ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Tomorrow I'm posting a new "Culture War thread" that links to this site. I also haven't had time to do this yet, but I'm going to be closing new posts entirely on the subreddit.
Basically it's going to have one or two stickied threads and a bunch of increasingly-old non-sticky threads.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Keep in mind that the FHWA guidelines are not legally binding, and are not designed for anything of this sort; they're intended for standard highway layouts, and they're ignored and stretched all the time anyway (check out the Lærdal Tunnel, which I guarantee does not have an emergency exit every 1000 feet.)
If you have multiple burning cars in the tunnel you're probably boned anyway.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Welcome back! I admit I've been thinking of you when talking about someone who got Reddit-banned for doing something largely irrelevant.
Current plan is to keep things roughly as they are. I need to fix the pin system first but then I'll probably make sure it can do three pins. Gotta do some work on the theme. From there, it depends entirely on how much traffic we get; "the Motte is a pale shadow of its former self" is a very different outcome from "the Motte is thriving", and it remains to be seen where it goes from there.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
We have the same top-post-filtering behavior that we did on original Reddit. So, nobody can see it except the mods :)
But it worked!
(But I'm still going to remove it :V)
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
That is a reasonable question!
The answer is that we will probably get hacked at some point.
We have some protection based on the way the server architecture works. We don't keep a persistent image around; the site environment is in Docker, and every time I update it, it reconstructs it from scratch. Even if someone manages to find a backdoor and create a more permanent backdoor, it'll all get evaporated next time we do an update. It's difficult to break out of Docker and so we're unlikely to have any sort of long-term unfixable compromise; once we find it, we can fix it and it's solved.
Of course, they can still steal the database during that time.
Email addresses would be exposed, and, of course, the full contents of the visible site. I'm not sure if IP addresses are stored right now; at some point I'll be changing it to store a hashed version, but that's only vague security because there just aren't that many IP addresses.
It is worth noting that we're in communication with the rdrama devs; yes, the codebase has forked pretty heavily, but we likely still share a lot of the same issues (and I'd love to gradually de-fork things over time). Nevertheless, this is still a volunteer endeavor, we just don't have the personpower to do full professional-level security audits.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Well, this is a good place to do this, I suppose.
The site hasn't even been up for a day and you've racked up eight contentless posts. Normally I'd just remove them all, give you a warning, and expect to go removing more. But I think overall I am also not a fan of the username you've chosen.
I'm banning your username; note that, while you are welcome to re-register under a less complicated username, you are not welcome to keep posting low-content stuff. This isn't rdrama, knock it off.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I dub this the official rdrama.net visit thread; importantly, the single rdrama.net visit thread, because y'all are kinda spamming the place with low-content stuff.
Post it here and keep it within community standards.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Hey there!
I am totally removing this thread. Sorry. I know you're unlikely to do this, but if you do want to post, go check out the rules.
I've dubbed this thread the official rdrama.net hangout, so if you want to go post your questions there, go for it. But a few of them you'll want to tweak or those will get removed too.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
We do, sort of, and also not sort of.
So, first, we have a similar comment filtering system that we had before. In theory we had it disabled but it turns out there's a hilarious bug where there's no "disable" option, and instead people with negative scores are getting filtered, which I think is hilarious and do not plan to change. (We'll be enabling it soon anyway.)
This means that top-level posts need to be approved by us before they go public, as do comments from new users. Turns out these still contribute to the reply count and so that's part of what you're seeing.
Second, if deletes their post, it doesn't decrement the post counter. We should probably fix that. I accidentally replied to someone with a test account and then deleted it and now that post eternally has an extra comment mark. Such is life.
Third, we do actually have shadowbans as well - it came with the site - but we haven't used any yet.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It spams them annoyingly :V I gotta remove it, just haven't done so yet.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I think in general I'm okay with those - I don't think I've ever warned for one - but at the same time, there's a limit on how much of that should happen, and if it gets spammy we might start grumbling about it.
I really want to add some kind of Reaction system, kind of loosely modeled off Discord's, with some Motte-appropriate set of reactions. I think that might fill some of the gap between "upvote" and "low-effort thankyou reply".
High-effort thankyou replies are, of course, always allowed :D
tl;dr: Go for it if you want, we'll let you know if it's getting to be too much.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I actually looked into that! Turns out it's annoyingly hard; the character count limit is baked into the database, changing it requires a database schema change and I think the constant itself is in a lot of places.
