I’ve taken this line - as many have and do all the time. Ride it once and you’ll realize why it’s the better way to travel in every way but cost and time - and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
> and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
What kind of funding are we looking at? Is the issue that this is cost-prohibitive for reasons of scale that make this non-competitive for businesses themselves to fund as compared to elsewhere?
Amtrak was created to preserve the last vestiges of passenger rail when private businesses pulled out. It has conflicting missions so it's never going to be competitive in service.
Amtrak does not own its own rail network. It has priority over cargo trains de jure but in practice cargo takes priority. Many areas only have one set of tracks and trains can only pull over onto sidings when they exist. Class 1 railroads are capital intensive so to be more profitable they don't spend any money they don't have to. Such as more sidings, more train yards, not maximizing the length of trains so they fit onto those sidings, or more than one operator per train. Class 1 railroads are focused on cargo and making money, not helping Amtrak trains go first. The government doesn't care to enforce the law either. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/tracking-productivity...
Amtrak operates routes that suffer from low demand instead of focusing on the New York Washington DC route. It's about counting US Senate votes as much as customer satisfaction or breaking even.
The Federal government heavily subsidized cars starting in the 1950s through the Interstate Highway System. Cars and airliners are considered critical passenger transportation infrastructure, trains are not.
The S-Line project is underway in NC and VA. It will rehabilitate an abandoned line (the former Seaboard Coast Line) to allow faster travel between Raleigh and Richmond. It won't be electrified but will allow trains to run at up to 110 mph/177 kph which is a big improvement over the current 60-70 mph (when the passenger train isn't being delayed by a freight train).
They are currently doing a couple of grade-separation bridge projects in north Raleigh and some minor curve straightening. Since the S-Line is not currently being used they can straighten many of the curves since there won't be any impact to existing operations.
The S-Line right of way is owned by CSX and they will be running freight on it. The budget wasn't there to acquire all of it by NCDOT and VA and dedicate it to passenger service.
I’m curious if a classic starlings antenna works at 100-300 km/h with occasional rotation, or will it need to be mounted on a targeting motor on top of the train?
Years ago I tried to book a train from San Francisco to Chicago as part of a trip I had planned but found it to be more expensive and, more significantly, a multi-day journey instead of a few hours. If you happen to be an American living near one of the useful passenger rail lines, and desire to go to one of the few destinations it can take you to quickly and affordably, more power to you. But most Americans live nowhere near a useful rail system.
I guess so. We took the girls when they were young to Omaha a few times from the Bay Area. I wasn't even sure passenger trains would be around when they were adults so wanted to give them that experience. I took a train between Kansas City and Chicago as a kid and found it magical.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
It seems though, increasingly, that the ability to avoid addiction is less about pulling one up by one’s own bootstraps, and in many ways determined more by genetics. That is to say, what might have been possible for you is much harder for others.
Look no further than GLP-1. People who have struggled for years - decades - with overeating are almost immediately able to cut back on addictive eating. It’s not that they suddenly discovered willpower. It’s a biochemical effect.
It’s no wonder then that kids are more susceptible to addictive building behaviors. Their minds are pliable and teachable.
Why would we not legislate things that take advantage of that?
Had Waffle House with some friends who mostly work in blue collar industries. One guy who works at a timber mill used Claude code to redo their ordering system. Took him about a month to go from knowing nothing about Claude Code to finishing the system. Basically just copied a proprietary software product that costs them upward $20k a year. They’re keeping that other product to cross check but so far the Claude coded item works great, and is of course more custom to their business. The dudes a hero at work because the system is heads and tails better.
Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.
I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.
> They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.
Time will tell, but I'm dubious this will hold longer-term. I don't doubt that Claude can write the code, but I am dubious Claude can manage it sanely. Does it have backups? Does the guy that wrote it know how to restore those, or can Claude do it? Can Claude upgrade the backend and/or migrate the data when the backend changes, or is this going to be running known CVEs in a month?
This has sort of always been a thing via hiring CS students as interns. I don't doubt most of them could jam out something that looks like Slack or Gmail. The problems aren't apparent immediately, they become apparent when you realize it doesn't handle invalid responses well and the backups are hosed so you just lost a bunch of data.
I'm converging on this as the real end state: it's a "better Excel" for general business work. And has some of the same limitations - maintainability and security. But there are also plenty of small businesses that run off a shared Excel spreadsheet and a few mailboxes.
Nobody ever really solved making CRUD apps easier through better frameworks. So now we have a tool to spit out framework gunk, and suddenly everyone can have their own app.
