This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this stuff is and it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc. I would replace a lot of my custom built mapping tools with Felt if it were possible, so I could focus on our core geospatial processes and not the code to display and play with it in the browser, which is almost as big if not bigger in terms of LOC to maintain.

As mentioned by another commenter, this DuckDB DX as described is basically the same as PostGIS too.

Yes, there are so many great tools to handle the complexity for the capital-G Geospatial work.

I love Felt too! Sam and team have built a great platform. But lots of times a map isn't needed; an analyst just needs it as a column.

PostGIS is also excellent! But having to start up a database server to work with data doesn't lend itself to casual usage.

The beauty of DuckDB is that it's there in a moment and in reach for data generalists.

DuckDB is great, but the fact that it makes it easier for data generalists to make mistakes with geospatial data is mark against it, not in its favor.

To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.

edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed

pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?

This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement

Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings.

If the few players who are using this bat tend to hit that spot naturally, it makes a lot of sense to modify the bat to accommodate it, within the rules like they've done here. Hitting is super, super difficult especially today with how far we're pushing pitchers. Love seeing them try to innovate.

Plus, reminder, most of the team isn't using it. Judge clobbered the ball that day with his normal bat. Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game.

I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road.

Golf used to be a finesse game with moments of power. Now everyone is swinging out of their shoes on every shot, and the strategy of the game has reached Nash equilibrium where you basically want to hit the ball as hard as you can at every opportunity, despite any strategic element on the course.

Professional baseball is always what I point to when I talk about what we've lost. You don't need the most optimized equipment to enjoy the game, in fact, ultimately, you don't even want it. Just use simply, standardized equipment, accept the limitations of that equipment, and enjoy a simple game, where strategy can be used to overcome the limitations of equipment. The best thing that the MLB ever did was reject aluminum bats.

This is all just to say that batters are falling behind and there’s an argument that it hurts the on-field product from an entertainment perspective since balls in play are what we ultimately watch for - if torpedo bats make it more likely that players can bat for higher averages by barreling up the ball more consistently, it will be good for the game.

Other alternative proposals include lowering the mound (famously done in the 60s), adjusting the ball (eg lower seams, which makes it harder for pitchers to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less effective), and so on.

One good (bad?) thing is that to some extent pitchers are starting to reach a biomechanical wall, evidenced by the greatly increased rates of Tommy John surgery, though that is partly also an effect of better surgical techniques and recovery times.

Point is - it’s complicated.

>In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays.

Again, I see this as the tail wagging the dog. It's easy to point to home runs as entertaining, but they a ultimately rather boring. For die hard fans, you want more hits that end up in play, with more strategy, and more opportunity for mistakes and drama. You're not going to get that from home run derbies.

Again, I know it's complicated, but ultimately, most sports organizations face an extremely complicated paradigm. It's fun to follow complicated sports where anything can happen, but it's hard to follow the same sports if you're not already into them. The way you solve this is to make the sports incredibly accessible so people visit games easily and cheaply as entertainment. The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system, and so the fan bases are too large to allow the game to be accessible to most people. You end up making decisions that make television more watchable, and by making things "important" by "breaking records." This ultimately dilutes the game because it makes breaking records less relevant over time.

We've got to the point in golf where someone setting an all time PGA scoring record is basically a yawn-fest, because everyone knows they're not playing the same game.

A few years ago a friend of mine from the UK made the observation that American Football would benefit greatly from a relegation system... every season I have the same reaction. By about the 4th week of the season, the NFL bifurcates into legitimate contenders and everybody else. You end up with Thursday nights and late season games that nobody gives a shit about because it's gonna be a blowout. For that matter - the last 2-3 weeks of the season the playoffs are already set, so half the league has no reason to even play - and the quality of the product on the field matches this. Some kind of two-tier system would go a long way to fix this, and might also help with the larger problem of the bridge between the college and pro games. At the moment, the NFL is maybe the only league that doesn't really have a "minor league" or development league - its the colleges, and between NIL and the portal system, colleges aren't necessarily producing pro-ready players.