I did set up a task to do that at some point (https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/229) but I wasn't going to wait to post this.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
There's a lot more room underground than there is aboveground. If we can build them cheaply, then we can build huge amounts of them cheaply. Land prices are a major part of highway costs, and in theory that price just kinda vanishes, and we still don't have to spread things apart more in order to make room for roads.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
That's part of the "price". Underground means you aren't using surface area, and surface area is expensive and valuable.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Keep in mind you don't need to be limited to under the streets; most buildings don't go that deep, but road networks can go pretty dang deep. There's a lot more "under Manhattan" than limiting it to under the streets.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
But then you run face-first into Fast; you're stuck with slow transportation.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
So, two answers.
(1) The site we forked with did that, and we didn't remove it.
(2) I actually think it's a good idea. People really like webapps for . . . some reason, I actually don't know why . . . and this is the only plausible way to implement one with our available resources. It also leaves us immune to Apple or Google deciding to remove our app; we don't have an app to remove.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
A few answers!
what the hell is your beef with Marseys?
Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.
Why don't image uploads work?
A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.
It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun
I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.
Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.
We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.
Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
At least for now, we're stickin' with the same behavior we had before; Culture War posts go in the roundup thread, non-culture-war posts can go elsewhere.
I think there's actually good reasons to keep this format and ugh ask me some other time I have been doing way too much typing today. But seriously, ask me if you're interested.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Yeah it's pretty nice, honestly. The code is kind of a pain to work with; I've put it in our queue, reasonably high up, but it'll take a bit.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm afraid this is definitely culture war material. Please repost in the culture war thread, thank you!
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Well I've actually shadowbanned a few trolls since then.
So . . . no. Sorry :V
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm willing to use it during periods of high new-troll activity; if there's a bunch of people making new accounts just to post bad stuff then I'll simply remove it. In a day or two we can turn the standard activity filters on, though, and that'll help things enormously.
actually maybe I should just turn those on now.
Common Objections
Yeah, we do. But we need roads anyway.
We need roads for emergency vehicles. We need roads for utility vehicles. We need roads for cargo delivery and for oversize transport. I just replaced my roof; how are you planning to get a full pallet loaded with tons of shingles to my doorstep any other way?
Roads are useful and they're not going anywhere. But a lot of these things don't require big roads, they require some roads. In the eventual future, the plan would be a dramatic reduction in road width; two-lane residential roads become one-lane residential roads, four-lane arterials become two-lane roads, highways mostly vanish.
If they must exist, and they must, then we may as well make them do double-duty. Below a certain threshold of usage, roads cost money simply by existing because they require regular maintenance to protect them from the elements. Usage up to that threshold is free, and using them just for the last-mile trips is going to be very light usage compared to how they're used today.
Remember, we need the ability to have inexpensive entries and exits from the system. This is both so we can provide easy emergency exits, so we can reduce the amount of surface road required for the last-mile trips, and so we can spend less land for the entire project. Rails have low friction which makes significant slopes impossible; without significant slopes, we cannot have cheap connections between underground and surface; without those cheap connections, the entire system economically falls apart.
In addition, part of how the system works is that self-driving cars can travel along residential roads to bring you straight to your destination. Rails would require that we build rails into every road in residential areas. This is just not economically feasible.
While I've been describing surface entrances and exits as the normal way of getting in and out of the system, you don't have to use surface exits. Skyscrapers already have enormous basements, and you don't need more than a single floor to build a terminus. In this case you really could have stations, located in multiple building basements; the car delivers you straight to your workplace and you go straight from car to elevator.
There's no way this is going to be based on internal combustion engines - that makes tunnels far more complicated to begin with. All electric, all the time.
Electric does not solve the problem entirely. A significant source of car pollution is actually particulates from tire wear. But a lot of the tire wear will be localized within tunnels, and can be swept up and disposed of much more efficiently.
The mass number of cars required isn't going to be cheap or great for the environment. But it may be better than subways. Your average subway car costs almost a hundred times more than a single car, and costs similar amounts more to maintain. Fleet cars gain huge advantages from massive mass-production and you simply cannot do that with subways. In addition, subways often run mostly empty, and the cars in this system will rarely be running empty; a car sitting waiting for a passenger is not polluting, while a six-car subway train carrying a total of three people is polluting quite a bit.
Maybe! The actual numbers are currently unclear.
