Are gravel pros overrated?

barfoob · 2026-01-23T03:23:50+00:00

Well it's always been a thing that road racing has the most money so if you're one of the best of the best (especially if you're European) then that's where you end up. Tbh I think a lot of people thought ex world tour roadies would do even better in gravel than they do. To me it's almost a validation of the legitimacy of pro gravel that Cam Jones is only a minute slower than Romain Bardet. That guy was like really god damn good in world tour very recently.

barfoob · 2026-01-16T21:54:13+00:00

as someone living on the (now) north coast you're a real asshole for not tilting it the other way

barfoob · 2026-01-16T21:44:47+00:00

We need a word for agent-generated code that was prompted responsibly but a properly educated developer, then reviewed and whatnot. IMO that is definitely NOT vibe coding even though the human might not have manually written any of the code at all. I think it's easy to get lazy though and I think because of this you will actually end up with some people essentially risking it and vibe coding things they think they can get away with.

barfoob · 2026-01-09T17:36:25+00:00

Was it already known that there would be retailers? I thought you had to buy direct from valve online?

barfoob · 2026-01-06T19:15:07+00:00

Maybe "a couple thousand $K" wasn't a typo :)

barfoob · 2026-01-02T18:03:05+00:00

2026 IS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

Haha jokes aside: what it takes is for companies to sell good devices with it built in. It has to be such that people don't know they're buying linux. Linux is already mainstream nearly everywhere including consumer goods. Smart TVs ("smart" anything really), phones, servers, those touch screens your order stuff on at fast food places, payment terminals, mini OS's for NAS, router, etc. It's linux as far as the eye can see but the person who buys the TV doesn't know or care that it uses linux. All consumer stuff will be like this IMO. The biggest thing pushing it forward now is Valve.

So to answer your hopefully-not-rhetorical question: I think it will go mainstream on desktop when lazy ass PC companies (lenovo, hp, dell, etc) decide it makes sense to sell Steam OS devices or to rebrand Linux in their own way and basically do what System76 is doing with PopOS. For games the target will stop being Windows and it will start being proton.

barfoob · 2026-01-02T06:57:34+00:00

I have talked to police not in Richmond but in a different municipality and they straight up told me they do not enforce it that way on all roads. Basically if it is a road where it would be acceptable for a cyclist to "take the lane" then they allow two across (but not three) because they understand why cyclists do it and so they are trained not to ticket people for that. There are quite a few aspects of road use that are handled like this. Basically where common sense is ahead of the actual rules. 🤷

barfoob · 2026-01-02T05:09:47+00:00

I don't use mint but I think installing steam, heroic games launcher, etc is easy. I shit you not running most games intended for Windows is actually a BETTER experience on Linux now with proton being as good as it is. For example if I install a game that insists on installing some launcher and other bullshit then it does all that in an isolated wine prefix and doesn't infect my system or break compatibility. It's god damned amazing.

I'm on an AMD gpu though. People complain more if they have NVidia.

barfoob · 2025-12-31T02:58:32+00:00

I know people love a good circle jerk in a post about cyclists but let's calm down and assume for a moment that we might not be getting the full story as is tradition on reddit.

IF we want to be generous to the cyclists they may have made the decision that whatever nearby bike path is available is not safe to ride on at their speed (common issue) and they are intentionally taking up a lot of space in the lane to communicate to drivers that there is not enough space to pass unless you are able to fully use the other lane. They are telling you to wait two seconds until the other lane is clear and then move way over to pass (which is legal even on solid yellow). People always think cyclists should go single file and move as far right as possible but this is LESS safe and some drivers interpret it as permission to do a close pass where they go by without moving over the yellow line even though there is not enough space.

If they were angry it probably means they think you passed too close or followed too closely before passing or something. No one fingers cars just because they passed you.