Guys are always playing for their jobs if nothing else.

There are only a few games where you can put out tape and careers are short in the NFL. So even if you're on a completely losing team there's plenty to play for.

In those few games where they sit starters, the backups absolutely want to do their best to get starting jobs, the games aren’t uncontested.

Any given Sunday.

The NFL has also been extremely successful in leveling the playing field via salary cap and draft, such that franchises beset by woe can become title contenders within a single year. The most recent of many, many examples is the Washington Commanders. Detroit came before that.

And no, the playoffs are not "already set" before the last 3 weeks. This is completely inaccurate, as anyone who watches the NFL and reads about the near-infinite playoff scenarios at the close of every season already knows.

And lastly, only a Brit with no understanding of the economics of American football would even propose that relegation could work in this sport. It can't. The sport costs far too much for that and any such "relegated" teams would instantly collapse financially. NFL rosters contain 53 players with a practice squad of 17 and gigantic support staffs which absolutely could not survive without the full levels of NFL TV contract funding, stadium revenues, and other financial flows that full NFL membership provides.

And lastly, anyone who is paying any attention to the NFL draft over time knows that there is no issue with colleges producing pro-ready players.

For ball games it sounds mostly fair.

There is a weird situation in cycling where any attempt at improvement (even in riding postures) getting banned by the UCI has become a meme and each year's announcement generates a fest of joke videos.

That would be the other end of the spectrum we're trying to avoid.

It lacks generational fandom, because there is no place for hope in farm teams.

Depends if you are a fan of the Major league team, imo. I enjoyed the Round Rock Express when they were a part of the Houston Astros. I still remember being really excited to see Hunter Pence in Round Rock on his way to the Majors. Lost interest in RR once it became the Texas Rangers farm team thou

There's a counter-example in Cricket.

The game used to be a 5-day long battle with daily skirmishes and tactical changes required according to the ebbs and flows of the weather, the players, the score each day. Sometimes you could win just by exhausting the other team, sometimes you could gain advantage by changing your play style transiently to force the other team to react. The players all wore white uniforms, national pride was wrapped up the success of the country's team and being a Good Sport was the highest ideal.

Then, the powers that be created a shorter variant, the One-Day Match. The players started wearing brightly coloured uniforms, the crowds grew louder and entire categories of strategy were rendered useless as the game finished in 20% of the time. Viewership increased, cricket became "exciting" and the players sometimes achieved rockstar status usually reserved for sports that more easily captured the Australian sporting imagination like swimming and athletics.

The trend was clear: the entertainment value of short-form cricket games were spectacular. In came a myriad of new sponsorship categories for things like domestic household goods ("It's Australia's Favourite Air"), energy drinks and Sports Utility Vehicles that would appeal to the demographic of viewers who only had a "day's length investment" in the game. They started playing popular music in between game pauses and the Gentlemanliness of the game's spirit gave way to Victory as the highest Ideal.

Then, Cricket had it's "YouTube Shorts" moment -- an even more abridged version of the game that only lasted 20 overs per side was born. This hyper-speed version of cricket favoured fast results, flying balls and fan participation like never before. There was now fireworks and rock music and after-parties and more. It was All Killer, No Filler. The goal was to Smash It Outta The Park as much as possible, and every time they did it, a quick ad-break got to play on TV while the fans in the crowd got to sing Seven Nation Army while cheering on whoever caught the ball this time. The domestic competition is even called the "Big Bash League".

Australian Cricket's archetype went from Twelve Magnificent Fellows in Baggy Green Hats to what feels like a monster truck rally with branded personalised beers, bucket hats, and brand-safe team rivalries. Sometimes they even drive a Ute truck around the stadium at half-time.

What I'm trying to say is that popular demand or the voices of those who claim to interpret it say that Spectacle Isn't Boring. They love the exciting moments, and maybe are only willing to tolerate the slow and strategic sides of the game to get to the next Home Run. This trend towards shallow spectacle seems to be happening to all forms of entertainment and I suspect that baseball is not immune.

