Spyke

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Why are maglev trains still rare?

Here's an interesting write-up about an attempt to develop a large-scale urban maglev system in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krauss-Maffei_Transurban

tl;dr: there were so many technical issues that when the West German company developing the tech lost funding and the Ontario government took over the project, they immediately abandoned the maglev concept and replaced it with linear-induction propulsion with steel wheels on rails (the mag, without the lev).

Even this tech, which does have a few advantages over conventional rail and is still used today in cities like Vancouver, is falling out of favour due to general logistical issues with using bespoke technology over conventional rail -- fewer people know how to build and maintain it, you're relying on usually just one company to supply your trains and infrastructure until the end of time, you can't reuse any existing infrastructure, etc. I'd imagine these issues still get in the way of maglev development today -- even more so because you can't even reuse existing rails

memes

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Big Sale! But not on everything...

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I'm fairly certain the text is AI generated too, just because of the questionable "creative" decisions that I don't think a human would make (why does some of the text have overlines? why is only the Canada line red? why are all the lines jarringly different font sizes?)

plus, now that I zoom in, one of the colons has different sizes for the top and bottom dots. I guess GANs can just do text now

android

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Wish there was an \*\*Android Studio Lite\*\* version of the IDE that is targeted to low powered devices and has only bare minimum features to develop an app.

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I do this but it's a pain in the ass. They keep making it harder to access certain features without opening Android Studio (i.e. the AVD manager, logcat, app signing functionality, etc)

Also sometimes gradlew decides to just not build your project and you have to open Android Studio to get it to work. Why? No idea

I don't even use low power hardware, Android Studio just manages to be an incredible resource hog even on normal hardware