this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.
Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.
Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)
The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day.
The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.
Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.
The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.
The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)
Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.
A lot of being "car brained" is because even the best transit sucks compared to a Taxi.
People objectively don't want to share space with the masses. Even in Singapore or Japan, the stress of being in crowds is simply not worth it. Its slower, requires far more mental energy to plan your route, and requires a lot of physical movement which is hard for fatass americans.
Especially when America has quite cheap, awesomely fast and fun cars (your local C8 Corvette can be had for 15% off MSRP from the factory right now).
Cars are freedom. Mass transit is biopolitics/biopower. Big ass off road capable trucks literally don't even need roads.
How does 'stress of being in crowds' in big cities indicate all those people would prefer to drive? Is stuck in traffic not the 'stress of being in crowds'?
The stress of 2 ton machines flying around at 120 km/hr and operated by the angry and impatient-- that is simply not worth it. You think automated trains with 2 minute headways in a network covering 85% of local journeys at $3/ride would be worse than a Taxi at $1/minute with traffic?!!
A lot of being "car brained" is not realizing that even decent transit by global standards would be far far better than the subsidized freeway only-if-you-can-drive $8,000/year horrorshow of the US/Canada. No one's going to take away your fun cars, but a system maximizing freedom needs to account for the young, old, disabled, drunk, poor, and motivated to read instead of drive. Mass transit is freedom. Cars are consumption-politics/corporate-power.
It’s unarguable that driving requires more mental energy. Which is exactly why we have licensing, sobriety requirements, age floors and limits, etc.
Route planning itself is a mostly solved problem for an average pedestrian in any developed city. You type in your destination in maps and go.
Cars are only freedom to able bodied people of a certain financial means and age. Or when you live rurally. To everyone else in a city, they make it harder to get around.
You should go to the third world and see how much cheaper gas is there.
A lot of third world countries exist almost entierly off of gas subsidies from the government. Go look at what Libyans paid per liter of gas during the Gadaffi years.
Americans already pay a "fair price". No, no one in the world properly accounts for "externalities" of consumption.
This is every attempt to improve a software project in a corporation ever… Small QoL fix gets pushed off because “the big rewrite work will fix it anyway” and five years later the small fix still hasn’t been done.
Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."
But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.
Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.
A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.
I know this is super late and nobody will likely see it, but the population of Quebec + Ottawa together is 18% of the population of Montreal + Toronto.
And the amount of track to connect the 4 cities together is double the simple Montreal-Toronto route -- on paper. In reality it's much larger, because most of the track along the Montreal-Toronto corridor is useable for HSR, but the proposed Ottawa-Toronto stretch is the one that needs a lot of new track.
There already are trains connecting to all of these cities, so HSR would still benefit people trying to get from, say, Toronto to Quebec City (the current rail service has a ~30 min stop in Montreal anyway, a transfer wouldn't add any real delay in that respect, and you'd cut down several hours of the journey with HSR service for the first leg). I'm simply saying that it would be great to just lay the damn track for HSR between the two largest Canadian cities, and deal with the smaller ones down the road.
At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.
Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
Well, if I’m going into the city 9 to 5ish I’ll usually take commuter rail because it’s less painful even if it takes as long as driving. But I do need to drive to and park at the nearby commuter rail station.
The game truly doesn't function without stakes. With no bets, the only stakes are losing your entire stack and not being able to play, so it pushes the game very early on into all-in territory.
With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)
In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!
Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.
I used a string of KaiOS devices mostly as my primary device from ~2017-2023.
I loved the battery life, the lack of distraction, the size and portability. I liked KaiOS because I could still chat via Facebook, Whatsapp, check email, maps, when I needed to. But it was annoying enough that I didn't spend much time in them. I loved/hated the physical T9 keys. I could text while not even looking, but it definitely was never as fast as a smartphone. If the predictive text was better it may have worked out.
The problems are
1. The camera. I had multiple devices with different levels of camera but it's truly a marvel of our world that I can carry around something that takes cinema-quality photos immediately. Dumb phones do not have good cameras. It's almost useless to even include one, I mostly just used it to remember specific posters/signs like parking.
2. The 'requirement' to use smartphone apps. Certain bank logins need an authenticator app. The Canadian border required Arrive can. Some concerts use apps for tickets. Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, it's possible to live without these.. But I can tell you from firsthand experience it's getting harder and harder, more annoying. This is actually simultaneously the reason I stuck with it so long, as a sort of protest against the direction our society is going.. but alas it didnt quite last.
3. Job changed, I needed to access discord while working at a bar. I realized I was carrying BOTH phones around for almost all of 2023, using my dumb phone for calls and texts, and my smartphone with WiFi to run discord and a few other apps. It felt stupid and was annoying so I bit the bullet and switched my sim to the smartphone.
4. I literally listen to less music. The music player apps were all garbage and it's no longer 2007 so it's not really fun to maintain a library of mp3s on a device. None of the KaiOS devices support streaming music.
