All i think about when people row, kayak or swim these distances in these waters is 'SHARKS'. Which i read and saw enough about that the chances of meeting one isnt that big, but my brain still associates these activities/areas with it.
One fun thing you get to do in long distance outrigger canoe races in hawaii is crew changes.
Generally, outrigger races have 6 people in the boat and a 9 person team. An escort boat will hold your reserve people, and then drop them in front of the canoe when you need to swap people out.
The problem is that you need to drop people around 200m in front of the canoe so the canoe can have enough time to prep for the crew change, but with that distance, the wave height can obscure the crew from the person steering.
The solution? If you're the one being dropped, you're expected to splash violently. Create as much splash as possible so the canoe can see you, even behind a wave.
The fun part is what gives signal to the canoe is the same thing that gives signal to sharks. Our coach used to say the adrenaline helps us in the race.
The last thing you'd want is a balloon or an inflatable hampering your movements. Getting into the canoe as it's moving is a tricky, practiced and precise motion.
A hyperbolic example would be imagine a pole vaulter with a safety sausage attached to them.
(I was replying to a child comment on fear of deep waters, seemingly deleted?)
I’ve heard this sentiment before, and can sort of intellectually follow, but man. I love scuba diving, I love the ocean and its varied and alien and multi-scale inhabitants. I’ve spent weeks on a live-aboard boat explicitly to seek out megafauna like sharks and rays (same subclass as sharks).
When I start my descent, I love to turn around and see my exhaled air bubble up, up towards the sun rays in the top layer of the water that slowly fade further away as the pressure on my ears builds and I enter the unknown ocean. It’s the most relaxing feeling, and I often remember it to go to sleep.
How beautifully individual our preferences can be. :-)
Curiously, I relate to both. I have a certain degree of fear or trepidation of sharks when swimming in the ocean. I feel vulnerable, and keep imagining a shark coming up under me or behind me. But I’m also a certified diver and have exactly none of those fears when diving or snorkeling! I think it’s because I have reduced awareness of what’s around me when swimming in the surface. In a sense it’s coming from the same place as a fear of the dark.
Watching the videos on the race I was surprised that "Marlin strike", where Marlin fish poke holes with their bill in the hull, seems to be a problem at least now and then. There was a scene where they epoxy the hole with part of the bill still sticking into the vessel.
It was some address in Warsaw, so if I needed that domain badly, it'd be one Ryanair flight away, and definitely an interesting experience :) But I was only using it for a small blog, so I just let it expire. I hoped I would be able to register it again immediately after it expires, but some scammers beat me to it (probably scanning for expiring domains with good reputation/SEO), so last time I checked, the domain is used to advertise some magic pills.
No. Nazwa may be a bait-and-switch scam when it comes to pricing, but they are a big registrar that has to play by the rules set by NASK. I used a small "PHP+MySQL+email+domain" provider, that (as I later learned) was so small they didn't want to fork out a few grands a year to NASK to be a proper registrar themselves, so they instead used another (still shady) registrar under the hood.
Creating aliases for the addresses you are actually using, e.g. a netflix@ signup is preferred over a general catch all, .. and all that spam senders can generate approach.
Samsung now blocks the word samsung at registration time. Previously if you signed up successfully they would disable your account at a random point in the future.
RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation, is an AI technique that improves large language models (LLMs) by connecting them to external knowledge bases to retrieve relevant, factual information before generating a response. This approach reduces LLM "hallucinations," provides more accurate and up-to-date answers, and allows for responses grounded in specialized or frequently updated data, increasing trust and relevance.
I was unaware what RAG referred to, perhaps other too.