I watch a spectacle, dreadful, terrible. Every time out is a good reason to blast loud, annoying music and show a group of dancing children on the jumbotron, for a cheerleading exhibition of people who are over 60 or under 13, for a competition in which the girl, or the middle-aged man in attendance, tries to score a bucket with bio-mechanically unsound movements that herald an expensive visit to the orthopedist, for a toss from the in-house entertainers either of T-shirts or socks that gets retirees, who are struggling to get out of their chairs, all excited.

Cops on the court checking that the retirees themselves are not throwing a fit, tickets to be scanned, metal detectors ringing for a key in the pocket, a $15 draft beer. When I leave, I'm exhausted, mortified, wondering who made me do it.

Give me back the sport of 50 years ago, or never invite me again.

Also I don't think your assertion that batters have "fallen behind" pitchers holds up. Shohei Ohtani just became the first player to have 50 homers and 50 stolen bases.

If pitching evolves faster than hitting, does that mean the response time of the hitter becomes shkrter? Can't you move the pitcher further away to give the hitter more time to respond?

https://static.odealo.com/uploads/auction_images//6441500406...

But in comparison these new bats look exactly like the old ones...

The other crisis baseball faces is pitcher arm health. The mere act of throwing a ball 90-105 mph is damaging to the arm, and it only gets worse the harder you throw. Every pitcher is chasing velocity and spin rate since the resulting success and money is undeniable. Pitchers frequently need major surgery and extended year+ time recovering as a result.

If the mound is moved back or lowered pitchers will respond by doubling down on chasing velocity just to stay level, leading to more injuries and UCL replacement surgeries.

The same incentives apply to other options to give batters an edge, like juicing the ball or shrinking the strike zone. Pitchers will respond with velocity and blow up their arms.

They seem, from the outside, like they'll do this no matter what. Move the mound back, allow torpedo bats or don't, do you think pitchers will intentionally pass up the money and success?

For me, Roger Federer's style represents tennis at its most beautiful. His all-court game feels effortless and graceful, almost like a dance. But from a court-level view, it's more of a high-speed chess match built on calculated aggression, constantly pressuring opponents and waiting for the slightest opening to strike a point-winning shot. That level of sophistication and precision wouldn’t be possible without modern racket technology.

I still feel emotionally tied to classic matches from my childhood, especially Federer versus Nadal. But there's no objective reason, because tennis keeps getting better. People worried finesse was disappearing, but players like Alcaraz have brought back drop shots and clever cat-and-mouse tactics against deep-baseline defenders like Zverev and Medvedev. It’s a technique that was once considered too risky to rely on consistently.

In golf, tennis, baseball, basketball, running, & any other sport will keep evolving as technology & athleticism improves. Clinging to older styles feels more like holding onto the past than genuinely appreciating progress. If you can’t enjoy Curry hitting daggers in the Olympic finals or Kiplimo breaking 57 minutes in a half marathon, maybe the problem isn't with the sport itself. Maybe it’s the comfort of past memories holding you back from appreciating what’s happening now.

They’re similar to things we know, but different enough that they haven’t been optimized out of reach by normals, or at least perceived as such, and both have a relatively cheap barrier of entry to get started.

I think we may find 20 years from now the dominate sports have changed up a bit. I have heard that the NFL and MLB for instance are worried about the incoming decline of their sports because they aren’t nearly as popular with people under 35 compared to basketball and other up snd coming sports

People who are passionate about either sport will find them less and less interesting, but 1) most of you will keep watching anyway, and 2) the sports can afford to lose you for the parts you won't watch if it increases the total amount of "seconds people will watch" enough by drawing in enough new eyeballs.

I think the toughest part will be equipment - golf bats cost a fair bit to make but perhaps a price limit might help fix that. You could define club classes akin to how sailing has standard class boats. You could even require that participants make their own for an added twist. I'd keep the current standard balls for now.

Why stop at the bats and balls? What about the format? You could do three holes with a very short shot clock and go straight to the 19th for a bladder wrecking session involving a golf themed drinking game. Instead of running in a Triathlon, do nine holes after the swim and before cycling to the finish. You could replace the cycle phase with knocking a polo ball from a pony along the course to the finish. The swim could be ... yes ... underwater croquet!

