If anyone's interested, the shoe being purchasable by the general public is a condition of them being deemed legal for pros, after a crackdown on Supershoes a few years ago.
The other conditions as I recall are there is only allowed to be one carbon plate in them and a maximum stack height of 40mm.
It really is incredible that Nike kicked off this Supershoe arms race ten years ago and spent (presumably) an incredible amount on R&D, marketing and hype to try and complete the mission of being the first shoe to go Sub-2, and Adidas has pipped them at the last minute... twice in one race. Oh to be a fly on the wall at HQ today...
Though I assume they made a lot of that cash back in the interim selling these things to weekend warrior suckers like myself!
Most superfoam shoes actually last longer than older EVA-based foams:
> Improved durability: Supercritical foaming produces a more consistent cell structure in a midsole. This should translate to pressure and weight being more evenly distributed, which should lead to greater durability of the midsole. “We’ve done a lot of testing of what foams look like on a dynamic impactor fresh versus 300 or 500 miles later, and we see less degradation in those materials longer-term,” FitzPatrick says.
> At least in terms of the midsole’s life span, super foams may have done away with the conventional benchmark that running shoes last about 300 miles. “I think it’s a dated standard,” Caprara of Brooks says. “It’s an easy go-to to help simplify. But every foam is different, and it’s not just the foam—it’s how it’s constructed, the shoe’s geometry, the rubber underneath it. There are so many factors. If I were to tell you the Glycerin Max lasts 300 miles, that’s probably less accurate than it is accurate. It’s probably closer to 500.”
You don't need to be competing on the world stage to enjoy some of the benefits of Alpha flys or those pumas. 500 for the new Adidas does seem a little silly though.
While the foam may last longer than older EVA foam shoes, the outsoles of the shoes have gotten ridiculously thin these days.
The continental rubber outsole on these Adidas Adios Pro EVO 3 shoes are so thin (less than two sheets of paper, I think), that they don't even appear in side/profile views of the shoes. The outsole doesn't even extend the length of the entire shoe, it stops around the middle of the shoe. So heel strikers aren't welcome and will have loads of fun in wet weather. see https://www.adidas.com/us/adizero-adios-pro-evo-3/KH7678.htm...
In general, these high stack, forward-leaning shoes are meant for going straight ahead - imagine ladies' high heel shoes with an inch and a half of foam on the bottom - any sharp turns will force the runner to slow down or they'll twist their ankles. Looking at the London Marathon course, https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/london-marathon/cours..., there's about twenty ninety-degree or sharper turns.
What sort of gain would that be for a non-world class runner? I'm unfamiliar with high level running, but I'm curious as in most sports these sort of things provide a small benefit at the top level (seems to be about a ~3% reduction in times over the past decade since the shoe wars began), and that quickly becomes statistical noise outside of the top due to diminishing returns.
But if you really want to reduce your marathon time by 15 minutes, then gaining a few minutes from better shoes, a few minutes from a high altitude training camp/holiday in Flagstaff/Dolomites, and a few minutes from a day at a gait analysis centre, may be worthwhile - or atleast a fun way to spend money on your hobby.
What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in charge of the China-Russia relationship. It's such a stupid plan for the US that you might think it was designed by Putin himself.
You started well, but then the train got derailed...
Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).
Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.
But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.
> Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles
This never made much sense.
Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller munitions from local seaboards (subs). This idea that NATO is somehow threatening by proximity is not credible. The answer to it would not be to rush headlong into a conflict to bring those forces to bear and bring your border to theirs anyway.
It looks more like the Ukraine conflict has been about securing resources, testing capabilities, and demographics (tied to capabilities). Russia wanted more resources to sell to partners and wanted to test the (declining) capability of it's own forces.
You are applying western thinking (acquiring captive markets, NATO is a force of good, surely not threatening) to Russia. Big fail, they think differently.
It is obviously clear that Ukraine is not about securing resources: Given the costs of war (Russia knew the sanctions will be coming, just did not think their funds will be frozen), the cost-benefit is simply not there. Given the obvious economic drawbacks of attacking Ukraine, the only explanation that makes sense is the national security one. You go to war to 'test capabilities' only if it is a minor thing without serious consequences, which Ukraine war definitively does not fit.
If China cannot get oil from the middle east what happens to China and China-Russia relations? I didn't say there would be hostilities just Russia would become potentially the more dominant partner.
If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?
