pc486

-20 isn't so bad. Neither is the winter gear, assuming you go outside at all during winter, as it's the same gear as going out for a walk.

Studded tires are nice, but also not necessary if there's proper bike infrastructure. Plowing bike lanes goes a long way.

A friend of mine explained why it's important to his kids: they can't chat with a group of their friends.

Why? Because parents don't want to install WhatsApp or other group chats due to legitimate concerns about scammers, pedophiles, and other child predators. SMS chat fills that gap, but it breaks horribly for groups bigger than 10 people. Hence if some kid is on Android, they break their chat. Given the penetration of Apple devices, it's the kids with Android who are considered at-fault. "Just get an iPhone!"

Welcome to anticompetitive practices targeted at your children.

Spot on!

Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.

My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn't like being cheated and didn't want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That's when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.

Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don't target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we'd headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn't hang around for long.

Camping in the shoulder season is great! A little cool but often far fewer bugs.

I've only bikepacked once in an area more hike-a-bike than bikepacking, but I still enjoyed it. This photo is a great reminder to just get out and do it. :)

Edit: I just noticed you strapped on a Stanley cook set. That's easily my favorite camping set. I've gone much lighter these days, but I still haul that one out occasionally. It's so cheap yet so well designed. What a nice idea to strap it onto a bottle cage/holder.

Highways are a great way to install new regional transit. Brightline West is going to link Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the median of interstate 15. That highway is a total mess on weekends and this new line is expected to drastically reduce traffic with big convenience wins given its average speed of 101mph/165kph. And the project is funding wildlife overpasses and other habitat improvements.

As is typical, this science reporting isn't great. It's not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

"Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time."

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don't realize you're playing.

Those are two different theys. Huston is against freeway expansion. They even sued in a desperate attempt to prevent it.

I'm so glad to see my own tax money is being spent to pave over Huston. It's certainly what they want.

There's no way we'll know this soon but, given there's been a huge push at the SEC to clamp down on crypto-related financial crimes[1], I wouldn't want to be anywhere near this debacle.

Before I go, I'll just leave this link: Report Suspected Securities Fraud or Wrongdoing.

1. Dot your i's and cross your t's with crypto and dancing with the SEC. LBRY failed to register as a security when they pre-mined and yesterday it sank their company. Charges are pressed in bursts of new cases almost every month.

What an unfortunate outcome. I hope his family and friends remember their good times together.

Hopefully John's death helps push for even safer cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure in Tucson. They're one of the best, perhaps the best, cycling city in Arizona. Residents there will provide political backing behind building safer streets.

This is a regulated area, one that the SEC oversees. They've prosecuted insider trading on crypto: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-98

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they're sustainable.

I'm not familiar with that YouTube channel, but the story absolutely repeats itself. A business will eventually die if it cannot turn around its finances and cannot raise money.