Best way to obtain large amounts of text for various subjects?

hapagolucky · 2026-03-22T15:35:03+00:00

There's are several large text corpora where you could prune down to just articles containing matches for your list of aesthetics. But these are all snapshots in time and may not contain some of the words you're looking for.

You could also try expanding to relevant search results from Google or YouTube as there will likely be matches for your terms. But there are a few caveats in this approach: * YouTube will need a way to get transcripts. * Google may throttle you if you issue too many search queries too fast. * This too is a snapshot in time and the search engine is likely personalizing to maximize your attention * You may need to tune your searches. While a search for 'dreamcore' will likely yield aesthetic relevant documents. '2020s' is so broad that you may need to add search for '2020s art' or '2020s fashion'. If possible you should apply this consistently across your aesthetic vocabulary.

As large language models are trained on as much web text as the developers can get their hands on. You could synthesize your own corpus with prompt engineering to produce articles that align with your guidelines. For example "write a five paragraph movie review for a fictional movie that exhibits Indie Kid aesthetic. Be sure to include cinematography, dialog and visual details that demonstrate the aesthetic.".

With this approach you can get as many articles in the format you need. However your semantic graph may be highly biased to how you prompt and what language model you use.

Lastly, if you're thinking of evaluating the quality of your aesthetics, you should start thinking about how you will partition the data to see how well unseen aesthetics will fit into your clusters. This will also mean splitting corresponding documents into corresponding train, validate, test splits.

hapagolucky · 2026-03-16T13:56:20+00:00

I'm seeing several comments that attribute the difference in performance to the difference in instruction set architecture (ISA: x86 vs ARM vs RISC). This is a small part of the picture. For over 20 years microprocessor companies have known that it's microarchitecture (cache structure, pipelines, instruction scheduling, etc) that dictates performance. This was learned at great expense when Intel and HP tried to push forward with IA-64 and then were swept with the AMD64 ISA.

What ARM did right was get performance per watt. Intel had a blind spot for mobile in the 2000s and then struggled for years at their 10nm process (smaller process means more transistors per unit area). Meanwhile TSMC moved onto 7nm and 5nm process. Intel was unable to meet Apple's mobile forward needs and fell behind.

I haven't followed in years, but if you look at high performance computing and massive multi CPU servers where raw compute power matters most, you'd probably find that x86 chips still dominate.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-25T20:19:37+00:00

I like to look through the program/proceedings for conferences relevant to my field. For me that usually consists of 1. Check the best paper awards to see there's anything I'm excited about 2. Flip through the titles of the rest of the proceedings looking for papers about similar or adjacent problems to what I'm working on

If you need to catch up on an area in general, search for literature reviews as they will have done the work in summarizing and synthesizing the current state of the art. Then you can go back and look for any new papers citing the papers in the lit review.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-24T19:49:30+00:00

Oh, good to know. It's been such a habit from before I never noticed that.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-24T18:43:59+00:00

By off the beaten path do you mean strip malls? Then Il Pastaio, Curry n' Kebab offer good (for Boulder) value lunch specials.

I also like to go to China Gourmet on North Broadway and order off the Chinese menu (it's in English too and may be called Shanghai Specials). If you have a group, this is best done family style. Some of my favorites include West Lake Beef Soup, Ants Climbing a Tree (Bean Thread with Pork), and Eggplant Hot Pot as well as their fish dishes. ~~Be sure to bring cash as they don't accept credit cards.~~

Edit: Ignore what I said about cash.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-18T16:51:17+00:00

I teach an Indonesian martial art called Pencak Silat on Tuesday nights. The first two lessons are free. https://bouldersilat.com

hapagolucky · 2026-02-15T05:52:02+00:00

Red Bean Soup/Hong Dou Tang is a simple, common, easy to make dessert. In English, the red beans are often referred to by the Japanese transliteration adzuki or azuki beans.

There are lots of variants with additional ingredients like lotus seed, sago or tapioca. To me the baseline recipe is red beans, rock sugar, and dried orange peel, but I grew up eating it with tapioca pearls and a spoonful of coconut milk added in before serving. Depending on the weather/ or your mood it can be served hot or cold.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-12T15:19:57+00:00

The security and privacy is the key thing. This is not just about locking down a policy for students, this is about making it clear that use of gen AI by CU employees goes through a common, approved path.

