smores's recent activity
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Comment on When do you know that you've found "the one"? in ~life
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Comment on Human contractors are seeing all your horny — and creepy — AI prompts in ~tech
smores Link ParentOh, sure, I mean Open WebUI is already that, you can hook it up to any of the paid LLM services. I'm not really sure if that wins you anything, though, since you're still sending all of your...Oh, sure, I mean Open WebUI is already that, you can hook it up to any of the paid LLM services. I'm not really sure if that wins you anything, though, since you're still sending all of your conversation data to OpenAI or whoever.
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Comment on Human contractors are seeing all your horny — and creepy — AI prompts in ~tech
smores Link ParentI run llama.cpp + Qwen-Flash-Next-3.8 + open-webui locally on a Strix Halo box. It's not lightning fast or anything, but it's very usable for web chat, and I also use it as a code review and...I run llama.cpp + Qwen-Flash-Next-3.8 + open-webui locally on a Strix Halo box. It's not lightning fast or anything, but it's very usable for web chat, and I also use it as a code review and planning assistant via the Pi coding harness for coding. It's on order of magnitude slower than, say, Claude for coding tasks, but that's fine with me for how I use it. You could run Qwen 3.8 27B instead and have room for like 3 or 4 slots so that you can have subagents and simultaneous web prompts.
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentThese topics have, historically, on Tildes, absolutely drawn out a lot of "just asking questions"/less-than-inclined-to-believe-women commenters. Definitely real humans, not bots. It sucks but it...These topics have, historically, on Tildes, absolutely drawn out a lot of "just asking questions"/less-than-inclined-to-believe-women commenters. Definitely real humans, not bots. It sucks but it is still a reality here for sure.
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Comment on Realizing I could run as far as my mental state carried me made me become addicted to distance running. Anyone else been enjoying running/long runs? in ~hobbies
smores Link ParentOh, yes, they are stupid expensive, definitely only worth trying to find used hahaOh, yes, they are stupid expensive, definitely only worth trying to find used haha
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentI assume they mean that this topic and the adjacent topics often garner detractors and conflict in online spaces. The stronger the language in defense of women's rage and the need to be actively...I assume they mean that this topic and the adjacent topics often garner detractors and conflict in online spaces. The stronger the language in defense of women's rage and the need to be actively and proactively feminist and pro-women, the more likely it is that someone jumps into the conversation to try to pick apart the original post, sometimes in less-than-good faith, and this experience is, you know, shitty for, like, women (and usually non-binary folks as well, especially femme non-binary folks).
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentAs someone who went to Cornell and finally found my way to the activists at the end of my undergrad, I would hazard a guess that the reason you've met so many smart, progressive, active Cornell...As someone who went to Cornell and finally found my way to the activists at the end of my undergrad, I would hazard a guess that the reason you've met so many smart, progressive, active Cornell alumni and students is that there is an ever-present counterculture that exists largely in response to the dominant culture of wealth, toxic masculinity, Greek life, and an administration that gives fuck all about any of it. The classic historical evidence for this is the Willard Straight Hall takeover in 1969. I don't really think that fight has ended.
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentDefnitely agree, this behavior is not in any way unique to Greek lifeDefnitely agree, this behavior is not in any way unique to Greek life
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentUltimately, while I met a lot of good people at Cornell (especially by my senior year, when I found my way into some of the activist circles that I wish I had found much earlier), I left the...Ultimately, while I met a lot of good people at Cornell (especially by my senior year, when I found my way into some of the activist circles that I wish I had found much earlier), I left the school feeling an immense bitterness and anger toward its administration. I ran Cayuga's Watchers for a year, and during that time I interacted with the administration regularly. They were inexcusibly passive on issues regarding student safety, and they would not hear a single argument about actually reigning in Greek Life.
I actually think that a Cornell that is safe for its students, especially for its undergraduate women, cannot coexist with its Greek Life system. Simply declaring fraternities against the rules would not actually fix the ingrained social problems that the student life has organized itself around, but it should be seen as a prerequisite component of any plan that wants to meaningfully address student safety.
