiculous rules and arcane formulas for what constitutes "possession" of the football. True Crime podcasters with vocal fry, and their more respectable cousins in various Innocence Projects, have shown us why Finality is a fundamental value of the justice system, that when you throw infinite effort into researching a case or event you will always find stuff that looks weird. Infinite angles of truth are fundamentally indistinguishable from falsehood without guidance.
When you base truth on Rule of Law you empower lawyers to tell you what the truth is. When you base it on religion you empower priests. If we base truth on surveillance technology, we empower the owners and operators of the surveillance tech. Coincidentally, Larry Ellison has a close relationship with Palantir and similar companies.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Pete Rose wasn't just banned from the Hall of Fame, he was banned from baseball, he couldn't coach and he couldn't work for a team and he was very rarely featured as one of the greats of the game along other legends of similar stature. This stance softened over the course of my life, and you started to see him acknowledged more as he got older and his sins faded into memory. But it wasn't that the voters never voted for him, like they have refused to with steroid users, but that he was never eligible on the ballot at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
So out of curiosity I opened Grokipedia up and searched the page for New York Yankees, a topic I know enough about to spot errors or omissions pretty well. It's...fine, but the verbiage is kind of off, and the editing is weird. The choice of which facts are important to fit into the article is distinctly odd. It inserts facts at random points, like this paragraph near the top:
On June 25, 2019, they set a new major league record for homering in 28 consecutive games, breaking the record set by the 2002 Texas Rangers. The streak would reach 31 games, during which they hit 57 home runs. With the walk-off solo home run by DJ LeMahieu to win the game against the Oakland Athletics on August 31, 2019, the Yankees ended the month of August that year now holding a new record of 74 home runs hit in the month alone, a new record for the most home runs hit in a month by a single MLB team.
Which is true, as far as I know, but not a record that anybody really cares about compared to about a million other things that the Yankees have done. It's a lot of text to cover a fairly obscure statistical record. While ignoring, within the "Distinctions" heading, a lot of more important Yankees accomplishments and records that a human would think of first like the streaks of winning seasons etc.
The whole piece steadfastly refuses to achieve any narrative flow at any point, never achieving a cohesive story structure. And it seems to lack the fundamental feature of Wikipedia: links between articles allowing me to learn more about a topic and dive down a Wikipedia hole, there is no Grokipedia hole unless I manually dig it.
On the other hand, the article structure and style is just copied from Wikipedia and slightly shuffled. Significant word for word sentences of the article seem to be directly pulled from Wikipedia, which was almost certainly within the training data used to make these articles, so actually what we seem to be dealing with here is better thought of as a fork than a competitor or alternative to Wikipedia. As human editing smooths out the rough edges of the AI, it'll get better over time. Though at that point, what is the use? It's mostly just Wikipedia copied.
I'll put a disclaimer here that I'm not someone with an Elon Musk hate-boner, but I do think that Elon is the fly in the ointment here. Grok has publicly done weird shit in the past, that was obviously the result of direct meddling, like the South African White Genocide fiasco. We know in advance that some articles are not going to be maximally accurate, but instead be designed by Elon to look the way Elon wants them to look. So you really can't trust Grokipedia, or Grok, without knowing Elon's Special Interests and where they might get you into trouble. I know there are going to be some articles on Grokipedia that will be edited in a certain way.
Which puts Grokipedia in basically the same category I use Grok for more generally: as an alternative source to double check on something I already looked up elsewhere, a sanity check for alternative views. Normally more prosaically, I punch a question into ChatGPT then punch the same question into Grok and see if they agree. Now we can do the same with Wikipedia. That's a useful enough thing.
I suspect for xAI, Grokipedia is actually more useful as an answer repository for simple questions asked to the chatbot that can be tied directly into the program more easily. The next non-American that asks "Who or what are the New York Yankees?" can be answered with a summary of the already-created Grokipedia article.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
I feel like the people blaming TikTok or whatever for boring conversations need to sit down and read some Jane Austen or something. People have been complaining about this kind of conversational boor for literal centuries, probably millennia. I think about this often in terms of RETVRN arguments, that every American novel written between The Great Gatsby and Infinite Jest is essentially about the emptiness, anomie, dissatisfactory nature, and soullessness of all the stuff that we're trying to bring back.
