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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2340 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I found a YouTube channel collecting videos credibly claiming to be "CIA video briefings for Reagan"

They're mostly under 10 minutes long, and faithfully produced in the style of an 80s TV news segment.

Do we have any alien posters here? Realized you guys could probably use the internet if you can do all those other things

I hate that feeling when you run face first into the lastlatest page of an ongoing webcomic.

I love myself a good deconstruction, so I binged through Sleepless Domain in the last couple of days. Now that I've run out of it, I plan to watch Madoka Magica for some more maho shojo action.

Was it a permanent hiatus ending, or an actual plot conclusion ending?

No, I meant it was an ongoing webcomic and I reached the latest page. Can't believe I've made that mistake. That's how you catch careless Russian or Ukrainian sleeper agents.

Крайнийchads stay winning

Gah, triggered. I'm fine with одеть, but not this.

This is probably the best place to discuss the latest in the ongoing drama of the Reddit API changes. Short version is that Reddit's APIs used to be free, but they are rolling out a new scheme where they charge pretty substantially for them. The prices are high enough to make pretty much all of the third-party Reddit phone apps non-viable. This has made a lot of people quite upset, as the "official" app is reportedly significantly worse and is lacking a lot of moderator tools that many mods use to run their subreddits. There's a big "blackout" planned for June 12-14th in protest, where the mods of a bunch of subs will turn them private and users are encouraged to not use Reddit at all.

So lots of users are mad and claim that they're going to delete their accounts and/or stop using Reddit at all. It's not clear how many people overall are actually prepared to follow through on this long term. Personally I'm doubtful that it's enough to significantly hurt Reddit.

The developers of all the major independent mobile apps (Apollo, RedditIsFun, Sync, Relay, etc) say they're going to delete their API keys the day before charges start accruing, which will disable all of their installed apps at once. Apparently if they don't, they'll get a pretty hefty bill at the end of next month for everything all of the current users have been doing. Ouch. The Apollo link has a pretty long writeup of the dev's experience where he makes a good case that Reddit doesn't seem to have much interest in working with third-party app developers.

Probably the most significant part is the mod objections. Apparently a lot of mods of big subs do most of their modding on mobile using one of the third-party apps, and they say the mod tooling on the official app is so much worse that they won't be able to do their work. Every reddit sub relies on volunteer mods to keep them free of spam and abuse, and none of them are paid anything, so making their work more difficult will be very noticeable. If many mods follow through on this, it could be very significant indeed.

I wouldn't care so much if not for due to the decline of the rest of the internet; Reddit has become a useful and very valuable repository of knowledge and discussion by actual humans. Preserving the utility of the platform is actually fairly important to me for that reason. And the changes to API access and crackdown on third-party apps is worrying because of how awful the actual official Reddit user tools are. Topic search is bad and comment search is nonexistent; prior to the disabling of API access you had to use something like https://camas.unddit.com/ if you actually wanted to search for something specific. Moderation is often opaque and censorious, and third-party tools like reveddit or unddit allowed you to see the comments and actions the mods/admins didn't want you to see.

Reddit is an imperfect and often frustrating website, but it's also a customizeable one that functions as one of the last remaining places where large numbers of humans come together to have online, organic conversations. Changes like this threaten, without exaggeration, its usefulness to humanity.

I have no reddit account, but if people are looking at alternatives, is it worth it for those of us who do to put up things directing them here?

With an accurate description, of course, since we would want people who fit.

Edit:Would the best place be a post in /r/RedditAlternatives, or one of the app-specific subreddits? We need to keep attracting users over time to make sure we don't gradually die, this seems like an unusually good opportunity.

I agree with the sibling - have you seen the quality of discourse on the average Reddit sub? We definitely don't want to be the next stop for the average Redditor. Growth is good, but we want a relative trickle of users who at least seem likely to be capable of obeying our rules, not a flood of people who want to post memes and cheap dunks.

I... mean... do we want to be reddit? Do we want more redditors?