The best part is is that they'll get popped because of it and have zero clue. Anyone building in any frontier provider currently, but has little background in software, is creating all kinds of new liabilities that didn't exist before.
In a school district where I live the IT department developed a password distribution app using Gemini on Google App Script (they didn't even need this part), sent out links with B64 encoded JSON that included: student name, student email, parent email and student password. Yet, when I found it and told them all the ways that it was technically a breach in our state they ran to their 2-bit "cyber security experts" and "legal". They were far more concerned with CYA than understanding the hole they dug themselves. And all of the advice they got back was that it wasn't a breach. They claimed their DPA with Google protected them. I explained how email works and they just ignored me, likely because in our state they are bound by GDPA and won't ever engage in a legitimate conversation via email.
The kicker here is they pay for an IDP with built-in mechanisms for password resets (that was the reason for building this: to reset students passwords). One of their cyber security "experts" (a lone guy who has zero credentials from what I found) told them that password resets using the IDP was "not recommended". When pressed on that they were, again, silent.
LLMs are creating a huge mess for people now empowered to go well beyond their capabilities and understanding. It's a second coming of the golden age of shitty software that's riddled with even the most basic of security flaws.
I'm just going to keep building software mostly traditionally, while using "AI" to help me research things quicker (might as well use it while it's here), survive the shitpocalypse, and then laugh as traditional-minded developers become a scarce sought-after resource again.
Either way, the instability of this industry due to the insane amounts of cargo culting every time <insert big thing> comes along has made me really question whether I want to stick around.
> Either way, the instability of this industry due to the insane amounts of cargo culting every time <insert big thing> comes along has made me really question whether I want to stick around.
I think this is where a lot of freelance contractors could pivot to - basically "last mile" coding, where the LLM does the front end work, and then high hourly pay engineers come in and fix the work. it'd still be cheaper than a lot of the industry niche software that is usually pretty bad.
I hear you but at least as my bud described it, the software that most of the timber mill industry uses is buggy as hell, crashes all the time, and makes mistakes. One would wonder if even the licensed software is hardened.
I have three teenage kids and they’ve all switched to wired. Many of their friends have as well.
It has nothing to do with fashion or retro vibes, as far as I can tell.
They’ve all lost too many AirPods through the years. AirPods just too easy to lose, and at their school, too easy to be stolen by someone else. And they’re expensive. Yes you can buy cheaper Bluetooth headsets but those often don’t sound as good and get lost just as easily.
So you’re either on a subscription basis relationship wih Bluetooth headsets, or you use wired headphones, which are actually harder to lose and less desirable to steal.
Sound wise they are exactly the same. This is what bewildered me at the time with the airpods. Everyone is raving about the sound. Same chinsy crappy earppod sound they always had. Might as well use one of the five pairs of those you've accumulated.
And then also everyone I know who was heavy into airpods has also over time moved off them because, the battery. Everyone uses over ears from Sony now. Like look at what the walkers in your neighborhood are doing, everyone has overears now with actual battery life that isn't going to be ewaste in 18 months.
Heavy usage on these is just killing the battery. It is worst case for battery health: people just draining these down in one session constantly. In like 1 year maybe 2 your battery life has sunk like a stone and apple wants $50 out of you. 10 years half a grand spend on $5 sound quality.
It's a growing trend in the "alternative" health scene. I have a few friends who should absolutely know better do silly stuff like use wired headphones due to RF, and even as much as turning Wifi off at night for health reasons. Nevermind they just switch to 5G in bed on their phones.
Probably the usual "RF is bad for your head" quackery that has been floating around ever since the first mobile phones, and for athletes, wired devices aren't in danger of getting damaged when they fall out of your ear.
I think you’re missing the point and approaching this with a myopically binary perspective.
Just because you consider AI an interface in line with, perhaps, a paintbrush, typewriter, or spell checker, doesn’t mean it automatically is. It may even be true for you, and not for others. That’s the myopic part.
The binary part is that simply because you see it as an interface, it doesn’t have effects that are different than the interface of a brush. You wouldn’t get very far arguing with a judge that 80mph over the speed limit is exactly the same as 5mph over the speed limit.
Or, where would you draw the line. Is hiring someone to write your hacker news comments still your comment? Or what about spam bots? Are they not also an “interface?” Is banning spam bots outrightly also “ableist” by you?
But also, we have plenty of both media philosophical musing and evidence based data that shows that while mediums may not BE the message, they absolutely do affect the message.
In this case HN is simply saying that the process of humans generating words that we type onto a screen is the valuable part of communicating that we want to maintain. And that using AI is a bridge too far in losing the effort and output from that process.
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
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