That’s always fun. Some people will swear it can’t possibly work like that, but they have plenty of experience riding bikes. You wouldn’t be able to turn properly at speed unless you’re counter-steering, so they clearly have done this. The idea seems to be so incredibly intuitive that people don’t even realize they’re doing it, which is very interesting.

The idea behind clips is that you can pull up on the rising pedal instead of just following momentum from the other foot pushing down. It does work, but isn’t really necessary for commuter biking.

I got a used bike that had a hybrid pedal with a clip on one side and flats on the other. While the clip (heavy) side usually landed down, it didn’t always and it was weird to pedal with it. I just ride around on my bike, so I replaced them with cheap flat pedals and it’s fine. I also converted it to an e-bike, and I don’t need the extra pedal power.

It’s pretty common to bring up gyroscopes for this when people know a little bit about physics. It’s all over motorcycle forums, for instance.

As you say, it doesn’t work. Experiments have been done where they attach a counter rotating wheel to cancel out the gyroscopic effect, and while it’s a little wonky to ride, it works fine.

IIRC, we’re not 100% sure how bikes work just yet. Every time somebody comes up with a model that seems to be good, someone finds a counterexample that throws it in the bin. Even your explanation of bike trail isn’t all the way there; Razer-type scooters still work without trail on the front wheel.

It works on its own. If you push your bike along with a good run and then let go, it’ll stay upright until it slows down too much.

Learning to ride a bike is mostly about being confident enough to let the bike work itself out. It gets more stable as it goes faster, but it’s natural to be afraid to go faster when it already feels unstable at low speed. Then there’s a little bit to learn about countersteering, but most people figure that out without being told it’s even a thing.

Pretty much. The US military can take on any other nation state (China is trying to change this, but it’s not there yet). The initial fight against the organized militaries of both Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t last long, and was as much of a one sided curb stomp as you’ll ever see in history. It was the insurgency later on that was the problem.

Neither is all that great in practice.

Gopher has many problems as a protocol. The original versions of HTTP had much the same problems, such as closing the connection at the end of a transfer rather than having a length header or a signal that the connection is actually done. HTTP went on to fix most of those problems, but Gopher never got the chance. Gopher+ started fixing it up, but it was a victim of bad timing. The Mosaic browser was released shortly after Gopher+ and everyone started switching over. To my knowledge, nobody has ever implemented Gopher+ on either a client or server. Not even after over 20 years of a “revival” movement.

Gemini intentionally limits things, such as not having inline images. This is supposed to be done to keep out methods that have been historically used to track users, but things don’t work that way. I can just as easily send my logs to a data broker without using a pixel tracker if that’s what I want to do.

In the end, you can just use HTTP with a static web page, zero cookies, and no JavaScript. That’s what I ended up doing for my old blog (after offering a Gemini version for a while), including converting a bunch of YouTube <iframe> tags to linked screenshots so you don’t even get YouTube cookies.

Attempting to replace people in the workplace without changing society so that people can live without work.

Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world

I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.

AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.

Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.

. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need

Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Sure you can, today, and this is why:

So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .

Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.

Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?

Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.

I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.

Electronics usually wants to control the temperature range more tightly than a butane soldering iron could do. Fine for plumbing work, though. Electronics soldering irons usually don’t have the thermal mass to handle plumbing work.

My biggest complaint about the ts100, Pinecil, and the iFixit station is that the tips are specialized and rather expensive.

Firmware was always there in a soldering iron more sophisticated than an old, dumb Radio Shack wall plug iron. That’s how you get good temperature control. Pinecil is just letting you modify it officially.

You’re probably adding $25-35 to that for a USB-C power supply that can handle it, but yes, it’s cheaper than this. $50-75 if you want it battery powered.

But yeah, I’m not sure what iFixit is bringing to the market that’s better than what exists.

And they validated this data 4 times. It’s really good data.

An interesting insight I gathered from a Bart Ehrman lecture somewhere is that cultures that have a primarily oral-based tradition don’t care as much about consistency in their lore. Not because they’re dumb or anything; it just doesn’t matter to them as much.

Both Judaism and Christianity started as oral traditions. That’s why you have two separate creation stories in Genesis, and different accounts of how Judas died, and the wildly different Gnostic tradition of Christianity. It doesn’t go much deeper than that: an oral culture that used these stories as parables that weren’t really meant as literal truth, but later got treated that way when it evolved into a written culture.

This is a Gnostic gospel, and they have their own cosmology that breaks with the mainstream Judeo-Christian traditional entirely. By their account, there was a singular creator god, but there were also a bunch of lesser gods. The ancient Jews inadvertently started worshiping one of these lesser gods, mistakenly thinking he was the main guy. Jesus came to set all this straight, and Judas was the only apostle who really figured this out.

Jesus is a very different character in these. He usually comes off as an asshole. In particular, see the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus kills his friends with his mind for not sharing the ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA8hXDJocQ

Is it more fantastical? Not really, but it’s not marching in the same direction as the rest of the story. It’s the difference between Captain Picard’s mom dying when he was young when we saw him dream her as an old woman, versus Captain Picard walking on the bridge and kicking Riker straight in the nuts for no reason and then lighting up a joint. One is a contradiction, but not really that important when it comes down to it (unless you insist that the material is absolutely true, in which case you have other problems). The other is so far off from the character’s normal behavior that we have to assume something is wrong.

Just to address this from a high level, I see this as typical of Nvidia and AMD approaches. Nvidia makes something that’s engineered to perfection, but adds a bunch of requirements on it that make it expensive and supports vendor lock-in. Even if you’re willing to put with that to have The Best, you might hesitate when finding out what assholes Nvidia are about everything.

AMD then makes something 95% as good, and it’s cheap and you can work with them without yelling.

See also: FSR vs DLSS.