You should probably post in places on reddit where people you want to join are present, not where everyone is, unless we want TheMotte to grow into a giant cluster of distinct interconnected interest groups that replaces Reddit.

TheMotte really isn't an alternative to reddit except for people exclusively using reddit for Motte adj subs.

Fair point, I meant with a fairly strong deterrent attached to whatever advertisement. (And we'd presumably have to stamp out fires here for a little anyway.)

21 days ago I got this message from Reddit when it auto-renewed my annual subscription:

Hi VecGS,

Thanks for being a Reddit Premium member!

Your yearly Reddit Premium subscription has been successfully renewed and you’ve been charged $29.99 (USD).*

You should expect a fresh delivery of 700 Reddit Coins every month.

If you have any questions about your subscription, feel free to contact us or check out the Reddit Premium FAQs.

Don’t forget, your subscription automatically renews each year. That means you can cancel your subscription at any time from your Subscription Settings. Just make sure you cancel at least 24 hours before your subscription period ends to avoid getting charged for the next year. You won’t be refunded for any remaining time on your subscription.

That $30 per year cost eliminates ads for me. That's around $2.50 a month. That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile. I'm pretty sure that sets up a very convenient upper bound for what Reddit's costs are. Even with that, I would expect they make a profit on me.

This is nothing but a clear attempt to kill 3rd party apps in my opinion.

The provable lying that the CEO is doing is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.

I guess it was a good run while it lasted.

I'm confused. I must be missing something. They're charging for the use of the API and you say that Christian Selig gets more than that. So how is it a problem for him? Why can't he just pay the fee?

It's the other way around. Reddit was getting that much directly from me. I paid for Apollo years ago, which was far less than the new charges that Reddit would be charging Christian on an ongoing basis. Overall, his bill would wind up being around $20MM a year based on historical usage. That's far less than the money he's ever made on it.

I was establishing an upper bound for Reddit's average annual customer value.

That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile.

Reddit's been saying that under their current pricing model the average Apollo user would incur about $2.50/month in API charges, and that Apollo is a particularly inefficient user of the API, with other applications like RIF incurring about a dollar per month per user in API charges.

However, it's not really clear what an "average" user is. Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.

At least, they claimed Apollo is inefficient. I'd like to see some specifics of that, since I'm skeptical. I have written a few Reddit bots, and while the API is weird in some ways, it's pretty straightforward, and I don't see how it's possible to be significantly more or less efficient while doing the same fundamental task. I'm inclined to believe that it's just users of different activity levels until proven otherwise.

Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.

I strongly suspect this is it. API requests are measured in exact numbers, so a reddit addict that spends 10 hours a day scrolling on Apollo will rack up roughly an OOM more request cost than a causal user that spends an hour or less scrolling on RIF. I'd hazard a guess that heavier users may prefer a different interface than casual users.

I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.

Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.

I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.

I'm also surprised that there's nobody who has been able to implement true 'microtransactions' where you can pay a few cents to view a piece of content once, rather than having to subscribe to a full service you may or may not use.

Like I would pay for news articles if I there was an ability to pay 25 cents per article with 1-2 clicks.

I can imagine a version of Reddit where the 'main' subs were free to access but if you wanted to subscribe to the niche subs you could pay like a buck to unlock them for a month. Or maybe even less for a 'day pass.'

Of course, that won't stop someone from scraping the content to publish elsewhere or use to train up an LLM.

I can’t agree enough, advertising has ruined so much in the last few decades.

I think more websites should've tried harder to monetize around a subscription model in the style of Spotify and Netflix. The trouble is finding some meaningful way to make an actually better experience beyond no ads, which is no easy task, but I think if they focused a team on it they could do it. Personally I think a feature that could be worth paying for is better search and sort tools.

This discussion could probably fit just fine in the main thread.

I can say that I'm personally glad we have already moved off of reddit. I hope more communities are able to make a similar jump. It is maybe past time for the internet to fracture into a million pieces once again. The mass centralization wave of the last decade and a half has had many downsides.

