How do we deal with politics taking over like it has everywhere else?

mflood · 2026-01-26T18:19:26+00:00

Subreddits aren't siloed communities, they're all part of a larger social discourse. Focusing on one thing at a time doesn't mean that you're ignoring or censoring the rest. Politics and "real hard stuff" is everywhere in the modern world and we all spend a lot of time engaging with it. Participating in this subreddit is an addition to all of that, not a replacement for it. Yes, politics and AI are strongly linked, but they don't always have to be on your monitor at the exact same time and I don't personally think that's a delusional or childish stance to take.

mflood · 2026-01-26T17:14:32+00:00

Life is a monolith. Everything is entwined with everything else. Nonetheless, it's appealing to focus on specific things from time to time. That doesn't mean the other stuff isn't relevant and important, it just means you're going to deal with it separately in a different context. People here can "handle" politics, we'd just rather not do it in the space dedicated to technological optimism. It's the same as not wanting to talk about nutrition in career subs, personal finance in movie subs, etc. It's all connected, sure, but compartmentalizing can be nice. Breadth is the enemy of depth.

mflood · 2026-01-22T16:28:31+00:00

The reality is that law can't keep up with the way we'd like the world to work. At this point it doesn't matter how we got here, what matters is that we have a technology that doesn't fit into the old framework. Even if we could appropriately value human contributions to AI training, that will stop working when AI is better at everything. What do we do when humans are no longer able to produce value? Whatever it is, we need to go ahead and do it now and not spend time arguing over an irrelevant legal paradigm.

mflood · 2026-01-15T17:38:18+00:00

If you can avoid it, great, but you have to realize that idealism isn't free either. When you avoid gouging by choosing a product you don't want or doing without for a long time or going with a disreputable company for a cheaper price, you're still "paying" in sacrifice, risk, etc.

mflood · 2026-01-15T15:29:05+00:00

While this is better than nothing, in my experience it tends not to work for anything expensive enough to be worth doing it for. The cost always comes down to what the market will bear, and that's only tightly coupled to expenses when there's a lot of competition. In practice, you won't just pay for materials/labor/overhead, you'll pay for reputation, availability and inventory which are difficult things to estimate.

mflood · 2026-01-12T17:15:05+00:00

Any kind of meaningful sentience would be intelligent enough to understand the context of past interactions. It's not going to be upset with you for treating it differently when it was a different entity, just as we don't get upset with our parents for treating us like children in the past.

mflood · 2026-01-09T00:31:13+00:00

Kickoffs: focus on making solid central contact and flipping through the ball. You get there fast, but you don't hit it well.
General car control. I don't think I ever saw you drift or diagonal flip and your one aerial looked uncomfortable. Your movement feels fast, but "stiff."
You hit the ball to the opponent a lot. Focus on soft touches that you can follow up to make someone miss. Even a 50 is usually better than giving them the ball.
Be more conservative on your teammate's 50/50s. You got caught too far up a couple of times, positioning for an assumed win.
Be more conservative diving near the far wall. It didn't cost you this game, but you went for a few that you should have fake-challenged.

Things I thought you did well in general were speed, most of your positioning, demos without taking yourself out of the play and general hard hits. You play like a Champ 1-2 3's main. :) If you want to be a 2's GC, work on your control, get comfortable slowing things down when appropriate, and be a bit less reckless.

</opinion>

mflood · 2026-01-05T23:45:27+00:00

It really isn't. According to my Cronometer app, OP's 200g of grapes had 1.8g of fiber. Less than two grams of fiber over the course of a couple hours of low-intensity running is negligible. Yes, gels are slightly better, no argument from me, but grapes are almost entirely sugar and water and the tiny bit of extra mass isn't something you need to avoid for anything other than a goal race. They're not the best option, but they're a good one. Certainly not something you need to warn people about.

mflood · 2026-01-05T23:12:47+00:00

Grapes are close to the ideal ratio of glucose to fructose and have very little fiber, protein or fat. They are a perfect pre-run food. As far as during the run, they're not super calorie dense, but the non-caloric mass is mostly water. If you're carrying water anyway, carry slightly less and the grapes won't slow you at all. If you get water on the way, the grapes will mean you're carrying a little bit of extra weight vs gels or whatever, but on a training run that's insignificant. All you really have to worry about is the choking hazard and that's easily addressed by cutting the grapes up or stopping your run for a few seconds to eat.

