Cosine Thoughts

My bow arrived today. A 14kg Jikishin 2. Up 4kg from the bow I was using at the dojo. And I feel... humbled. Some of it was expected. Some was not. All of it is good though. Experiences. Expected was the extra time to make my first nakajikake for the new bow. I haven't done one in over a year. I made a slight mistake in the direction I wrapped the top of the tsuru, but fixed it. Beyond that, I haven't had a chance to shoot with it yet, and while I did test out a similar bow at the dojo recently, I only fired two arrows with it. I expect to be humbled further the first time I need to make it through a full practice with it. I also expected to hit issues with the nigirikawa. Never wrapped one before. It went a lot better than I expected. It isn't perfect, but it is actually a lot closer to perfect than I expected. Next time I need to go a bit slower in the wrapping and make sure the edges are flush. Perhaps even a bit more than flush. I don't remember seeing the tiny gaps...

So, the latest buzz is about the deal between China and Canada which allows the 100% EV tariff to be dropped on some number of sales, starting at 49000 and increasing over the term of the agreement. The skepticism is whether cheaper EVs will actually show up, or if already present companies like Tesla and Volvo will simply consume the quota and pocket the difference.   Honestly, I don't think that the deal was really about EVs but rather about reopening trade negotiations and tossing rural canola farmers a lifeline. However, I also think that the cheaper EVs will come.  The doubters think EVs aren't profitable enough in the first place, or as mentioned that greedy companies will simply hoover up the allocations. As you can tell, I have a bit of a disagreement. Problem #1 is China and export controls. With the number of units able to dodge the tariff being limited, I find it highly unlikely that China won't impose its own controls on top of these exports. Which is to say, ...

A new format and process for my Kyudo posts. I'm going to start by summarizing before I write. This is to keep me on topic before I write. Then I'll provide glossary of Kyudo terms at the beginning, followed by the post.   Glossary: YUGAERI (弓返り) - The way the bow rotates as the arrow is fired, bringing the string around to the outer forearm. TENOUCHI (手の内) - The proper way to grip the bow in Kyudo.  YUNDE (弓手) - The (left) hand which holds the bow.  METE (馬手) - The (right) glove hand.  UCHIOKOSHI (打ち起こし) -  The fourth stage of shooting in Kyudo where the bow is raised up above the head. HIKIWAKE (引き分け) - This fifth stage of shooting in Kyudo, where the draw of the bow begins. DAISAN (大三) - A intermediate in stage during HIKIWAKE where there is a pause before proceeding into KAI. KAI (会) - The sixth stage of shooting in Kyudo. Stretching out in forward and back into a full draw. HANARE (離れ) - The seventh stage of shooting in Kyudo. The point where the arrow is r...

My last post talked about how I use AI to help with some Japanese language learning. That process reminded me of one of my biggest nags about it; it always seems to want to start a conversation. Is that a problem? Context, I suppose, is everything here. I didn't ask Gemini to act like a friend or to try and converse with me. I asked it to help me with my translations. Regardless, every single chat prompt would end with it asking me some sort of follow up question. Most of those didn't even revolve around learning Japanese. I should be able to specify that I only want it to answer the questions and not provide any follow up or additional conversational elements. And it should listen. I don't agree that it should be the default.  Now, you might ask, "why is this a problem"?  Because running AI isn't free. The data centers running these things are power hungry, ecological nightmares. And these LLMs have gotten very good at conversing. But there is no value to hav...

I think a good way to understand the proper usage of AI is with a practical example. From a coding perspective, I don't always have a ready made example, but I use it with my language learning in a similar fashion, and my Japanese is poor enough still that I can pick an arbitrary sentence of enough complexity and benefit from it. I recently switched from Windows to Linux on my computer and finally setup my Japanese Input. This sentence was something I wanted to convey in a group chat in Japanese earlier. My first step in just a normal stream of though. What is my first best guess at how to form this sentence? 最近パソコンに「Windows」から「Linux」までかえました、そして遂に今日は日本語の入力が設定された。 Next question: How confident am I in that answer? Honestly, this one I felt was about 60% of the way there. My guess was that it was coherent, but that there were things I could improve upon to make it more natural sounding. So, next step. Can I think of any ways on my own, after re-reading this, to improve on it further? ...

So I pulled the trigger and bought a Steam Deck (256GB LCD) while it was on sale for the Black Friday sale. Then I grabbed a 1TB nvme drive and a USB hub. General thoughts? It is a great device. It isn't without issues, but it is definitely a good value buy. Almost too good a value, made all the better by recent hardware price increases. This is no silver bullet. The battery life isn't going to make waves, especially on the LCD model and there are going to be games that you can't play or which don't play well. I also hit a few times where the Deck froze on me for seemingly no reason, though always when launching a game so it never impacted game play. Oh, and I've yet to successfully get the thing to install Docker, but that is not a problem most people care about and there are VM related solutions to that particular issue (I just happen to want it running natively on the device). And that is really the extent of the "bad". And I put bad in quotes because t...