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I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we can’t do that because of property rights etc.
The auto industry:
But then no one would buy cars and fuel anymore and we can not allow that. /i
Trains and bicycle infrastructure
Holy shit
We wouldnt ever get to Safe space travel
“We don’t even need all of these trains!?”
Shhhh, you’re gonna love it. We put a train on your phone. Windows is now powered by trains.
trAIn
Coincidence?AI models are usually train ed. Even more of a coincidence?
Maybe someone mistook trains for AI.
Getting on board, but as I’m looking for my seat a giant anthropomorphic paper clip starts shoving me and shouting that I’m using the train wrong
Can’t spell train without AI
Autism >9000.
(Actually autistic btw, so I can make that joke).
Can we please give everyone Tylenol so we can get a better passenger rail network?
That or he’s a Father who finally hit their retirement phase.
I don’t think you need the disclaimer. This is Lemmy. We’re all autistic here.
So I’m starting to notice.
Though… we don’'t all like trains. So some may not have appreciated that whimsical comment.
No you can’t, it’s a spectrum. You’re gatekeeping. (I’m joking)
But it is being used for train
-ing AI models.
Or the post office. Or consumer protections. Or wage increases. Or UBI. Or housing. Or food distribution. Or infrastructure maintenance. Or nuclear. Or teacher pay.
Or anything else has that a proven track record of being beneficial to our country.
all of those solutions are based except nuclear. nuclear reactors rely on colonial acquisition of nuclear ore in order to keep their prices competitive with the other energy solutions. and even then, they can’t compete since they’re more expensive and risky than solar.
there’s no way to keep a nuclear reactor going without also feeding into Russia’s nuclear markets and funding their war effort. https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/russias-global-grip-on-nuclear-energy/
Or things beneficial to the whole world.
AI investment is expected to reach $1.5 trillion dollars in just this year alone.
Housing every single homeless person in the entirety of America would cost anywhere from $11B to $30B, per year.
That’s anywhere from 50 to 136 years of housing, full paid for, for every single person currently homeless in the USA, at current market rates without any investment in affordable non-profit federal/state/city housing.
You could do so much fucking good with this money, and yet they choose to throw it all away on things that when they are successful in delivering value, deliver much less than the value that could otherwise be gained from that money, and at worst, create their own problems, like actual, direct deaths.
But think of the resell value for ho-moewners!
Trains are not profitable or generate an Ai bubble of investments. Duhhhh
I dunno, train bubble has a nice ring tho…
Get on board the train bubble before it leaves without you!
No need to imagine, that has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
A total of 6,220 miles (10,010 km) of railway line were built as a result of projects authorised between 1844 and 1846—by comparison, the total route mileage of the modern UK railway network is around 11,000 miles (18,000 km).
Wow. Must have been nice having such a solid foundation to expand upon. Meanwhile in the US:
There is no such thing as trains. Now get back in you gas guzzler, sit in traffic for 3 hours each way on each day, consume more gasoline to enrich the corporate overlords, and run over as many kids as you can because you can’t see them in your behemoth.
-The political establishment
Fuck yeah! Damn those environmental pansies! I’ll even hang a ton of flags on the guzzler expressing my obnoxious political-opinion so I can own the libs. That’ll teach 'em.
-The morons
the total route mileage of the modern UK railway network is around 11,000 miles (18,000 km).
Public transit in the US is trash, but the country is so much larger than the UK, that we still have like 15x that here.
It’s fair to say the direct comparison between UK and US doesn’t add up. But, Europe as a whole is roughly as big-ish as the United States. They have a really well-developed rail system and they are better because of it.
According to Google (so maybe it’s wrong), the European Union has a total of 124,864 miles as of 2023.
It says the US has a total of 136,729 miles.
So if we’re going purely by length, which admittedly is not the only factor, then the US still edges them out.
I do imagine that many of those miles are in disrepair, but I still think it’s important to remember just how large and spread out the US actually is. Laying down that much track is an enormous undertaking
I do imagine that many of those miles are in disrepair
Actually most of it is in good working order! The FRA regulations require a certain standard of maintaince for trains to be allowed to roll down the track so railroads will either abandon trackage or keep it maintained. Yes some sidings and branch lines will see lighter maintenance but they will still be maintained to a relatively safe standard until they are abandoned and no longer used by the railroad
Making me think of the hemp fuel powered car with a hemp fiber composite body stronger than steel, that got suppressed (or at least, “shelved”). Not to mention other clean fuel car innovations, and so on. But instead, we get the same old two evils false dichotomy bs. We can have individual autonomy and clean efficient transport.
