domain:felipec.substack.com
ffrreerree
1yr ago
What is the plan if no one posts here? Would it make sense to announce an impending shutdown of the subreddit so that people actually move?
Let's kick this CW thread off with a discussion of the KiwiFarms attacks. Broad strokes include:
CloudFlare posted just yesterday on how they were turning off KiwiFarms use of their DDOS protection. This was 4 days after their post attempting to explain their "abuse policies" and how they would respond to such things, a casual reading of which would suggest that they would not do this. Their claimed justification for this was "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site". They did not detail exactly what acts and threats were posted and the nature of the site moderator's response.
KiwiFarms is back up at https://kiwifarms.ru/ (note that this is somewhat spotty, they are still actively under attack) (https://archive.ph/2tS7Y should work if their site is not responding at the moment). The site admin has created a post here in which he lists the user and post that he suspects was the trigger for this, the reasons why he thinks the post was suspicious, and the actions the admins took in response, which included banning the user in about half an hour.
To me this looks like a flop on CloudFlare's part. KiwiFarms may or may not be honest in their explanation post, but it's a lot more detail than anyone's posted on the "ban it" side on exactly what were the posts of concern.
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.
IGI-111
1yr ago
This is a political decision as usual. The object level means nothing. The activists are just flexing their power over the industry and anyone who expected anything else of Cloudflare when they bent previously under sufficient strain was deluding themselves.
Now, where's the startup that provides blockchain based DDoS protection given it is one of the applications where the tech has a genuine and impressive advantage? I want to invest.
alchemist
1yr ago
So, I watched the first two episodes of the Rings of Power -- and it wasn't that bad.
For the record, I thought Wheel of Time was pretty horrible, and while it was far from the only problem, the woke aspects (forced diversity, all men have to suck, all women have to rock) was definitely a big part of the issue. RoP has some forced diversity as well, but it's somehow not as bad. The black elf is one of the few elves who actually seems attractive and somehow beyond human -- the others come across as Roman Senator types.
Galadriel is a Mary Sue, but I guess she is in the books too. We'll see how her story develops.
I'm not happy with the proto-hobbits, and of course, the one who pushes the rules and is clever and daring is a woman, but that's mostly okay.
Dwarves -- well, of course the woman gives wise council to her buffoon husband, but it was still fairly well done I thought.
The visuals were great, and you did somehow get a sense of fleshed out, interesting and complex world. I'm very cautiously optimistic. Miles and miles ahead of Wheel of Time.
For the record, I'm /u/The-WideningGyre on reddit, but felt like grabbing one of the more common usernames I use on the new Motte.
I'm really disappointed by the weird groupthink shitshow I feel like 'normal' reddit has become, so I will do what I can to support this new Motte. Thanks /u/ZorbaTHut and other creators!
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
It works..let's see
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
This is how the Boring Company is going to solve tunnel price:
- Cars are much smaller than trains [citation needed] and don't require as much sheer size.
- Cars travel on concrete, not rail, and this surface is perfectly suited for passenger exit, meaning that you don't need an extra passenger lane as long as there's enough room to get past the cars. (Note: in the current Loop tunnels, there is, even though it's not obvious in a lot of the videos that have been posted. It's not comfortable, but it's enough for emergency evac.)
- We can reduce the necessary emergency equipment by having frequent stations. Trust me on this for now! I'll get back to this one very quickly.
All of this put together makes Boring Company tunnels a whole lot cheaper than train tunnels.
I'm not sure I believe this. The current FHWA guidelines for vehicle tunnels requires exits at no less than 1000 ft spacing (which is plausibly close to your station spacing), and requires a 3.6ft wide protected pedestrian egress walkway -- not just squeezing past potentially burning vehicles. That's pretty clearly not done for Musk's tunnels, nor is it easily plausible with their existing boring machine sizes. There are no shortage of tragic accidents involving tunnels, and EV fires are particularly concerning in some ways.
