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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • I run Michelin Country Rock as a hybrid tire. Anything that’s not knobbly is going to be a huge upgrade on pavement.

    You also don’t need to run the same tires on both wheels. Having a slicker tire in the back can make sense as you put more weight on it, and slipping with the back wheel is a nuisance, while slipping with the front is often a disaster. So you could start off just swapping the rear. That way if it doesn’t work out, you also spent only half the money :)

    Lastly I’d want to share that I really disliked those wheels that are knobbly along the edges. Leaning over when taking a curve at speed, and suddenly transitioning from smooth to vibrating was very unsettling to me.




  • Something not mentioned in the video is that you want to use the smallest U-lock you can.

    This is because one of the easiest ways of defeating a U-lock is to use either leverage or a jack to force it open. But for that to work there usually needs to be extra space inside the loop. If the lock is snug around the bike and post it’s hard to get a tool in there, or to manipulate the frame into a position where it can be used for leverage.

    It might be tempting to get a large U-lock to make it easier to lock it to things, but you should know that’s a trade off for security.


  • 4K is an outrageously high resolution.

    If I was conspiratorial I would say that 4K was normalized as the next step above 1440p in order to create a demand for many generations of new graphics cards. Because it was introduced long before there was hardware able to use it without serious compromises. (I don’t actually think it’s a conspiracy though.)

    For comparison, 1440p has 78% more pixels than 1080p. That’s quite a jump in pixel density and required performance.

    4K has 125% more pixels than 1440p (300% more than 1080p). The step up is massive, and the additional performance required is as well.

    Now there is a resolution that we are missing in between them. 3200x1800 is the natural next step above 1440p*. At 56% more pixels it would be a nice improvement, without an outrageous jump in performance. But it doesn’t exist outside of a few laptops for some reason.

    *All these resolutions are multiples of 640x360. 720p is 2x, 1080p is 3x, 1440p is 4x, and 4K is 6x. 1800p is the missing 5x.


  • Last time Iran tried to become a liberal and democratic country the UK and US organized a coup to replace the government with a more dictatorial one, which is how they ended up like this. Is more violent foreign intervention the solution? We’re about to find out!

    Looking at their track record there’s no reason to believe Isreal would give an occupied Iran any rights or do anything good for them. More likely it’s just more territory to be ethnically cleansed and repopulated after they’re done with Palestine.





  • In the USA voter turnout is 50-60%, and the winning party often gets less than half the votes. So actual support for the ruling party is often less than 25%. And that’s without counting the millions who aren’t allowed to vote.

    Yet that doesn’t seem to lessen the power of the government.









  • Economists refuse to accept that their subject is really just sociology. They like to imagine it being like physics, where study of reality leads to underlying mathematical truths to extrapolate from. Not a big messy subject where you can’t be certain of anything.

    What makes it even more freaky is that many of the subjects being studied know they are playing a game. So in many ways economy is more like the evolving metagame of competitive sports, where hardcore nerds constantly try to game the system and outplay each other, and what was a solid strategy last month doesn’t work anymore, even if the rules are the same.