"we heavily biased the network against trains and now it's just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle 'cars' with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug..."
And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn't require lumbar strength for balance.
Hey there 👋, I know you mean well by that comment, like I get it, I do. ☺️ But I just wanted to let you know:
THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO STUDIES DONE ON THE SAFETY OF CRAB TRAINS.
ZERO.
But despite that, they are gaining widespread support, and now even people like yourself are calling them "optimal."
Listen: Someone I know lost an arm in the pincer mechanism of one of these trains. More work needs to be done before we can consider them safe, nevermind "optimal". Don't buy into the techbro BS.
the last time I gave factorio a serious run was waaaay back in its beta, before it was even finished and had an end game.
its just gotten so complicated since then that I get overwhelmed, especially when you start to scale up and realize you fucked something up and have to undo an entire day of shit to move something 2 tiles or something.
Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I'm personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.
There's likely some cases of convergent evolution, but I'm not sure this is settled for all trees.
I'd suspect that at least some trees with last common ancestors that are shrubs have re-enabled genes that enable the tree phenotype rather than independently evolving the tree phenotype.
But still really cool (and maybe turns on exactly how much evolution your consider needs to happen before it's convergent evolution.)
Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.
I know it's a shitpost, but i hate that people interpret carcinisation as a crab being the ultimate piece of evolution.
When learning evolution like algorithms in computer science, one of the first things you learn is strategies to not get stuck in locally optimal solutions (solutions that seem the best when you look at other nearby solutions, but are worse than other solutions if you allow your algorithm to look further away).
Crabs seem like that, it's just an easy defensive evolution that then stagnates in a form that kind of works. Seeing how many crabs we eat, and how few crabs eat us, it's obvious that crabs aren't the actual pinnacle of evolution, just some locally optimal solution that evolution tends to get stuck in :p.
I understand your point but some of history's most publicized and powerful figures have been consumed by crabs. Amelia Earhart and countless other well known examples through history show the crab threat is much more present and real than you imply.
Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
Motherfucker, that's just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.
It didn't catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.
So I'm out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
That's a thing for forklifts since what, a century? Even better, they use a wire with a set frequency instead of magnets, it's called wire guidance system.
That's the end game for self-driving cars. They can drive close enough together to draft, efficiency goes way up. If a problem happens ahead, they communicate back so that pileups don't happen.
IMO, the big strength with self driving cars, if we ever get there is that level of car to car communication. The vehicle will be able to communicate ahead and see the best possible route, and where there's congestion etc, then optimize the drive to avoid unnecessary delays.
A big problem with human drivers is the tenancy for ghost traffic jams to occur. There was a test they did with about 10-20 drivers of all varieties put into cars and told to drive a circle track, following eachother. No other instructions were given. All they need to do was keep distance in front of them and everything would be fine, what was observed was that some drivers went more quickly than others, and would brake to a near stop when they came close to the person in front. In doing so, everyone ended up basically in stop and go conditions.
IMO, that test exemplifies the problem with human drivers. Put enough of them on the same road and given enough drivers and enough time, traffic/congestion will create slowdowns that otherwise shouldn't exist.
Taking people out of the equation means that all of the cars can accelerate at the same time and travel in tight packs, so merges are effortless because the entire system is working together to ensure that merging vehicles are able to merge (allowing sufficient space for them to merge), and perhaps more importantly, the merging cars will match pace with the flows of traffic already traveling on the road. Those are the two main tenants of a zipper merge. Find space to merge into, and match pace with the vehicles in the lane you are merging into. Seems that a lot of people forget that last bit.
I read a study once that covered the stop and go traffic wave effect. Apparently all you have to do to stop the wave propagation as have a couple of drivers with a two - three car buffer. The first person to not have to come to a stop in the wave has the power to more or less reset and stop the wave.
