I would also recommend The Arctic Grail as a good companion read. It covers the history of the British quests for the North Pole and the Northwest Passage, with the Franklin expedition being a significant part of that overall story. It also really drives home the point of how much the British love a good heroic failure!
It is a fantastic book, and a great miniseries adaptation.
Just a note though, in the context of this conversation, it was written before much of the big discoveries of the ships, and other historical research came out, so it is largely speculative after last contact (obviously the supernatural elements are pure fiction)
Many of these are car-specific. Is there a reason you can't use buses on those roads, instead of building train tracks?
Buses use existing infrastructure, cost less than the train itself, are generally good when electric, require significantly less engineering to implement, cut down on noise and air pollution if they replace car drivers, etc.
Safety may or may not be as big a concern with buses; this article [0] seems to indicate Tha bus travel is as safe (if not safer) than train and car travel. That doesn't seem intuitive to me, but it's not a stretch to assume that bus travel isn't significantly less safe than train. This could even be improved with dedicated bus lanes.
Fast floods are definitely a concern, but I'm not qualified to say for certain how large the issue is.
There is literally a whole transit system called Bus Rapid Tranist 'BRT' that is exactly that sort of thing. And in the real world it isn't better or cheaper.
You know what, trains in most of the world also use existing infrastructure. The US had a very nice train infrastructure. So maybe the whole logic with 'lets not rip out infrastructure' should have been applied earlier.
Yes buses are good. Specially trolley buses. And you could built a country based all around trolley buses.
But the reality is, buses are actually operationally more expensive then trams or trains. Roads are more expensive long term. And the whole thing will be a lot less cost or space efficient.
As soon as you have sufficient scale, buses become impractical.
I live in a city of 70k people, we have electric double bend buses. These are huge 140+ people buses. And the are very often full.
People how don't live in a society based around public transport don't seem to understand what happens when you want to move a whole society, rather then disinfranchised poor people.
And just from a user-experience perspective, tram and trains are just so much better. Traveling threw the city, I rather spend a couple more minutes and take a tram route. Trams are just so much better and more comfortable.
We have routes in Zürich Switzerland, that only 1M people, where you have S-Bahn trains that are double stack and 12+ wagons long. They come every 5-10 minutes. And pretty much all of them are full during peak hours. Go to Zürich rush hour during those hours and just observe the amount of people, and then start to attempted to do it all with buses. And that's a small city, we aren't talking about Paris or Tokio.
> This could even be improved with dedicated bus lanes.
The running joke in the tranist community goes like this.
We could make buses better by using electric trolley buses rather then disel.
We could make buses better by giving buses a dedicated bus lane.
We could make dedicated bus lanes better by having steel rails rather then asphalt.
We could make buses better by having steel wheels as well.
Congratulations, you just invented a train.
Truly ask yourself, what do you want in your city, this:
For a while the idea of 'Bus Rapid Tranist' was promised as some sort of solution. But real world shows this simply isn't the case. As soon as you actually have a successful BRT lane, you instantly start to think about that it would be far better as a tram line.
Yes, dedicated bus lanes are great, use the extra lanes you have and your existing bus fleet and try to improve the system as much as possible. But once you are serous and you have some users, build a tram or a subway.
P.S: Plastic wheels are also a big source of emission that you don't want to have in a city.
The reality is, people want walk-able neighborhoods. In fact, the places where they exists, they are so horrendously expensive that people can't afford to live there. There are so few of those places that the demand/supply is just crazy. So even if there was a good walk-able neighborhood most people couldn't afford it.
The Texas DoT isn't about transportation, its basically about highway building (and often right threw neighborhoods). 60 years of infrastructure investment in on thing lead to more of that thing.
There are about 160 car accidents a day in Houston alone. The amount of cost society gets from that is huge.
Population count is just one of many metrics when evaluating the "niceness" of a place. Maybe "destroyed" is not the best way of describing the effect of car dependency (my english is not that good) but a city that doesn't value walking sounds like hell to me.
Most US cities require parking to be built when you build a new location. You know what my city doesn't require? A safe connection between the required city side walk through the required parking lot to the business.
Roads also go where authorities want them to go. Have people actually bought into this 'F-150 cross country rover' blabalbal. Buy a Cybertruck and solar panels and live of the grid driving threw the desert.