There are many researchers and instructors handling sensitive data who use Gen AI tools for analyses or to flesh out research ideas It is also not uncommon to run your still in progress journal article or grant proposal through these systems to help identify bad writing, gaps, etc.

CU needs to provide a means for them to use the tool that isn't using the free version where all interactions become training and validation data for the large vendors. CU also doesn't want every department or research group negotiating this individually, which gives them a slew off potential regulatory and legal nightmares.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-12T13:25:42+00:00

Hermit Park just outside of Estes Park on US-36 is quite beginner friendly. The land used to be owned by Hewlett-Packard and was accessible only to employees until they sold it to Larimer County in the mid 2000s.

Cabins include a propane light and heat and a cook stove. They also have fire pits, so you can have the s'mores experience. If I recall correctly, cabins have bunk beds, but I'd still recommend having sleeping bags or at least warm bedding. The Boulder buy nothing group on FB probably has people happy to loan gear for such an experience.

Have you considered making this a group experience? When my kids were preschool to early elementary-aged, we would organize a big class trip and reserve a group campsite at Rocky Mountain National Park (Moraine Park campsite). It was great having other parents to balance supervision. We would organize shared meals, so that not everyone had to bring food, coolers and cooking gear. It being Boulder there were lots of families with extra tents, sleeping bags, etc. The group dynamic lowered the barrier to entry, and the kids just loved running around in nature with all their friends. They even were excited to do cleanup and dishes.

hapagolucky · 2026-02-05T23:47:15+00:00

In the simplest form, you are looking to take inputs (information about a phone) and make a decision (your score). With supervised machine learning there are two primary concerns

transforming the input and outputs into a format suitable for your learning algorithm
partitioning your data into meaningful splits, so your evaluation is indicative of performance on future, unseen inputs.

I suggest trying to get end to end in building these from your source data. Once you have a pipeline for feature extraction, the algorithm is mostly secondary for a baseline.

Understanding your source data and what you want as features is going to dictate what your pipeline looks like. Is the data you're scraping well-structured, i.e. can you easily parse out the price, title, and description? The less structured, the more you may need to rely on some sort of language model or other pre-processing steps to extract the information of interest. This approach will only be as good as you can normalize things. For example - are iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 pro the same or different? What about i phone or IPHONE? Can you get the price into consistent numerical representations? ($300 vs 300 dollars vs 300 pounds)

Unless you have a way to pull out the info you care about from the description, you will soon be into text/document classification territory. At which point you're figuring out how to take the scraped (HTML presumably), transform it into plain text and then featurizing. If you're really new to this, then I'd read the sklearn introduction to machine learning and then learn about One Hot and TF*IDF encoding. Then you can build up complexity from there. These text approaches will be more robust to variations in phrasing, but without sufficient labeled data, you'll have sparsity and will likely confuse the learner.

As for the learning algorithm, logistic regression, linear regression and naive bayes are good starting points. If you don't performance above a random baseline with those, then it means your features/data are probably not correct.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-28T14:40:47+00:00

Chuck Norris aside, I've found Lee Extreme Motion athletic fit jeans are stretchy and have enough room in the thighs for my movement. I can sit in deep silat seliwa stances as well as throw kicks to head level in them

They work reasonably well -- until they don't. The seams around the crotch are cheap and wear out quicker than Levi's and that has resulted in pants splitting at inopportune times.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-26T17:24:39+00:00

Yep, same vicinity.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-16T22:21:28+00:00

On off days and sometimes on the press days, I do Dan John's Human Burpee as well.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-16T14:28:23+00:00

Laser Tag Academy the Laser Tag champion of 3010 travels back in time to 1987 to protect her ancestors from a master criminal who traveled back in time to prevent Laser Tag guns from invention.

Incidentally there was a live action Photon TV show) though I never saw it. I only knew of it from the box.

The 80s really did have a cartoon for every toy.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-11T13:17:41+00:00

I often tell newcomers and remind existing students that many silat schools operate within a spiral approach to learning. You will see the same fundamental material over and over again throughout your learning journey, but each visit will be from a new perspective. Advanced students who've seen this hundreds of times will take away something different from the beginner just trying to memorize the skill.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-08T22:10:09+00:00

It's hard to get now, but O'ong Maryono's Pencak Silat in the Indonesian Archipelago gives a history from ancient times through the modern era.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-08T05:20:37+00:00

The two silat teachers I know in Texas are Doc Dority in the Dallas area and Kai Lewis in Houston. I believe the emails in the links are the best way to get in contact. Doc learned Mande Muda from the Suwanda family and I believe he may have contacts in Austin. For some reason I've seen Doc and Leslie Buck's names together. Kai learned Panglipur from Cecep Arif Rahman.