You don't, some will get ahead of you but not everybody does that, and the same assholes that are swerving to get ahead of you are the ones that cause the propagation of the wave. You're slowing down a little bit and accepting some leakage makes it that much better for the whole crowd
I am looking for intersections with two catepillars of drafting vehicles that slightly intersperse to cross each other at right angles by microtiming the gaps to avoid collisions by microseconds.
Self driving taxis aren't an awful solution for last-mile transport. Trains can't take you door to door, and walking isn't always a good option (people with mobility issues, inclement weather, etc).
Key word being "taxis". They don't need to be in every individual's garage.
Train cars are crabs. They've got an exoskeleton, they're squat bodied, many legged, and have pincers on either side. All they have to do is start moving that body plan around some and they will be crabs.
IDK why but I actually thought the title was this pun when I first read it. It was only after reading your comment that I realized that OP didn't actually cash in on the joke (skill issue, smh).
Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it's always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.
the Dutch train system is so incredibly cool, you can get from one end to another end of the 'main' part of the Netherlands in an hour and its so easy to just get to any station anywhere and then you can just go everywhere for so incredibly cheap. Literally the only thing you need to get anywhere in the Netherlands is a bike and something to buy train tickets with. You dont even need to buy tickets, you can just tap your debit card on the gates in the entrance station and then tap it when you exit and it just handles everything for you
Could a blimp be sailed like a boat? I don't think so, it's a different physics problem. A sailboat is both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic, it's touching water and air, a blimp is only touching air. A sailboat can sail into a quartering headwind by turning the yards so they form an airfoil creating lift like an airplane wing in a mostrly forward direction, and it keeps from sliding sideways by the mass of the water interacting with the hull. A blimp with masts wouldn't do that, the wind will act on the envelope to just push it downwind, the sails might be able to drive it slightly forward so it goes slightly off to the side of downwind?
Also, to keep it from being blown over you'd have to hang the masts below the airship rather than above like a boat. Bouyancy is much more precious on an airship than a boat because air is a much bigger pain in the ass to be lighter than, so a deep keel full of lead like a sailboat ain't gonna cut it. Putting the masts on top would be too easy to blow over, if you hung them from below crosswinds might cause a rolling moment but it wouldn't roll all the way over.
Damn I wish they were still making Mythbusters. "Could an airship with sails sail into a quartering headwind? Or in any direction but downwind?"
I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they're just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they're fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They're only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn't going to help anything.
Yeah it's a terrible idea, airships barely work as camera platforms cum billboards. But sails aren't just windbags, they can function as airfoils to provide power in directions the wind isn't blowing. I'm exactly one episode of Mythbusters curious about it. I remember going to a hockey game and the stadium had a remote controlled blimp the shape of a Coke bottle that would fly around the arena, I'd like to attach rigging to one of those and contrive a 5-6 mph wind scenario to see if it can do anything other than go downwind under sail.
Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that's highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions.
Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.
And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.
Wouldn't it be neat if companies weren't flocking to a few neighborhoods in a few cities, creating not only traffic jams but driving up housing prices as well? Isn't it silly how local governments are competing on who can throw the most money at private enterprise to get the new widget factory or tech campus built there?
Looks like fast frequent all neighbourhoods city tram system with tap on, tap off, coherent pricing, decent buses and free park and ride at tram stops.
Why does Lemmy and reddit love trains so much? They could solve some travel problems in some but are we expecting tracks to run literally everywhere and into every suburb? What about rural places?
It's a matter of perspective. If someone's from the USA, they have no idea whatsoever that trains could be anything good at all because that's the opposite of what trains are like in their experience, but if they're from the Netherlands then they know that trains can be simple and great.
"we heavily biased the network against trains and now it's just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle 'cars' with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug..."
Even in bike racing the optimal form ends being to become a train. A peloton is just a train made up of bikes.
And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn't require lumbar strength for balance.
Damn now I want pedal powered train
This is just the AI bias showing through: It's all that training.
Nice pun, I think you railed it
They were certainly on the right track
People who are biased against trains have a real loco motive.
They're all intent on just derailing the conversation!
So what you're saying is the optimal form is some kind of crab train?