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Comment on Cornell won't, we will in ~news
smores Link ParentIndeed. When I was an undergrad at Cornell (~2016), I had a friend who was in a fraternity. I knew him through Cayuga's Watchers, a non-profit that trained undergrads on how to be...This is not a dark chapter in Cornell’s history, it’s a morbid pattern
Indeed.
But also at every single other man in that group chat. Not one objected in the chat to an offer of "free pussy". Not one called the police. Not one physically intervened. Maybe one was a witness to an investigation, but there's no sign of anything at all.
When I was an undergrad at Cornell (~2016), I had a friend who was in a fraternity. I knew him through Cayuga's Watchers, a non-profit that trained undergrads on how to be non-confrontational, active bystanders around dangerous/risky drinking behaviors.
At the end of a frat party, one of the older fraternity members was carrying a nearly unconscious woman upstairs with him. My friend gently interrupted him, suggested that they find the woman's friends, and found someone to take her back to her dorm and keep an eye on her. She ended up being fine.
My friend, on the other hand, was punched in the face in front of his entire fraternity for interrupting the other member's opportunity to "get laid." Not one single member of his fraternity, all of whom knew exactly what had happened, did a thing about it.
Greek life at Cornell is an absolute plague. It reinforces the most hideous and violent tendencies of college-age men (and women, for that matter — the hazing that happened at the "top tier" Cornell sororities was horrifying). The administration knows this, just like they know that their insistence on banning freshmen from attending official Greek life events during their first semester drives all of the social events into unmonitored, unregulated parties in college town, which leads to more hospitalizations. But those happen off campus, so they don't affect the university statistics, so they don't care.
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Comment on Realizing I could run as far as my mental state carried me made me become addicted to distance running. Anyone else been enjoying running/long runs? in ~hobbies
smores Link ParentI have a Thule Urban Glide 3. I haven't used any others, so I can't really compare, but it's hard for me to imagine a better one. On a flat surface, it barely requires any force to get rolling,...I have a Thule Urban Glide 3. I haven't used any others, so I can't really compare, but it's hard for me to imagine a better one. On a flat surface, it barely requires any force to get rolling, and once I'm up to speed it will literally keep moving at speed under its own momentum for several feet without any pushing from me.
It's actually our only stroller. We got a second hand Uppa Baby because the Urban Glide is a little heavy and long for a non running stroller, but the Urban Glide is so much better at actually being a stroller that we never use it!
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Comment on Realizing I could run as far as my mental state carried me made me become addicted to distance running. Anyone else been enjoying running/long runs? in ~hobbies
smores LinkI started running in high school, first as a distance runner in track (not fun, track coach genuinely disliked the distance runners to a degree that I still can't really comprehend) and then in...I started running in high school, first as a distance runner in track (not fun, track coach genuinely disliked the distance runners to a degree that I still can't really comprehend) and then in cross country (mixed bag; team was wonderful, coaches were miserable). I had bad running form, I feel mildly self conscious looking at pictures of my running from that time. I took huge steps and landed hard on my heels, so I was constantly battling shin splints (and... was not very fast, though I wasn't very worried about that, and I'm still not).
After I basically couldn't compete for most of my senior season, I started running in Vibrams (yes, the toe shoes, this was shortly after Born to Run was published). I hadn't read the book, I just had sort of a vague feeling that running closer to barefoot would be better for me. And let me tell you, you can not take giant strides and land on your heels in Vibrams. I had also been doing some research into shin splints and found that many elite runners had a stride-per-minute rate of 180, whereas mine was probably more like... 80?
So I reset, essentially. I hadn't run all season anyway, so I was out of shape, and I just started doing short runs in my toe shoes with a metronome playing in my ear (literally a metronome, set to 180bpm). I can still count off 180bpm on demand pretty accurately.
Anyway, this was a huge turning point for me. I joined the running club in college, and goddamn those guys were so much faster me, but none of them knew it so they all just assumed I could keep up. I ended up getting much, much faster, and without any injury!
