If the only train was 6 hours before you needed to be there then you'd probably just deal with parking instead.
The point isn't that the timetable is the only reason to use a train, it's that without a good timetable it really doesn't matter what other advantages it offers and planners need to keep this in mind at all times.
A while ago a train line that's around a kilometre from my place reopened after 20 years and I wanted to use it, as it would outright teleport me to the city centre in 8 minutes having no stops in between(vs 20min by tram), but it appears to depart every 1,5h on average and isn't very compatible with commuting.
This is the way I like to think about problems. Essentially you start backwards from the problem and (hopefully) arrive at a solution. If at some point in the depths of abstraction you lose touch or forget what that original problem was, you've already failed.
Building infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is a good example of being completely out of touch. The problem was there weren't enough trains at the right time to the right places. The bridge builders clearly weren't thinking about that.
In my work this often happens because of the XY problem. People ask for X, but in fact they need Y and X is just their proposed solution. This would be like people asking for a new train from Cambridge to London, but in fact they are really going to Oxford and were only using London to connect.
There are also assumptions that even the most pedantic people don't mention all the time. If people ask for more comfortable seats on trains, they implicitly also mean at the right time. They don't mean a comfortable seat at 2:00 in the morning that takes 3x as long to get there.
I've often thought some kind of daily meditation to remind yourself of what the problems are is useful. There are the "bedrock" problems (like the train timetable) that never change, and there is the specific problem you are trying to solve right now (like connecting Cambridge to Oxford). I think it's worth thinking about it every day lest you lose sight and build the bridge nobody needed.
It's funny because when I see people who really, really like something their faces are filled with joy. They talk about what they love and it's always positive.
When I see car people I see anger, frustration, furrowed brows everywhere, oh and did you hear about that asshole on the road yesterday?
From the outside this "love" looks more like an abusive relationship or Stockholm syndrome or something.
I'm biased because I'm 45 and have never driven a car in my life. I grew up in a very rural area in Florida, went to a big state college, and then moved to Portland, OR because it was a decent place to live without a car.
I knew from a very young age that driving a car seemed like a dumb way to live and so wondered why everyone did it and why nobody decided to try something different?
My view is that if people really hated driving they would change their lives to do it less! Instead they make excuses about how they have to drive. I judge people's actions and the way most people choose to live tells me that they love driving!
This is a huge problem where I live too. The thing is, technically, everyone is equally connected, because people have a legal right of way on all roads using any means of transport (apart from motorways, but these are always redundant links). But practically, most routes are unsafe and just downright unpleasant to use in anything but a motorvehicle.
I don't know what metrics they are using to assess walking or cycling infrastructure, but it seems like it's just raw miles of pavement/tarmac. This is a useless metric. You can have 10 miles of pristine cycle path but if it goes nowhere it's not useful and nobody will use it.
The metrics need to be based on graph completeness. Important places are the nodes. You get to draw an edge if there's a reasonable route that is less than, say, 150% of the crow flies distance (or some more clever formula taking into account gradients etc., ie. it's allowed to be longer if it means not including a 25% gradient). Then your score is simply number of edges divided by number of edges in the complete graph (or 2E/(N^2*N) where E is number of edges and N number of places).
I wish they wouldn't just focus on deaths. The difference between being killed and having your body wrecked is pretty small. I'm curious to know what the numbers look like if we considered some less extreme interpretation of taking someone's life.
You can always run a diff. But how good are people at reading diffs? Not very. It's the kind of thing you would probably want a computer to do. But now we've got the computer generating the diffs (which it's bad at) and humans verifying them (which they're also bad at).
That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has always worked flawlessly.
I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.
Anything that's been done before. Otherwise we'd probably start with making nuclear fusion work, then head off into the stars...
You've always been able to read books. What you're talking about is skipping the slow learning step and instead generating a mashup of tons of prior art. I don't think it helps you learn. It sounds like it's for things you specifically don't want to learn.
Congrats, you now have a job similar to a factory worker turning a handle every day. Gone is that feeling of growth, that feeling of "getting it" and seeing new realms of possibility in front of you. Now all you can do is beg for more grease on your handle.
Nah. We’re literally on “hacker news”. Frankly a lot of the hacking ethos has always been cobbling stuff together building upon the works of others that you don’t really understand.
Learning by getting something to work and tweaking it is massively more effective than grinding against a wall of impassable errors while you’re just trying to get started. You don’t become a good programmer by reading a book.
All I've found is the LLM just makes me work more. It's hard to talk about % boost when you're just simply working more hours.
It's like having a faster car with a bigger engine. Big deal. I want a faster car with a smaller engine. My ideal is to actually go home and stop working at the end of the day.
I also don't want to use it for my day job because I'm afraid my brain will atrophy. You don't really need to think when something is already done for you. I don't want to become someone who can only join together LLM output. I don't feel like I'll miss out on anything by not jumping on now, but I do feel like I'll lose something.
The point isn't that the timetable is the only reason to use a train, it's that without a good timetable it really doesn't matter what other advantages it offers and planners need to keep this in mind at all times.
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