Hey there 👋, I know you mean well by that comment, like I get it, I do. ☺️ But I just wanted to let you know:
THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO STUDIES DONE ON THE SAFETY OF CRAB TRAINS.
ZERO.
But despite that, they are gaining widespread support, and now even people like yourself are calling them "optimal."
Listen: Someone I know lost an arm in the pincer mechanism of one of these trains. More work needs to be done before we can consider them safe, nevermind "optimal". Don't buy into the techbro BS.
Friends don't let friends crab train.
Hey, when the train needs blood the train gets blood
Choo choo Charlie intensifies
As a tf2 player. A crab train is majestic.
Trains only move forward and back. Crabs only move side to side. It only makes sense.
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
the last time I gave factorio a serious run was waaaay back in its beta, before it was even finished and had an end game.
its just gotten so complicated since then that I get overwhelmed, especially when you start to scale up and realize you fucked something up and have to undo an entire day of shit to move something 2 tiles or something.
Bots can do that shit. Ctrl+X, select, move the two tiles, place. Realize that's still a tile off on the Y axis, and repeat. The bots don't complain.
I will hand make the hundred or so blue science I need to make construction bots if I have to.
Yes.. if you are far enough in the game for them, perhaps.
Which I wasnt.
Since space age came out, it's way easier to rush bots and rockets. Just red green and blue science.
embrace the spaghetti 🍝
This was me but I tried it a year ago 😂
I tried about 6 months ago after falling deep into DoshDoshington's various Factorio Mod and Challenge series.
I got about 15 hours in before I was just overwhelmed with what I was doing. I miss being young and eager.
ELEVATED RAILS my BELOVED ❤️
The children inside make it scary
I know, right? Are they passengers, or are they stomach contents. And is there a meaningful difference between the two
They make everything scary.
Okay I laughed while my exoskeleton genes got activated.
the perfect transportation does not e-
Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I'm personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.
That seems unfairly obvious, but I certainly didn't consider it before.
Okay so now we are looking at some kind of tree-crab-train as the crown of creation, am I understanding this correctly?
Sounds like a creature from All Tomorrows
There's likely some cases of convergent evolution, but I'm not sure this is settled for all trees.
I'd suspect that at least some trees with last common ancestors that are shrubs have re-enabled genes that enable the tree phenotype rather than independently evolving the tree phenotype.
But still really cool (and maybe turns on exactly how much evolution your consider needs to happen before it's convergent evolution.)
Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.
BAM: train.
I know it's a shitpost, but i hate that people interpret carcinisation as a crab being the ultimate piece of evolution.
When learning evolution like algorithms in computer science, one of the first things you learn is strategies to not get stuck in locally optimal solutions (solutions that seem the best when you look at other nearby solutions, but are worse than other solutions if you allow your algorithm to look further away).
Crabs seem like that, it's just an easy defensive evolution that then stagnates in a form that kind of works. Seeing how many crabs we eat, and how few crabs eat us, it's obvious that crabs aren't the actual pinnacle of evolution, just some locally optimal solution that evolution tends to get stuck in :p.
I understand your point but some of history's most publicized and powerful figures have been consumed by crabs. Amelia Earhart and countless other well known examples through history show the crab threat is much more present and real than you imply.
This is why I stopped shitposting, too many sweats
We will see (or not) who has the last laugh, crabs or homo sapiens sapiens?
It's gonna be homo sapiens unless crabs evolve laughter.
Like came back in a million years. Bet crabs are going to be still around while we'll already extinct.
After several days of what I can only describe as ill-informed pro crab propaganda posts all over lemmy I realy needed this. Thank you.
Exactly. It's a local minimum/maximum optimization problem as applied to genetics and evolution.
Even the slime mould knows it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network
Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
Motherfucker, that's just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.
It didn't catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.
So I'm out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?
That's a thing for forklifts since what, a century? Even better, they use a wire with a set frequency instead of magnets, it's called wire guidance system.
TIL. Thanks for that. I wonder what frequency they use...
