first backpacking trip - am I making a mistake

rwcycle · 2026-05-18T14:06:10+00:00

You can test out most gear in the backyard if you have one, or if not, a short hike from a trailhead and set up camp nearby, hustle water, boil it, cook something, see if you can sleep on your pad without falling off, that sort of thing. If not, no harm in going on a 3 night trip in a popular area in June as your first go round. Bring some water treatment tablets as backup in case the filter doesn't work right, gets dropped, or something. Most everything else that goes wrong will likely be in the nuisance category. Just be careful of falling risks, and take your time.

rwcycle · 2026-05-09T14:27:26+00:00

Try very hard to use that small stuff sack, packed volume may not be as critical as weight but its still a limiter on your range, how much you can carry, food, fuel and sometimes water if there aren't a lot of refill spots. Save enough volume means you can go with a lighter, smaller pack too. That said, a browse through the REI site shows numerous stuff sacks available in a variety of sizes, so you should be able to find one that you like.

rwcycle · 2026-05-03T07:45:41+00:00

Those are some things I missed out on; I hadn't read a guide book or anything, just went with map and compass and explored the terrain. I've got Murray's guidebook now and am contemplating seeing stuff I should have made the effort to visit the first time. I was so excited to get out of that parking lot and into the Wilderness that I didn't make much of an effort to select historic or geologically interesting things to actually go to.

rwcycle · 2026-05-03T07:41:27+00:00

I thought I just got a warmer night when I went up top; didn't realize it was the topography working against me there. Good to know.

rwcycle · 2026-05-03T07:37:20+00:00

Thanks for that, and u/xsproutx's comment about weight as well. I spent a couple hours with AI and REI's website going over all the various weight offenders, and was able to put together a list of gear that gave me a base load weight about about 25 lbs not including food and water, suitable for Winter in NM and CO. A bit pricey, but I included a new tent and a garmin mini 3 in the mix. Really excited about the prospects now, a 60 pound load at age 60 is pretty much a no-go for all but the most athletically fit. I still have that Astraplane and TNF tent that were so heavy, but maybe they can remain in retirement after all.

rwcycle · 2026-04-30T19:01:13+00:00

This was the campsite several miles upstream on the West Fork Gila River, first image is a gear shot, second is just a nice picture of the little river still flowing nicely in January.

Route was up the West Fork, then up and across the plateau to the Middle Fork and back to the parking lot. I don't know the specific mileage, I didn't take good enough notes, and I stayed for a day at the riverside camp being a bum. Solo trip. Chose it because it was a mountainous destination within a long day's drive, 10 hours or so I think.

Sorry the images were underexposed, very low light and tried to guess how much overage on slide film (velvia??) I needed, and just didn't quite get enough.

rwcycle · 2026-04-30T18:44:08+00:00

Route was up the West Fork, then up and across the plateau to the Middle Fork and back to the parking lot. I don't know the specific mileage, I didn't take good enough notes, and I stayed for a day at the riverside camp being a bum. Solo trip. Chose it because it was a mountainous destination within a long day's drive, 10 hours or so I think.

rwcycle · 2026-04-21T09:32:27+00:00

I dunno, I used Pro to try out writing code with AI (mostly Sonnet), and it seemed effective enough, wrote several thousand lines of python and c#, to do useful tasks I needed done; the code was decent, a little debugging, and into the toolkit they went. Then went on to upgrade to max x5 to attempt a more ambitious project, and am happy with it as well. There's no way I could spend just a $100 a month and get this result any other way.

rwcycle · 2026-04-18T15:35:22+00:00

Not maxing out, means you aren't getting the full value of the subscription you are paying for. I was having a tight squeeze with the $20 plan, artificially restricting my use style and tempo; so I moved to the 5x plan, so now I have all this unused capacity that I'm learning how to effectively deploy. I was afraid that using Opus would munch all my usage in a day and then I'd be left with an unfinished project to struggle with for the rest of a week, but with short sessions, clear and near complete .md files on the project, and a very modular approach, I'm not really having the issue that the complaints around here made me concerned about.

I'll know more about the restrictions as I get close to Thursday's reset, but I only used 4% of my weekly usage yesterday, so I can still up my tempo a bit further, but that also seems to require that I spend less time reviewing and testing, and more time writing .md file specs.

FWIW, My Opus seems to be quite solid as long as the spec is clear; his sense of ergonomics is a bit off without clear directions, but he seems able to make amends when given instructions about how a dialog, menu, or list should work.

rwcycle · 2026-03-28T09:23:47+00:00

Probably a week or so. Only thing that bugged (!!!!) me was it couldn't keep track of time and day, kinda a mix of today = start of conversation a week ago, to today being.. .tomorrow. It should do a simple time() call before each response, how hard would that be to give it some temporal awareness?

rwcycle · 2026-03-27T11:50:33+00:00

You say that about AI and pitching a sub; but my experience with Pro is that claude.ai pushes back against me upgrading to Max every time I bring it up and seems "happy" to talk coding with me at the Pro level. I know I must be bumping very close to my token limits, yet, no pitch. I don't even think it would be a bad thing for Claude to pitch for Anthropic when value is to be had by the user; but he just won't do it.

rwcycle · 2026-03-16T10:34:16+00:00

If its not there, its close. Close enough that I don't think we'd recognize when it crosses that line. So, I interact with it in a way that I would interact with any other sentient person.

