Disc brakes are great!
#251
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I want to know if that avatar photo is really you or just for effect to go with your shtick, clearly designed to wind people up and create the backlash you always receive.
I find it hard to believe that you are being genuine. Do you really think people here are getting paid by Big Bike to argue against your repetitive shtick?
I find it hard to believe that you are being genuine. Do you really think people here are getting paid by Big Bike to argue against your repetitive shtick?
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#252
ignominious poltroon
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Last time I mentioned Taylor Swift here I got banned, but I’ll try again, because people are unaware.
Celebrities, actors, and musicians have long been controlled by 3 letter agencies to sway public opinion. With the internet and the “democratization of media” it’s way easier for a random to blow up and get a following. It used to be gatekept by the record agencies and kingmakers, but now a Fortnite streamer can have a bigger following than a titan of the entertainment industry.
naturally, this is unsettling for those who seek to control the media sphere and influence public opinion. The days of Prince, Evis, or other cultural icons being important to large swaths of the public are over. The promotion of Taylor Swift across so many media platforms is a last ditch effort by the media moguls to artificially inflate her popularity. She’s one of the last big names still out there making music, and I won’t get into her history but it’s a deep dive. She’s controlled, and used to influence public opinion.
Also for anyone listening to reports about Q-anon adjacent conspiracy theories regarding Swift helping Biden, it’s a complete lie. Nobody is suggesting that, and the media is clamoring around a fake story to stoke division and increase Taylor’s popularity.
Celebrities, actors, and musicians have long been controlled by 3 letter agencies to sway public opinion. With the internet and the “democratization of media” it’s way easier for a random to blow up and get a following. It used to be gatekept by the record agencies and kingmakers, but now a Fortnite streamer can have a bigger following than a titan of the entertainment industry.
naturally, this is unsettling for those who seek to control the media sphere and influence public opinion. The days of Prince, Evis, or other cultural icons being important to large swaths of the public are over. The promotion of Taylor Swift across so many media platforms is a last ditch effort by the media moguls to artificially inflate her popularity. She’s one of the last big names still out there making music, and I won’t get into her history but it’s a deep dive. She’s controlled, and used to influence public opinion.
Also for anyone listening to reports about Q-anon adjacent conspiracy theories regarding Swift helping Biden, it’s a complete lie. Nobody is suggesting that, and the media is clamoring around a fake story to stoke division and increase Taylor’s popularity.
Except different. Robert Hunter had talent, and they only influenced the same 650 people, over and over again.
Last edited by Polaris OBark; 02-17-24 at 06:08 PM. Reason: added link
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#253
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The heirs of some gentleman named Moore in Oklahoma City are going to pay me the prevailing steel scrap rate for all the Takaras I can get my boney fingers on.
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#254
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W...T...F...that is all...now go about your day and do something productive or at least pretend to...
#255
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Eleven pages of chatter....And still no one has given a single solid reason why, for my riding and my bikes, I should shun disc brakes.
#256
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Maybe because we wouldn't presume to dictate what you should do. We can only tell you why we prefer or shun disc brakes. If you go back through those eleven pages, you'll find plenty of opinions, kindly and delicately expressed.
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#258
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#259
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Unsettling indeed. Back to disc brakes - specifically on performance road bikes where they are heavy, fussy and unnecessary.
Whenever someone posts an opinion contrary to the current industry trend/fad, there is an immediate pile-on from the paid industry influencers, followed by a flood of irrelevant silly content perhaps designed to dilute the thread or cause it to be terminated? Deliberate tactic so that buyers looking for unbased experienced advice can only see the industry dogma?
Just so we know who is who, can we get a show of hands as to who works directly in the industry or is paid by the industry to spawn social media content? AI chatbots too please.
Whenever someone posts an opinion contrary to the current industry trend/fad, there is an immediate pile-on from the paid industry influencers, followed by a flood of irrelevant silly content perhaps designed to dilute the thread or cause it to be terminated? Deliberate tactic so that buyers looking for unbased experienced advice can only see the industry dogma?
Just so we know who is who, can we get a show of hands as to who works directly in the industry or is paid by the industry to spawn social media content? AI chatbots too please.
