I was really hoping for a tracker with the only sound being a good model of a bassoon, one of my favorite instruments. But this is a pretty good little tracker, always like seeing a new tracker.
Bike chain lubes are mostly terrible, they are meant to work properly for maybe a few hundred miles assuming they were applied to a properly cleaned chain, properly applied and the weather cooperates. They all wear chains and chain rings quickly unless you are very good about cleaning and relubing your chain. 3in1 is still king unless you are racing.
I would expect WD-40 to work fairly well because it cleans the chain and gets the filth out of the links, filth is a big part of drive train wear and we really don't need much in the way of lube as long as things are kept clean and rust free so the links move smoothly.
> I would expect WD-40 to work fairly well because it cleans the chain and gets the filth out of the links
That it does, but it doesn't leave much lubricant behind, which you need for a properly functioning chain. As you know, you want something that will get between the pins and rollers and stay there, minus the grime that would turn it into grinding paste. Which is probably why some people swear by wax, but that sounds like a giant hassle.
That's not really true. There's lots of research out there showing that waxed chains result in less power loss over longer time compared to no lubrication and most other lubricants (both bicycle specific ones and more general ones). Now waxing your chain is admittedly annoying, but it does work.
3in1 is actually bike specific, it fell out of favor with the rise of the modern bike lubes. Wax collects dust and dirt, especially when friction or the sun cause it to soften, which turns your waxed chain into a drive train eater and will cause power loss. More for the track than the road.
Wax is great for road riding. I ride in Auckland where it’s wet half the time (all the time this summer). I re-wax every 400 or so km. It’s clean running and beautiful compared to the expensive oils I was using, and lasts longer.
Wear appears to be down too.
The reduction in grease and dirty chain makes is so nice.
It is much better than the expensive oils, but not as good as old fashioned 3in1. The expensive chain lubes are mostly meant for racing, they give you the least friction by a long shot but don't last and most of them do not take well to reapplying without cleaning, you end up with grinding paste.
Wax holds up quite well against water but does hold grit and tends to deposit it on chainrings, sprockets, and pulleys, and it wears them quicker than 3in1 will. Wax shares the downside of PTFE, you need to clean off the old before applying more or things start wearing fast, which is not an issue for everyone. It is nice and clean.
Here in the winter of northern Minnesota, one good snowy ride with the road salt and sand will strip wax. Not that you would want to use wax in this sort of cold even if the road salt and sand were not an issue, wax gets stiff and brittle in the sorts of cold we get. I am an everyday rider and bike is my mode of transportation for everything, in this climate I need ease of reapplication or I will be replacing chainrings yearly.
What sort of temperature are you getting down to? Any special gear needed for you or the bike?
Here it’s never below about 5C and maxes at about 30C. It’s mild. The rain is the only thing that can be a lot. The most was about 250mm in a day, which is exceptional, but sudden, very downpours are common.
We can go from 30C to 5C in a couple minutes with a wind change, the weather here keeps your toes. We always get down into the -20sF with another 20 degrees thrown in by the windchill and can spend weeks at that, 2014/15 we spent 3 months in the -20s. Coldest I have biked in is -47 before the windchill. Windchill is tricky on a bike since you make your own wind, it is considerably colder biking than just standing or walking in such conditions.
Gear has mostly been a move away from cartridge bearings, you are lucky if those will last the winter. Old fashioned cup and cone bearings hold enough grease to get you through most winters without having to repack. For the messy and icy weather I try to ride my fixed gear, does not matter if the brakes freeze up, very simple drive train (single piece crank!) I can just ignore all winter other than oil the chain and its 1/8" chain sucks up a lot more oil than the skinny 10+ speed chains and sheds filth much better as well. 3in1 helps a lot as well, it is pretty good about shedding filth. For the brutal cold, when things are dry and for most errands it is generally my touring bike, its granny gear is nice when the grease starts to thicken in the cold and high rpm pedaling does a good job of keeping you warm but keeping the derailers working well even with friction shifters can be a chore.
Only specialty gear I have is studded BMX pedals, they do a great job of keeping your feet on the pedals and are footwear agnostic. Not the best pedal choice for a fixed gear, they can really shred your shins.
