That raises a lot of ethical concerns. It is not possible to prove or disprove that these synthetic homunculi controllers are sentient and intelligent beings.
I think we should still do it, we probably will never understand unless we do it, but we have to accept the possibility that if these synths are indeed sentient then they also deserve the basic rights of intelligent living beings.
Only if they confirm it can experience consciousness and tremendous amounts of pain well they deploy them on a large scale industrial 24/day meaningless jobs.
This came up in my Discover feed and I initially assumed it was a fake news site. Unfortunately all the things in the article are indeed real (aside from the robo-brains which they note are mock ups). The brain cells learning to play Pong made the news last year. Combine this with the creepy as hell skin grafted onto a robot and you have nightmare fuel for life.
A full 100% sounds weird. It means complete overlap with the ASD assessment which itself isn't bulletproof. Weird like there were some mistakes in the data. E.g. all ASD pictures taken on the same day and getting a date timestamp, "ASD" written in the metadata or filename, or different light in different lab.
I didn't see any immediate problems in the published paper, but if these were my results I'd be to worried to publish it.
It sounds like the model is overfitting the training data. They say it scored 100% on the testing set of data which almost always indicates that the model has learned how to ace the training set but flops in the real world.
I think we shouldn’t put much weight behind this news article. This is just more overblown hype for the sake of clicks.
That is such a weird "headline feature" to be adaptable to different riders. I've never known someone who would regularly share or swap bikes with someone where this is needed. I need my bike to fit me. I buy adoringly and set it up once. I then never touch saddle height, handlebar position and whatever else is adjustable ever again.
If it brings production costs down for having less variants or sizes, sure. But who needs this as a feature so desperately that it's one of 3 l features even mentioned in this post (except for it being a trike in the first place, I guess).
Not even all that unusual a feature for trikes, but I get the appeal: It's for lending it out and making it more compact for storage or transport. Being adjustable also ensures a good fit.
Japan has outstanding high speed rail but that's pretty much it. Local train servives are, from what I've heard, subpar in terms of frequency. The share of goods transported via rail is also comparatively low.
Check out these numbers and sort by each colum, Switzerland is always near the top (for population/size adjusted values)
Your link doesn’t show Switzerland at the top except their network is completely electric.
Having been to both countries without a car, Japan is not subpar in terms of local services. They’re very different though because they have such different size and population densities.
the lowest amount of area per km of track, except for micro nations
a fairly low amount of population per km of track - among the top 10 if population density is considered
lost less than 10% of tracks since its historical peak
a majority nationalized rail network
(as you mentioned) a fully electrified network
While I haven't travelled in Japan by rail (or any other mode), I have been to Switzerland. From what I've heard, in Japan there are many smaller local stations, where an ancient train arrives a few times a day.
Whereas in Switzerland, it seems like nearly every local station has at least one train per hour.
It is true that in Japan there are many local stations that only arrive a few times a day, but I've found that this is generally for places that are very low traffic; ala middle of nowhere Fukushima countryside train. I'm usually more surpised the train system even goes there than I am surprised by the frequency. For pretty much anywhere you'd expect local trains to exist, they're usually very good. Not trying to compare countries or anything (I've never been to Switzerland). Just describing my experience in Japan (not expert; only lived there ~6mo)
It's a tiny station with 440 passengers per weekday - yet it seems that two train lines, one of which is hourly stop there. Most of the passengers are likely commuters, so the bulk of all passengers will be during morning and evening rush hour. Outside these hours, hardly anyone uses this station I believe - yet trains still stop there.
(Note: I have just searched for "Least used train stations Switzerland" and picked a random result, this might be an exception. But it goes to show that stations with few passengers still get a lot of connections.)
As I said, I'm not trying to compare or enter a discussion about what system is better, since I've never been to Switzerland. I like it when places have good trains, and it sounds like both places have that. So that's good enough for me. I was just replying to give you a better idea of what it's like in Japan.
