rogerdb (u/rogerdb) - Readit News

rogerdb commented on What Was Cyberpunk? In Memoriam: 1980-2020 (2020) forums.insertcredit.com/t... · Posted by u/Bluestein

rogerdb · 2 months ago

I'm not an expert in the genre, but I am a big fan of Neuromancer. I skimmed the article, and while I agree that the "cyberpunk" aesthetic has practically evolved into self parody, I'm not sure I agree about the analysis/critique of the genre.

IMO the core of cyberpunk is about envisioning a world where advanced technology is useful and ubiquitous, yet humanity is worse off than ever ("high tech, low life"). It's a subversion of the simple tech dystopias where the technology itself is evil or is misused by evil people, and more of a realistic counterpoint to the idea that technological progress leads to inevitable utopia.

I'm not sure about more contemporary works that build on those themes. Maybe it's lost its edge as "futuristic" technology has pushed its way more and more into our lives?

rogerdb commented on Implementing a Personal Transportation Hierarchy collindonnell.com/impleme... · Posted by u/ingve

slooonz · 2 years ago

Why are taxis so high in this hierarchy ? It seems to me they should be barely different from single occupancy vehicles.

rogerdb · 2 years ago

Taxis are complementary to the higher-priority parts of the hierarchy. It's easier to commit to walking/cycling/public transport knowing that you can always take a taxi in a pinch. SOVs have the inverse effect - it's hard to combine them with other modes of transportation, and if you're already paying to own/maintain/insure a vehicle, you're incentivized away from considering alternatives.

rogerdb commented on Implementing a Personal Transportation Hierarchy collindonnell.com/impleme... · Posted by u/ingve

kdmccormick · 2 years ago

Nice article, although I wonder why walking is considered greener than cycling. Is it because producing bicycles and bicycle infrastruce has an environmental impact?

Regardless, once you own a bike and once bike lanes are built, there's no environmental reason not to bike instead of walk whenever you want to, right?

rogerdb · 2 years ago

The hierarchy isn't so much about how green each individual option is, but rather about how trips should be distributed to reach an overall optimum.

For short trips or connections, walking should be more convenient because you don't need any gear or space to store your bike. This also gives a multiplicative effect with other transport options, because (e.g.) people are much more likely to take a bus or train if they can walk directly to the station instead of needing a bike or car to get there in the first place.

As an aside, mature bicycle infrastructure goes beyond bike lanes, especially as the number of cyclists grows. For instance, here's a video showing off a huge bicycle parking facility in Amsterdam: https://youtu.be/EqwasBTzZS8?t=530. Obviously this is great compared to car parking, but it's still a lot compared to the infrastructure needed to support short walking trips.

rogerdb commented on Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/... · Posted by u/kitkat_new

silverpepsi · 3 years ago

Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing?

"Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction."

It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.

rogerdb · 3 years ago

Not seeing it mentioned in the other replies, so I'll mention that (at least the way I read it) "our massive car addiction" should be taken as a societal addiction to cars rather than addiction of any individual. If someone lives in a place where a car is the only feasible way to meet their day-to-day needs, it's not fair to say they're addicted to their cars; however we might question why they find themselves in that situation in the first place. Often this comes down to societal pressures (zoning, lack of funding for other modes of transportation, etc.) which are largely outside the control of individuals. The challenge is to change the cultural mindset from "I need a car today, so cars are a necessity for life" to acknowledge that other options can be viable if we, as a society, are willing to recognize and seriously consider them.

> ... the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.

Places like this already exist (ie. basically any major urban center), but I don't think the intent is that every place needs to be like that. Small steps toward better options (eg. allowing limited commercial redevelopment in residential-only areas, improving the safety/speed/accessibility of alternate transit options) should be the short-term goal, and we can work slowly towards them. But societal pressure (eg. from NIMBYs and zero-sum car-first people) often makes even small improvements glacially slow or impossible.

rogerdb commented on No minimum parking requirements? No problem for Fayetteville, Arkansas sightline.org/2022/02/22/... · Posted by u/jseliger

duxup · 4 years ago

This appears to already be a very walk-able kinda place.