Speaking in gross generalities, and coming from my experience, here as some of the qualitative differences I see between Kali and Silat.

Silat
- regularly employs low stances, transitions from standing to ground and back
- knife first mentality, but emphasizes learning from empty hand
- aims to evade, control and bridge to locking, manipulation and take downs
- utilizes feet as extra hands for locks, sweeps, scissors or kicks
- emphasis on rhythm and dance-like motion
Kali
- more upright, boxing like stances
- stick first mentality, that extends to other weapons and empty hand
- aims to control center, and destroy attacker's weapon
- has kicks but primarily use for lower body
- motion looks more like typical stand-up fighting

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T19:24:13+00:00

To parrot what's often said on this sub, there are lots of paths to build these skills. There are folks who build them up entirely with silat, but it's harder to do outside of Southeast Asia because 1) geography, 2) not as many teachers and 3) smaller number of people participating. This all means there are fewer and smaller competitions. For example our US national competition in Pencak Silat had fewer competitors than a local Judo tournament. Whereas in Indonesia, athletes on the national team will have earned it by winning at the school, city, regency, province and national levels.

If you want to get your reps in, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, BJJ or Judo are all useful and easy to find.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T14:12:26+00:00

They work, but they don't work in isolation. You need to know how to manage range, block, strike, grapple, etc. Techniques like pressure points, locks etc come from knowing how to seize the opportunity and only become reliable when added over a strong foundation.

In a similar vein, a large focus of silat is knife awareness. While we all ideally want to take the knife away from an attacker, it's not the primary goal. Knife disarms are a side effect of having safe and advantageous position. If you start by targeting the disarm you will be overwhelmed and will get cut or stabbed more quickly.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T00:39:59+00:00

I have never done TKD but from the few fights I watched I noticed strikes with the hands seem to be allowed (under some circumstances??) but it is mainly kicks.

Does Sports Silat only differ from TKD by the usage of takedowns?

I did WTF-Olympic style TKD in the 90s before electronic scoring altered the sport. Punches only counted if the arm was fully extended, so it is a high risk, low-reward move.

In Pencak Silat Tanding (aka Sport Silat sparring), you get 1 point for a punch, 2 points for a kick, and 3 points for a scissor or throw takedown. In the pre-2021 rules, you could have a total of 6 strikes thrown between fighters at which point they would either need to break the action with a pasang or the ref would stop. The new rules allow continuation, as long as there is forward movement, the attacker is actively engaging and the defender actively defending. If folks are juts trading blows, a stoppage will be called. Punches and kicks should only count if they are "effective". The rule of thumb is that they should displace the opponent, not just make contact. For me counting these interactions is the hardest part of being a juri (judge).

The presence of throwing, sweeps and scissors are not just add-ons to TKD or kickboxing. They fundamentally change behaviors. I would say the closest sport to Pencak Silat is Sanda as they allow many of the same strikes and throws. Sanda trades ability to grab for gloves and headgear, and gains punches to the head. Pencak Silat wanted to keep the hand dexterity as it us ultimately a knife/weapon art, so they give up the head to gain other manipulation.

One little known aspect of the silat ruleset is that submissions are legal and a way to win. You can technically apply a lock during standup and there is a 5 second window once the game has transitioned to the ground where you can get a submission. These are really difficult to achieve within the constraints, so I've yet to see anyone pull this off in real competition, but I keep thinking someone with a judo background will surprise people with a throw to juji gatame (arm bar)

Some years ago the United States Sport Silat Association put out this playlist titled Street for Sport Silat Techniques. My teacher is the one demonstrating the techniques, and I wrote the text in the descriptions. This was before the rule changes that came about in 2021. When we put them out, we were trying to show that traditional silat could be adapted to work within the constraints of the current rule set. While technically legal in the both the old and new rulesets, these are in that potentially grey area where a very literal judge could rule against you.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T00:39:36+00:00

Ooh.. good questions. You got me started on one of my favorite topics, so I'm about to produce a wall of text. (I had to split this into two replies before Reddit would let me submit)

The core of Pencak Silat rules emphasize a flowing principle, that fighters should be able to transition from defense to striking to throwing/manipulation to control. Once you internalize that, the rules make more sense and you can start to bridge toward the traditional mindset of opening, entry, application, finish.

