You'd be surprised at the places that have electricity, like houses in middle of nowhere, central asia. One of the challenges with engineering technology for the global south is that poverty is wildly different for different people. I met a professor working on flatpack windmills to pump water/electricity. The major challenges he kept seeing in the the Andes weren't the sorts of longevity/efficiency/logistics issues we usually solve with standard engineering, but how the products interacted with local politics and society.
To add to AlotOfReading's point, many places have some electricity, just utterly unreliable.
It might be down a few hours every day, or completely cut for days after storms or infra degradation, or the current fluctuate too much for delicate electronics. Many places could also get hold of a gasoline generator.
These kind of variations could require more thinking on the design, but being able to use electricity when available and hand power when needed would be the best.
Ideally the people on the ground thinking about their specific issues and having open ways to adapt the machine for it opens the door for many kind of evolutions.
> There is a set of languages which are essentially required to be available on any viable system. At present, these are probably C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Bash
Java, really? I don’t think Java has been essential for a long time.
Right but it will be something they can't work with. Like some custom magnesium-aluminum metal that has to be cast and can't be machined with normal tools.
My bet is on that there will be some kind of interaction of the metal catenary in the environment and maybe causing friction in the cables and shorts, which no one thought of since 1890 when they chose wood due for its insulating properties.
Then they will have to replace the metal with some fancy plastic one, because you can’t just admit the wood was better after all, but the plastic will also be unsuitable and degrade quickly which will ultimately end up with going back to wood in another 10 years. But that wood will then only last a fraction of the original wood, because we do not have old growth wood anymore and all the pine plantation wood won’t last a similar 130+ years.
So after about $3 billion dollars in costs and another $5 billion in economic and lifestyle impact after 20 years, they’ll declare it all a wonderful success, even though the wooden catenaries will live on as art or interior decor for another 200 years.
I foresee a "oh we can't replace the plastic one it with wood now because that would be a new material and we don't have data to prove it conforms with some rule we made up so the only solution is to pay some engineering firm who knows people on beacon hill a ton of money to say that pine is fine" situation before they go back to wood.
And as bad as the MBTA is... Keolis is worse (arguably).
I encourage anybody who gets the opportunity to ride the green line. It's cool that they managed to build it in a time before tunnel boring machines (by literally digging a huge, long pit, building the track, then covering it with a roof and dirt again). Just wear noise cancelling headphones or something cuz those trains screech
Cut and cover is still the cheapest way to build subways, but is less often used nowadays because of the surface disruption.
Long before tunnel boring machines existed we needed to develop methods to dig under rivers. Brunel invented the tunnelling shield for digging under the Thames in 1825 and later a more refined version was used to dig the first deep-level tube line which opened in 1890.
I think there's a good chance it is. Not out in the sun, not in contact with ground/moisture, pretty consistent temperature. Wood can last a very long time under those conditions.
It could be. A lot of wood has been around for longer than that. Wood is easier to damage so I expect some has been replaced over the years, but there is no reason to think it wouldn't last in that application.
> I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through
I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.
Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.
I worked at the local McD as a teenager and it was always funny to see a horse ordering something (the camera does not pick up the rider). Ours was near the end of a trail often used by people on horseback.
And since horse riders are legally equivalent to vehicles it's pretty much a "fine as long as you don't shit in the driveway" situation.
>Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.
That's a social class and location based. The average overpaid techie on HN who lives in the kind of place where all the houses are a million bucks and everyone buys their trophy wife a 4Runner because that's what you need for one kid then yeah, the drive through won't serve you as a walk up.
The Popeyes in Camden NJ don't care if you ride an elephant through the drive through.
With GCP announcing they built Gemini 3 on TPUs the opposite is true. Anthropic is under pressure to show they don’t need expensive GPUs. They’d be catching up at this point, not leaking some secret sauce. No reason for them to not boast on stage today unless there’s nothing to boast about.
Anthropic is not going to interrupt their competitors if their competitors don't want to use trainium. Neither would you, I, nor anyone else. The only potential is downside. There's no upside potential for them at all in doing so.
From Anthropic's perspective, if the rest of us can't figure out how to make trainium work? Good.
Amazon will fix the difficulty problem with time, but that's time Anthropic can use to press their advantages and entrench themselves in the market.
> The secondary market hurts their sales for new sets, or so they believe.
I think the secondary market drives sales. People need to believe that the overpriced sets they are purchasing, never open, and stash in the attic will make them a fortune on the secondary market one day.
It was called SIMTEL20 for a while because it was hosted on a PDP-10 mainframe running the TOPS-20 operating system, but apparently it was hosted on a PDP-10 running ITS first:
> The archive was hosted initially on the MIT-MC PDP-10 running the Incompatible Timesharing System,[1] then TOPS-20, then FreeBSD servers
> Stick a microphone and camera outside on a robot and you can get unlimited data of perfect quality (because it by definition is the real world, not synthetic).
Be careful with mistaking data for information.
You are getting a digital (maybe lossy compressed) samples of photons and sound waves. It is not unlimited, a camera pointed at a building at night is going to have very little new information from second to second. A microphone outside is going to have very little new information second to second unless something audible is happening close by.
You can max out your storage capacity by adding twenty ML high megapixel cameras recording frames as tiff file but gain little new useful information for every camera you add.
I think within no time it will be modded with motors, maybe salvaged from broken electrical appliances and it will come full circle.
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