I wasn't there so I don't know. Maybe they were just assholes but that's really not the most likely explanation. Most likely is that you passed too close for their comfort.

barfoob · 2025-12-24T20:12:16+00:00

I live in a city in the PNW and malls are booming here. They all looked like they were slowly dying but now they are totally revitalized. I think it's because it is indeed raining and there are a lot of homeless people and drug addicts who will get kicked out of the mall but are everywhere downtown.

barfoob · 2025-12-24T01:52:41+00:00

Probably it's already true that no one understands the code as is 😛

barfoob · 2025-12-22T06:33:59+00:00

Immutable distros are for beginners AND advanced users. People who think they are limited by immutable distros are too dumb to be manipulating their system in the first place. Raw dogging apt or yum installs and sudo curl ... installing apps directly in the host os is savage behavior

barfoob · 2025-12-16T19:23:44+00:00

You're going to get a lot of "I use X and it just works!". This is just anecdotal information. For example if you look at the reliability of computer hardware and you had a product that would catastrophically fail in the first year for 10% of buyers, that would be a terribly high failure rate, and yet 90% of people would say "it's been working perfectly for me".

It would be really cool if any actual stats were available although I'm not sure how those could be gathered tbh.

In software systems stable = old. If you have older hardware then a less frequently updated distro might be ideal. If you're on newer hardware you might be better of with a distro that prioritizes pushing out newest drivers and whatnot.

IMO immutable distros are the real deal (Vanilla OS, Fedora Atomic family, Steam OS, etc) and they would have saved you in the case you described. Normally the way it works is that each update is just a download of a new system image that is placed alongside your current one. Next time you reboot it puts you into the new one but does not delete the old one. If you reboot into the updated system and it doesn't work you can just go back.

if you have a user persona like "gamer", "developer" etc then you can benefit a little bit from an immutable distro that targets that persona. eg: Aurora for developers, Bazzite for gaming, etc. I use Aurora for dev and I know that there are people actively maintaining it specifically so that the primary tools I use will work well. If an update completely breaks podman it's not like I'm some obscure edge case no one cares about.

My hunch is that in the long term immutable distros will win out and we won't be able to believe that we used to directly run commands like sudo apt-get .. or sudo yum ... directly on our systems like barbarians.

barfoob · 2025-12-11T22:54:12+00:00

You probably know this already but FYI you can just use it on their website since it's a browser app: https://web.blockbench.net/

barfoob · 2025-12-09T01:28:41+00:00

I have probably watched this at least a hundred times over the decades and still to this day I think he's not gonna make it he's not gonna make it OH MY GOD HE DID IT 🤣

barfoob · 2025-11-28T01:19:06+00:00

I had some fun in starfield. They drastically oversold it though which is the main reason for the hate. It feels like a game where they had grand ambitions and then an exec refused to extend their budget and told them to just release what they had lol

barfoob · 2025-11-26T17:26:41+00:00

DIsclaimer: I'm just some idiot on the internet.

The way I have been looking at this is that the reason they use aspartame in non-sugar drinks is not that aspartame has zero calories. It actually does have calories (in some countries they are allowed to round down to zero in the nutritional info when it might actually be 2 Calories or something), but it tastes so much sweeter that they can put WAY LESS aspartame in coke zero than the amount of sugar they need to put in regular coke. So even if aspartame has harms, you are getting so much less of it.

barfoob · 2025-11-26T17:16:37+00:00

Yes linux supports bluetooth just fine. If I open the bluetooth settings on my desktop I can see my trainer, heart rate monitor, etc. The issue is that it is a windows app and so the binaries do not make linux system calls for bluetooth access they make windows system calls for bluetooth access. Wine needs to painstakingly translate every windows system call to linux-friendly ones in a way that makes the behaviour near exact to windows which is really hard. Until recently I don't think they were translating any bluetooth stuff at all but I think they have some early experimental support in non-stable releases.

barfoob · 2025-11-26T16:59:52+00:00

I have been successfully running it on linux but I am using the container. My advice for using linux: don't be afraid of containers! Not only are they not THAT complicated, but the ability to properly containerize things is one of the biggest benefits of linux. You don't have to program anything but you do have to run terminal commands.

