> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.
> a cruise, but a cruise with ~30 other people, not ~6000.
This is the sort of thing that tempts me - an enchanting vision, like something out of "Death on the Nile", only minus the death. Just a small floating hotel that takes you to interesting places, not a floating amusement park combined with buffet.
> An embedded Lisp that supports a true REPL would be a god-send.
I might be misunderstanding your requirements; "embedded" can mean so many things these days. But what do you think of ECL (https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/main.html)?
I am thinking more like Lua where you can create thousands of lua_State, and run them all independently with none of them messing up the global state of the application. Something which is self-contained, portable, runs in a VM, doesn't use global state, whose execution can be controlled from the outside with hooks, etc.
I don't know if ECL is disciplined enough to actually constraint itself in all these ways to be a good embedded citizen.
> I don't want half finished changes forever committed to history.
This is exactly why I hew to squash+rebase. As I like to put it "I don't care about every little sneeze a developer had." Git has spoiled me with this, where I have the power to commit to my private repo anything I damn well please, but in the end I can clean things up and keep the central repo clean and bisectable[0].
Any VCS that doesn't offer these (squash, rebase, bisect) is a complete non-starter for me.
> Most definitely sharp edges, and your bevels, matter when you are really pushing it, especially if you are racing, and most especially if you are on extremely hard or even water-injected snow.
I have to ask, as someone into alpine touring and ski mountaineering (but not racing), what difference would backcountry skiing make to this advice? I imagine you'd need sharpening more often, due to twin factors of A) more rock and hard ice and B) really wanting that control on ungroomed (ie, icy) slopes at high angles.
I don't consider myself "really pushing it", but would like to have every ounce of control I can get when heading downhill. I'm enough of a beginner that I will often side-slip or even just hike completely down a slope I don't like the looks of.
A well sharpened edge can give better grip and precision but comes at the cost of forgiveness.
So it’s a doubled edged…. edge?
Your best bet is to get your skis tuned at a shop that is knowledgeable about backcountry skiing and be brutally honest with them about your ability and the type of terrain you ride. They should set you up appropriately.
A full tune once or twice a year should be sufficient, unless you’re doing over 20 days or so.
If you have significant rock damage to your base or edge you should get it addressed asap.
> So what people do is instead of carving perfectly, they deliberately slip to create some friction and slow themselves down.
As an amateur alpine tourist who is deathly afraid of that feeling of "loss of control" from incredible downhill speeds, this is exactly what I do.
That said, I'm here reading because I want to know if the heuristic for sharpening changes when A) one is mostly off-piste (rock, hard ice, etc) and B) really want those edges sharp for ungroomed (ie, icy) slopes.
> I think interesting take on the same idea I saw lately was "Every Dead Body on Mt. Everest Was Once a Highly Motivated Person". It seems not that new but still.
I mean, everyone dies. Not that I'm elevating Mt. Everest climbers, but at least they're aspiring for something.
Now, if the message you're trying to get across is it takes more than motivation, and life is rife with failure, that I can get behind. But "don't try, there's no point" is the laziest, most self-serving twaddle ever to be uttered (and no, it's not Nihilism either).
Plus C-a, C-k etc. This is one of the reasons I'm so glad I learnt Emacs defaults instead of something else like vi. It works in every program that users readline!
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.