I have fond memories of porting Cube, Sauerbraten and AssaultCube to the Mac back in the day. Given what i've seen from Wouter back in the day i am not surprised he is still on it full steam…
great article but the 44 tonne limit is not "physics", it is regulation. if an electric truck would be allowed to weigh 5 tonnes more all these calculations would be different.
The computing cost to mine more bitcoin is hailed as the underlying value by proponents of that notion. It depends on bitcoin holders refusing to sell at a price lower than the cost of mining, which isn't a given. It's also a notion that doesn't account for potential innovations such as quantum computing, which would significantly reduce crypto mining costs.
Hindsight is 20/20. That bitcoin is a store of value has been talked about for a very long time when other blockchains overtook it in terms of functionality. People’s memories are short so I am sure it will be touted as such again in a couple years.
> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7.
The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context.
> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy,
They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.
> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability.
So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.
But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.
English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.
As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)
Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.
English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).
Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.
Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.
> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.
Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...
We've gone so over the top on weather fearcasting. Just look out the window if you want to know what the weather is. Save the "the world is ending" messages for truly life-threatening, property-damaging weather (and no, temperature alone doesn't qualify---it's easy to know it's cold or hot by just stepping outside).
Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts.
And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.
hahaha we could also track if you typed too fast! ... actually, this is an actual idea, if you use AI to generate the code ... hmmm; that would then be a fun project vs a cloud cost saving one
good explanation and i also wondered why many of the CGI effects today are so unbelievably bad - and worse than decades ago.
it still doesn't explain why it is done:
• why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?
• using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics". a final render-pass can't be that expensive that ruining the movie is preferred? if 20 years ago a render-farm could do it, it cannot cost millions today, can it?
The reason is it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to work with, and in general enables things to be done that would otherwise be cost prohibitive.
(And AFAIK they do usually do a non-realtime run, but a high-end render going for maximum photorealism also requires a whole different pipeline for modelling and rendering, which would essentially blow the budget even more so)
- There's an order of magnitude more CGI in films than a decade ago, so even though the budget and tech is better, its spread way thinner
- With CGI it's easier to slip into excess, and too much stuff on the screen is just visual noise
- Practical effects/complex CGI require months of planning, as it must work or you blow the budget/miss the deadline - now you don't need to plan ahead so much, leading to sloppy writing/directing, as the attitude is that 'we can rework it'
- Movies used to have 1-2 epic scenes they spent most of the runtime building up to. Nowadays, each scene feels less memorable, because there's a lot more of it, and have less buildup
- 3D people don't have the skillsets for nailing a particular look. The person who's best at making gothic castle ruins, is probably not a 3D expert, this also goes the other way
I feel like there's some strong rose tinted glasses effect happening here. Early 2000s were especially full of absolutely dreadful CGI and VFX in almost every film that used them unless you were Pixar, Dreamworks, or Lucasfilms. I can give you almost countless examples of this.
The only thing that changed is that now it's easier than ever to make something on a cheap budget, but this absolutely used to happen 20-30 years ago too, horror CGI was the standard not an exception.
> • why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?
It's a bit cheaper.
> • using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics".
It's probably a bit expensive in terms of effort or processing-wise.
In both cases you aren't ruining a movie. You're just making it more mediocre. People rarely leave cinema because CGI is mediocre.
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