I hope more communities are able to make a similar jump.

I doubt it. There's a real sense of learned helplessness.

Even subs like stupidpol that are totally hostile to the admins and identity politics of reddit - including some of the issues that spurred a desire on TheMotte to leave - appear just totally fatalistic.

Other places exist. I’m on mastodon, hubski, and saidit. They’re certainly smaller than Reddit, but I think it’s a decent way to get better communities, even if you’re somewhat beholden to whoever runs those sites.

I mean running your own website is a lot of work, and totally unpaid. We are super lucky to have admin’s that are willing to take on the burden.

Yeah, fair. I shouldn't have sounded disdainful, this sub probably had a disproportionate number of IT-interested people compared to other subs

I'm not sure it's that much work on top of what sub mods already do, but you do need at least a few trusted users with strong technical skills and a strong enough community for a critical mass of posters to be willing to continue their activity on a new site. We are indeed fortunate enough to have both.

I'm traveling to the beach tomorrow. Gonna be there with my family, meaning my wife and kids, plus my parents, plus my siblings, plus their kids, plus a few aunts/uncles cousins.

Any thoughts on something fun and different to try?

Get some boogie boards and teach your kids to surf with them. Much safer and easier than surfboards but still a blast. I loved them when I was a kid.

If you've got the right sort of sand, you can make a Sagrada Familia sandcastle. My daughter enjoyed this when she was about 4 or 5. Otherwise just crack a beer and let 'em run around, they make their own fun at that age.

We're doing the same right now, for ten days straight. How old are your kids?

4 and 2

If you're in an area that has them, I bet the 4 year old will be fascinated by sand crabs. You can find them by looking for little holes/air bubbles as the water at the shore recedes. Dig 'em up, and let 'em go back to burrowing.

Might be a bit young for catching scuttling crabs proper on the beach at night, though, although that's very memorable.

Are you planning to dig foxholes in the sand, like any self-respecting Kraut?

Sadly no, my little one doesn't yet have the patience for industrial warfare. We intended to visit some WW2 landing beaches and bunkers, but I think the wife changed her mind (no big deal, I've been there.)

Sadly no, my little one doesn't yet have the patience for industrial warfare.

Soon...

Definitely take them when they're a bit older. My dad took me to Normandy when I was 8 or 9, and decades later those are still some of my most vivid memories. Extremely cool and interesting.

Moderate-scale sand engineering.

For me-as-a-small-child, this meant digging a pit until I hit the water table. Later, it evolved to wanting elaborate waterworks and embankments. Of course, that required a lot more effort, and competed with the traditional pastime of beach drinking. So I was more likely to compromise and excavate something smaller with my cousins.

No idea, is what I’m saying.

Good idea, I also did that as a small child, and I've mostly forgotten how fun it was at the time. I should help my kids build something really huge. I can probably build a castle as tall as my youngest child.

I do remember a lot of frustration the one or two times some randos came along and stomped our castle.

I always enjoyed making a fort at low tide, and then seeing how long it coild survive against the inevitable encroachment of the ocean. Fun times.

With small kids, you can also always throw them into the waves (get them to launch off your hands as you hurl for extra force!) Or simply walk out deeper against the waves, holding hands in a chain. I always found thay fun, at least.

This was always my favorite thing to do. I somehow found a way to turn every situation into an opportunity to "play Alamo" as I called it. Even as a little kid, there was something intrinsically fascinating and romantic about doomed last stands.

Allegory in the Book of Jonah Part 2: Jonah 1:4-6

But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a great storm on the sea, so that the ship thought to break apart. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they cast the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the recesses of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”

The ship here is anthropomorphized, and having a personality it considered breaking apart. This unique choice is not incidental and betrays the spirit of the book, which is allegory. The word “wind” is the same as the word spirit, and this is no coincidence if we take wind to be a metaphor of the spirit of inner unrest. Jonah, we saw, was disobeying God, who is the great master of his soul and purpose (as to any believer). Jonah already broke apart with God when he stood by Jerusalem — the seat of religion — leaving his moral calling to Ninevah and spending his money on a trip to Tarshish.