If anything, loudly sharing boring personal anecdotes is the opposite of the typical internet-brained problem, which is not saying anything ever.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
I'm not sure where you're contradicting my point.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
I'm kind of excluding you and me from the category "everyone" here. I guess "everyone relevant on the political spectrum" would be more accurate, but less felicitous.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
Exactly. If you don't like the America we live in today, you can't love Ronald Reagan. He compromised with the New Deal, he made Social Security and Medicare understood as permanent entitlements for "hard working" old people, even as he tried to roll back welfare benefits for working age young people. Reagan brought on The End of History, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all for conservatives.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.
I don't know where the saying originates, but I've heard many times that Athens recovered from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War very quickly, while Sparta never recovered from its victory. America may never recover from what it did to win the Cold War.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq.
No, we just argue about making them shorter and sharper, but we still haven't moved into another paradigm. Obama's foreign policy operated within the same system as Dubya's, the Reagan paradigm, but trying to keep it to drones and special forces instead of heavy ground troops. Obama's interventions in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen were all built around the same foreign interventionist playbook. Trump made lots of noise about being an isolationist, and at times I've applauded him for it, but he kept up drone and special forces campaigns begun by Obama in his first term, including the strike against Abu Bakr and Suleimani, and in his even-more-schizo second term he's bombed Iran in the shortest and sharpest way he could. Trump is trying to break the paradigm, but he hasn't yet constructed a cohesive edifice that shows what he actually wants to do: he talks America First then acts Israel-only. Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.
Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008
People are dissatisfied with neoliberal economics on both sides of the aisle, neither side has constructed an alternative. Our economy still functions as a neoliberal Washington consensus corporate financial system. The big banks are still big and still bailed out by the government, the big insurance companies are still causing the same problems as before the ACA, outsourcing and deindustrialization continued apace. Have corporations been pushed from power in any way since 2008, have admins since 2008 been any less in bed with corporations? Sure we've swapped General Motors and General Electric and IBM for Nvidia and Oracle and Meta, but the economy is still built around corporate profits and the stock market. The way it has been since Reagan.
Obama and Trump both talked about moving past the current paradigm into new territory, nobody has done it yet. Trump has yet to build a cohesive economic model or foreign policy. He gestures in new directions, he has not yet completed the change. Maybe President Vance will.
I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.
Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.
But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.
Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.
And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.
If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.
*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
To add to what MadMonzer said:
Wins Above Replacement and Replacement Level became popular as analytical concepts because they capture the reality that the "average" player in the major leagues is actually really good, a team full of average players would be pretty good, and an average player costs a decent amount of money/resources to acquire. What you get for "free" (a minimum contract and no draft capital) isn't an average player, it's a replacement level player. So once you determine what a "free" player looks like, you can determine how many wins a player was worth over a free player, and on the free agent market you can determine the value of each win.
Compare to the financial concept of the Risk Free Rate of Return, you don't compare your return on an investment to zero, you compare it to what you would have gotten without taking on added risk. This lets you both assess how much return you got on an investment in a more rigorous way (if I made 5% on an investment over a time period when I could have gotten 4% in FDIC insured CDs, I actually made 1% over risk-free rate of return), and determine the cost of risk you're taking on (in an efficient market every percentage point over RFRR represents a chance of losing your money).
The closest real analytical concept in politics is the polling around Generic Democrat and Generic Republican ballots, where respondents are asked if they would prefer to vote R or D without candidate names attached. But in most people's imaginations, the Replacement Level candidate looks like a person, every congressional district has a local mayor or councilman who will run for anything or an ambitious young ADA who pictures himself getting to congress someday. There was a prominent local lawyer for years in my town who would always accept the Democratic nomination for a position if the party couldn't dig up another candidate, he never won and my great aunt used to joke that "the poor guy couldn't get elected dog catcher," but he was always willing to be on the ballot, that's probably what a replacement level candidate looks like.