Could be a lot of fun even if it never takes off - and that is what any past time ought to be.

I still play with my grandfather's persimmon clubs about 25% of the time.

It's just a coordination problem... but once the dominant professional association the game changes forever, because the vast majority of people just want to emulate the pros, because they grew up dreaming of becoming pro.

Golf is finally trying to do something about this with rolling back the golf ball so that it will have diminishing returns with more power, but the real damage was done in the early 80s by allowing hollow clubs to make the sweet spot bigger, which lead to it becoming absolutely huge in the 90s.

Again, once you go down this road, you'll wake up in 20 years wondering what happened.

So why do I feel the need to dislike golf? I'm a white skinned, middle aged male and my job title is Managing Director. Obviously I should be a passionate small white ball smacker. No I'm not.

I love the idea of golf but hate the ... environment. That is still on me. Our wedding ding dong was held in a hotel that majored in golf (Woodbury/Devon/UK - Nigel Mansell's place), 19 years ago.

I think that golf needs to go back say 300 years. A bloke sporting a kilt would slyly whip out a hidden club on a Sunday (shock, horror) and whack a ball/stone away. Just for the absolute hell of it.

Golf needs to find its joy again. If it does, then I'll join in.

My blogs name is “Wigs on the Green” because that’s and archaic term for a fistfight, and I wasn’t to write like I was willing to burn every bridge if I thought it was good for golf, environmentalism, and the culture.

I learned on muni’s and went to graduate school in Scotland where I learned the snooty aspects of golf are almost exclusively a North American phenomena.

"Wigs on the Green" - love the name ... OK it looks like Georgian/Regency so roughly 16-17C when wigs were popular and they would fly off during a proper scrap.

Maybe there could be a coordination method to only play with blades and persimmons. Then you could mark it in when reporting your score for handicap calculation. That's the make-it-or-break-it decision. If there's a way to get recognition or compensation for playing with worse equipment, then people might do it.

Shorter courses could also be more interesting this way. Then you would have more places to play closer by, eliminating travel etc.

There's some precedent already. Drivers have limitations and most manufacturers are under them (ie just at the limit for things like moment of inertia) but drivers that are outside regulations are available to buy online. Also horizontal distance metering is allowed in competition, but not vertical distance. Most rangefinders have a visible external switch to disable vertical distance. One could expand from those two places where we by regulation already use sub-optimal equipment.

I routinely use "Mickey mouse money" as an American once colourfully described it to me. I bit my lip and added 25% to the bill before presenting it. "Sauce for the goose" ...

I don't want to squash anyone's dreams but I feel like "emulating the pros" undermines the "spirit of the game" a lot. Most sports are literally "bet I can" style games that have then been refined and refined. They don't intrinsically matter to life continuing.

When you've experienced "sledging" in a low skill amateur series and the defence is "the pro's do it" then the fun of the game is gone...

even better- i get to suck on so many shots. but sometimes - glory and feels.

another thing i like to celebrate when doing new sports ks starting with the crappiest gear available. it works and i learn. eventually when i upgrade, i can appreciate the new features and tech. or it’s bogus and doesn’t matter.

probably inappropriate but i find this phrase encouraging - it’s not the arrow, it’s the indian.

When you play, you can play with whatever equipment you want, with a like minded group of players. Keep the game as “pure” as you want or use “The Sure Thing” clubs from top golf. The changes only matter on TV and then specifically if you compare that product to years or decades back. MLB is an incredibly poor example of maintaining purity. the most sacred records in the game were totally shattered, repeatedly, with modern technology and pharmaceuticals all in order to increase TV viewership and no penalties at all. To pretend there is some preservation of purity they are keeping these guys out of the Hall of Fame for a while, but the teams didn’t have fines or lose wins or draft picks or even have any of these guys suspended when everyone knew they were cheating.

