• FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    “we heavily biased the network against trains and now it’s just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle ‘cars’ with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug…”

    • 257m@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      Even in bike racing the optimal form ends being to become a train. A peloton is just a train made up of bikes.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn’t require lumbar strength for balance.

    • rothaine@lemm.ee
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      17 days ago

      Hey there 👋, I know you mean well by that comment, like I get it, I do. ☺️ But I just wanted to let you know:

      THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO STUDIES DONE ON THE SAFETY OF CRAB TRAINS.

      ZERO.

      But despite that, they are gaining widespread support, and now even people like yourself are calling them “optimal.”

      Listen: Someone I know lost an arm in the pincer mechanism of one of these trains. More work needs to be done before we can consider them safe, nevermind “optimal”. Don’t buy into the techbro BS.

      Friends don’t let friends crab train.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      the last time I gave factorio a serious run was waaaay back in its beta, before it was even finished and had an end game.

      its just gotten so complicated since then that I get overwhelmed, especially when you start to scale up and realize you fucked something up and have to undo an entire day of shit to move something 2 tiles or something.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Bots can do that shit. Ctrl+X, select, move the two tiles, place. Realize that’s still a tile off on the Y axis, and repeat. The bots don’t complain.

        I will hand make the hundred or so blue science I need to make construction bots if I have to.

        • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          I tried about 6 months ago after falling deep into DoshDoshington’s various Factorio Mod and Challenge series.

          I got about 15 hours in before I was just overwhelmed with what I was doing. I miss being young and eager.

  • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.

    BAM: train.

  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I’m personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.

    • Wofls@feddit.org
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      17 days ago

      Okay so now we are looking at some kind of tree-crab-train as the crown of creation, am I understanding this correctly?

    • dondelelcaro@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      There’s likely some cases of convergent evolution, but I’m not sure this is settled for all trees.

      I’d suspect that at least some trees with last common ancestors that are shrubs have re-enabled genes that enable the tree phenotype rather than independently evolving the tree phenotype.

      But still really cool (and maybe turns on exactly how much evolution your consider needs to happen before it’s convergent evolution.)

  • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    16 days ago

    I know it’s a shitpost, but i hate that people interpret carcinisation as a crab being the ultimate piece of evolution.

    When learning evolution like algorithms in computer science, one of the first things you learn is strategies to not get stuck in locally optimal solutions (solutions that seem the best when you look at other nearby solutions, but are worse than other solutions if you allow your algorithm to look further away).

    Crabs seem like that, it’s just an easy defensive evolution that then stagnates in a form that kind of works. Seeing how many crabs we eat, and how few crabs eat us, it’s obvious that crabs aren’t the actual pinnacle of evolution, just some locally optimal solution that evolution tends to get stuck in :p.

    • Syd@lemm.ee
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      16 days ago

      I understand your point but some of history’s most publicized and powerful figures have been consumed by crabs. Amelia Earhart and countless other well known examples through history show the crab threat is much more present and real than you imply.

    • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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      16 days ago

      After several days of what I can only describe as ill-informed pro crab propaganda posts all over lemmy I realy needed this. Thank you.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    17 days ago

    Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.

    The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.

    Motherfucker, that’s just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.

    It didn’t catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.

    So I’m out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      17 days ago

      The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.

      That’s a thing for forklifts since what, a century? Even better, they use a wire with a set frequency instead of magnets, it’s called wire guidance system.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      17 days ago

      That’s the end game for self-driving cars. They can drive close enough together to draft, efficiency goes way up. If a problem happens ahead, they communicate back so that pileups don’t happen.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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        17 days ago

        IMO, the big strength with self driving cars, if we ever get there is that level of car to car communication. The vehicle will be able to communicate ahead and see the best possible route, and where there’s congestion etc, then optimize the drive to avoid unnecessary delays.

        A big problem with human drivers is the tenancy for ghost traffic jams to occur. There was a test they did with about 10-20 drivers of all varieties put into cars and told to drive a circle track, following eachother. No other instructions were given. All they need to do was keep distance in front of them and everything would be fine, what was observed was that some drivers went more quickly than others, and would brake to a near stop when they came close to the person in front. In doing so, everyone ended up basically in stop and go conditions.

        IMO, that test exemplifies the problem with human drivers. Put enough of them on the same road and given enough drivers and enough time, traffic/congestion will create slowdowns that otherwise shouldn’t exist.

        Taking people out of the equation means that all of the cars can accelerate at the same time and travel in tight packs, so merges are effortless because the entire system is working together to ensure that merging vehicles are able to merge (allowing sufficient space for them to merge), and perhaps more importantly, the merging cars will match pace with the flows of traffic already traveling on the road. Those are the two main tenants of a zipper merge. Find space to merge into, and match pace with the vehicles in the lane you are merging into. Seems that a lot of people forget that last bit.

        So rush hour nonsense will at least be reduced.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          16 days ago

          I read a study once that covered the stop and go traffic wave effect. Apparently all you have to do to stop the wave propagation as have a couple of drivers with a two - three car buffer. The first person to not have to come to a stop in the wave has the power to more or less reset and stop the wave.

          • Naz@sh.itjust.works
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            16 days ago

            Yep. I do this all the time on highways. I’ve seen dark red traffic lines on Google Maps as I’ve driven over them turn green.

            Patience and the efforts of a single person in a wavefront can make an enormous difference, like a rock sticking up from a pond.

            • rumba@lemmy.zip
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              16 days ago

              You don’t, some will get ahead of you but not everybody does that, and the same assholes that are swerving to get ahead of you are the ones that cause the propagation of the wave. You’re slowing down a little bit and accepting some leakage makes it that much better for the whole crowd

      • buttfarts@lemy.lol
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        16 days ago

        I am looking for intersections with two catepillars of drafting vehicles that slightly intersperse to cross each other at right angles by microtiming the gaps to avoid collisions by microseconds.

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      Self driving taxis aren’t an awful solution for last-mile transport. Trains can’t take you door to door, and walking isn’t always a good option (people with mobility issues, inclement weather, etc).

      Key word being “taxis”. They don’t need to be in every individual’s garage.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Train cars are crabs. They’ve got an exoskeleton, they’re squat bodied, many legged, and have pincers on either side. All they have to do is start moving that body plan around some and they will be crabs.

    • jawsua@lemmy.one
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      17 days ago

      Checks out: while they CAN move forward, they highly prefer to move side to side

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it’s always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.