… Reminding myself of that Bakunin quote:
We are convinced that freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and that socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
AI trains that are never on time and derail constantly? 🤔
For some reason, I think the most likely bad parts of AI trains will be that some of the cars will be misshapen (some won’t even have seats), and you will have to pay a subscription to even take the train.
Between Amtrak and freight trains I think this is already the state of trains in the US, no need for AI.
That’s a different type of AI. Not Artificial Intelligence, but American Ingenuity.
You are right to have expressed concerns. I didn’t actually run the train today.
AI trains that calculate profitability of each route while in transit. If profits are too low your trip is canceled mid trip and you are left in Arkansas. Partial refund, then you book to continue the journey tomorrow but now there is surge pricing
This was already possible without the new LLM buzzword nonsense. In fact, LLMs would be worse at it than whatever algorithms were already around to do this
Better take the AI back out then, before it decides to ‘simulate’ not derailing.
trAIns
Just saying
TRAiNS
Just saying
The subway trains in Singapore is automated, no driver.
It would be great, but it could never happen. All the marketing of AI is around speculation of what it could do.
Investors know what a train is, what it does and how much it costs. They don’t know any of those things when it comes to AI, so they’re willing to spend a lot, because they were promised a lot.
But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?
There are a million guys with ideas for cars that will go 750km on a thimble-full of Fresca, robot butlers that can’t turn evil because they don’t have red LEDs in the eye positions, and 200:1 data compression as long as you never have to decompress it. They must all be looking at Altman and company and asking where their bubbles.
I sadly suspect the charm is “we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers”
A technology that, according to the marketing that heavily leans on sci fi media to prop up its glorified autocorrect tech, could, in theory, replace almost all non manual labor, while still helping alleviate a portion of that, would be a technological milestone that would effectively define a new age of humanity… Is an incredibly seductive concept. Especially to capitalists who hate having to share company revenue with the people actually doing things that generate that revenue.
Although LLMs are unlikely the avenue to general AI they claim to be…
But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?
Part of it is, as you pointed out, just the elimination of costly labor. That’s a capitalist’s wet dream. But the main thing that makes it attractive as a slick, highly marketable investment vehicle is that AI models are inherently black boxes.
There are ways you can examine the ways they work (for example, researchers found that the parts of an LLM that “understand” one topic, like money, can also simultaneously “understand” other different, yet related things, like value, credit, etc), but we can’t truly comprehend everything about them. It would be like looking at a math problem billions of equations large and assuming we could hold the whole equation perfectly in our brain and do the mental math to solve it. We can’t.
That means that instead of seeing “here’s our robot that is currently capable of this, but these are the components that could be upgraded/replaced, X is an issue it faces because of Y” and so on, instead you get “It’s not good at this yet, but it will be if you just throw a few billion dollars more compute at it, we promise this time.”
Problems are abstracted away to “something that will fix itself later,” or something that “just happens, but we’ll find a way to fix it”, and not any kind of mechanical constraint a VC fund manager might be able to understand.
I sadly suspect the charm is “we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers”
It’s that, and a really impressive working prototype.
It’s that LLM output looks like human writing, so it looks like they might be able to do anything a person can.
if firing people is the ultimate good, maybe we can get the corpos behind UBI so nobody cares too much about getting fired?
And because the rest of the market is really slow and barely above inflation so not really worth much to invest in while AI is going like it’s the good ol’ days. That’s how the money boys see it anyway.
Do you know what good mass transit could do though? Imagine cities without parking lots and garages. Imagine having spaces that are much safer and more comfortable to walk. Imagine solving the housing crisis, since you can now build downtown complexes where those parking garages were.
Imagine getting most semis off the road and reducing road repairs by more than half.
Trains could do a lot, and it doesn’t take much imagination.
Yeah but if you no longer need workers, you don’t need downtowns anymore, so screw the plebs /s
I mean there was a train bubble once, simpler times tho