But this isn't as big a problem as it sounds. If we have cheap tunnels, then we can make dedicated parking tunnels. Fleet cars are entirely homogenous, and we never need to access any specific car, we can just cram a bunch of cars in a tunnel and do first-in-first-out retrieval as they're requested.
We don't even need dedicated parking tunnels. Because these are all computer-controlled, we can dynamically reprovision transport tunnels as they're not needed. Maybe we need four parallel tunnels in one area for peak hours; well, once the peak is done, we can turn that into one travel tunnel and three storage tunnels. As it gets closer to peak, clear out a storage tunnel and turn it back into a travel tunnel.
A lot of this is very much hypothetical and requires a lot of software development. But it's all software, not hardware; this can be improved as the system grows.
Not at all!
The Las Vegas Loop is a good example of this. You can build one tunnel, then connect another tunnel to it, and just keep on going. Cars don't require complicated switching systems like trains do, and computer-controlled cars don't require complicated signage. In practice I expect this will generally start with the backbone of a city, then get expanded as it gets used, in order to move more traffic off streets and into the underground.
Nobody knows!
Seriously, nobody knows. This is all quite experimental. I made an argument above that Boring Company tunnels will be a lot cheaper to build than train tunnels, which is, I think, true. But you'll need more Boring Company tunnels, because each one is incapable of holding as many people as a train tunnel, and we expect more people to use them, and we expect people to travel longer distances in them too. It adds up fast.
Traditionally, this is handled by trying to buy property, then eminent-domaining it if necessary, usually with some detours through poor areas to cut down on price and voter dislike. But this is the old model where building a station requires knocking down a building. If we're going completely underground without needing that aboveground work, this should be cheaper.
Subsurface rights are complicated; some properties technically own all the land beneath them, some properties (especially in Texas) own only a few feet down and the rest is owned under "mineral rights". Some cities explicitly reserve the right to run underground utilities under your property without consulting you. Even if you do own the rights, eminent domain can still apply, and how many people are really going to object to getting a few thousand bucks in return for a slice of rock a hundred feet down?
Often train tunnels get run under roads as much as possible, specifically to avoid the ownership issues. Low-speed car tunnels are more agile than train tunnels, able to make tighter curves and hug the road network better than trains. High-speed car tunnels aren't, but they can be run deeper, which is likely to cause fewer property arguments.
I'm reasonably confident that property costs won't turn out to be a big problem, assuming the Las Vegas Loop turns out well and other cities start salivating at the idea of their own Loops; minor things like "unused property rights" tend to fold quickly in the face of government interest. Practically, though, we won't know until the lawyers are done with it.
Nope! But I can't blame you for being confused.
The Las Vegas Loop has, officially, nothing in common with Hyperloop, besides the word "loop" and the fact that both of them are intended to move people. Elon Musk has mentioned that he wants to put some effort into building Hyperloop tunnels with Boring Company but so far he's done nothing more concrete than speculation.
I think, assuming Hyperloop can be made to work, it could turn into the long-distance leg of a country-spanning network using Loop as the short-distance part. Don't hold your breath on that one though; in a post that is almost entirely speculation, that is, like, speculation-squared.
Nothing stops you from owning your own car! Boring Company has said that they would allow privately-owned cars in with the appropriate self-driving software. I suspect most people wouldn't own their own cars, but if you want to spend the money on it, you're welcome to do so.
In addition, the ground road network does still exist! Likely cut down quite a bit, but only because of a lack of demand; if you want to use it, you're welcome to.
Yeah: Weather!
In some areas of the world, traditional roads are very expensive to keep clear and have constant maintenance burdens due to freeze/thaw cycles. Putting the roads underground reduces the impact of weather and may cut down on maintenance costs considerably long-term. This also protects cars from weather, improving driving speeds during rain and snow.
(Comedy option: install air curtains at every entrance and exit, then heat the entire underground section from waste heat in order to reduce per-vehicle vehicle heating costs. I have no idea if this would be cost-effective.)
There's potentially a flooding problem during extremely heavy rains and, obviously, on coastal flood-prone cities. Similar to how aboveground roads have to shut down during heavy snow, the underground network would probably just have to shut down during flood conditions.
In general I suspect this ends up being a net improvement, although it obviously isn't a panacea.
I own Tesla stock, and I would own Boring Company stock if I could. But besides me buying some of Tesla's stock, I have no further relationship (that I'm aware of, at least!) with any Elon Musk company.
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