This reminds me of college, when some of my professors were still sorting out their curriculum and would give us homework assignments with bugs in it.
I complained many times that they were enabling my innate procrastination by proving over and over again that starting the homework early meant you would get screwed. Every time I'd wait until the people in the forum started sounding optimistic before even looking at the problem statement.
I still think I'd like to have a web of trust system where I let my friends try out software updates first before I do, and my relatives let me try them out before they do.
Ah, I remember those days. One that wasn't an error exactly was an assignment that had a word limit of 2000 words or something. I'd written maybe 3000 words and spent quite some time cutting it down, getting it to just under the limit. Then someone else who also wrote too many words asked the professor if that was okay and they sent out an update to everyone saying it's fine to ignore the word limit.
I work in a lab as an analyst (bioinformatician), we are register and pay for quality assurance programs that contain an embarrassing about of technical errors.
There's a lot of things going on that lead to this.
One, the developers spend more time running this code than we do, and they have to get the program working before we can even use it. So any parts of the program that are hostile to the developers risks killing the entire project. Obfuscating the copy protection can hit a point where it makes bug fixing difficult.
Two, lack of training. If you, me, and Steve each have a bag of tricks we all use to crack games, whichever one of us figures it out gets bragging rights but the game remains cracked. Meanwhile Developer Dan has to be aware of all the tricks in all of our bags together if he wants to keep the three of us out. Only there's not three of us, there's 300. Or today, probably more like 30,000.
Three, lack of motivation, which is itself several different situations. There's a certain amount of passive aggression you can put into a feature you don't even really want to work on. You can lean into any of the other explanations to defend why your code didn't protect from cracking all that much, but it's a checkbox that's trying to prove a negative, and nobody is going to give you any credit for getting it to work right in the same way they give you credit for fixing that corner glitch that the QA people keep bitching about. Or getting that particle animation to work that makes the AOE spells look badass.
There are some databases that can move an entire column into the index. But that's mostly going to work for schemas where the number of distinct values is <<< rowcount, so that you're effectively interning the rows.
The carriers were taking about 70% in tariffs and fees even without you bribing them to get better positioning. That’s why all the mobile app people rushed to Apple in the early days. They could actually turn a profit on the App Store.
If probably be retired now if I wasn’t already so burnt out on how SMS tariffs worked at the time. Utterly opaque and on a delay. They basically wrote you a check for however much they felt like each month.
Essentially the reseller arm of carriers at that time was just a money funnel from VCs to the telcos. They were eating their own young and I was full up on the bullshit.
It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).
Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot.
I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?
The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out.
If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.
I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers.
The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part.
It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.
Here is the thing, you demand incredibly high amounts of capital cost for not actually achieving much. And that capital could be use for far, far, far, far more useful things the city actually needs. Like high capacity transports, like metros, trams or bike lanes.
The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the morning is just a great deal.
For individual transport last mile is regularly being done by cargo bike or small electric truck just fine.
But you are right, tunnels do make sense for some things. Like transporting garbage underground. Or transporting heat underground for district heating, or district cooling. Both would be better investments then trying to move logistics under-ground.
There is a reason, no serious attempt anywhere in the world is trying to move logistics under-ground. There are just so, so many better ways to invest in the city. Its literally not even in the Top 100 most needed things.
Specially in the US where the road network is so hilariously overbuilt that it could serve 10x the amount of people on the same area if public transport was just taken minimally serious. And in the US, underground cargo transport isn't even in the Top 1000 things a city should consider spending money on.
There’s only so much gridlock you can avoid without going above or below grade. I was shocked when I moved to Seattle and they had no subway system. It was made even worse by being crammed up against a tall hill with a ridiculously deep lake behind it. They are finally changing it now but I’d spent time in Tokyo before, and time in London and Paris shortly after and it was a real head scratcher. One bus tunnel helped, as was evidenced when they shut it down for a couple years, but cmon.
Because The Boring Company hasn't built any tunnels worth noting, perhaps, and stalled most of its projects.
This isn't a case against tunnels, this is a case against The Boring Company.
The tunnels aren't a great idea apriori. Good luck pitching the tunnels idea in Venice.
The tunnels may be a good or a bad idea depending on many variables, and the tunnels that the Boring Company has actually built are worthless.
As for the tunneling equipment: selling those machines isn't their core business, and there's no evidence these machines have, or may in the feasible future, do anything revolutionary in the tunnel industry (i.e., built radically better, radically cheaper, or radically faster).
The idea of having such machines is good. They don't have such machines.
> It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field
It's never premature to say that. Read what you wrote.
You can say a field has been revolutionized once a revolution takes place.
It's hasn't.
The impact of the Boring company on the way tunnels are dug is, very sharply, zero.
Is it possible that they will? Sure. It's also possible that Britney Spears will. She still has the time, it's premature to say she wouldn't do it, right?
Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market.
> But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.
It's not stupid, it's weaponized incompetence to divert funding from actual transportation infrastructure to their non-solutions which are all about the company owner's biggest money-making product (cars).
Generally you’d like the variable to imply a call to action. Even if the call to action is for a feature still in the backlog.
Over time I’ve developed some tricks that invite people to add features to the code in the “right” place, and this is one of them. Once in a while someone gets credit for work I already thought to do but didn’t have time. But for every one of those there’s a half dozen or a dozen cases of increasing the bus number on a block of code I wrote be nerd sniping people into making additions while I’m busy with something else.
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