Distance is fairly variable, minimum is 4 miles, a busy day can be 50 miles. When we get extended bitter cold I tend to start running errands before work since I can break up the distances and stop and warm up instead of the shorter straight shot, that will be about 10 miles a day.
It is not as bad as most people think as long as you get out there everyday and avoid getting in the habit of not doing stuff because it is too cold. That first -10 day is brutal but that -10 is not so bad after a -20 day and feels almost warm after -30. So I convince myself that a beer would taste really good and bike to the bar in -30 just to get out there because the longer you go without riding in that sort of cold the harder it is to get back out there, do it daily and it is easy to remember that it is just a minor discomfort until you get the blood flowing.
What is dying when it comes to text is entertainment and some areas of non-fiction, things which really are not the strength of written language; it is capable of these thing but other mediums are far better at it, but even in those areas it has some strengths and ability which other mediums lack. The primary strength of written language is communication, it removes the abstraction and all those things which hinder communication like the look of frustration on my face being taken as frustration with the person I am speaking to when it is really frustration with my own difficulties in expressing what I want to express and find those right words which will not be taken any other way than as I meant them.
Writing is not dying and is not going to die anytime soon, people use it more than they ever have for communication in this texting and emailing world and writing will be continued to be used for those areas where it is undeniable king. What can explore the inner world of people better than the written word? what can develop and explore idea to the extent and depth of the written word? All those unfilmable books that keep being read are works which exploit the strengths of the written word to express things which no other medium can without a great deal of abstraction and becoming so experimental that only a tiny niche can appreciate them and a much smaller niche than the niche that is literature.
Assuming the poster's recollection of the quote is correct, there is nothing to be negated, coming to terms with something does not mean you overcame it, No clue how close that is to the actual quote but it sounds like Wallace's phrasing.
In conversation with Michael Silverblatt in 1996 (this is from a machine generated transcript, I’ll do my best to clean up after it’s attempts to parse DFW’s stammering):
> ...I guess when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit, what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say. But I think looking back, that's what was going on. And uh I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when when I was a young man and and now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness, and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted to I—I had very—I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions. And one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before. I wanted to do something really sad. And I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And um I—there's a—there's a fair amount of of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it and that I'm sorta proud of it in a way I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like I—Whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. Um I—I—I sort of think like all the way down kind of to my butthole I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of uh you know, faced various darknesses, um it's very difficult to understand how—how You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a craft product or something.
The part about writing having to "evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue” is my own interpretation of what I took from interviews between Wallace and Silverblatt on KCRW between 1996 and 2006. Skimming through the entire transcript I have (there’s a 2+ hour compilation of all the interviews on Youtube) this is probably a mixture of remarks made in 1996 (Infinite Jest) [1] and 1997 (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) [2]. I vaguely remember a remark of his along the lines of the duty of a writer to ‘always let the reader know what the stakes are’. Or something like that.
Another quote from the 1996 interview in attempt to support my previous statements:
> [Fiction’s] got a very weird and complicated job because part of its job is to—is to—teach; Teach the reader, communicate with the reader, establish some sort of relationship with the reader where the reader is willing on a neurological level to expend effort; to look hard enough at the jellyfish to see that it's pretty. And—and that stuff's in that kind of effort is very hard to talk about and it's real scary because you can't be sure whether you've done it or not. And it's what makes you sort of clutch your heart when somebody says, I really like this...
My favorite one may be from the conversation they had in 2000:
> I—I think—I—I—I think somewhere in the late eighties or somewhere some at some point when that sort of minimalist fiction began to pass from vogue It wasn't that the class questions changed, it was that I think the class questions disappeared. And—and questions that were issues that were fundamentally about—about class and inclusion became more for people like maybe my age a little younger, questions of—of corporation, um corporations and consumers and consuming models versus kind of alternative uh homemade quote unquote non—non—corporate transactions. I don't know if this makes any sort of sense. Where I—I know for me a certain kind of smoothness, um, that you could th—that you can identify with resolution, easily identified kind of black and white um heroes and villains, um standard standardly satisfying endings involving the gratification of romance or, you know, epistemological problems. I associate with corporate entertainment whose—whose agenda is fundamentally financial, whose—some—some of and—some of it’s—some of it's quite good. Um but—but its fundamental—its fundamental orientation is um there —there's no—there's no warmth in it toward the reader or no attempt to involve the reader or the audience in a kind of relationship or interaction. It's a—it's a—it's a transaction of a certain kind of gratification in exchange for in exchange for money. [3]
>David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader.