Wtf is this nonsense? Do people not need water, electricity, internet, school and other things that all depend on 'the authorities'.
I will tell you something about true freedom. When I was 15, me and friends went from Switzerland to Czech Republic by our-self in the train. Parents didn't have to drop us off anywhere. We just went.
And today, I can literally get up, without thinking or planning, walk a couple minutes, and be anywhere in the country 2h later. I can can drink and go home no problem.
But I guess its a much better solution to just keep telling people 'don't drink and drive', because that has helped so much.
It continually amazes me how 40000 a year die, plus an unimaginable amount of property damage, policy cost, medical cost, infrastructure cost and so on and so on. And the defense for that is 'freedom bro'.
Road planners can respond to shifts in demand by reallocating resources. It's not easy, but it's possible. No such thing when it comes to fixed rail. Fixed rail involves investment of staggering amounts of money under the assumption that things will be exactly the same 50 years from now as they are today.
In any other context, hackers would be mortally offended by such a proposition... but for whatever reason, hackers love trains.
There's a weird inversion that happens around the concept of "freedom" w.r.t. cars--everyone insists owning a car is the ultimate expression of freedom, but they never pay heed to the fact that you, the human, become bound to a world built for rolling metal boxes when you own a car. You can only go places that have parking for it, you become responsible for driving yourself wherever you want to go.
With public transit, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to hunt (or pay) for parking, I don't have to worry about not having an extra beer when out with friends. If on a whim I decide I'm going over to a friends house or if I just want to explore the city, I don't have to circle back to where I left my car to continue my journey (or return home): I hop aboard the train from the nearest station.
When I'm on regional rail to visit a friend a few hours away, I'm not stressed about traffic or timing my bathroom trips--I get a snack and a drink from the cafe car and use the bathroom when I want, otherwise watching a movie from the comfort of my train seat.
Moreover, a car is a liability: it requires fuel, storage, maintenance, all of which have varying prices at the dictates of entities beyond us. War overseas? Gas prices go up 30%. Need to park at your apartment? That's another $100 a month. Weird sound coming from the wheel? Could be anything, I hope you've got a trustworthy mechanic. Let alone insurance!
But the subway is $2.50, the bus $2.25. I can get to the airport faster than I could drive, for less than I'd pay in gas, and I don't have to pay parking storage fees.
Cars turn our cities into endless expanses of pavement just to hold our idle vehicles when we're not using them. They isolate us from our world and our communities, limiting us to experiencing everything through metal and glass. Cars are the ultimate expression of wealth separating one from the world: of course hackers love trains and transit.
> You can only do things that some planning board sets up a route to get you from A to B
No, I have an entire grid of transit options to go most places within the city. It's not just A to B, it's anywhere along the co-ordinate grid formed by all the transit routes, plus what I'm willing to walk or bike. Moreover, it provides far easier access to most of the places I do want to go than driving would.
With a car, A to B is possible given that (1) there's car parking at both ends, (2) there isn't overwhelming traffic in-between those two points, and (3) that anywhere else you might want to go also meets those criteria. Providing (or guatunteeing) (1) (2) and (3) results in massive expanses of parking lots which are rarely ever filled, massive expanses of stroad to support all the traffic trying to get to those parking lots, and pushes everything further apart just to support cars, all requiring maintenance and upkeep. Not that trains don't, of course they do, but they're far more efficient in terms of space and money usage to person-miles travelled.
You clearly have no idea how a actual transport system works. You are so hilariously and completely wrong train infrastructure its not even funny.
Go back 50 years and look at the train usage patterns then and now in places like Japan and Switerland.
There are some rails that have been around for 100 years and have been used in many different ways. Going from mining, to transport to tourist attraction.
Rail planners regularly adjust train length to adjust for demands. Frequency of certain routes can be increased or decreased.
If you actually think about it for a while, you realize you need transport where people live. And people don't move to new places in a year or two, new cities don't just pop up.
Many city in and villages have been there for literally 1000+ years, they aren't moving. So the idea that we shouldn't build a train to them because 'who knows about what happens in 50 years' is just beyond idiotic.
If you government is actually smart, they make sure to build transport where they expect people to move. Sweden did this very nicely in Stockholm for example where they built out the train routes and zoned for living along those routes. And guess what people moved there.