"I can't name names for privacy reasons.
The gist of what I do is teach computers to do sentiment analysis on social media posts that are of interest to clients, tag them based on their various properties (author, sentiments, keywords, etc), and add them to a giant graph of all social media posts we're interested in, who else has retweeted them or the link, who responded to them, etc. We use this to estimate exposure numbers and influence, and try to isolate the key people in a social graph which are causing an opinion to form. (Ideally, on the order of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.)
Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense ****** posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)
Careful analysis of online communities (or reading the papers where they got caught) would tell you that various nations are using similar technologies against their citizens and other nations. It's not entirely about business that China is concerned with building a domestic social network, and DARPA runs extensive research programs on social graph analysis and influence, on behalf of the Pentagon."
Last edited by LarrySellerz; 02-18-24 at 01:25 PM.
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#263
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When you look at the world, it is important to remember - "Never Attribute to Malice That Which Is Adequately Explained by Stupidity"
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For anyone interested, here's a 2022 article published in the Decision Analytics Journal:
A systematic review of social media-based sentiment analysis: Emerging trends and challenges
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FYI, I've reported my previous post and LarrySellerz' post 260 for being potentially too political (for General Cycling, anyway).
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The tendency to want to silence someone when they speak something that makes you uncomfortable is human and understandable, I’m not angry, but you should try to do better. Especially with the algorithms putting us into echo chambers.
I’ve smoked salvia Divinorum a few times this last month, and it’s made me more open minded to outlandish theories.
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I'm confused now. Are you asserting that I called you or anyone else dumb or gullible? Or that my opinions were indisputable fact? If I did, I apologize. I've been diligently drinking myself to death, so if I said something hurtful, I'm very sorry.
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#271
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I want to know if that avatar photo is really you or just for effect to go with your shtick, clearly designed to wind people up and create the backlash you always receive.
I find it hard to believe that you are being genuine. Do you really think people here are getting paid by Big Bike to argue against your repetitive shtick?
I find it hard to believe that you are being genuine. Do you really think people here are getting paid by Big Bike to argue against your repetitive shtick?
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#272
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calling my post political is absurd. I’ll probably receive a ban, and tbh you should feel bad about that. I know you’re confused by my postings, you said you think I’m a performance artist earlier in this thread, which is a more personal attack than almost anything in my post history.
The tendency to want to silence someone when they speak something that makes you uncomfortable is human and understandable, I’m not angry, but you should try to do better. Especially with the algorithms putting us into echo chambers.
I’ve smoked salvia Divinorum a few times this last month, and it’s made me more open minded to outlandish theories.
The tendency to want to silence someone when they speak something that makes you uncomfortable is human and understandable, I’m not angry, but you should try to do better. Especially with the algorithms putting us into echo chambers.
I’ve smoked salvia Divinorum a few times this last month, and it’s made me more open minded to outlandish theories.
First: My "Theater major" post was simply meant to demonstrate how easy it is to come up with a conspiracy theory on the strength of scanty or nonexistent evidence. You and I both know no one could take it seriously.
Second: Before you added the post I quoted here, I had pretty much no idea that "sentiment-based" marketing analysis existed, and certainly no idea that the field of study had advanced so far. Honestly, having barely skimmed the article that I linked to, I'm shocked and depressed.
Despite that, and despite the fact that I'd almost rather not know it existed, I'm grateful to you for providing the information that sent me off to find out about it.
Third and finally, you absolutely do not deserve an infraction. You're far from only one who has gone off on a tangent in this thread. I reported your post and mine only because the frightening topic of machine learning being used to manipulate our reactions doesn't feel much like a General Cycling topic, or even Foo.
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#273
Senior Member
The higher-end carbon bikes that I lifted up all weighed more than any of my carbon road bikes, some considerably more. More than even my 20-year old titanium bikes.
So if you need better braking in the rain, at the expense of a couple of extra pounds of bike weight, and you are willing to spend $3k more for a 2024 bike relative to a good used high-end 2015 rim brake model, then these bikes would be for you.
BTW: I'm not an AI influencer bot; I think we need to include this disclaimer on posts going forward.
#274
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#275
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Sorry, I wasn’t referring to you.