Not to say this can't be done elsewhere but this seems like a place that was going to be popular / this was going to work regardless.

rogerdb · 4 years ago

These shouldn't be thought of as orthogonal issues. You can dramatically improve the walkability of a place by reducing the amount of space reserved for parking.

rogerdb commented on SNES – Super Mario World Widescreen github.com/VitorVilela7/w... · Posted by u/gtonioli

rytill · 4 years ago

I love this game, have played at least a hundred hours of it in my childhood, and this seems … nice? What in particular makes this so amazing?

rogerdb · 4 years ago

It's mostly impressive from a technical standpoint, since the programming of games from this era would be strongly tied to the display resolution, eg. a programmer could know which background tiles or entities could be shown in the viewport at any time, and dynamically load/unload them for performance reasons. All of these optimizations now need to be tweaked or removed in the widescreen version so things outside the original 4:3 viewport don't disappear at the edge of your 16:9 display.

More recent games use flexible approaches to allow for different aspect ratios, which would behave similar to eg. fluid design on the web.

Jon Burton of TT Games has an interesting Youtube channel where he goes over some of these old school development techniques, if you wanted to learn more; eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96DO4V8qrR0 uses a lot of techniques that would be difficult to extend to a 16:9 display.

rogerdb commented on All Hail King Pokémon inputmag.com/features/kin... · Posted by u/nomoreplease

germinalphrase · 4 years ago

Is there a standard list of highly valuable MTG cards? I have a couple thousand cards from the mid-90s and while I’m sure they are probably worthless, I can’t bring myself to just dump them even though I haven’t played in 20 years.

rogerdb · 4 years ago

Depends on your definition of "highly valuable" - from that time period, there's a very short list of cards worth >$1000, quite a few in the $100-$999 range, and a ton in the >$10 bracket. What they're actually worth depends a lot on the particular printing and what condition they're in.

If you wanted a starting point, Scryfall is a useful tool for looking up cards (though they're missing pricing data for some early cards, presumably due to scarcity of transaction data). Here's something to get you started (cards printed before 2000, sorted by price, displayed as a price list): https://scryfall.com/search?q=unique%3Aprints+sort%3Ausd+dat...

rogerdb commented on All Hail King Pokémon inputmag.com/features/kin... · Posted by u/nomoreplease

salamandersauce · 4 years ago

What amazes me is that Charizards can sell for so much when they are so worthless to the game. In MTG the most expensive card Black Lotus is basically broken and can be used in some formats and so actually desired by players. Charizard from the the original Pokemon base set is bad now. His HP is laughably low, his attack throws away tons of energy and it's a 3rd stage evolution making it slow and hard to get out. Even the buffed 2016 Pokemon Evolutions version isn't much more playable.

rogerdb · 4 years ago

I don't think it's too surprising - cards from this era are primarily collector items, so among equal rarity cards, the most "iconic" ones are the ones that demand the highest price. Charizard had a pre-existing (and continued) level of popularity that made it the obvious most desirable card, even if it's not particularly playable. MTG didn't have the existing IP, so the cards that became iconic are more based around their playability, rarity, and associated mythos. Not too many people are dropping $20,000+ for a lotus to play it in vintage, but the prices continue to rise because of increasing collectibility. For what it's worth, Ancestral Recall is arguably a stronger card of equal rarity, but it's worth substantially less on the basis of being less iconic (if only slightly).

rogerdb commented on Software Disenchantment (2018) tonsky.me/blog/disenchant... · Posted by u/ibdknox

buzzkillington · 6 years ago

RTFA:

>And build times? Nobody thinks compiler that works minutes or even hours is a problem. What happened to “programmer’s time is more important”? Almost all compilers, pre- and post-processors add significant, sometimes disastrous time tax to your build without providing proportionally substantial benefits.

rogerdb · 6 years ago

FWIW, I did RTFA (top to bottom) before commenting. I chose to reply to some parts of the article and not others, especially the parts I felt were particularly hyperbolic.

Anecdotally, in my career I've never had to compile something myself that took longer than a few minutes (but maybe if you work on the Linux kernel or some other big project, you have; or maybe I've just been lucky to mainly use toolchains that avoid the pitfalls here). I would definitely consider it a problem if my compiler runs regularly took O(10mins), and would probably consider looking for optimizations or alternatives at that point. I've also benefited immensely from a lot of the analysis tools that are built into the toolchains that I use, and I have no doubt that most or all of them have saved me more pain than they've caused me.

rogerdb commented on Software Disenchantment (2018) tonsky.me/blog/disenchant... · Posted by u/ibdknox

buboard · 6 years ago

Windows does it. And despite that, versions like win 7 were pretty fast

rogerdb · 6 years ago

I'd argue that of any software project on the planet, Windows is the closest to having unlimited resources; especially when you consider the number of Windows customers for whom backwards compatibility is the #1 feature on the box.

And speed isn't the only metric that matters; having both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of DLLs uses a non-trivial (to some people) amount of disk space, bandwidth, complexity, etc.