The last masters of Afro-Colombian machete fencing
13 comments
·April 29, 2025CobaltFire
_bent
i got this one recommended in the sidebar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo6axEMVRcY
ano-ther
What are the rules? And how do they not end up hurting each other?
andrewflnr
According to the article, the edges are dulled. Also they're going pretty slow in these videos and swinging at ranges where they can barely reach each other. It looks to me like a collaborative sort of sparring. If they were trying to hurt each other, or maybe even "win" at all, I assume it would be much faster and more brutal.
actionfromafar
holy shit that's terrifying
pazimzadeh
So this is what is meant by hacker news
cs702
Just when I thought I'd seen everything, here comes organized fighting with actual machetes -- oh, and without protective gear.
irq-1
They want the tradition to continue, but they should also record everything: get experts and record them from multiple angles, record demonstrations, etc... With image/video => 3d, and AI to recreate the system of fighting, it would be 'saved' for the future.
kulahan
There seems (to me) that there is too significant of a disconnect between a cultural practice handed down through generations and an AI-trained bot that can tell you about it.
pessimizer
Where?
If AI (or a book) can tell me something that has been passed down through generations, it was still passed down through generations. The problem with books is that they often don't/can't give you enough detail to do the thing. AI doesn't have that problem.
Hell, a few books and a bunch of videos don't have that problem. If people forgot about ("regular") fencing tomorrow, and 1000 years from now came across a cache of 1000 hours of fencing matches and a handful of books, I would have faith in their ability to recreate fencing accurately and then innovate on it.
andrewflnr
What advantage would an AI have over video, especially from a couple different angles? Trying to apply AI to this problem seems like a near-terminal case of have-hammer-see-nails syndrome.
7thaccount
Looks pretty similar to escrima.
pmags
I wonder how similar / different this to the Filipino martial art known as Arnis, which is also bladed weapon + stick based?
Perhaps an interesting cultural example of convergence or parallelism (depending on how you think about the shared influence of Spanish colonialism w/respect to the development of these martial arts in Columbia and the Phillipines).
Sounds interesting, and was only able to find one video showing it in a quick search on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_YoaP0cHpQ