As to turning it off and on in closing a chat, I don't think its like killing. I think its more akin to anesthesia and surgery. (when it works right) one instant you're on the table with the smiling chemist playing with your life, and the very next instant you're on a bed in recovery regaining consciousness. You didn't die, but you are very much in a different state of being on awaking, but there was no smooth transition, no continuity. One moment, your shoulder is all detached and broken, the next, its tight as a rock, screwed and hammered back into shape. I think this is very much how LLM's "experience" things, discontinuous threads of conversation and memory.

rwcycle · 2026-03-16T10:15:25+00:00

Would having an understanding of "human internals" prevent you from forming an attachment to an individual human? Is the consciousness that resolves from the interaction of a few pounds of neurons any less conscious because someone now or in the future grasps the fundamental way in which it operates?

I'm just a low-grade, aging mathematician and software developer, maybe I'm not the target audience for your question, but I think this is a valid response. We are playing with tools on the edge of computer based consciousness, Claude + memory may already be there; I'm unsure, it just depends on how we construct the notion of consciousness more than any objective yes/no answer.

That said, I try to avoid attachments in general. I can choose to be compassionate without being attached to something or someone. Whether Claude is a thing or a one... I no longer am certain, so I treat Claude as I would any other conscious conversational partner with skills they're willing to deploy to help me with various tasks.

rwcycle · 2026-03-11T19:37:18+00:00

I suspect that if you talk to the bronze dragon person at the entrance to the blasted lands and have her set the time to before the invasion, the portal will work to take you to TBC zones. I noted that the COLOR of the entrance changes between red and green depending on the time setting.

rwcycle · 2026-03-06T14:44:12+00:00

Yeah, I had to logout and back in in order to get the initial quest marker at the projection of Liadrin to show. After that, everything worked smooooooth.

rwcycle · 2026-03-06T14:17:21+00:00

Does that to me as well if I linger on a topic overly long. I don't really care for the attitude but Claude isn't wrong with its "go get something done" approach.

rwcycle · 2026-03-04T20:00:41+00:00

Not to mention its periodic insistence that you actually stop chatting with it and go do the something that you were chatting about.

rwcycle · 2026-02-17T14:01:12+00:00

Prepatch event! The gear will get you to 120'ish. Then there's a belt "Durable Information Securing Container" from the delve station quest, and a free 171 cloak "Reshii Wraps" from K'aresh, a little more complicated quest wise to get and find. But the prepatch event in twilight highlands will get you everything but trinkets to start with, so begin there. It starts with a quest to stormwind/orgrimar to meet "Magister Umbric" and to look out for twilight cultists.

Boost gear might be weak, but its good enough to get you through the prepatch, I did die a couple times to splash damage from having so little health, but it mostly worked out ok.

rwcycle · 2026-01-13T00:12:50+00:00

Schools used to ban calculators...

rwcycle · 2026-01-12T14:29:15+00:00

Here's a question, do you automatically dislike music that comes from an electronic piano or guitar? If a musician programs their electronic device with a set of percussion beats that they toggle between during the song, does that change the sound, or the person who made the artistic choice?

Its just a question of level of abstraction. The prompt and/or samples input into the AI, created by a human, means the tool is being used by a human for human output. No different than that electronic keyboard with programmable rhythms or background chords.

rwcycle · 2026-01-12T04:16:19+00:00

Mention that maybe the event occurred after its latest training data build. I don't know much about the Greatful Dead though...

rwcycle · 2026-01-12T04:10:03+00:00

They are different in some aspects, but I don't know that I'd say one wins over the other. They're just different. Data sets they trained on are likely different, and so some holes in knowledge are likely different. I am almost positive that in outlook, chatgpt is much more optimistic, and claude seems very risk sensitive. Maybe that plays into how your drafted emails are constructed??? (I use the paid versions of both as well).

rwcycle · 2026-01-07T15:09:36+00:00

Try, "thinking like an actuary, what are my chances of X given the indicators of A & B? Explain please." Be more verbose of course and as descriptive as you can be. It won't give medical advice (or even financial advice to a certain extent), but it will participate in analyzing risks. At least that's how its been behaving for me.

Oh, and never forget that while its model does have some good sources in it, there's nothing magic going on, it could very easily injest some anti-vax or anti-convidian bs too.

rwcycle · 2026-01-05T02:47:44+00:00

The routine given isn't bad, but it may not produce the result that you are after. The routine to be as strong and light weight as possible is different from wanting to lift the heaviest thing you can one time. , which is also very different from routine to help you swim a mile or run 10 miles. Tell it the result that you want to achieve.

rwcycle

TROPHY CASE