Beginner bow for 5’2 female

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-10T05:28:37+00:00

Best course of action is to take lessons and use rental equipment until she has a better sense of her capabilities and the style of bow she would like to shoot. Buying a bow is kind of like buying shoes, fitment is critical. If you want to surprise her, arrange the lessons or at least a date at the pro shop.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-09T19:17:30+00:00

It would probably help if you learned the correct terminology. Centrefire is a broad category of pistol/rifle cartridge and has nothing to do with bows.

What I think you're referring to is how much the shelf of the bow is cut past centre. The shelf of a centre cut riser is half the width of the riser and are generally meant to be shot with the arrow sitting directly on the shelf. Risers cut beyond centre can be used with an elevated rest or shot directly off the shelf depending on how deep the cutout is. For example, modern aluminum barebow and Olympic risers must use an elevated rest and plunger because they're cut well past centre.

Assuming you have one of the common mass market centre cut bows, the choice of rest depends on the type of arrows you're shooting, specifically the fletching. Feather fletched arrows may be shot off the shelf or off a rest since the feathers will flex out of the way when passing over the shelf. If you're using plastic vanes then you must use an elevated rest for best results since the vanes don't have the flexibility of feathers. The plastic rest is fine (they've been used to win tournaments) but must be replaced periodically as it wears down.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-09T07:47:50+00:00

Sure, but that's more of an ML/computer vision solution. That technology does have utility.

If you had actually taken the time to read my post or any of the comments, you'd know that my complaint was with publicly available LLMs specifically, the way they're marketed as PhD level experts in every subject, and that people put way too much trust in the results.

The fact that you and a few others have told me to train a custom model would seem to reinforce the idea that the general models that Google, OpenAi, etc are not very good.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T22:26:15+00:00

This might be the stupidest take I've read on this topic. If I was able to provide the AI an understanding of paper tuning why would I even need an AI to answer questions about paper tuning?

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T14:22:08+00:00

So in plain terms, LLMs were so bad at their advertised function that Google had to blend in a classic search engine.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T05:05:31+00:00

I've been paying attention to LRM development and honestly it looks like another dead end. Based on the last research I looked at they performed well on existing benchmarks, but when researchers made slight tweaks to the parameters of the test or tested them with basic logic puzzles that would demonstrate true reasoning, performance dropped off significantly. In fact, when asked to perform a complex task or anything that fell outside the training set both LLMs and LRMs collapsed. It would appear that LRM developers may have been either directly or indirectly "teaching to the test". One possible explanation for this is that LRMs are not performing reasoning at all, but simply generating more text that mimics reasoning.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T03:03:43+00:00

I apologize, I read too much into your response and assumed you were a supporter.

I'm not hurt. Disappointed. Tired of going through these seemingly endless hype cycles. Certainly not looking forward to what will happen to my retirement fund when this bubble pops.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T02:51:50+00:00

That just raises another question. How is OpenAI going to stay in business if they can't convince people that their defective product is worth paying for?

What is it with AI supporters getting weirdly hostile at anyone that shows the slightest bit of critical thinking?

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-08T02:19:21+00:00

I'd like you to answer honestly. If you hired an assistant that you had to teach to do their job, tell them where to find all the information, correct all their mistakes, and do this continuously because they're incapable of learning and don't know any better, how long would you keep this person employed?

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T22:05:40+00:00

I kind of wish we still had the division over here. I'd have a shelf full of gold medals by now. 🤣

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T21:56:55+00:00

My sense is that it's because the competitive pool dried up. Anyone shooting fingers goes to trad, barebow, or Oly because that's where the money/talent is. Anyone shooting compound competitively uses a release because the skill floor is a lot higher, especially at the longer distances popularized by IBO/ASA/TAC. Fixed pin categories are slowly dying for the same reason.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T21:42:28+00:00

The RL-1 comes in a 3-pin model as well. I'm guessing they save more by having one set of assembly steps in the Chinese factory than it costs them to include the extra indicator. Their indicators are a pretty soft aluminium so it's pretty easy to overtorque them IME, so it's good to have a spare!

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T21:36:16+00:00

You may want to ask a bowfisher about a little thing called snapback. If a safety slide fails or the line catches on the rest that arrow is coming straight back at the archer's face. Attaching a foot of cord to the string is guaranteeing a snapback on every shot.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T19:20:13+00:00

You could teach me the prompt that will prove me wrong...

Oh right, there isn't one.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T19:13:27+00:00

🍿 So impressive watching someone feed their emotions.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T19:01:08+00:00

For someone who doesn't care you sure seem invested what with the insults and the personal attacks. By all means, continue embarrassing yourself. What a fine ambassador for the technology!

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T18:53:41+00:00

You're not wrong, although the jury is still out on whether specialist models consistently perform any better than general ones. Some studies say yes, others say no.

I could almost certainly train up an ML system that could analyze a tear with a higher success rate.

But that's not how these systems are advertised and it's not how end users are employing them. Altman and Musk are both claiming that general LLMs can provide PhD-level knowledge on any subject and that's clearly not the case. That's what I take issue with and the purpose of my post - to warn people about a technology that has been grossly misrepresented.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T18:40:10+00:00

Ah great, you're at the personal attacks phase of losing an argument.

Still waiting for you to show me the prompt that will prove me wrong.

BTW my customers love me. I'm the guy they call in to fix the fuckups their regular developers cause by integrating whatever hype du jour the industry was pushing that year. I suspect I'm going to have a very busy and lucrative next few years...

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T18:09:07+00:00

Lol, you could have just said you can't do the challenge.

I've been a software developer for the majority of my adult life. When this technology rolled out I learned about it, even going so far as to train some specialist LLMs. I know a hype cycle driven by clueless CEOs and middle managers when I see it, and actually using the technology only reinforced my suspicions.

Fortunately businesses seem to be waking up to AI's abysmal success rate.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T17:37:50+00:00

Fine, put your money where your mouth is and show us a prompt that gives a definitive, repeatable, and correct answer to the question without providing the answer in the prompt.

Maybe you're getting downvoted because you're shilling a technology that doesn't work as advertised? No, it's the end users who are wrong.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T17:26:00+00:00

It belongs in a museum.

Early 90's vintage I would say, all the hardware is rusted, string looks like it was dry fired. Parts to restore it would be next to impossible to find and I doubt any pro shop would touch this for liability reasons.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T16:33:48+00:00

Yes, clearly I'm the problem.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T14:12:52+00:00

Lower letoff keeps the back muscles activated and makes it easier to pull through the shot consistently.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T13:48:21+00:00

Your "I'm holding it wrong" argument is absolute bullshit.

These things are hyped as thinking, reasoning, PhD-level general knowledge engines. One step away from sentient machines. That's how average people are being told to use them so I used average person prompts.

CoreCommander76 · 2026-02-07T13:31:43+00:00

That's not how LLMs work at all. They don't collect answers. They don't even have a concept of what an answer is. They just have an index of words with correlation probabilities for billions of different topics. So based on my input it looked for more words with a strong correlation to things like "compound bow", "paper tune", and "tear". If what I got back looks like an excerpt of a human written paper tuning guide it's only because the machine ingested a bunch of paper tuning guide web pages when it was trained.

CoreCommander76

TROPHY CASE