> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.
You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?
They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.
The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about.
What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.
That's between Waymo and their investors at this point. They claim it's not, but it's not there's any way for them to actually prove they aren't, like the moon landing.
FSD on the other hand works fine without sleight of hand techniques, since I’ve taken it up to rural Maine without any cellular connectivity and it worked great, even in irregular rural traffic situations.
> active fluid exchangers operating at speed spanning kilometers of real estate, to get dissipation/area anywhere back near linear/area again
Could the compute be distributed instead? Instead of gathering all the power into a central location to power the GPUs there, stick the GPUs on the back of the solar panels as modules? That way even if you need active fluid exchanger it doesn’t have to span kilometers just meters.
I guess that would increase the cost of networking between the modules. Not sure if that would be prohibitive or not.
> He’s working with a company to develop nanosensors able to detect movement in the iceberg so he has advance warning of a flip
The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.
For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.
The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
"Nanosensors" is useless technobabble. But I bet you could do it by carefully monitoring the rocking of the iceberg in waves. Watch the period of the berg's movements; as the melting brings it closer to instability, the period would get longer and longer, which could give you some warning. (You couldn't predict the consequence of some portion breaking off, but it might give you something.)
> traffic lights by design are very clearly red, or green
I suspect you feel this because you are observing the output of a very sophisticated image processing pipeline in your own head. When you are dealing with raw matrixes of rgb values it all becomes a lot more fuzzy. Especially when you encounter different illuminations, exposures and the cropping of the traffic light has noise on it. Not saying it is some intractably hard machine vision problem, because it is not. But there is some variety and fuzzyness there in the raw sensor measurements.
I once solved a machining problem using SVG and a bit of javascript and python.
I was prototyping an orrery. It involved cutting out a lot of ad-hoc gears and frame bits on my CNC out of a sheet of brass. It was relatively easy to generate the g-code for the individual parts using fusion360, but then it was a lot of faff to zero the machine such that it cut the part from a fresh part of the brass sheet without wasting too much metal in between the parts. It involved a lot of guesswork, and eyeballing. And even with that there was a lot of brass “wasted” between the parts especially since you could only move your part in x-y but not easily rotate it.
As a solution I wrote a python script which converted the g-code into svg, and a simple one page website where i could drag the svg around and rotate it on a visual representation of the sheet. Once i found a good safe spot for it to be cut the page told me the x,y, theta coordinates for it. And then with a separate python script i could transform the g-code using the coordinates and rotation. This way the svg renderer was doing the heavy lifting of visualising the cutting paths, and i only needed to concentrate on the relatively easy transforms.
I don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
I’m aware of the facts you say. But they have nothing to do with terrestial operations. If the same thing happened to an engine sitting next to a data center the worst thing which could happen is it knocks the neighbouring engines out too. And if you are worried about that you can add more armouring between the engines. Which you can do because they don’t need to fly. Heck you can put a row of hesco barriers between engines in a terrestial application. But either way the data center is not going to suddenly fall on a fuel recycling plant.
The purpose of zoomed out comparison is to show the quality reduction of applying this tool. The purpose of zoomed in before picture is to show how a typical pixel misalignment. Aligned pixels can be easily imagined.
> The purpose of zoomed out comparison is to show the quality reduction of applying this tool.
Reduction? Shouldn't the tool be improving the quality of the image? If it is reducing the quality then why do it?
> The purpose of zoomed in before picture is to show how a typical pixel misalignment.
Okay, but how does this supposed "misalignment" look on the picture? Would I even notice it? If not, does it matter? Did they just zoom in, and draw a misaligned grid over the zoomed in image? Or the grid fault lines are visible in the gestalt?
> Aligned pixels can be easily imagined.
Everything can be easily imagined. Misaligned pixels can be imagined. They could just write "our processed images look better" and let me imagine how much nicer they are. The purpose of a comparison is to prove that they are nicer/better/crisper whatever they want to claim.
The way I see it, converting something to pixel art is akin to lossy compression or quantization. The goal is to retain as much detail as possible given the constraints.
The exact way that pixels are misaligned is a feature of the specific AI models that generated the almost-pixel art.
There are more details in the fixed version too, e.g. an extra detailed dark line within right leg (tibia) that is not present in the original; where do these details come from?
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
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