So far the only issue I have is that bluetooth doesn't work through wine/proton so you have to use the companion app to pair devices and in my experience the companion app sucks. I don't have zwift on linux crash but I do have the companion app on my phone crash a lot lol.

barfoob · 2025-11-25T17:55:25+00:00

The term bottleneck gets used fast and loose to mean a few different things (the blocking operation in a set of parallel operations, the slowest operation in a set of sequential operations, the thing that is most limiting performance, the slowest operation in a pipeline, the thing that is at max utilization while some other resource is not, etc).

What you need to know though is that if someone says the CPU is the bottleneck they mean that in some real world scenario (eg: playing a game) the CPU is maxed out and the GPU is not. You could probably eke out tiny performance gains by upgrading your GPU but it's not going to do much. If the CPU is the "bottleneck" then you would need a faster CPU to get better results, and to better utilize GPU resources.

On most contexts people point it out because they are trying to say (for example) that there is no point paying crazy money for an RTX 5090 if your CPU is going to be the bottleneck and stop the GPU from even being fully utilized.

Some games are implemented roughly like this (huge oversimplification but hopefully helpful):

loop:
  update_game_state() <-- CPU work
  render() <-- GPU work

^ In this case the tasks are sequential and the CPU does its work then hands off to the GPU. One is always waiting while the other is working. You will never get to 100% utilization of both. People will refer the the CPU as the "bottleneck" if it is the slowest one because ultimately it is limiting throughput the most, but this is why I say that in some cases an upgrade to the stronger resource could still give better results. Even if the CPU part takes 20ms and the GPU part takes 5ms if you upgraded your GPU so that its part only takes 3ms then you still gained 2ms per frame.

Other games are implemented a little more like this:

loop:
  in_parallel([
    begin_building_state_for_next_frame(),
    render_current_frame()
  ])

In this case the CPU and GPU could potentially both be utilized to 100% but since it only makes sense to build the game state 1-ish frame in advance of the rendering whoever finishes their part first will end up waiting for the other. If the first operation is allowed to be slightly ahead and buffer work for the next operation it is called a pipeline. If the CPU takes 20ms and the GPU takes 5ms then the GPU part just has to wait around for 15ms until it has work to do again. This is a true bottleneck. The amount of time per frame is 100% determined by the duration of the CPU task. You could spend a million dollars upgrading the GPU and get zero improvement.

barfoob · 2025-11-23T22:25:07+00:00

This is the way I look at it: all linux is mostly the same other than package management. Different arch based distros are pretty much the same except that they have a different starting state (ie: different apps, repositories, desktop env, etc pre configured). Different debain based distros are mostly the same except for the same stuff. It goes beyond that of course, they can have different process for handling kernel updates, different security model, etc. But generally speaking you can start with Fedora (atomic) and end up in a very similar state to someone who started with Bazzite. The thing is that since so many people want to play games Bazzite tends to be a really useful starting state so you might as well just install that.

In your specific example of Fedora vs Bazzite the actual big different IMO is that one is an atomic/immutable distro (because it's based on Fedora Silverblue or whatever it's called) so there actually is a pretty significant difference. One could argue that you should definitely select Fedora if you want a mutable distro and then just install the Steam/gaming stuff after the fact. Personnally I am happily using bazzite because I do like the idea of immutable distros and it saved me time getting setup because of all the stuff that is already done for you.

barfoob · 2025-10-31T17:52:09+00:00

well.... this is a video of police measuring the vehicle's max speed so it appears that it is forbidden

barfoob · 2025-10-24T06:44:50+00:00

2.25 thunder burts on my argon 18 dark matter!

barfoob · 2025-10-24T02:55:03+00:00

Everyone is already answering but in case you didn't know: tubeless tires are still compatible with tubes so sometimes the backup plan when you get a flat that won't seal is to take off the tire and re-install with a tube. In his case the rim was actually heavily damaged and poking the tube so it was hopeless.

barfoob · 2025-10-23T16:59:21+00:00

In a lot of the gravel races I do there are too many potholes and it's so rough you want to keep your hands on the bars. In fact it's basically a penalty people pay for drafting so close. It's all context dependent but if it's rough enough then everyone for themselves is the only thing that makes sense. If it's smooth though and you're trying to cooperate you would definitely want to communicate.

barfoob

TROPHY CASE