"rolling very far unpowered" is like the entire point of rail systems
Exactly. There's a train route here in The Netherlands, from Den Bosch to Utrecht, where the train can coast the last 20 km. That's out of a 48 km trip, so almost half!
Readit NewsRWSen commented on Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected caltrain.com/news/caltrai... · Posted by u/ssuds
> Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power.
Who do you think the existing mods are?
> Who do you think the existing mods are?
I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread.
(We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.)
Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.
RWSen commented on Fark redesign is now live (2007) fark.com/comments/2762299... · Posted by u/MrThoughtful
I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit users are low value. There the sort of people if a company tries to engage with them with just be hostile. This means the amount of money Reddit can charge for ads isn't that high. Which means the companies advertising on Reddit are generally on the lower end of the scale or it's just a tiny part of a bigger ad campaign.
So if ad revenue isn't going to do it. Then it needs to be a freemium model with subscriptions. They probably get 25% of their revenue from reddit premium. That also means, charging for the API.
The problem for many of the third party apps is they've also been running a freemium model with very low overheads due to the fact Reddit has been largely funding their freemium model. They've been charging next to nothing for their premium options ($1.50 a month) and they have massive amount of very active users. They're so big that paying a reasonable per API request fee results in a massive bill. A bill they can't pay due to a freemium model and super low fees that don't pay for the freemium users. Third party apps directly compete with Reddit, therefore it's fair they pay Reddit for the resources they use as well as the lost potential of the users they did take. Those paying for premium on an app would probably pay premium on Reddit.
Then comes in the low value users, who are outraged the free toy they have wants to make a profit. "It's too much money" - funny enough Reddit users think they're worthless - was one of the main cries. "This third party app IS REDDIT" - well if they're Reddit they shouldn't need Reddit access. A userbase who resists being monetised. Either they're monetisable or they're not. If they're not the company can't survive. What the Reddit users need/want is a non-profit.
You're not wrong: reddit probably needs to raise their income, which means monetising their users more.
The biggest issue most vocal users (including many mods and developers of third party apps like Apollo) have, is that the prices are much higher then the expections reddit set beforehand and that everything was only communicated 30 days in advance.
If reddit wanted to keep third party apps, but have them pay for the users use of reddit, they could have implemented a transition plan. Or make it work another way. Or charge a realistic amount (you yourself state reddit's users are low value, but reddits is asking for $20 million per year in missed monetisation just for Apollo's users, which is very high value).
Instead, reddit seems to approach this aggressively, signalling through their actions that they intend to kill off all third party apps. That's what the the subs going dark are protesting against. Especially since reddit's own site and app are of significant lower quality.
RWSen commented on Things people blamed on bicycles twitter.com/paulisci/stat... · Posted by u/the-archivist
> Going out for drinks? Bike.
As long as you don't actually drink anything hah. Everyone's a designated driver with bikes.
ANother anecdote from The Netherlands: when we go out to drink we go by bike so everyone can drink! Worst case scenario: you bike there and walk back again. You can't take a car with you when you're walking.
Personally, while drunk, I lose the ability to walk straight before I lose the ability to bike.
Every bug ever was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer told the computer to do but not what was intended. I'd like to meet the guy or girl that never coded up something with a bug, even the greats mess up.
Donald Knuth famously wrote: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.", see also: the doctrine of testing.
> Every bug ever was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer told the computer to do [...]
Ironically, the first ever computer bug does not fit your claim [0].
RWSen commented on Neural Supersampling for Real-Time Rendering research.fb.com/blog/2020... · Posted by u/jsheard
How close are we to working Foveal rendering with eye tracking so that upsampling only needs to be done for a small area of the screen?
Spending precious milliseconds perfecting the corners of the image for VR seems like a complete waste.
Foveal rendering is in a weird spot. The software seems to be there, but mostly only in academia. The hardware is almost nowhere to be found, because it is another expense. People prefer spending that extra money on a better computer, since that improves every VR experience, not just the possibility of (part of) future experiences.
FVR needs a hook: what can it do that "dumb" VR headsets don't?
RWSen commented on Points of contact – a short history of door handles apollo-magazine.com/histo... · Posted by u/pepys
Maybe this article never loaded correctly, but it really seemed to be lacking in images. It's spends a paragraph talking about a handle made by Walter Gropius but never bothers to show it to you.
I satisfied my curiosity here: https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/products/my-favourite-...
The handle designed by Walter Gropius is the first image of the article for me, even before the introduction. Direct link: https://apollo.imgix.net/content/uploads/2020/06/GettyImages...
RWSen commented on Reddit has become a guide to personal finance qz.com/1707479/reddit-has... · Posted by u/lxm
UK folk should head to https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/
I've always been interested in personal finance, but this community has helped me learn new things and everyone is very supportive.
For The Netherlands: https://www.reddit.com/r/geldzaken
RWSen commented on The Rise of the Electric Scooter blog.codinghorror.com/the... · Posted by u/idoco
Is that the case in the winter too? I just started bike commuting in SF and have been wondering how it works in bike oriented colder countries when it starts raining/snowing.
Here in the Netherlands during winter, bike paths are cleared/salted before most residential streets. That together with the sheer amount of bicycles keeps all mayor bike paths clear enough, though it does get slippery.
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