He expands on this in his conversation with Bryan Garner (of Garner's Modern English Grammar) published as Quack this Way, and I think he gets to the core issue, which is that your ideas are not interesting to anyone but you; if you are showing off how smart you are, you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care.
Infinite Jest is a also a good example of something which goes against TFA's point, it opens with a very sterile, impersonal, literal and completely disconnected first person narrative, he gives us nothing to care about. But it evolves, but he still doesn't give us anything to care about, just has the narration turn in on itself despite it seeming to have nothing to turn in onto. All he really gives us is the suggestion that there is something more than what we can see. He gets us interested and curious but I don't think we really care at that point.
> "you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care."
This is writing-as-bookselling and marketing. If you find your ideas interesting and want to write about them, it's not your job to show the reader why, you only expect readers who share your interest to be potential readers. You may not think the reader should be interested or should care at all?
>You may not think the reader should be interested or should care at all?
You can but that does not mean you should. If you write under such assumptions your writing will likely not be of much interest to people who don't share your interest, you will be preaching to a choir and much of the choir may be interested in a different aspect or care about it in a very different way than you do. Writing under such assumptions means your writing depends on those assumptions. No idea why you think this is writing-as-bookselling and marketing, preaching to the choir is almost always better for sales than trying to win over people who don't care and are uninterested.
To his credit and with the exception of mentioning an objective to show his smarts off to readers (which I don’t think he wants to do anyhow) Gwern informs us that he is assuming that we will find what he writes as useful as he does, because his objective is to write things that are useful to himself:
> The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.
We can reconcile this with the purport of the writing of his that we’re discussing now—it’s a notice with his future self in mind. And we can compare and contrast the above quote and the aforementioned piece with some of PG’s writing which I find is meant to be public-facing literature at full bloom. [1][2]
I think there’s a difference between 'writing for my future self’ and ‘writing with the public in mind’. Howard & Barton (1986) would argue that they represent separate stages of the writing process and I agree with that and prefer writing that is primed for the latter form. [3] I associate the maxim “First, make me care” with the latter as well and by-and-large feel like Gwern’s writing—that which I’ve come across most frequently—is geared toward the former form. Which I’m sure serves him well, as well as I’m sure it’s served well to those who enjoy his work. I’m yet to determine whether that’s a good or bad thing.
As I’ve cited earlier, some consider Gwern's writing to evoke a sort of misanthropy. But hey...I’m sure there’s someone else to say the same about Paul Graham and his stuff. I’ll withhold judgement against the both of them on that matter—for now—lest I get caught unprepared to be deemed one myself.
I don't think we need to credit him or reconcile anything, what he says is not wrong or hypocritical, it is just his view of what makes a good blog post. I disagree with him but the only consequence for him is that I won't read his blog unless I feel compelled to because I want to join in the discussion on somewhere like HN and don't want to be one of those people who interjects into a discussion on an article they did not read, even if the conversation is clearly about the title and not the article or marginally related topics or I simply want to make a marginally related comment.
For me, it is the way he presents and develops ideas that prevents me from reading, it reminds me of reading a tutorial on how to reach his conclusion. Some people probably like the style, some probably don't care about the style, and some like me struggle to even skim a short post like TFA. But I find a great deal of what is on the internet to be difficult to read and think nothing of reading a book like Infinite Jest in a week. I am not the target audience.
We seem to be of like mind on this matter then. I look forward to us reconvening the next time Gwern hits the front page and we each feel compelled to voice some kind of informed dissent on the subject. Dissent probably isn’t the right word here because I don’t think either of us actually disagree with what he’s saying.
How fun is a conversation once it’s established that both parties are in agreement about something in principle? Does one probe to be provocative?
I place high expectations on writing that 1) I feel is right up my alley because I think I’m already familiar with the topic and 2) I’m unfamiliar with but am eager to learn about—it sparks my curiosity. Not all writing meets these expectations and this is probably why I’m disgusted by the though of using LLMs for information about subjects I have a genuine enthusiasm for and can care less about doing so for others, at least until I can figure out whether I want to know more about it. Then the subject becomes forbidden to prompt about.
