• teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 hour ago

    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

  • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 hours ago

    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.

    • Syd@lemm.ee
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      1 hour ago

      I understand your point but some of history’s most well known 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.

  • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    12 hours ago

    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?

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • buttfarts@lemy.lol
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        2 hours ago

        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.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        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.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours ago

      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.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      12 hours ago

      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?”

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        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.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      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.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    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.

    • jawsua@lemmy.one
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      5 hours ago

      Checks out: while they CAN move forward, they highly prefer to move side to side

  • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
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    24 hours ago

    With how bad semis rut the road I’ve been wanting to see them with retractable train wheels on the back