The bike that got worse with more gears
Grease on my fingers, I bolted yet another set of gears onto an old bicycle. I expected hill climbs to feel easier. The bike started slipping and wobbling, even on a flat bit of road, and I just stood there with my hand on the chain.
Back at the bench, it wasn’t laziness or fancy parts. The chain now had a longer, fussier route, brushing past more places where a tiny mis-line could throw it off. Building picture-finding software can go the same way: stacking more layers can make it harder to get working well at all.
So I changed the rule. Each new gear section didn’t have to create the whole drive from scratch. It only had to make a small correction to the motion already coming through, and if it had nothing useful to add, it could leave things as they were.
On the bike, I kept a simple bypass line so the original drive still had a clean path, with the new section sitting alongside it. In the picture system, the old signal goes round the new bit and gets added back in, so the new bit only learns the leftover tweak. Takeaway: a safe path lets you add more without making the whole thing fall apart.
Sometimes parts didn’t match, like when I swapped wheels and the chain line sat a bit wrong. I used a plain spacer or a small adapter only where the size changed, and kept the bypass as simple as possible. The picture system sometimes needs the same kind of small match-up so the shortcut still fits.
With the correction style, I could add lots of sections without the bike turning into a nightmare to tune. To stop it getting clunky, I used a compact section that narrows the work, does the main job, then widens it again. The picture system can do that too, so it can grow deeper without getting too slow or bulky.
Out on rough streets and tight turns, the bike held its line because each section gave a steady nudge instead of fighting the whole ride. That’s how these shortcut blocks help picture tools that both recognise things and point to where they are in a photo. I realised “more parts” only helps when each part is allowed to make a small, safe improvement.