It’s this intersection between taking part and entertainment where this odd gatekeeping happens. I hated hydraulic disc brakes and EPS on race bikes, until I tried it, the stuff is great but for myself I still ride bikes without electronics and rim brakes sometimes. I pinch the barbs on my hooks when I fly fish, I know others don’t and probably catch fish that I don’t, but for me I pinch the barbs. Oddly, I find it acceptable to use completely modern lines and rods and can throw a fly way better than any angler could in years ago. I’ve been able to find more satisfaction competing against myself with my own criteria than worrying about the purity on tv.

I guess if you want to compete with them then there is that.

I agree completely with your synopsis, but I'm still a bit torn on whether it is a bad thing... I first golfed using my parent's 1970s era wood headed, aluminum shaft clubs that were extremely limited - it really was entirely about the golfer, not the equipment. Years later when I picked the game back up a bit - it's clear the equipment is doing a lot of work to make the user better. That said, at least at the amateur level - most of us still aren't great golfers, and given that many golfers are older and have physical limitations, it is a bad thing if better equipment improves their game and potentially gives them a few more years of enjoyment over the old stuff?

I have a parallel view on skis - man those old straight long skis were hard on knees and so many skiers were lucky to still be charging after 40. Lotta knee surgeons made good money in the 80s! Then along came parabolic skis and made us all better and safer skiers - almost anyone can shred in today's skis because they are frankly easy to ride. In that case - the technology was a positive innovation.

Your last paragraph nails it - the magic of baseball is its simplicity. Baseball games should take a long time and be an act of leisure. The idea of putting a baserunner on third to speed up a game is an abomination in the same way the addition of something other than a wood bat would detract from the skill of the player swinging it. So I'm with you - this could be some kind of equipment arms race that won't end well.

And I guess that's where I wonder if golf might be a sport where equipment should be restricted at the professional level, the same way that metal bats are not allowed in MLB. Here's another weird way to look at it - you can ingest whatever you want and go play on the company softball team, but an Olympic athlete takes an aspirin and they might get a lifetime ban. It doesn't seem unreasonable to deliberately restrict professional athletics in ways that might constrain it and yet allow us to gauge the athletes in their purest form. Some in the world have advocated for the idea that we should remove all constraints - take all the drugs, use all the physics and science to enhance performance, and let's really see what we can do. It's a fun idea, but like one of the parent posters alluded - we might not like where that all ends up.

Babe Ruth’s wood bat was 44 oz.

Today’s wood bat in MLB are ~33 oz.

The bat Babe Ruth used was so heavy he literally had to swing the bat different than how players can swing the bat today.

There’s a short video on this here: https://youtu.be/P_uiHUJg7zs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat

—-

Fishing has even undergone this technical change.

FFS (Front Facing Sonar) has completely changed the sport of fishing tournaments, since now you can literally identify where to cast (direction and depth) to catch a fish … and you can even target the fish by their size.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Dw-l_Smuqj8?si=QVvuAoNlfAb_-9F2

So the difference between Babe's bat and today's is about the weight of 55 quarters (a roll and a half). Years of doing laundry at laundromats have given me a keen sense of how much handfuls of quarters weigh, so I find this actually pretty handy.

Just in case:

* A nickel is exactly 5 grams.

* A penny (1982+) is 2.5 grams.

* A dime is 0.08 ounces.

* A quarter is 0.2 ounces.

* 5 rolls of nickels = 1 kilogram

* 2 rolls of quarters = 1 pound.

Why did the U.S. Mint switch between even metric and even imperial units? Probably has to do with the changing metals in those coins. That said, the new small dollar coin is 8.1g / 0.286oz which makes no sense at all. It is, however, exactly 2mm thick.

Surely any strategy around loading up bases to stack the deck for your strongest hitter remains, it seems like this levels between hitters more than from hitter to pitcher?

Not at all! Always swinging for home runs is a recipe for a lot of strike outs. Singles and doubles win games.

Though, maybe not for long.

It's the clubs and everyone knows it but nobody wants to admit it because the club manufacturers are the money behind the game.

You give a pro a persimmon driver and 70's blades and it doesn't matter if they're hitting a modern ball or the pre-pro v's from the 90s... you can't hit it out of your shoes because you won't be able to hit the sweet spot.