Since then, I've dropped the shoes entirely about 90% of the time, running in Tarahumara Huarache-style sandals (Earth Runners, though the weird earth "grounding" magic that Earth Runners is into doesn't do anything for me) when I need to protect my feet from glass or rocks or heat. I've run three half marathons, all barefoot, and trained for my first, barefoot, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In theory I am training for another one right now, but we'll see whether my friends actually stick with that ;)
My pace has slowed quite a bit since my daughter was born 18mo ago, partly because I have less time to sink into 10mi runs, and partly because I'm often pushing her in her stroller, and wowza does that increase the challenge on a hilly run. Still running often, though, and luckily found a group of friends to run with recently that enjoy running for its own sake, like I do, rather than feeling like we need to be constantly training or timing ourselves.
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Comment on Realizing I could run as far as my mental state carried me made me become addicted to distance running. Anyone else been enjoying running/long runs? in ~hobbies
smores Link ParentGreat explanation. Once you're at this level, where jogging doesn't bring you out of Zone 2, you get to enjoy all of the nice feelings from continuous cardio exercise (mostly in the form of...Great explanation. Once you're at this level, where jogging doesn't bring you out of Zone 2, you get to enjoy all of the nice feelings from continuous cardio exercise (mostly in the form of endorphins and accomplishment). There's further nice stuff your body experiences at even longer distances ("runner's high"), but mostly people are just experiencing a combination of endorphins and a feeling of accomplishment from doing a hard thing that they wanted to do.
Running 8-10 miles barefoot is probably one of my favorite feelings, similar to finishing a really hard rock climbing route. It feels good and challenging while I'm doing it, and then feels even better for hours after!
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Comment on Realizing I could run as far as my mental state carried me made me become addicted to distance running. Anyone else been enjoying running/long runs? in ~hobbies
smores (edited )Link ParentOkay so I'm NOT a doctor but I was a long time shin splint sufferer and am now a happily painfree long distance (about half marathon distance when in shape) runner. Shin splints are repetitive...Okay so I'm NOT a doctor but I was a long time shin splint sufferer and am now a happily painfree long distance (about half marathon distance when in shape) runner.
Shin splints are repetitive strain injuries. The pain is from inflammation in the tissue around your shin bone, which can happen after repeated high impact exercise. Basically, if each foot strike puts so much strain on your shin that your shin bone itself wobbles/rocks/flexes because the structure of your shin bone can't sustain the stress, your muscles and ligaments around it have to compensate. They then get inflammed, press back on your shin bone, and you feel pain. Also, because you're continually overloading your shin bone, you're at risk for stress fractures.
So how do you prevent them? Lower the peak stress on your shin bone per step. Your skeleton can sustain a really amazing amount of continued strain over time, it's the sharp peaks that are getting you. Having never watched you run (feel free to send a video if you like!) the peak strain probably has three primary sources:
- How high your stride is. If you jump higher in the air, you have more time to accelerate on your way down, which means that your legs have to decelerate you that much more to compensate
- How long your stride is. This has a significant effect on the angle of attack — what angle your leg is when your foot hits the ground. If your leg has a positive angle, and your foot is sticking out in front of you slightly, your legs needs to decelerate you horizontally and vertically when you get the ground
- The part of your foot that hits the ground first. My guess if that you're landing on your heels (I was!). When you land on your heels, your calf and other lower leg muscles are already extended, so they can't assist your bones in deceleration.
Ideally, you want to address all three of these. The minimally stressful stride lands on the middle of your foot (don't focus too hard on this, generally speaking, it's easy to overcompensate), with your foot directly under your hips. You also probably want to take way more steps than you normally do — ideally 180 per minute, even if you're not running very fast!
Some tips to try:
- Start and end each run with a few minutes of completely barefoot running. Don't sprint, don't jog, just run at your normal running pace for two to three minutes at most. Pay attention to how your stride changes, and actively experiment. The most comfortable barefoot stride is very often your body's desired stride. You will find it very hard to land on your heels (it hurts!) or take long strides, that's good! Just be wary of landing on the balls of your feet — that's effective for very short distance sprints, but your arches can't keep up the strain for a distance run. Your stride should feel low effort and low tension!
- Run with a metronome, or with music that's 180bpm, for a while. Get used to taking 180 steps per minute. This will help you keep your steps small and light. It literally felt like I was shuffling when I first started doing this.
Take it very easy when you start these exercises, because they're going to load your calves and foot muscles/ligaments WAY more than you're used to!