Honestly, I would tend to cite Thunderf00t's rant about why the Boring Company is ill-advised in its adventures.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
To kinda tie it back to this site, I feel like we could easily gain the same level of harassment just for hosting wrongthink, but the only reason we haven't is because we have stricter standards on behavior and we write long and nuanced posts that are hard to take out of context (compare Kiwi Farms which, while they might not harass people themselves, will routinely dox people who have no opsec). Still, though, there are already communities dedicated to do, well, exactly that - take nuanced posts out of context and paint us all as some sort of menace to society. But Kiwi Farms is a good example of what a completely legal site needs to do if it wants to stay up. Null has had to move hosts and VPSes countless times, move domain registrars, spend thousands of dollars on hardware and DDoS mitigation, move to Ukraine (and later Serbia) to reduce personal expenses, hire lawyers and pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight several frivolous lawsuits, and do it all while he's been banned for most of the time from using Visa and Mastercard. The site's history is a harrowing tale of what harassment mobs can do if they just yell at someone for long enough, and I hope we never have to go down that path. We've already had to move off of /r/SlateStarCodex and now even our own subreddit due to the increasing tension of people who just can't stand living in the same world with people whose speech they don't like.
IGI-111
1yr ago
The problem with Galadriel isn't so much her unrestrained ability but the form it takes. She's supposed to be a beautiful but prideful maiden who grows into the wise sorcerer-queen we see in the third age through experience.
Her skill is cunning, not strength. She's an enigmatic plotter with an inscrutable mind, not some formidable warrior.
Having her prancing around killing giant beasts feels like if you made a biopic of Talleyrand where he keeps shooting people himself.
IGI-111
1yr ago
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.
aqouta
1yr ago
It's good to be back after several months of using alts like /u/exiledouta /u/spacerenrgy2 and others to circumvent a reddit giga fingerprint ban surprisingly not for unsavory Motte style arguments but the drawing of a forbidden orange cat.. @zorbaTHut now that you've had some time to get confidence in the new site's capabilities and limitations what changes if any do you think make sense to the format of the old sub? Still a weekly CW roundup? More than two pins? overhaul of karma system?
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.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1yr ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm starting Minsky's Society of Mind, a classic AI text about building minds from smaller, mindless components. The current zeitgeist seems to be moving away from classic AI, but eventually we'll need better understanding of where precisely our machine-learning models fit in the broader scheme of knowledge. "Shut up and scale" doesn't seem entirely satisfactory. Maybe going over some slightly dust-covered ideas might spark some useful thinking. The book itself seems like a mix of aesthetic quirks and precision, and I seem to be in the mood for that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That's true. None of the harassment against us has reached that level yet, but there's no way to tell what the future will bring here. It's definitely a good step to be technologically independent from Reddit. Hopefully no more will be needed, but if it is, we're as prepared as we can reasonably be to try.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
the drawing of a forbidden orange cat..
Since we're out of the sight of the all seeing eye of Mordor Reddit admins (and this is the small scale questions thread), would you mind giving a TL;DR what that was about?
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1yr ago
Might be good to have an official move date, so everyone has some warning and it doesn't feel abrupt.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
The moment Cloudflare started defending its actions, it was clear to me they were about to capitulate. Those who are steadfast in their principles do not bother justifying it; principle stands on its own two feet. Cloudflare is best understood as another tentacle of Left, Inc., with all that entails, and any protestations otherwise are a thin veneer of impartiality that will not be backed up by action.
This is the fatal flaw of centralization of power, regardless of the form that power takes; the internet is small now. Far too small.
SecretlyATleilaxuGhola
1yr ago
Here's hoping it works out.
RE: dwarves, I didn't read that as a forced "woman smart, man dumb" moment. Durin isn't dumb, he's just peeved that his friend hasn't visited him in decades and he's clearly quite open to forgiving him.
I particularly didn't view it as a woke scene, because the wife is employing the soft power women have traditionally wielded in the home, while the "hard" power (i.e. the ultimate decision on whether Elrond should stay or leave) is Durin's. And in any case, it's more like Durin and his wife are playing out their roles so that Durin can both forgive his friend and keep his pride -- the man's clearly open to forgiving Elrond (note how Durin allows Elrond into his home, with predictable results).
Rex
1yr ago
Are people sentimentally attached to the motte logo? I don’t recall seeing it much under the old.Reddit layout. Might this be a time to switch? I generally don’t love modern aesthetics, but I imagine someone could come up with something a bit better that still retains the motte and Bailey imagery.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There's a certain degree of wokeness to all modern media of which must be tolerated, but RoP is where I draw the line.
I don't like series which disrespects its core material, its literary fanbase, which sneers on twitter and all of the fashionable places to mine for engagement eyeballs. It may be a perfectly servicable show but I hate the modern hype engine that intentionally turns up its nose at the nerds to try and gain cachet with an audience that doesn't even exist.
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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