The sailors, who were not Hebrews, all prayed to their gods for salvation. Its literal reading would be that they cast down the objects of the ship, to lighten the above (or upon) — and there’s ambiguity here to what is being referred. They may be lightening the “above” of the ship, or the “above” of themselves, but in either case we take it allegorically. There was a great inner unrest, and they were throwing out all the baggage that was weighing them down, in order to lighten that which is above. It’s of note that this occurs in the same breath as each one praying to his god, immediately after the ship considers breaking apart. In cases of violent unrest, when your ship threatens to break apart by a great and fearsome spirit, you throw out the baggage to unburden your “being above”, which is the very nature of “crying out to one’s god”.

In furtherance of this great metaphor, we read that Jonah had descended down into the recesses of the ship — or the most remote part — and laid down and fell asleep. The mariners were lightening what was above, and Jonah once again unwisely descended and absconded of any duty or moral impulse. How many times has Jonah descended now, anyway? He descended to board the ship, he descended to the remote part of the ship, then he lowered himself to fall asleep. And just like he determined to flee to the remote part of the region of his world (Tarshish), he went to the remote part of the ship.

The word “ship” in “recesses of the ship” is a hapax legomena which steps from the word “cover”. So rather than just descending to the remote part of the ship, there’s an element in which he descended under a cover, covering himself, so to speak. The failure of academics to read allegorically is why we have the poor translation here.

Now who goes to speak to Jonah? The Septuagint says “the look out man”, which fits neatly in relation to Jonah’s role both etymologically and as a prophet. “What do you mean, you sleeper” is a very quizzical question. It can be translated more literally as “what to you, sleeping?”, questioning both what sleeping’s purpose is for Jonah and even questioning the listener as to in what way we are sleeping symbolically. The look out man tells Jonah to arise (yet again!), and interestingly the word is “perhaps THE GOD will consider us”, in contradistinction to the the polytheistic god(s) in the previous sentence. It’s as if this mariner in a state of unrest required a singular mighty god.

A better translation is, “perhaps Elohîm will SHINE on us, so that we may not be lost”. It’s confusing how translators are so bad at their job. The word is shine because that’s the only previous use of the word in Hebrew, and because it is a request to cure the storm that Elohîm had cast down. Storm with clouds -> shining with sun. The word “lost” could plausibly also connote wandering, which makes sense for Jonah — our wandering prophet.

It is interesting now to note three ways this intersects with the Gospel. The first is when the Apostles were in a boat during a storm and Jesus was sleeping, and they go to awake him. He gets up to tell them to have faith and the storm quiets (and presumably he goes back to sleep). This is pretty funny. The second is this word sleeping, which in the Gospel connotes a spiritual torpor contrasted with wakefulness, something beautifully put to music by Bach. Third, we have this phrase arise — and it’s not by chance that Jesus tells those he heals to arise, lift their bedding, and walk.

How many times has Jonah descended now, anyway?

Note one more descent, the first one - leaving the Holy Land, especially permanently, is literally called "descending", even in modern Hebrew. And he "descended" coming from Jerusalem (mountain city) to Jaffa (port) to board the ship, both metaphorically and very literally. Once Jonah decided to flee, it has been all downhill for him, it's not even subtle. Even the word "fell asleep" in Hebrew looks like "ירדם", which looks the same as "ירד" - "went down". This descent theme is hammered in pretty heavily.

Great insight! Didn’t know that about the Hebrew. I know there’s also a lot of punning in Jonah, too, which I imagine can only be enjoyed by knowing Hebrew.

Yeah dawg, I'm not reading all this on a Friday Fun Thread.

  • -11

Then there was no need to take seconds out of your day to complain about it. You could just... not read it.

It’s a good book!