> For me, it is the way he presents and develops ideas that prevents me from reading, it reminds me of reading a tutorial on how to reach his conclusion.
My assumption is that this kind of writing exists somewhere along the same strand of writing that lends itself to what’s expected from some writing in public school (‘Good writing is what shows the reader/teacher that you correctly grasped the material that was taught to you’); writing that is received well by ’The Masses™’ or some in-group (‘Good writing is what shows the reader/audience that you’re beliefs are in correct alignment with theirs’); something like a mathematical proof (a more literal representation of how to reach a conclusion if I correctly understand what a mathematical proof is); and a well-formed atomic note written for private consideration.
If your goal is communication, isn't being well received by the masses a very applicable measurement of good writing? David Foster Wallace's contribution to the world is primarily indirect, filtered down to the masses by "bad" writers who are more pragmatic about things and take into account that most people don't want to spend 1000 pages analyzing a topic, don't even want to spend 10 pages doing it, they want it boiled down to a simple choice so they can decide if it is of value to them, if it can improve their life and I can't blame or judge them for that. Wallace certainly did not blame them for it, just felt they should be conscious of why they came to a conclusion instead of blindly accepting it because it is their conclusion.
His general style is simple and direct, how we all learn to write essays in school. He writes his outline, diligently follows it while writing his draft, edits the draft and then publishes it. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about this, I just would rather read something which explores the idea instead of makes an assertion about it, but he is writing about what he looks for in his reading. I would not call it good writing but I also would not call it bad, it is just uninteresting to me.
I agree with your first assertion but not so much on the rest. There is more than one reason to write and for many it is about communication, they have something they want to express and you would be wise to consider your reader if that is your goal.
Hooking the reader with the opening page is swinging to the other fence of having a terrible opening page that no one will get through, generally not good to swing to the fences. I think the writer should be honest and upfront with the reader, the opening pages should be representative of what is to come, they should represent the whole and not just the beginning.
I will take a more positive view, all the translators being put out of buisness will take up literary translation and we will enter a golden age when it comes to translated literature. AI still has a very long ways to go here and there is a great deal of untranslated literature out there and literature which only has a terrible translation. Probably won't happen but maybe the struggling publishing industry will see the opportunity provided by a glut of out of work translators and jump on it.
Looking at the pictures brought back the smell of sharpening a wooden pencel and resulted me in ordering a couple boxes of pencils. It has probably been 30 years since I have used a normal wooden pencil other than the odd usage here and there, have used the mechanical pencil I swiped from my mom back in 9th grade for all my pencil needs, I had a math teacher who required us to write in pencil and I only had pens. He was a great teacher, erased the board with the sleeve of tweed jacket and would be covered in chalk dust by the end of the day.
I am not sure what the general point of this is; for a good chunk of their conversation it seems to show why AI will fail in the arts, it is incapable of understanding their frustration with the AI as demonstrated by the conversation, it misses the humanity of it and only states it and states it as a weird sort of concession. But at the end it seems to undercut that by making it all out as futile and the writers pretentious and/or the AI cruel, which leaves the whole rather thin. The final prompt to the AI had a great chance for a bit of recursive metafictional fun, but does not seem to be used; could be a hint to a subtle bit of indirect metafiction but I don't think it was.
It spoke to me as someone who's not jazzed about LLMs but also not convinced by the "it's violating our precious copyright!" arguments against them.
I think there's something in there with the character hierarchy of screenwriter vs novelist vs poet; it seems like the screenwriter in the story writes to make a living, the novelist does it for prestige, and the poet does it largely for the love of the game. The screenwriter is on board with AI until he realizes it'll hurt him more than it'll help him--ironic since he had been excited about being able to use different actors' likenesses!--and the whole time he's looking down at the poet like "Oh, god, if all this takes off I'm going to be as poor and pathetic as that guy." (Which raises interesting questions about the poet's stake in all of this: he doesn't actually have much to lose here, considering how little money or recognition he gets in the first place, but he's helping the other two guys anyway.) The novelist is rallying against the AI, but he's also initially disappointed to find out that his work wasn't important enough to use in its training data... and then later gets a kind of twisted thrill when it does actually quote his own work back at him.
