VBprogrammer

> I can't imagine what would've happened if we adopted block signaling for ATC ...

You don't have to imagine. We already do in many places. The North Atlantic Tracks are essentially exactly that. Aircraft give position reports and estimates, those positions reports are used to decide whether an aircraft can climb though which levels etc.

It's also used extensively in an IFR non-radar environments. Exactly why aircraft have to cancel IFR at uncontrolled airfields in the US or under a procedural ATC service in the UK. You hear it a lot around the Caribbean and Bahamas too.

I think you have to be careful about assuming the US would have air superiority. It doesn't take a lot for what, on paper, looks like a superior air force to turn out to be not fit for purpose.

The famous example is the F4 Phantom getting beat in dogfights against the Mig 21 in Vietnam. It was mostly solved by changing the tactics and to improvements to later model aircraft.

Obviously dogfights aren't realistic in the modern age but that is just one of many variables which might lead to an unexpected deficit. Robustness, reliability, repairability, availablity of parts, ability to operate out of unimproved airfields, using poor qualify fuels etc.

I enjoy reading the comments explaining how the whole Trump / Vance meeting with Zelensky spat was some epic move in 3D chess.

Meanwhile Trump isn't even able to keep phrases like "rare earth minerals" correct in his head (repeatedly calling them "raw earth"). To be honest 90% of the meeting was him waffling on about how this news organisation was brilliant (because they give him a softball question) and this one was going bankrupt because their rating suck (because they asked a difficult question). You could see Zelensky trying to keep himself from rolling his eyes.

> Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.

In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.

The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.

In general failures like this aren't so much because of a single point of failure but because they trigger cascading failures across the network.

One piece of infrastructure trips offline, causing an abnormal situation at another, which then trips etc.

American needs an enemy. Drugs, communism, terrorism, China. I guess without something to fear it would be hard to justify spending trillions on their military.

It is possible that the person you replied to wasn't confused by that. I've certainly come across the type of developer who'd deride the lack of ability to formally test their code then, in the next breath, click through the happy path of their code and send it.

I really enjoyed this but at the same time find it completely perplexing - I can't place where the author is coming from - they are either really good at explaining things from the point of view of someone who knows almost nothing about this stuff or they genuinely started this without knowing most of it. I'm not sure which would be more impressive.

If that is 40% efficient as in 40% of the theoretical energy input comes out as electricity then it's quite incredible but I find that hard to believe. It would put it in the same range as diesel engines.

The gym revenue model.

The indie / startup space has been so all in on subscription revenue that I guess it's not a huge surprise that the big companies eventually tried to get in on the act.

Yeah, I used to take our daughter to nursery on her balance bike. I could tell when she started doing little bursts of speed so that she could put her feet up and coast for a while that she had picked up the essentials of balancing.

She did have a bike with stabilisers but she didn't use it much like that as she didn't enjoy it. Between getting "high sided" on bumps and the feeling of falling over before the wheels took the weight.

When her first friend started riding properly she asked me to teach her to ride without stabilisers. I bought one of the push bars from Amazon which was a confidence booster for both of us as I could run behind her and make sure she was safe. It only took 5 minutes before she was riding off on her own. Sadly she got a bit over confident and had a bit of a spill which gave her a bleeding lip which set her back a couple of weeks but the next time she was off without assistance almost immediately.

A few months later she was cycling 10km around the Ile d'oleron in France!

I don't really have time for a deep dive but from a brief look these are diesel electric trains. The water and steam we are talking about here is likely a simple boiler where the steam is only used to deliver heat to the carriages.

This is similar to heating systems installed in skyscrapers of the period (I'd definitely recommend this video if you haven't seen it https://youtu.be/nkgM0qCy5o4?si=46vNv6aaoYHcDO2l).

After the steam condenses the water in a skyscraper is trivially returned to the boiler (by gravity). However, on a train I suspect they run it as a total loss system and the condensate is simply discharged when it reaches a trap.

This whole system is relatively low pressure and, more important, low velocity so it's unlikely it would have caused an immediate issue (the train would obviously have required work before going back into service in any case).

I think the problem is more likely to have been an inability to collect enough snow to make a meaningful amount of water, in addition, it would likely have needed to be liquid to introduce it to the boiler, you can't just shovel it in.

Which is great if you are the exact person, team, and organisation which wrote the code and / or has access to the source code as well as the time and knowledge to know-how to fix it.

> Keep in mind though that 3blue1brown is peanuts compared to Mr. Beast.

Well, there is a thought which is not helping keep the January blues at bay.

I have what I think is probably a weird mindset that practically everything I own, short of maybe a car or a house, I assume is worth £0 after I've owned it.

Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.

Yeah, you can stay on it for a bit longer after they arrive but you'd have to be very asleep not to notice the lack of movement and noise of the station around you. Funny enough the best night I had on it, it was delayed by a few hours (normally a horrible thing on the train but perfect on a slightly too short sleeper!).

I've used the Caledonian Sleeper a couple of times. The first time it worked reasonably well, I got a reasonable amount of sleep. The second time not so much, not really any fault of the train, I just didn't relax enough to get a reasonable amount of sleep.

Both times I'd say well rested would be a stretch. The first time felt a bit like a magic carpet in that I got somewhere while using up no useful hours but it still wasn't perfect.

I don't have an electric car (not against it in principle but waiting for the right time).

One thing that always bothers me is that, from what I've seen, queuing for charging seems to be based on coordination and trust between EV drivers. Surely it would make far more sense to have some kind of virtual queuing system built in. Then when a charger becomes free it automatically sends you an alert and gives you some period to connect to the charger.

Longer term, I would hope charging stations would be designed with a layout which lets cars queue sensibly.

Russians mainly by my experience.

Metrics are useless in my experience for figuring out a problem. For the most part they only tell you that you have a problem. Being able to slice and dice logs that you have faith in is critical in my experience.

I have an M1 at work. Anything off the beaten path fills me with dread and / or poor performance because I end up emulating it.

I haven't got any personal experience of them but aren't there a number of Raspberry Pi clones which offer the same functionality at much lower cost? Seems like that would open the gap up.

I find it quite interesting that we're beyond the point of having an Intel processor being a massive advantage. I think 10 years ago most people would have jumped at an x86 processor with similar specs to the equivalent Raspberry Pi.

I had a play with Dart a while back. It felt like Python with types designed in from the outset. Would quite like to use it more seriously.

It's in that funny position though where it is in danger of becoming synonymous with Flutter. Like Ruby and Rails.

If you are at an airport you will sometimes notice large signs giving Longitude and Latitude of the individual stands at an airport. These are used to give the initial position to the INS via the FMS. Of course these are now all built into the database these days so are only used (if at all) for gross error checking.

Same. A pirate copy of VB6 and a download of some website which gave a reasonable introduction of how to do things. I remember doing things like using the Win32 API to get DMA to images so I could do pixel perfect collision detection between sprites etc. Fun times.

Well, this just opened up a new phase in the captcha wars.

My ability to write an essay under exam conditions is...poor. Thankfully there were less than a handful of essays I had to write as part of my undergraduate CS degree and I only remember one under exam conditions.

I think it's probably more concerning that spitting out the most generic mathematically formulaic bullshit on a subject is likely to get a decent mark. In that case what are we actually testing for?

As a British person this is always so alien when traveling in the US. You could go one step further and suggest that perhaps tips which are practically mandatory should be included in the headline price but that might be a step too far.

LLMs really help me with the blank page problem. Just getting something, even partially working, to built upon can be a huge win.