What's the rating on Good Reads?

The Good Book, even.

Some great bits - as a former Muslim I'm always shocked Ecclesiastes is canon , nothing like it in the Quran - but it really drags in places and the characterization of Yahweh especially can be pretty uneven.

What’s your favorite bird?

I’ve been watching the local Great Blue Herons. Majestic, yet goofy. Love ‘em.

I still want to go somewhere I can spot a Green Heron. Basically all the same advantages, but they tuck in their neck and look like a completely different bird. This amuses me.

Cardinals! That bright red is so striking. Plus they choose the next pope so I want to be on their good side.

I like Mourning Doves because their call reminds me of home. They're clumsy dum-dums.

The trees in my parents' neighborhood have finally matured enough for barred (not barn) owls to move in, and now I hear them every time I visit. One night about a year ago I woke up to find one sitting on a branch outside the window, maybe 8 feet away from me. Its size was awe-inspiring.

Japanese crows. They're huge and really clever. There are crow fanzines and crow pet owner societies in Japan. Sometimes they even have live crow pop-up cafes.

I'm liking blue jays because they chase the grackles away from my feeders so all the other birds will show up.

Blue jays are radiant, territorial dickheads. They're characters. I like 'em.

Man, I wish our resident blue jays would chase the grackles away, but the latter are completely ungovernable.

Actually, scratch that. It's not the grackles I mind half so much as the starlings.

I like the birds of prey that perpetually circle over the valley I live in. No idea what kinds they are - Buzzards? Kites? But they're always nice to watch, even though they act like strangers when you stumble across one sitting around somewhere.

Apollo - https://youtube.com/watch?v=tonI_hzrgrA&t=34s (talking parrot)

I like my local pileated woodpecker. Comes to the feeder and yells.

Recently, I saw a few waxwings. Never seen them before in person, so that was cool.

Bird I know we have locally, but I don't see as much of as I'd like: plover types (killdeer, etc).

Bird we don't have locally that I'd like to see: woodcock.

A good, thorough answer!

I happened to see a pileated or maybe downy woodpecker in the only nearby conifers. Very neat.

Waxwings are also excellent. I can only second your desire to see the stilt-type birds, which I find incredibly charming.

You might have seen a Hairy Woodpecker. They're about halfway between Downys and Pileateds in size, but look exactly like Downys in all other aspects.

Woodpeckers in general are just nice. We've also got some red-bellieds, and a Northern Flicker or two, which I believe are adjacent to woodpeckers, but ours just seem to enjoy throwing mulch halfway across the yard as a daily activity.

We used to see lots of hairy woodpeckers in my area, but the council cut down the woods, so now we just see lots of hairy peckers.

Lately it's been the robin because it's sociable and likes to join in with the gardening.

Absolutely, the second I lift a bunch of dirst, at least one robin comes to check for bugs and worms. They're so bold compared to birds five times their size, they'll fly past my head and hop closer and closer, especially if I don't make sudden movements.

You can go to a corniche that has seagulls around and throw pieces of bread and they will all flock and grab it mid-air. Sometimes take it off your hands. A lot more exciting than feeding ducks or pigeons which don't seem to have the reflexes or inclination to grab food mid air.

I always consider it a sight when I get to see a bird of prey because they are rare where I live.

Great horned owls ever since reading a collection of inspirational stories about a pair of Great Horned Owls that faced down a cougar.

When I was a child, I considered seeing a Red-Tailed Hawk a great stroke of luck. "This is going to be a good day, I saw a hawk." Or, if I made a decision and then saw a hawk, I figured it was the right decision. It was a little superstition I had, small but meaningful.

Successful environmental policies, including the elimination of DDT and habitat preservation, and the nature of development in my area have successfully brought the local raptor population back, so now I see multiple hawks virtually every day. I wonder what that means all the time, before when they were rare it was meaningful, now it's sorta humdrum. On the other hand, my life is also going exceedingly well, so maybe it's just constant good luck.

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