I dunno. I think it's a messy story in the same way that the conversation about AI and the arts is itself messy, which I like. And I always appreciate a story that leaves me with questions to mull over instead of trying to dump a bunch of platitudes in my lap :P
What I meant by not being sure about the point was not that he was not clear in what platitudes he was trying to convey, just that I was not sure about what he was trying to say which includes what questions he was trying to raise. It provides the reader with something to think about primarily through the messiness that you noticed instead of raising questions and ideas which work off of each other; the ending simply undercuts any nuance of the AI failing to get their frustration instead building on it or changing our perspective on it.
For example, if it had ended a few sentences earlier and used that potential bit of metafiction it would be suggesting that the story we just read was or at least could be the story written by the AI for the novelist and now the AI does understand their frustration but represented itself as not understanding it. That gives us a great deal to think about and builds in a second perspective on the entire piece, the perspective of the AI. But as written that only works well with the conversation part of the story and those last few lines make it really not work at all.
Edit: I think you could make the case that the meta is utilized just as I outlined above, it kind of works with the general pretentious ass that ChatGPT is in the story, things like the mace and the general lack of preparedness of the writers kind of works with those last few lines in that context. But that raises other issues and likely has some rather ugly/messy ramifications on the whole, I think. Probably will reread it when I get home but on a quick check of a few things, strongly suspect my initial view is the the more accurate one and I am just having fun with analysis at this point.
That's fair! I guess I didn't feel the same frustration with the last few lines because they did raise further questions, at least for me. The AI in the story is so bitter and cruel that it makes me wonder whether it does possess the capacity for human experience/emotion that they claim it doesn't have, and therefore might actually have a shot at replacing them. Without that final zinger I don't know I would've felt the same way. (And I did think it was a funny jab at the novelist's own elitism, especially since it adds another dimension of pitting him against other humans in addition to pitting him against the AI.)
Like, I don't think it's an amazing ending, but it did leave me on a contemplative note in a way that a "the AI wrote this all along" ending wouldn't have, at least for me personally. Although I would've still preferred that to an "and then they did, in fact, behead Sam Altman" ending :P
And I definitely respect having fun with analysis, lol. If nothing else I think the story was successful on that front... I don't think the successfully-beheading-Sam-Altman ending would've sparked this kind of discussion!
The hierarchy of writers you previously mentioned really suggests archetypes of writers, how do you feel about that last jab in that context? What about in context of the pretentious ass of AI? These are some of the things which I had issue with and things which I felt contributed to the general messiness of the story, that the author never considered the piece as a whole. If I dig into it and look closely instead of look at the whole and notice things like the unrealized metafiction, I would end up hating it, it would make it impossible for me to see the author as anything but a pretentious ass or pandering. At least in context of this one short story and generally I do not judge writers on short stories unless they are exclusively writers of short stories, there is a pragmatism required for the novelist writing a short story.
Beheading Altman could be made to work quite well if it had used the metafiction.
Hmm, I guess I didn't see it as pandering, or I'm misunderstanding what you mean by pandering; if anything it I saw it as the opposite, since the author (a writer) is poking fun at writers. So instead of a story about a bunch of noble, intelligent, sexy writers who defeat the big bad AI, it's a story where these writers are regular, imperfect people with their own insecurities and selfish motivations. But even as imperfect people, their fears and goals are (to me!) sympathetic.
My perception here is probably colored by some of the circles I run in, too. I think a lot of writers and artists are concerned about AI, and will reassure themselves how their jobs are safe because AI can only produce crap, but then they'll also complain how a lot of popular human-produced art is also crap--which opens up a kind of dual insecurity of (1) why is that crap popular and not my own amazing, brilliant work and (2) if audiences already love crap then maybe AI really will take all of our jobs after all...
And I'm probably reading waaaaay deeper into the "I thought genre was beneath you" line than the author ever intended, but that's what it evokes to me. It makes the three writers in the story seem like jerks, which keeps the whole thing from feeling like a two-dimensional morality tale, but it also makes the AI really seem like a jerk for playing to their insecurities, which reminds me that I'm still rooting for those three jerks.
https://youtu.be/gU1UfNQXAKQ
Link is bassoon, not tracker.
reply