Yes, the ball is a problem, but it's not the problem. The problem is exactly that we've allowed the sweet spot to become too big, which has led to the end of the finesse aspect of the game.

pros are going to be better with any type of equipment, and they're going to be better at finesse, but doesn't a bigger sweet spot allow amateurs to play with more finesse than they could otherwise? it means more reliably being able to fade, draw, etc. rather than slice and hook, and it means more people can enjoy the game.

Here is Sam Snead in his prime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjEJgC5nYXw

Here is Bryson warming up today: https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1joeiap/vijay_just_lo...

It's like absolute night and day. It used to be a combination of balance and power. Now it's just brute force. The way Bryson is playing just isn't possible with a persimmon.

If you don't like a particular thing in golf, then don't use that particular thing. And if it destroys the entertainment value, then don't watch that.

This is very similar to how speedruns for video games have multiple categories with different rulesets, and you pick whichever one you like best.

That is not at all how tournament/competitive golf works. And that's what sets the tone for the whole sport.

With modern golf, yes. This is only because of the advent of television. Match-play used to dominate the game, and is still advocated my many (myself included), which allows direct competition, and introduces risk-reward strategy depending on how the other player plays.

Very different from the direct interaction you have in a game like Baseball.

Indy car is every team essentially driving the same car. (The standardization you’re talking about)

F1 however, establishes guardrails for what teams can & cannot do. And then lets the teams innovate within those definitions.

There's innovation happening on both ends.

Golf is also an arms race too. Look at the lengths of golf courses over the last 50 years. It's comical. It used to be 6000 yards was a championship course... now it's over 8000.

They used to put bunkers in front of greens to make them more challenging, but the equipment evolve to maximize height, and stop the ball on a dime. It's completely convoluted, because we just keep letting technology overcome every obstacle, but players don't like the obstacles, but you're not supposed to like the obstacles. So we let the tech overcome those obstacles, and then we build new, more difficult obstacles, and it's a never ending process of legalizing more tech, and then building more obstacles. And it continues until the game is unrecognizable from what it was a half century earlier.

But in all seriousness there is a difference between something that is forgiving and something that requires a high degree of practice to master. If its a hobby, get what is forgiving.

If you can't see the wisdom in that advice, well you can lead a horse to water eh.

I know its unpopular opinion basically anywhere, but I detest most professional sports that have enough money in them for enough time. It literally and visibly corrupts game. Football (and hockey, basketball etc.) became monopoly game long time ago. Cycling became much worse re doping than bodybuilding ffs, literally everybody is dosing and the game is only about better evasion of newer compounds from ever-evolving tests. And so on.

There is very little former spirit of why games like olympics started. Just read about first few olympics how they were done. Very respectable achievements even if not the best times. But times should be largely irrelevant, it should be way more about team efforts, camaraderie, and internal motivation. Now its just chasing sponsors, promotions, routing to instagram accounts in bikinis for female athletes. I get it, it generates tons of cash, but I do sports and like them for sports, nothing else.

In contrary I still love sports cca on fringe, where sportsmen do it more for the love of it than anything more pragmatical. Thats real passion, not manufactured ones with big redbull or adidas logos all over the place and contracts running in millions or more.

When I extend it to personal level - I like running just by myself, no watch to track me. I know how much effort I do, every sporty person does very well. I don't care about my times, laps, energy spent, progression, getting better every week and so on. That's not a good reason to do it and sustain long term (apart from unhealthily competitive persons but thats another story).

So all the tech improvements are doing is letting the average duffer keep it closer to the fairway and maybe have some fun, instead of getting so frustrated they quit.

On the other hand, a real MLB pitcher is not just throwing fastballs down the middle.

How cheap could one prototype a 'programmable' pitch machine that can handle the scenarios one would want to practice against?

My intuition tells me this whole thing is stupid and a fad, sure you might get slightly more mass behind the ball on perfectly barreled swings, but you get so few of those on the year already, were they already home runs of XBH on the old bat? And what are we losing on mishits with the skinny end of barrel, since after all hitting is more than just perfect swings caught in the right spot. Seems like more of a push towards feast or famine, 3 outcome baseball, which I personally just ain't a fan of.

Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.

https://www.therunningweek.com/post/carbon-plate-running-sho...

You could probably accomplish something similar by strictly capping spending per team to force people to do real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but the result would be a very different sport that would appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller) audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.

This is simply not reflected very well in how professional sports are structured. If this were really a priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing the influence of performance enhancing drugs.

Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting children, but we're already buying and selling humans. How good of an influence was this to begin with?

But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.

(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)

It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.

Edit: yup, https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders. Kind of an orthogonal issue to disproportionate spending of teams, though.

It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:

- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise

- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning

Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff. (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)

In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.

Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable, then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for entertainment of the audience.

Customization of equipment should always be fine unless it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.

Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue to have the traditional rules to keep things "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just go full tilt.

Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch. Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.

This is because winning in this game is seen as an achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement-- after all, there are many world records that nobody cares about.

There's a reason someone might prefer a sport over seeing a circus performance.

You’re arguing that others should not be allowed because you don’t like it.

All the major sports alter their rules every year to increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks, NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL challenges and reviews, etc.

There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident opinions if that's the case.

But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least risk injury.

I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive though. They certainly are in tennis.

The problem here is of course that you probably won't get the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes who feel they have literally no other option in life.

The spirit of fair competition (and thus ordering teams according to some predefined metric) is very important to most sports.

Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.

Are you suggesting the rules of sports are a natural property of the universe? It’s all completely arbitrary. That’s kind of the point: we watch people perform these arbitrary tasks and then we celebrate.

It's called worker safety.

F1 introduced a cost cap to stop the top manufactures from being able to test and develop everything they want to.

F1's regulations are very strict and completely artificial, just not quite so strict as to allow only 1 car. This is both for safety and cost control. In Schumacher's days, why did ferrari dominate so much? Because they have a private circuit, a much larger budget than anyone, and the racers flew back to the factory to spend long day after long day of testing right next to where the parts where being manufactured. We'd not have a full grid if anyone had to compete with budgets like that

Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now

The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow

Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and try. The best don't win neccesarily, just who handles the drugs the best

Would you be willing to be the guinea pig?

It's no different than asking if workers should be allowed to work without PPE.

The problem was not offered as your sibling comment as a forced decision. Some people choose to juice, others do not. That same logic applied to if you want to do it, here's the waiver to acknowledge it was your decision. I can feel sorry for someone's family for being related to a dunce, but no empathy is required on my part for the dunce.

Why in the world would this have any bearing on the conversation? What point are you trying to make?

If the former, I regret to inform you: you are a psycopath.

If the latter, then please go read some Nassim Taleb and refrain from opining on what is acceptable risks for others unless you yourself are willing to pay for the consequences.

Always wondered why the NFL doesn't ban sticky gloves.

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/56/66/25/12281186/4/960x0.webp

Sanding and finishing are subsequent steps.

I think it's an interesting mixup.

From a marketing standpoint;

- If certain batters have their 'ridge' in a specific spot/range, it adds marketability. e.x. 'This is the bat ????[0] uses'.

- OTOH the first danger with this is that most folks don't have the same stature/etc as the hitter in question, so it doesn't mean much.

- Lots of fan dollars to be made here though.

From a Game Standpoint:

- It vaguely detracts from accessibility; if this goes full, that means that 'pros' get a sort of custom bat that other leagues don't get, and from my view that impacts how folks are viewed.

- It's also a challenge of 'doing well with a good standard' vs 'doing well with a custom thing that happens to fit regs'. I suppose examples of other sports having similar (where a 'custom' item per player that fits regs, is legal for the sport and provides clear benefit) would make me feel a little better about this, maybe.

The Weird/offball:

- Saw a youtube video recently claiming some countries/municipalites have specific laws about not being allowed to carry a bat unless there was a glove and/or ball also involved in the process, would these also fall into it? (I said it was weird/offball, no I don't live in such a region [1], just morbid curiosity.)