5g from the covid vaccines of course!
That's the end game for self-driving cars. They can drive close enough together to draft, efficiency goes way up. If a problem happens ahead, they communicate back so that pileups don't happen.
IMO, the big strength with self driving cars, if we ever get there is that level of car to car communication. The vehicle will be able to communicate ahead and see the best possible route, and where there's congestion etc, then optimize the drive to avoid unnecessary delays.
A big problem with human drivers is the tenancy for ghost traffic jams to occur. There was a test they did with about 10-20 drivers of all varieties put into cars and told to drive a circle track, following eachother. No other instructions were given. All they need to do was keep distance in front of them and everything would be fine, what was observed was that some drivers went more quickly than others, and would brake to a near stop when they came close to the person in front. In doing so, everyone ended up basically in stop and go conditions.
IMO, that test exemplifies the problem with human drivers. Put enough of them on the same road and given enough drivers and enough time, traffic/congestion will create slowdowns that otherwise shouldn't exist.
Taking people out of the equation means that all of the cars can accelerate at the same time and travel in tight packs, so merges are effortless because the entire system is working together to ensure that merging vehicles are able to merge (allowing sufficient space for them to merge), and perhaps more importantly, the merging cars will match pace with the flows of traffic already traveling on the road. Those are the two main tenants of a zipper merge. Find space to merge into, and match pace with the vehicles in the lane you are merging into. Seems that a lot of people forget that last bit.
So rush hour nonsense will at least be reduced.
video of a ghost traffic jam test: https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M
I read a study once that covered the stop and go traffic wave effect. Apparently all you have to do to stop the wave propagation as have a couple of drivers with a two - three car buffer. The first person to not have to come to a stop in the wave has the power to more or less reset and stop the wave.
Yep. I do this all the time on highways. I've seen dark red traffic lines on Google Maps as I've driven over them turn green.
Patience and the efforts of a single person in a wavefront can make an enormous difference, like a rock sticking up from a pond.
How do you prevent people from squeezing into your buffer?
You don't, some will get ahead of you but not everybody does that, and the same assholes that are swerving to get ahead of you are the ones that cause the propagation of the wave. You're slowing down a little bit and accepting some leakage makes it that much better for the whole crowd
I am looking for intersections with two catepillars of drafting vehicles that slightly intersperse to cross each other at right angles by microtiming the gaps to avoid collisions by microseconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhA917NnnCg
Self driving taxis aren't an awful solution for last-mile transport. Trains can't take you door to door, and walking isn't always a good option (people with mobility issues, inclement weather, etc).
Key word being "taxis". They don't need to be in every individual's garage.
Train cars are crabs. They've got an exoskeleton, they're squat bodied, many legged, and have pincers on either side. All they have to do is start moving that body plan around some and they will be crabs.
Checks out: while they CAN move forward, they highly prefer to move side to side
More like Carcinistation!
Cars in a station?
IDK why but I actually thought the title was this pun when I first read it. It was only after reading your comment that I realized that OP didn't actually cash in on the joke (skill issue, smh).
You appear to have downvoted yourself.
Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it's always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.
Crab-spotting is completely undervalued as a cultural activity.
That girl had a crab ran on her last party.
the Dutch train system is so incredibly cool, you can get from one end to another end of the 'main' part of the Netherlands in an hour and its so easy to just get to any station anywhere and then you can just go everywhere for so incredibly cheap. Literally the only thing you need to get anywhere in the Netherlands is a bike and something to buy train tickets with. You dont even need to buy tickets, you can just tap your debit card on the gates in the entrance station and then tap it when you exit and it just handles everything for you
you can even tap on sone bikes to rent them. everyone saying owning a car makes you free can suck it
There's two kinds of ground transportation: off-roading, and should be a train.
I also really like that every time I see some dumb idea to "improve vehicles" there a long comment chain improving it even further into a train.
Well if every vehicle becomes autonomous then isn't that just a large scaled high speed train?