1) Russia will happily supply China with oil and other resources, and China will pay by industrial good and all other stuff they produce. China is working really hard on getting rid of dependence on foreign energy sources, any leverage Russia might get if it became the sole supplier of oil/gas to China is very temporary and Russia knows it. Furthermore, unlike USA, it has no delusion of ever dominating China - China already has them by the balls.
2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
That's the easy way out, isn't it? Why argue on merit of anything you don't like, just name it Russian propaganda.
Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)
> Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
It's an act, and everyone in Russia knows that it's an act. Acting this way gets the dumber kind of Western politicians to carefully tiptoe around Russia; that is the value this act provides.
There are many western authoritative sources documenting that.
Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe.
Or Merkel's memoirs.
Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO.
But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe....
Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomatically engage them, open intelligence, military and financial support of Ukraine 'carefully tiptoing'?What do you propose instead? Open WW3? I am really curious.
You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war.
As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-formal circles of imperialists and neo-nazis, nor anywhere inbetween, is paranoid about the US, NATO and the West in general. What is there to be paranoid about? They see the West in general as utterly impotent, making big words, but not backing it up with a stick. This week one year ago, Trump wrote "Vladimir, STOP!" in response to a massive air attack on Kyiv. Putin didn't, and what followed? A bunch of nothing.
The answer to your question about tiptoeing is abundantly clear to anyone familiar enough with Russian culture to know what zek and kagebeshnik mean and how to deal with them. Politely asking them to stop has never worked. The idea that you have to talk with people in the language they understand is hardly a novel one.
Sigh, joke sources. Burns and Kennan also, right? Anybody who actually understood Russians is a joke. Study a bit, and not only neocon think tank sources, but from the people who actually understood Russians (there are practically none left in recent administrations).
Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.
I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
They don't "actually understand Russians" and I don't need to study them to see through it. I was born in the USSR. Lived experience makes most foreign "Russia experts" look like the nerds who are very into Japanese or Korean culture and have memorized a bit of superficial trivia, but don't actually know at all how the society functions and are completely helpless at navigating it.
For example, Kennan warned in 1997 that accepting Eastern European countries into NATO would trigger a pivot toward authoritarianism in Russia. The pivot was well underway by that time. The breaking point was the genocidal war against Chechens that Russia launched in late 1994. Internally, it eroded the positions of the reformists and liberals who were seen as weak, and contributed to the rise of the alliance between crony oligarchs and KGB old-timers to undermine democracy and market reforms and restore state-controlled monopolies as their personal piggy banks. Exernally, the Chechen war proved to Russia's neighbors that Russia was no different from the USSR and that transgressions into their countries were only a matter of time. This made them run toward NATO was fast as they could. And personally, Putin, who had started out as an enforcer to St Petersburg's major, was already on his meteoric rise and had broken through to Moscow and joined the presidential administration by 1996.
For reasons that still elude me, western "Russia experts" prefer to believe noble-savage type myths like "NATO paranoia" and not treat Russians as capable people who have their own agenda. It's almost comical how they refuse to listen to what Russians are discussing among themselves, and that applies especially to your question about what should've been done:
> I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
Yes. That's what Igor Girkin, the commander of the 2014 invasion force, has said. First, that he and his commandos who attacked the city of Slovyansk are directly responsible for igniting the war. Second, that if NATO had intervened in support of Ukraine and bombed them like the Serbian forces in Yugoslavia, they would have lost and that would have been the end of it.
The second opportunity was on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Had forces like the 82nd and 101st Airborne been deployed to likely attack paths such as Hostomel airport, the invasion would have been called off out of fear of direct confrontation with the US. Instead, Biden acted like a chicken and publicly promised "No boots on the ground," which Russians took as a green light to go ahead.
The third major opportunity was during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukraine made a major breakthrough and Russian forces became so disorganized that they collapsed without a combat in many sections of the frontline. Instead of supporting the counteroffensive with everything they've got, NATO members got spooked by Russian nuclear blackmail and tried to micromanage Ukraine's combat operations. The counteroffensive stalled and Russian forces dug in. The war is now going as most wars do once entrenched positions are established: heavy casualties and minimal territorial changes.
The policy of tiptoeing around Russia has not yielded results because of a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia among western "Russia experts." They interpret fake acts such as "NATO paranoia" as genuine fear, in which case it makes sense to issue reassuring statements (like Biden's). But the fear is not genuine; it is simply a way for Russians to probe how far they can go. Overstating fears to extort concessions is such a basic manipulation technique that I cannot understand how "Russia experts" fail to recognize it. It's a strange plague upon the field. Military experts, by comparison, have been much more reasonable in their assessments and recommendations. The current mainstream recommendation is to stop wasting expensive air defense missiles on shooting down each arrow that Russia fires into Ukraine, and blow up the launchers in Russia instead. The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
First, thank you for taking your time to write a proper response.