The fact that it's Japan (a place with a damn good rep for trains) planning to make a giant conveyor system between 2 cities rather than a freight line is what's so shocking to me.
They're going to have to clear a lot of stuff for a big conveyor system why not do it properly and go with freight trains?
Trains are a tried and true method of moving freight, they have a bunch of skilled engineers already versed in trains, they have all the necessary industry for getting the parts for those trains built, etc, etc. This just screams stupid AF and wasteful AF to me.
They're going to have to clear a lot of stuff for a big conveyor system why not do it properly and go with freight trains?
They would have to do the exact same thing for trains, though. Do you have any comments on the actual differences in the projects, or do you only have (probably rightfully-placed, but still) knee-jerk reactions to your favorite vehicle?
Although I agree that other forms of transport should be considered, I genuinely can't figure out how either a conveyor belt or autonomous carts could be better than a freight train. Both for battling decreasing manpower and for intercity freight transport.
I think both proposed ideas are better for short-distance transport, with conveyor belts better for a single direction of movement in indoor (or as the article mentions, tunnel) conditions (must be kept clear of debris in order to run, more so than track which only needs to be cleared before the next train) and autonomous carts better for transporting small packages between many origins and destinations (eg. a warehouse or maybe delivery service).
Conveyor belts might also require much more maintenance, as moving parts would be all along the length of the belt.
They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.
I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.
I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.
You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.
I sympathized with your statement immediately, but then after thinking about it for a bit, most people basically have controlled pressure bombs (gas-water boilers) and buildings filled with gas pipes that can (and have) wiped out whole city blocks.
It's still not a good idea, obviously, but localized fossil fuels are also ridiculous when you think about it.
Reading a few articles about this, it seems a big concern is area. They wanna squeeze them in every free space they have between and around roads. Conveyor belts can probably do a lot sharper curves etc. than railways. If they do special small rails, they’ll also need special trains for that.
From the articles it’s also not clear if it’s from one point to another point or from multiple to multiple. They talk about deliveries, which would rather be multi to multi, but it’s not explicitly mentioned anywhere.
Hmmmm I'm still skeptical mind you, but hear me out ...
What if there's benefits to be had by the traction motors being stationary, the electrical connections being fixed instead of moving contacts (read: not 3rd rail or overhead catenary), and the simplicity of containers not being all connected for easy removal from the conveyor without disrupting the movement of other containers?
I don't think speed is the thing we need to concentrate on anymore. You could have this country spanning convayer belt essentially, and power it all with solar. Thereby reducing pollution by a HUGE amount within Japan.
And hopefully other European countries will follow. Then we'd have to deal with the beast that is North America. Large sprawling land, both in Canada, and America. Especially America would be difficult. Canada probably has an entire unused northern half. Whereas America doesn't really have much unused open space in the eastern half. And it's just sooooooo big.
I have zero faith this will ever come to America. Too much politics. Too much zoning issues. Too much distance.
I won't agree or disagree with the speed comment, you could very well be correct.
As for powering by solar in Japan (and any other currently electrified system), I would guess that's easily done right now by changing how their power is generated; and that doesn't require a change in the system, just the generation. In japan around 66% of their rail is already electrified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Japan look at the summary box showing total miles and electrified miles). So I'm still skeptical that a conveyor system is the answer vs adding more electrified rail in that same strip of land and powering it with solar generation. But again, maybe there's something to be gained with such a different engineering solution per my OP.
And while you're spot on for the US (less than 1% from my google search) a conveyor won't solve it sadly unless there's something about that which makes it cheaper to deploy then adding a catenary system to our current railways.
A train sends 100 cargo boxes from town A to B in an hour. It takes 4 hours to put all the boxes in, and 5 hours to pull the boxes off the train and stack them in the yard
Conveyer sends 1 box every 6 minutes for 10 hours.
Same throughput, but one is easier to schedule workers around at both ends. I’ve never worked in a train yard or anything, don’t know how accurate my time frames are or anything, just trying to imagine what’s better about this.
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