Yes. That is the point. Trains are optimal.
Inter-vehicle cooperation and autonomy makes highways act like trains, yes, with a bunch of unnecessary steps
A less efficient train, because it has a bunch of small engines and batteries instead of one big one
But you don't have to smell unshowered people. I'm willing to sacrifice earth climate for my nose good.
With how bad semis rut the road I've been wanting to see them with retractable train wheels on the back
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container this is kinda the same idea.. same container can be transferred from ship to rail to truck
If trains were optimal, they'd have pincers.
They do though?
Look how sweet, they're holding
handspincersAnd on the first day multivac said LET THERE BE TRAINS
We are the simulation and everywhere we've evolved to using trains of some form, with a few very notable exceptions
That's not true I likewise "invented" a blimp. With sails so it can really catch the wind.
Shit you may have nerd sniped me.
Could a blimp be sailed like a boat? I don't think so, it's a different physics problem. A sailboat is both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic, it's touching water and air, a blimp is only touching air. A sailboat can sail into a quartering headwind by turning the yards so they form an airfoil creating lift like an airplane wing in a mostrly forward direction, and it keeps from sliding sideways by the mass of the water interacting with the hull. A blimp with masts wouldn't do that, the wind will act on the envelope to just push it downwind, the sails might be able to drive it slightly forward so it goes slightly off to the side of downwind?
Also, to keep it from being blown over you'd have to hang the masts below the airship rather than above like a boat. Bouyancy is much more precious on an airship than a boat because air is a much bigger pain in the ass to be lighter than, so a deep keel full of lead like a sailboat ain't gonna cut it. Putting the masts on top would be too easy to blow over, if you hung them from below crosswinds might cause a rolling moment but it wouldn't roll all the way over.
Damn I wish they were still making Mythbusters. "Could an airship with sails sail into a quartering headwind? Or in any direction but downwind?"
I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they're just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they're fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They're only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn't going to help anything.
Yeah it's a terrible idea, airships barely work as camera platforms cum billboards. But sails aren't just windbags, they can function as airfoils to provide power in directions the wind isn't blowing. I'm exactly one episode of Mythbusters curious about it. I remember going to a hockey game and the stadium had a remote controlled blimp the shape of a Coke bottle that would fly around the arena, I'd like to attach rigging to one of those and contrive a 5-6 mph wind scenario to see if it can do anything other than go downwind under sail.
I always wanted to get one of these and program it to follow me around the disc golf course with my bag slung underneath it.
I'm almost certain it would struggle to lift the frisbee.
___One could almost say that Trains are good.
Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.
And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.
Highly optimized for traffic jams.
Wouldn't it be neat if companies weren't flocking to a few neighborhoods in a few cities, creating not only traffic jams but driving up housing prices as well? Isn't it silly how local governments are competing on who can throw the most money at private enterprise to get the new widget factory or tech campus built there?
I just hate the whole concept of housing as an investment vehicle. You get all these old ass shit houses worth a million dollars for no damn reason.
I don't believe you
Tram is 2/3 the time as car in rush hour in my city. You just need a decent tram system with fast offstreet lines outside the city centre.
It looks like trains, bikes, and walking
And trams. Which admittedly look a lot like trains but run to a high frequency rather than a timetable.
Looks like fast frequent all neighbourhoods city tram system with tap on, tap off, coherent pricing, decent buses and free park and ride at tram stops.
BTC at $101k
Why does Lemmy and reddit love trains so much? They could solve some travel problems in some but are we expecting tracks to run literally everywhere and into every suburb? What about rural places?
I mean, as someone who didn't grow up around trains, but moved to a place with trains in the suburb when I was 18.... Yes.
Yes. Theyre called trams, or trollies.
Autism
It's a matter of perspective. If someone's from the USA, they have no idea whatsoever that trains could be anything good at all because that's the opposite of what trains are like in their experience, but if they're from the Netherlands then they know that trains can be simple and great.
Yes, please put tracks everywhere.
least funny meme of 2017