Gaybees

Yes!! Gotta love Kagi and the ability to tailor search results to be exactly what you want.

This is for the US, not sure about elsewhere, but…

The easy and reliable way for most people is probably just bikesdirect.com
I’ll fully admit that their website looks like you’re immediately gonna get scammed, but it’s legit and I’ve ordered from them. Don’t just trust me though, search around and find people who have posted and can verify that they’ve ordered and it’s legit.
They’re importers who sell branded and off/non branded bikes direct from the manufacturers at a heavy discount. Shipping is free, but it takes a pretty long time since they’re shipping it from China

The hard and less reliable way is to ask around. I got to be good friends with the owner of my local bike shop, and he’s the type of person who organizes races and does a lot of custom work, so he knows a couple people who run small bike factories/workshops in the US. They sometimes have bikes that have some marks on the down tube or a slightly messy weld etc. but otherwise perfectly great bikes that they can’t sell. So it’s definitely a long shot and more likely in cities with a big biking scene, but this is where you get the best deal. I got a frame for $300 and they would have sold it for over $1500 but didn’t because the holes for a water bottle cage were milled slightly off center.

If you know where to look you can get a great adult bike for under $500

I can only on road bikes as that’s what I ride. But it seems like the biggest factor that drives up prices is a combination of weight and aerodynamics.

For just regular people, If you know where to look you can get a high end bike that was unfinished at the factory and didn’t get painted/stickered/branded and pay a fraction of the price. A lot of time the branding is what really drives up prices.

But in the very high end it’s really all about weight and aero. Professional racers will pay a hefty premium to knock a few grams off of their bikes total weight, or to get parts that are more aerodynamic and thus give you better power transfer between your bike and the road.

And then the lighter you want to get, you start getting diminished returns, and exponentially higher prices. Like if you compare a 3 pound saddle to a 1 pound saddle it might be a little bit more expensive. But then if you have a 150 gram saddle and want to get a 100 gram saddle that might be 20x the price.

Lighter parts also have to sustain the same amount of forces (and sometimes much much more) as their heavy duty steel counterparts so finding things that can undergo this amount of stress and not break plays into it as well.

And this doesn’t even go into materials. The big new thing is titanium bikes which are ridiculously expensive but will last several lifetimes if taken care of. And then carbon fiber is difficult to make and even more difficult to make well. Much lighter and than other materials but really only flexes in one direction and can be really fragile if under the wrong type of stress.

I don’t think they said anything like that “it can’t be intelligent because it’s wrong sometimes”. It’s more like the AI doesn’t exist outside of the prompts you feed it. Humans can introspect, reflect on the actions we’ve done and question what effect our actions had on the situation. Humans can have desires, we can want to be more accurate, truthful in our actions, and reflect on how we might have failed doing this in the past. AI cannot do this. And we can do this outside of the prompt of a similar situation. AI only takes an input and then generates an output, wipes its hands, and calls it a day. It doesn’t matter if it gave you a correct answer, wrong answer, or gave you a completely illegible sentence.

New cars have all sorts of privacy issues too. I think it was the Mozilla foundation that released a report recently that claimed every single modern electric car harvests as much data as they can about their users and sells it.

Too late, Baldurs gate 3 already came out. And I didn’t need to buy horse armor with real money. 10/10

Exactly. We have all the tools we need to solve society’s problems, we’ve had them for thousands of years. The issue is that it would make it harder for people in power to continue to accumulate power and money, so it won’t happen.

Crypto cannot solve this, it’s actually making the problem worse since it allows very wealthy people to launder dirty money for (almost) free.

Crypto also has an absolutely horrendous reputation with the general population who only hear about the scams, so using it in/with your products severely restricts who will buy your products.

Subtle phrasing can change Christianity into kink in a matter of seconds