Second, I must respectfully disagree.
The reformist/liberals lost it by mismanaging the transition in the 90's. And the society at large was not ready anyway.
And it was not about the turn toward authoritarianism, but a turn towards anti-west as such; those are not the same.
I totally agree that Russians are capable and have their own agenda, no noble savages there. NATO paranoia is not noble-savages, it is, at its roots, historically well-founded self-preservation instinct.
Btw, your choices of wording in several places (Putin is 'enforcer', 'Girkin's invasion force (of, initially, maybe 60 men)', Chechen 'genocide', Russian's 'full scale invasion' (maybe 1/4 manpower of what USA used in Iraq) is rather strange and reeking of just a little bias (are you, perchance, from Ukraine?).
Regarding 'what the west should have done':
In 2014:
a) do you sincerely believe that Russia would have let NATO bomb Donbas like Serbia?
b) that would have been a very sharp escalation from what was, at that time, not yet as bloody conflict. Such an action would have required a long logistical and planning preparation and great political will for such an costly and risky action; there was simply nobody in the west politically ready for that. The consent was not manufactured yet. It was simply political impossibility, not a realistic course of action that could have been taken.
c) what about Crimea? should had the west bombed the Russians there, going to direct war with them?
d) 'they would have lost and would have been the end of it': full-on wishful thinking
Before the invasion of 2022: One of the reasons why Russia attacked in february 2022 (and not some other time) was the apparent preparation of a major Ukrainian offensive to retake Donbas. Believing that a show of force by NATO would have not elicited a response is supremely naive. It is on the same level as 'we will push NATO eastward, and Russia won't be able to do anything about that' (The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski). Eventually, the real red line war crossed and the war ensued. Anyway, there was no political will to preemptively escalate; furthermore it would have broken the narrative of 'unprovoked aggression by Russia'.
Fall 2022 during Kharkiv offensive: That offensive achieved great results, mainly due to major local force superiority (the Russians refrained from conscription and major recruitment, and sent home plenty of soldiers whose half-year duty expired). Expecting the Russians to totally collapse everywhere was about as realistic, as expecting the Ukrainians to totally collapse in February/March. The west was applying the salami slice strategy, incrementally increasing the support of Ukraine (they basically scoured the whole Earth of USSR equipment and sent it to Urkaine). Maybe, they could have sent some western equipment (that was subsequently sent in 2023), but it is unclear how much difference that would have made. Or you mean actively employing NATO airforce/groundpower?
Military experts (Mike Milley) have said in the fall 2022 that this is a high water mark for Ukraine, and they should negotiate now. He was piled-upon; with a hindsight, he was right.
I do not understand: The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
You are advocating for NATO to strike at Russian launchers firing at Ukrainian cities? Because the Ukrainian are doing that, as much as they can.
You know, the main reason I believe the Russia's attack was due to national security reasons and not due to 'imperialistic expansion of territory/capturing natural resources' is simply that there is no economic payoff in the latter. The cost of the war and the inevitable economic sanctions is simply punishingly high. On the other hand, people/countries are willing to suffer greatly in order to ensure their (perceived) security.
To sum up: What you consider 'realistic options that west should have taken', I see as 'highly escalatory and very risky actions that were politically unfeasible'. From the point of view of Ukraine very desirable, from the west's point of view too risky. Simply because Ukraine does not matter to the West sufficiently for the West to be willing to risk their own citizens.
I see it completely the opposite way, you use an LLM and correct all its mistakes and it allows you to deliver a rough solution very quickly and then refine it in combination with the AI but it still gets completely lost and stuck on basic things. It’s a very useful companion that you can’t trust, but it’s made me 4-5x more productive and certainly less frustrated by the legacy codebase I work on.
I think it’s clear that Anthropic are leading the industry right now and I believe it’s because they are better at using their own tools to develop software than anyone else. I suspect that trend will accelerate.
Do we know if other models have started detecting and poisoning training/fine tuning that these Chinese models seem to use for alignment, I’d certainly be doing some naughty stuff to keep my moat if I was Anthropic or OpenAI…
I wonder if you could just setup a small model and suggest a load of things and try every file and it might still end up being cheaper and just as good as Mythos at a specific task. Maybe this will be something that holds true for more things, formulating a small model to do specific things may well end up being as effective/efficient as a larger model looking at a huge solution space.
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