I bring this up because you want to distinguish Replacement Level from Average, the Average major league baseball player is really good at baseball and at $8mm/WAR on the free agent market an Average player is worth about $16mm/yr. An Average candidate for President is factually a really smart and accomplished person, a good politician*. Even somebody who makes it pretty far in the primaries is damn good at the game.
Which is where I would differ with my learned friend in argument @MadMonzer : Hillary Clinton, for all my dislike of her policies and my dead-ender belief that Bernie got rat fucked, was an incredibly good politician. 2016 Donald Trump was just that good that he ended her career. She was a way above average candidate in terms of experience, in terms of her ability to rally institutional support and scare off opponents, etc. There's a reason only joke candidates ran against her.
Bringing it back to the NYC mayoral race, this is a case where you have three below-replacement candidates running against Mamdani. Cuomo is a disgraced former governor with a litany of scandals**, Eric Adams probably sold his soul to Donald Trump to avoid federal indictment, and Sliwa has a tan line from his beret. Replacement level for Mayor is probably a lesser CEO in the Bloomberg mold, or something like that, and none of them reach that level.
*I'll note here that when I talk about a "Politician" I'm including within that identifier their whole machine, their advisors and handlers, their braintrust, the power behind the throne, the people that are referred to in political reporting as "[Candidate]-World." I don't think trying to untangle the influence of different factors is useful, it's better to just lump them all together than to try to argue who the man behind the curtain is. In this conversation George W Bush is also Karl Rove; Barack Obama is also David Axelrod; HRC was also John Podesta and Bill Clinton; Joe Biden is probably mainly his tight universe of advisers.
**My favorite Cuomo story I read was that he told a male intern that if he got a boob job he would make a hot tranny. Which is just top tier sexual harassment: invent a woman to harass if none are available.
When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.
Your instinct is probably correct here. Not because it is dehumanizing, but because I don't think it's an easy classification system. You probably only get a consistent classification of parasites versus hosts, makers versus takers, whatever you want to call it.
Are Landlords parasites? Are people who own large amounts of stock? Are people who profess a willingness to work but are currently out of work, or make so little money that they rely on government relief programs to get by? What if they credibly argue that they could be making more but-for technology/immigration/bum-knees/whatever? What about people who make a lot of money, but they do it by selling things that are bad for us? Are drug dealers makers or takers? What about the Sacklers? Is a prostitute who supports herself and saves enough for retirement a parasite?
Is my neighbor the farmer a parasite? On the one hand, he is doing the single most essential labor in the world, growing food I eat. On the other, he's broke without an elaborate system of tax breaks, subsidies, exceptions to laws, and the generalized good-will that causes me to buy local sweet corn from his stand rather than at the supermarket.
It's a tough move to make consistently.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
Men travel to escape from themselves, but it does not work. For wherever you go, there you are.
Sure, but where do you come from? Your genetics, sure, but also you are the product of your experiences, of how you grew up. It's hard to contend that there is no impact from formative experiences throughout your life on personality.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
No, it doesn't.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21d ago
I'm surprised that people who are terrrrrrrified of Socialism aren't using the obvious weirdness of the election to discredit Zohran.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21d ago
The hectoring boomer "you're not allowed to vote for him" tone is so incredibly bad it makes one doubt the supposed competence of the billionaire bloc that forms the anti Zohran forces. If they're this stupid, he might be right that they don't deserve all that money.
I've been trying to put off doing all this, I guess out of embarrassment over how bad I am, like I need to earn it. Also why I've put off spending any real money on a bike. But maybe all the persuasion on here has made the bike shop up the road a few hundred bucks.
I despise everything about their business model, but Mrs. FiveHour wanted one off craigslist and she loves it, it's worth any price to keep her working out, so we already have one in the basement.
For the places I've done long rides, wawa is my rest station, so I've got a wide variety of junk food on tap. Tastykakes are the thing I allow myself only in the middle of large cardio events. I doubt its optimal, but its good enough.
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