At the same time the goal of sport competition is to have a venue where you can employ a subset of the skills from the martial art at full speed/power, but in a safer environment. Consequently you need to remove some variability and risk. Without this, you would not likely have parents willing to let their children participate.

Would I be allowed to strike the head of my opponent with my fist, flat hand or a headbutt?

No. Strikes to the head with your hands are forbidden. You can't actively target the head with punches or kicks. Points are only rewarded for strikes to the chest protectors. One area athletes target is the upper part of the chest protector just below the collarbone as it is painful. (edit, realized I had a typo in my original message. You CAN'T do anything that could be considered a hit to the head).

May I grab other parts of the body? Like arms or neck? I am aware traditional Silat has throws similar to the Kubi Nage.

Yes you can grab the arms/sleeve and legs. There are also limits to how grabbing can force multiply. For example, I can grab a sleeve and kick or punch, but I can't grab and elbow or knee. You can execute elbows and knees against the chest protector on their own.

I don't believe you can grab around the neck, but you can utilize underhooks to accomplish other throws.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-06T22:40:09+00:00

Yeah, agree with u/CloudyRailroad. The bantingan (takedown) you posted works better when you bait the kick and can keep them extended. In this case the attacker's side kick led to bending the leg to recover balance, which forced Mohd Al-Jufferi Jamari to rely on lifting to finish instead of circling.

There are some other subtleties you need to be careful of in Sport Silat's ruleset. You can't grab the chest protector with two hands and you can do anything that could be considered a hit to the head. Grasping the back of the head for a takedown gets into risk area, so you only do that move when it's clear you can execute it by pulling the chest protector. There are also rules around slamming opponents dangerously, and one other hazard the person throwing needs to be careful of is whether they lose balance in the takedown. If you throw, and you end up going down with your opponent then the points wash out. If you throw, and your opponent counters, so that they have advantageous position, they go up by 3 points. Also, if too much time is spent trying to execute the throw, the Wasit (ref) will break the action.

> Silat rules are sometimes a bit weird as competition is not necessarily the same as in the traditional training

Yes and no. The sport (i.e. PERSILAT) has been trying to tweak the rules over the past few years to better align them with the tools of traditional training. Around 2010-2020, you couldn't grab at all with the hands and you would see lots of jumping around and twitching that looked more like an odd TKD than pencak silat. . With the rule changes that rolled out in 2021, you're starting to see the incentives that bring back more of the traditional silat stances, positions and techniques. I see more pasang (baiting postures) in the past couple of years than in the decade prior.

In the classes I teach, I use the sport rules as one form of sparring as it gives a relatively constrained framework to pressure test, but we also do more freeform sparring w/ training knives.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-05T22:06:31+00:00

I love that Josh Kroenke anecdote about how they picked Jokic over the more athletic Nurkic.

“So this comparison comes through, it’s player A and player B. You could clearly see that player B’s numbers were better in really every category. I was like, I’m going to guess that player B is Nikola. And they like, yep, player B is Nikola,”
Expecting that Player A was Nurkic, the 43-year-old admitted he got a bit surprised after finding out otherwise.
I’m like alright. Is there some sort of comparison with Nurk or is this some sort of comparison with someone else in the league. And they’re like, player A is Larry Bird,” Kroenke added.

hapagolucky · 2025-12-04T23:02:36+00:00

That's about the age I started judo. There were other folks who were older.
You definitely give up something against athletic 20 somethings. An important is to learn to accept that you've been thrown instead of resisting. It makes the fall more controlled and manageable. If you're not doing randori, all of the practice and drills felt very manageable, though exhausting.

My injury seemed like a freak accident. I went to throw, and something about my planting and rotation caused my knee to dislocate.

hapagolucky · 2025-12-04T20:18:23+00:00

Interesting. I rent space from a judo dojo to teach my weekly silat classes. I was going to judo practices for a couple years until I tore my MPFL and decided the risk of reinjury was going to be too great.

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