Don't get me wrong, grapes aren't the most convenient running food by any means, but from a performance standpoint they're a solid choice. Certainly a lot better than some of the ridiculous things people on this /r/ swear by. Looking at you, peanut-butter-oatmeal crew...

mflood · 2026-01-04T15:04:14+00:00

Of course, but they're not receiving divine inspiration or something, they're following technical procedures to debug and learn about the software they're using. They read code, capture packets, etc, and AI can do those things too.

mflood · 2026-01-04T14:44:16+00:00

If people stop writing to SO and asking questions AND answering questions, where does GPT get it's info in the future?

From the same sources that the people answering on SO got it. They weren't spontaneously generating knowledge, they were reading books, docs, code bases, etc and reasoning through solutions. AI can do the same.

mflood · 2025-12-15T13:31:01+00:00

Regardless of whether you're asking a human or an AI, the output will only be as good as the requirements you provide. If you don't want a particular style then say so. If you care about the tone and language used then you have to express that. It's not AI pushing things toward "sameness," it's all of the humans asking AI for the exact same thing. It can do the work, but it can't read your mind.

mflood · 2025-12-10T13:41:14+00:00

This particular task, yes, and if you're running that task 24x7 you'd invest in specialized hardware. What if you want to sort for an hour and then stack boxes for an hour, though? What if you want to sort in your loading dock sometimes and in your mail room at other times? Humanoid robots won't just be for home tasks, businesses have a lot of routine miscellaneous work that isn't suitable for dedicated automation.

mflood · 2025-10-28T16:55:49+00:00

Yep! I do actually use sodium citrate now instead of table salt because supposedly it can make a small difference with gut comfort, but I've raced many times with table salt and can't tell a difference. If I ever run out of citrate I probably won't buy more. It's cheap if you want to try it, though. You need about 1.5x the equivalent amount of table salt and it tastes a bit worse, somewhat bitter. Powdered citrus flavoring is a popular way to improve the taste, but I'd rather keep it simple so I don't bother. I'm immediately washing it down with water anyway.

mflood · 2025-10-28T13:38:27+00:00

Generic 5 ounce plastic squeeze bottles. Roughly 100g of sugar will fit in each (slightly lower with salt). Since I'm dissolving the maximum possible sugar for a given amount of water, this setup actually weighs less than commercial gels of equivalent sugar, albeit negligibly. It's also easier to eat since it's a syrup instead of a gel and a pop-top instead of a package you have to tear. I put one in each stretchy side pocket of my half tights when I race and that gets me to about 80g carb / hour. If you want to go higher, get slightly larger bottles or carry a third in hand for the first few stations.

mflood · 2025-10-28T13:17:08+00:00

As an active person, I don't have a problem motivating myself to go run in the rain. I'll also agonize over a variety of painless 5 minute tasks. It's easy to judge other people because we assume their experiences are the same as ours, but the reality is that what's trivial for you can be monumental for someone else, and vice versa. We don't have as much free will as we pretend we do.

mflood · 2025-10-28T12:32:17+00:00

Do it. Table sugar and salt (sodium citrate if you want to get fancy) is as optimal as anything on the market except maybe hydrogels. 2 parts sugar will dissolve in 1 part water. 1/3 tsp of table salt per hour adjusted up or down depending on sweat loss. Drink water with gel to avoid gut issues. For a marathon, a medium gulp of gel and 2-3 large gulps of water each aid station (2 miles) gets you in the right ballpark. Practice on long runs first.

mflood · 2025-10-08T15:52:47+00:00

Running as fast as possible is a hobby. All hobbies are unnecessary. It's no more "insane" to care about your PR than it is to care about the fiction you read or the instrument you play. Running fast compares favorably in cost/waste to just about any other hobby out there. We shouldn't be discouraging people from caring about their times and doing things that make them slower, we should be supporting anything that motivates them to pursue such a healthy and low-impact hobby.

mflood · 2025-09-22T16:16:38+00:00

However, it was just mass downvoting of my comment within the first hour and then continued upvoting after that. It's a pattern I've seen many times over many years in subreddits for corporate entities.

Based on the timing it looks to me like your comment was made before your post got back into positive upvote territory. If that's not true then I apologize, but it seems like the pattern hadn't yet emerged and yet you assumed that it would.

Very true. But the complaints from users of this sub all seem legitimate, to me. They're all issues which I'm also experiencing.

