>This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.
The big advantage is creating tunnels with a smaller diameter, allowing them to dig much quicker. So much space is wasted between each subway car that a large diameter isn't necessary.
Broadly speaking, active safety systems in any industry are generally considered less reliable than passive ones due to things like software bugs, unforeseen circumstances, malicious tampering, power outages, etc.
But hey, that's why we're both here, right, shooting the shit on a site called "Hacker News." Because we believe there are -- and will continue to be -- better ways to do things through the appropriate application of technology.
Right? If your bio isn't a joke, you'd better darned well have that attitude. Otherwise I don't see how you'd get through a typical workday.
Bio's not a joke, I actually design nuclear reactors. In fact, my experience in that field is why I believe what I said above.
The SL-1 nuclear reactor accident (possibly murder-suicide) happened because a human was actively actuating a control rod by hand and pulled it out too fast. Passive systems that limit rod withdrawal rate are better.
The Three Mile Island accident happened because a sensor mislead the human operators, who then did the wrong thing and ended up dropping the coolant level below the core, which subsequently partially melted. Passive safety systems like a pool of low-pressure coolant preclude this entire class of accidents.
Chernobyl happened because humans could and did manually disable all the automatic safety systems that told them the reactor was in an unstable configuration. Passively safe reactors can't physically get into unstable configurations.
Fukushima had active cooling systems powered by diesel generators. After the earthquake, they started up and worked fine. But when the tsunami came, it flooded the basement. The operators for god knows what reason put the fuel supply and electric switches in the basement, which flooded. The active safety systems failed, the coolant boiled, and the cores melted. As with TMI, passively safe reactors with low-pressure coolant and/or natural-circulation driven decay heat removal (i.e. no diesel backup power needed) would preclude this condition.
The nuclear industry is very into passive safety features, from experience. The first true passive safety demos happened in Idaho in April 1986 (weeks before Chernobyl) at a reactor called the EBR-II.
In summary, making a system safer with active systems is one approach. It's often both more elegant, more reliable, and cheaper to improve a system passively via design ingenuity. Thus, passive safety has a place here at Hacker News.
Every Tesla has gobs of torque, it doesn't qualify any of them as work trucks.
It's a toy, this is a recreational vehicle hence the ATV. Off-roaders often need compressed air to refill tires after deflating for traction in exceptional conditions like sand and snow.
The decision to have sloped bed-rails prevents mounting toolboxes anywhere on this thing, nor can you place oversized loads across them without sliding off. That alone precludes the vast majority of work truck applications. The 1st gen Honda Ridgeline had the same defect, to a lesser degree.
Gordon was famously mute and his hands and forearms were hidden. This allowed anyone to easily immerse themselves. (Same for Portal.)
Unlike a third person game where you're controlling a character, I could see how having a different voice and hands in VR would be odd. I bet Valve realized that a mute protagonist no longer works in a story-driven environment.
I remember reading various making of stories regarding the half-life world back when it was still relatively new, and even then the designers spent a lot of time talking about how difficult it was having a mute, non-interactive protagonist. What they pulled off is excellent considering the state of gaming at the time, but I think you're right in that it just wouldn't fly today.
South Park did a really good job with a mute character in both of their recent games. It became almost a running joke in how the conversations would flow and the silence was taken as support for whatever the speaking person wanted it to mean, highlighting narcissism or teasing societal expectations.
The single page app at https://hkmap.live/ opens on iOS with a note telling you how to add it to your Home Screen.
That gives you a custom app icon, which opens as a live full screen map app w/o browser chrome.
This open mechanism to “sideload” what a regular user can’t tell the difference from an App Store app was the original iPhone app distribution strategy for both live and offline HTML5 apps, provided to developers before the App Store existed.
It remains relatively trivial to distribute apps this way.
The big advantage is creating tunnels with a smaller diameter, allowing them to dig much quicker. So much space is wasted between each subway car that a large diameter isn't necessary.