I can send some videos as well if I have a moment later today
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Comment on In fighting for every black child, did I forget my own? in ~life
smores Link ParentI didn't say that Najya didn't experience hardship. The commenter I was responding to claimed that she wasn't given the "best opportunities." I don't think we have enough information to make such...- Exemplary
I didn't say that Najya didn't experience hardship. The commenter I was responding to claimed that she wasn't given the "best opportunities." I don't think we have enough information to make such a claim, given the contents of this article, where Najya is now a successful sophomore at a wealthy, predominantly white public school. Her first choice of schools, in fact.
Najya is a Black girl in New York City in 2026. There were vanishingly few, if any, paths to her education that didn't involve suffering. By her own words, she appears to have preferred the challenges she did face, of being a smart girl in an under-resourced school, surrounded by people who looked like her and who largely did not assume that she was incapable because of her Blackness, over the challenges that her mother faced of being one of the only Black girls in a school that assumed she was capable of nothing:
She then said she was glad she had not spent her early years in a white environment as many of the Black students at her high school had, because she'd developed a strong sense of her identity and had the confidence to speak up against the casual racism they sometimes experienced. Najya said that spending the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids had taught her that these students weren't smarter or even necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before; the just had more.
I'm not saying that Hannah-Jones did the right thing. I think you could easily make the argument that there was no right thing. That Black parents in the US, especially in extremely segregated school systems like NYC's, are choosing among bad options. But I also think that it's not as simple as "never involve children in movements for righteousness." From the end of the article:
I asked Tate if she felt resentment to her parents, if she wished they had made another choice, doing what was best for her and not the country. "Noh-oh," she said … "I think it was a hard decision, a courageous decision, to put your children on the front line like that. And I probably would do the same thing. I'm glad I did what I did when I did it. Somebody had to do it."
If the parents that sent their kids to white schools during desegregation are heroes, then why isn't Hannah-Jones? If they're not heroes, is it because they exposed their kids to danger? Did they expose them to more danger than if they'd allowed them to grow up in a world where we never even made the first attempt at desegregation in the US?
I think it's overly simplistic to think about this as a story of "ideological good" vs "safety." There are real, material, physical dangers to being a part of a marginalized community. If you and your family can be a part of a movement that reduces the marginalization of your community, then maybe sometimes the short-term increase in suffering is worth it, or even required, for the long term safety of your community. Which your children are a part of.
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Comment on In fighting for every black child, did I forget my own? in ~life
smores Link ParentFair enough, I suppose. I think you and I (and the Hannah-Jones family) have completely incompatible values on this subject 🤷. I believe that she would argue that this kind of thinking is at the...Yes, no question whatsoever.
Fair enough, I suppose. I think you and I (and the Hannah-Jones family) have completely incompatible values on this subject 🤷. I believe that she would argue that this kind of thinking is at the heart of the deeply broken systems of power that propagate and reinforce themselves to the detriment of impoverished students and students of color in the US, and I would agree.
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Comment on In fighting for every black child, did I forget my own? in ~life
smores Link ParentThis feels overly simplistic to me. Best available opportunities for what? On what axis/axes? At what cost? If you could pay an affordable-to-you but exorbitant sum of money for your child to take...This feels overly simplistic to me. Best available opportunities for what? On what axis/axes? At what cost? If you could pay an affordable-to-you but exorbitant sum of money for your child to take another child's place at a high school with a very high acceptance rate to Ivy League colleges, would you? What if you knew that the student you replaced would be forced to go to a school with abysmal test scores and acceptance rates, but your child would otherwise be at a mid-tier school?
What damage to your community are you willing to cause or abide at the expense of your child's success?
It's clear that Hannah-Jones and her husband see a need to balance their responsibility to their daughter with their responsibility to their community, the Black community in New York (and maybe even more specifically, their neighborhood). Could you not see a world where that balance could lead to an overall better life for their daughter, one where she is happier and more fulfilled, even if she, I dunno, makes less total money, or whatever other metric is implied by "best available opportunities"?
Also, it's not clear to me that Najya's opportunities meaningfully suffered from these decisions. She was admitted to her first choice of wealthy, white public high schools. And in fact it seems she probably benefitted significantly from being in a majority Black school for her elementary and middle school years — when she started attending the wealthy white and Asian high school, she experienced a significant amount of racism and anxiety. Her parents did what they had always planned on and hired a private tutor, and she got A's and B's by the end of her first year.