If someone comes out with a small "dumb" phone with maps, Spotify, a great camera, and support for signal, Whatsapp, maybe FB messenger, and a basic browser, with good predictive typing and an OS that doesn't lag, I would pay a premium for it.
Edit: one of the most annoying side effects is when I'm in public trying to check maps or write a text and suddenly everyone around me asks "omG is that a flip phone???" and I am not a rude person so I maintain a slight conversation while they pry and ask to see it and show their other friends. Slows down the process of quickly using my phone quite a bit
i have a phone with KaiOS. The trouble I have is texting. Everyone wants to text but if I need to reply it takes three different button for each letter. I am looking some t writing a custom keyboard. does any have any ideas?
Edit: Maybe (just now looking at KaiOS development stuff) I could write a morse code keyboard.
I don't mean to be nitpicky, but you specified the difference between a theoretical impossibility and an engineering impossibility in your parent comment. I assume the reply is just referring to the fact that technically getting to a star system within the 10s of light-years away is an engineering feat, not a break-the-known-rules-of-the-universe feat. I don't take it that they're actually claiming it's a realistic feat that may be accomplished soon.
Sure, I guess I shouldn't have used the word "theoretically". My point was that with our current knowledge and capabilities, it is completely unrealistic to consider it remotely possible to achieve such a thing. We are orders of magnitudes more likely to disappear as a civilization in the short term than to achieve any kind of meaningful space travel.
Wait but driving cars is pretty much the classic example of how learning to use tools can become an "extension" of our visual, motor, spacial perception.
It's why a new driver feels so uneasy while a seasoned driver can almost "feel" the amount of space their car takes up.
As a single user, you must assume that anything you upload to the Internet will be there forever, because anyone can download a copy and maintain it. This means users need to be careful about privacy-sensitive information, controversial opinions, etc.
But on a broader level we don't actually dedicate much effort at all to maintaining the bulk of what's posted online, meaning most important things will eventually be deleted.
I'd phrase it like this - the longevity of something on the internet is correlated with its need/usefulness.
If someone needs that 'thing', they will download & keep a local copy, and then when if it disappears, then someone will ask for it on Reddit and voila! you shall provide.
I absolutely understand why NVIDIA is incentivized to maintain CUDA dominance, and I absolutely understand that within these market parameters, AMD/Intel/others have dropped the ball.
However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.
>However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.
I think in most cases you are right, but for CUDA, the consumer is winning. CUDA isn't some special secret complex algorithm just for nvidia GPUs. nvidia just spent a decade giving a fuck about the developer experience across a wide range of industries. CUDA isn't just AI, it's also physics, numerical modeling, cryptography, biology and more. They found a thousand use cases and spent time listening to customers and built a platform around it - it just turned out AI ended up being a huge money maker.
The problem is, and will continue to be, that Intel and AMD will only see the "AI" money bags and ignore every other part of platform, from debugging, compilers, language integration, GUIs, and even bug fixing. If Intel is saying here "we want to eliminate CUDA by investing billions into OpenCL and ensure OpenCL has a top of line developer experience and platform" than I'd be excited. But what I'm reading is "we will replace a few function calls for CUDA in Pytorch", which might be fun for a while up until you have to debug some performance issue and you realize you can get in touch with a CUDA engineer on github instead of emailing some dead Intel mailing list.
Well said. It sounds like NVIDIA went through the hard work of listening and building for years (decades!). I can imagine some top level execs looking at that success and looking to replicate the tech, studying the use cases that customers want.
AMD/Intel/Khronos are free to compete with something better. NVIDIA isn't preventing them from doing so. And in that regard, CUDA is a massive benefit to consumers, because the alternatives are really bad.
I remember reading a very well written article on stuxnet, detailing the entire way it worked. It was written in a very story-like way that built slowly until it revealed what the actual payload and impact was. Does anyone have a link to this article?
The book about it is a great read although I think it could have used a lot more editing. Chapters approach the timeline from different angles and as a result it does feel like later chapters are going over the same material too many times. Anyhow, you can read part of it here: https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/
This Quora answer isn't article length but follows a similar story-like narrative and is well written imo. I remember reading this before I was working in tech and was amazed at how somebody(ies) came up with this
(Can't link direct URL as work filter doesn't allow Quora!)
I'm not sure I fully buy this, only because how would anyone be absolutely certain that they'd make more with Sam Altman in charge? It feels like a weird thing to speculatively rally behind.
I'd imagine there's some internal political drama going on or something we're missing out on.
I fully buy it. Ethics and morals are a few rungs on the ladder beneath compensation for most software engineers. If the board wants to focus more on being a non-profit and safety, and Altman wants to focus more on commercialization and the economics of business, if my priority is money then where my loyalty goes is obvious.
Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.
Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)
The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.
Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.