[0] - It's been a minute since I've looked at Tigers stats who the hell are these folks and no wonder my family doesn't talk about baseball anymore

[1] - Per [0] I can at best tell funny stories about DPD and potato launchers I designed and had to explain to the police and non-authorized users and how same precinct gave specific advice as to "if we had to use a firearm in a home invasion, here is how we treat as self defense".

There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)

Totally ignorant about baseball, but would wearing thick padded gloves help? Do major leaguers build up calluses to help?

[Edit] You do build up some crazy calluses swinging a bat for hours upon hours of practice. They absolutely don't help, like at all, when you strike a ball in on the handle of the bat. It always hurts.

I assume that when not hit in the sweet spot a lot of the energy gets transformed into vibrations in the bat. Those vibrations then hurt your wrist/arm because flesh absorbs ~100 Hz vibrations far more than wood does.

The bat will add probably 0.2-0.5% longer bombs statistically but it’s still a skill of the player at bat that makes the difference.

> “The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge said a day after his third career three-homer game. “Why try to change something?”

He's certainly not wrong!

Is this one of those situations where the Yankees are even still paying part of his salary?

There is a marked difference between hitting it in the sweet spot and not.

A very common flow for me when I see something weird on adsb or fr24 is to grab the ICAO address of the plane and search it on https://app.airframes.io/ to see if it was sending out any ACARS messages so I can... see what the drama was ha!

It's a really fun hobby if you find this stuff interesting. You can pick up an SDR online for like $30 USD and be able to do all this without Internet, above your own home.

https://www.flightradar24.com/add-coverage

Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z.

This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status.

So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression.

Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?".

This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words.

There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.

for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommuni...

Make hay while the sun shines.

Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?

/bestcomments is a great place to discover these types of comments, in case someone has missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

With the passage of time I’m not who they want in the big end of that funnel anymore anyway, so maybe I just don’t see it. But the founder class back then had an appeal that they don’t today to me. I’m sure it’s naïveté but I believed people wanted to change the world back then (while making money) and it was inspiring. Now I only believe people are in it for money, which is the opposite of inspiring

- you can't outsource sales before pmf, and you probably don't have pmf yet

- talk to (at least) a potential customer every day, keep track of what you said and how they responded

- make and give your leads materials they can use to sell internally, figure out who makes decisions (probably not who you talked to first) and make sure it's relevant to them; you may need multiple versions

- aggressively think about pmf, don't worry too much about official definitions here. just ask yourself: "if i took a month long vacation, could sales ostensibly be on autopilot?" if no, you don't have it yet. if yes, take the vacation you're doing great

- look for pmf by making your idea smaller, not bigger, or you will waste money and time

- when you can make a product idea really tiny in scope, and someone will still pay for it, you've identified a strong pain point you can exploit (aka charge for). Build the product/platform around that, not the other way around. Never convince yourself you have to build a huge thing before you can sell it, you're most likely wrong. optimize for finding that tiny scope early on

- when i say look for or find or think about pmf i mean come up with a way to pitch your product, and then pitch it to someone new. then compare that to the last times you did it. you have to talk to a lot of people for this to work, way more than you think. your product will not sell itself, you will have to talk to a lot of people. as many as physically possible to get the feedback you need to create a sales cycle that runs without you i.e. pmf. this is something that took me multiple years to internalize. you're just never talking to enough potential customers

- don't ignore seo, and pick names that are easy to say and read; figure out where your customers consume media and get your content there. every business will be different here, and you gotta get creative

- something i saw on reddit that stuck with me: first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution. i operationalize this as: do not begin engineering a product until you're clear on how it will be marketed and sold, bonus points if you can convince someone to sign a contract saying they want it-- and remember in B2B/gov this can (should?) be a sales channel partner not just an end-user

then there's the bigger resellers like cdw or insight and companies like carahsoft and similar

some research firms looking at grants will work with you if you offer something innovative to add to their application

it's just making as many connections as possible, everyone wants to make money so just be honest with people and usually they're open to it

*fixed a typo

This!! And your related explanation is so good!