And in the meantime, what came of this family's direct participation in these schools that they otherwise would have skipped? Two very popular articles in The New York Times, for one thing, bringing awareness to the stark reality of segregation in NYC's public school system. Najya herself said that she was glad she hadn't spent her early years in a predominantly white learning environment. And the constant attention and feedback from the Hannah-Jones family to Najya's middle school principal was turned into meaningful (if probably marginal) changes to the school curriculum that may yet help more kids without Najya's affluent parents get a better education.
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Comment on I want an RPG with reverse leveling in ~games
smores LinkI mean this sounds very interesting to me. If someone makes this, I would play it :)I mean this sounds very interesting to me. If someone makes this, I would play it :)
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Comment on Tildes Book Club - Future in ~books
smores LinkI'm not always able to line up my reading schedule with the book club, but I have read a lot of books that I both really enjoyed and would not otherwise have read with this group! I am definitely...I'm not always able to line up my reading schedule with the book club, but I have read a lot of books that I both really enjoyed and would not otherwise have read with this group! I am definitely in favor of its continued existence, if someone feels they have time to run it.
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Comment on Help me choose a small electric car in ~transport
smores Link ParentHm, no, but I bought it used and have moved several times (and changed my name, all for non-sketchy reasons I swear) since, so that's not totally surprising to me. Though if it survives another...Hm, no, but I bought it used and have moved several times (and changed my name, all for non-sketchy reasons I swear) since, so that's not totally surprising to me. Though if it survives another few years, I'll probably call it even rather than replacing the engine — it's already an 11 year old car!
I feel like it's important to note that there's not any particular reason to think that everyone has a singular person that they are going to be happy in a single monogamous relationship with for the rest of their life. Some people seem to find this, some people don't. Sometimes people that appear to have found this actually spend their lives hiding their misery from everyone outside their marriage. Some people seem to be genuinely happy (on net) for their whole lives with their spouse/life partner. Some people have multiple life partners. Some have little (or big) polycule families. Some don't have any life partners at all, but have shorter relationships with many people, either in sequence or simultaneously.
I've been married to my wife for almost 4 years. We've been a monogamous couple for almost 13 (!!). Before that, I had dated a lot of people, which I think was a good thing. I had had some relationships that lasted a week, some that lasted several months, some that lasted years. I learned a lot about what I was like in different relationships and what I liked in my relationship partners. I learned how to be a good partner myself.
With my wife, everything built slowly. At each point that we decided to move forward in our relationship, we both found that we felt like it was past time to take that step, so we did. After two years of dating, an opportunity arose to move into the same apartment building (different apartments), and we both thought "well, we're already spending nearly every night together, this'll make that easier for sure". Then it was time to move across the country for work, and we both thought "well, I really don't want to be on the other side of the country from you". And then it was time to get a dog, and move again, and get another dog, and move again, and at some point we both started thinking "we seem pretty committed to this relationship, do we want to get married? Why?"
For us, getting married wasn't itself a life change. Unlike moving in together, or adopting a dog (or a second dog), or moving across the country together, we didn't think anything would change after we got married (we were right). Rather, marriage was a way for us to tell our families and friends "this person is maximally important to me — I'm starting a family with them, and they're going to be here for a while. You should get to know each other." The framing for our wedding was: let's get all our favorite people in one place so that my favorite people and my wife's favorite people can spend time together and become one big group of our favorite people.
Now we have our first kid, and we're eyeing a seconsd, and I feel endlessly lucky to have found my wife exactly when I did, when both of us were single and compatible and ready to try something new and meaningful. Our favorite thing about our relationship is how well we solve problems, for ourselves and each other and our family. We are able to talk through what we're feeling without feeling judged or ashamed (mostly). We're able to work together to find solutions for the problems we're facing, or just comfort each other when there are no solutions. We're a good team. And we love each other with a deep, knowing love. We really understand and care about each other. We want to meet each other's needs.
But all of that came with time (a lot of time!). We're completely different people now than when we first met. We grew together, rather than apart, and we keep growing together, it seems.