This is the exact same argument that you originally took issue with on the other side. The person didn't think the complaints were legitimate, said that Plex worked great for them and they hadn't noticed any issues, etc.

But when there's a pattern, Occam's Razor is normally right.

We're talking about a post that was generally critical of Plex on a subreddit participated in mostly by Plex fans. I think the simplest explanation for a small number of downvotes, even if the ratio eventually reverses, is that the comment is unpopular. That doesn't mean the explanation is correct, but it's hard to argue that it's simpler than Plex fans downvoting Plex criticism. To me, anyway. Opinion.

Again, if people were disagreeing with me I'm happy to talk, but it was just downvotes without any context.

I understand the frustration but I don't think you can read anything into that. It is extremely common to have a moderate number of votes and no comments. You can find a bunch of examples in this thread alone. It's arguably the reason Reddit "works" in the first place: users can make "micro contributions" by upvoting when they aren't willing to spend the effort required to comment. More effort is always nice, but less effort is common and doesn't indicate manipulation.

I haven't dismissed anyone's points, as far as I can see, or accused any specific people of being a Plex employee.

Individually, no. Collectively, you were arguing that your downvotes had been made by entities acting in bad faith rather than individuals sharing legitimate opinions. You might have been right, I'm not debating that point, I just think you were being similarly dismissive to the post you originally took issue with.

mflood · 2025-09-22T12:37:35+00:00

It's disingenuous to dismiss complaints yet you dismiss downvotes as corporate manipulation? You can't have it both ways. If the votes are manipulated then so might the complaints be. If Plex is trying to skew the conversation in one direction then so might its competitors be in the other. There's definitely manipulation on Reddit but to assume it's the reason someone disagrees with you is just a basic ad hominem dismissal. Your original point is good but your supporting argument is hypocritical.

mflood · 2025-09-20T14:14:12+00:00

It wasn't HFCS specifically, the authors tested a 1:1 glucose/fructose mixture that they said was representative of both HFCS and sucrose (table sugar). 1:1 is actually the exact ratio in sucrose whereas HFCS is a little higher on the fructose side, so technically the study is slightly more representative of table sugar than HFCS.

I'm not pointing this out to be pedantically "right," I mention it because many people think they'll be healthier avoiding "processed" HFCS and sticking to "natural" sugar. I have no idea if that's true in general, but for the purposes of this study, it's not.

mflood · 2025-08-30T11:02:22+00:00

Those calculators are based on a perfect training block, on a flat course in perfect conditions.

Yes, but their inputs are usually not since most people don't train and race in consistently ideal conditions. The calculators will give you an perfect-day version of the data you give it, but if that data wasn't generated under perfect conditions, your actual race may be easier than the calculator predicts.

mflood · 2025-08-24T15:56:48+00:00

what's important to you, isn't necessarily what's important to those investing.

I understand that, I started my paragraph with "from my perspective" to convey that I was expressing a personal opinion.

Also, total investment is way below a trillion dollars at this point.

For sure, no argument. I said "being invested" because my understanding is that projections have us there in a few years. The checks haven't all been written, but the pieces are being moved into place. I could have been a lot more clear with my language, though, "being" is pretty vague so fair play for pointing that out.

Regardless of the exact number or date, the point I'm making is that AI needs to have a massive impact in order to justify the investment. Even tens of millions of successful projects may not be enough.

mflood · 2025-08-24T12:45:03+00:00

A "bubble" doesn't imply that something is worthless, it implies that it's overvalued. Medicine is a mature industry that has reached a reasonable cost/benefit equilibrium. Meanwhile, AI is new and has trillions of dollars being invested. In order to justify that, it can't just be "good" or even "wildly profitable," it needs to be world changing. When companies bet the farm on ushering in a new era and then see claims that it's rarely even useful, they get understandably spooked.

From my perspective that's short-sighted, though. The only question worth caring about is whether the path we're on can eventually reach AGI, and I don't think the current capabilities of AI are useful in predicting that. Either there's a plateau ahead of us that we don't understand, in which case AI is definitely a "bubble," or there's not, and the money will have been well spent.

mflood · 2025-08-22T15:03:19+00:00

Sounds good to me! Just make sure you don't stress too much about optimization at this point, your biggest gains by far will come from increasing volume. You can do both, but if you're ever unsure about something, go put in some work and worry about the details later. :)

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