This idea that each person is some rugged individualist who at any point my get up and leave to start a new colony somewhere over the horizon is ridiculous. People generally move to places where infrastructure exists.
> Fixed rail involves investment
Rail can be built and still used for 50+ years just fine. How many times do you have to repave and rebuild a road in the same time. Once you actually do the math and you are not guided by 50 year of propaganda, its clear that trains are a far better investment.
And also, just by the way. The US had a huge amount of fixed infrastructure, that was already built. And then dropped. It clear wasn't the up front investment cost that was the issue.
> but for whatever reason, hackers love trains.
Maybe they have thought about it for more then 5min.
The math behind subprime mortgages was also kind of "solid" (something about stochastic PDEs). Math can be "solid", but disconnected from the reality.
(The connection to reality is impossible to prove mathematically).
Whenever I have difficulty finding the info by googling, I go to chatGPT and ... it gives me the wrong answer with confidence and aplomb. It is never in doubt.
(Eventually, the info can be found by more googling).
By now I am collecting the examples of ChatGPT and now bing getting obvious things spectacularly wrong, and sharing them with the less techy friends, as a warning.
That said, I treat the GPT answers the same way I would treat a “question dump” for a certification: it’s almost certainly wrong, but it gives me an idea where to dig further.
Even incoherent babbling with the right terms uttered can provide a useful set of anchors for future learning…
This indeed often works, but there's a whole class of questions where it doesn't.
Example: yesterday, I was listening to Abbey Lincoln's performance of the song "Angel Face" (you can find it on youtube). I wondered who composed such a beautiful song. Unlike the majority of jazz standards, this song doesn't have a dedicated page in wikipedia. Other sites cited different composers. When I asked chatGPT, it confidently told me the song was composed by Duke Jordan in 1952.
This claim was easy to refute by googling Duke Jordan. By more googling, discovered the real composer: Hank Jones (1947, originally as an instrumental piece).
This is an instance representing the class of questions where you expect a very concrete answer, but chatGPT fails, and the info it provides is totally useless.
I noticed that ChatGPT is absolutely terrible at many “factual” questions, where the answer is a date or person or list of such.
On the other hand it seems better at more abstract questions, as well as giving interesting background around some of the “why?” ones.
The coding ones I would limit to very short tasks that are easy to eyeball and verify: on one hand, the other day in 5-6 iterations it wrote me a functional prototype of an audio player (because I was bored to try to piece together the complexity that is WebAudio api); on the other hand once I tried to ask it to write a file upload code for a Rust web server ride - and it came up with three plausibly looking but totally invented frameworks :-)
So, I won’t let it do anything in an unsupervised fashion.
Useful for who? Who is the customer that wants this? Especially when is output is untrustworthy?
I guess generating nonsensical bullshit is 'useful' to those who like sending spam emails and enhancing their scams across the internet. Makes it easier to not rely on 'GPT' search engines or silly use-cases like generated cover letters at all.
GPTs cannot reason or explain their own output. Even worse as it is often confident about giving the wrong answers. It is a another solution in search of a problem.
I get real value out of GPT-based models for software development. I've had ChatGPT answer questions about particular APIs I don't use often, and Copilot has made it faster to rapidly iterate on things because I don't have to type out boilerplate.
Early on I was pretty dismissive about both, and thought they were at best a crutch for junior engineers. But I've come to appreciate that they have the capacity to remember many more APIs and idioms than I do, so when I'm venturing outside of my usual languages/APIs, that's where they really provide value.
As SE you can use it as a dedicated junior doing tedious snippets and small programs for you. Not always a hit but often right or at least outline it right is enough to collect value.
And with Google getting worst results by the day and often not finding anything, these feel like a step ahead.
Anyone who share OPIndia links, we can safely assume, is a "Bakth", Bakth is equivalent for MAGAhat.
Or they're in denial and think this kind of oppressive tactics are something to be proud of and come up with how its actually good for the nation.
BJP has been nothing opressive, jailing people on sedition charges. Banning content that speaks against them. Calling anyone who questions them an Anti-National. Man, I dont care if Obama did it or Queen of England did it, but why the heck do you want to think its okay because they did it.
