Possibly a separate concern, but I have some degree of confidence that the requirements and oversight of the CA/B forum (or whomever else determines which root certs go into bundles) are sufficiently strict, and issuers kept under sufficient scrutiny, that I tend to trust those more than I trust myself to secure my own root CA keys adequately. The ideal would be for people setting up their own PKI to ensure their root uses the Name Constraints extension, but the default “can sign anything for any host” I fear makes it easy for people to install their own self-pwn device, and probably left the private key lying around on a box exposed to the Internet.
* with some notable root certs that I have… questionable… trust and confidence are not simply controlled by certain state actors.
The article lets itself down when it reveals it's had some marketing "polish" added: "where certain resources (like an AI model instance) are stored"
They could have picked something far more concrete (for Cloudflare's business and the type of services they deploy) than "AI model" there, which is clearly picked just to make it seem 'current' and on-trend.
I’ve consciously not used Fable because I want some usage allowance to remain for the rest of the week. The 2x billing is just too aggressive for me when I tried it (max x20 plan user currently).
I believe some Tube stock uses wheel revolution counters to track where the train is and trigger announcements, although a lot of signalling will be going over to using balises to tell the trains where they are (if not already) and to provide supervision.
> If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use.
Yes, it is a fact of modern life that one reason there's no political will to reduce ticket prices is that it's an effective pricing mechanism for limiting demand or pushing travellers to other modes of transport to avoid further overcrowding – as perverse as that sounds for a rail network.
This information is derived from open signalling data, which the signalling system _has_ to track to operate trains safely and identify their locations.
The reality is the illusion of pinpoint accuracy is a figment of this site's imagination; this site is using some creative license to guess the precise location of trains.
There's no way its input data is anywhere near adequate for the rate the position indicators refresh, so it's taking some base data and then just... guessing the rest.
Not affiliated with the site, but it's almost certainly just the Train Describer feed from Network Rail to observe headcodes stepping through berths, and then doing some proprietary interpolation within berths to guess where the trains are, probably using fairly coarse inputs like train class, rolling stock type and line speed. It's possible it's not even doing that, and they have just built a model that observes typical passage times between berths and they average that out.
TRUST (reporting system that describes train movements as they've happened) does accept updates by means other than the Train Describer, which might include GPS if the unit is equipped, and in many areas is dependent on signallers making manual reports (which may not be made immediately). They might also use TRUST as a data source, especially in non-Track Circuit Block areas. The rate of GPS updates is not going to be anywhere near as frequent as those train position indicators that appear to move here in "real time" across the map, so however they combine data sources, their site is trying to be clever in guessing train location.
It goes without saying: this sort of map is highly likely to be wildly inaccurate and isn't useful for anything safety-critical.
It's probably a static feed, and they've probably had to do some lifting to define the layout and map that to the raw data they get from Network Rail, and they've probably not updated it for newly opened stations. There is a station near me that's been open for many years that isn't shown there either.
There are many different alphabet-soup coding systems used across Network Rail, retailing systems, and the wider railway industry to identify locations on the network. Station names will often be different in different databases; look at any station with an apostrophe in and you'll find it inconsistently named in different places.
> I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are
It varies substantially across the network, dependent on the mode of operation of the signalling, the desired headway, the maximum operating speed, the service braking distance of the rolling stock at line speed, factors in the layout that might influence safety (e.g. junctions), the number of colour lights used on signal heads (i.e. 2, 3 or 4 colour lights), signal sighting distance, whether signal visibility might be affected by sun glare, etc. And of course this assumes that the area is actually using line-side signals – most of the network does, but there's notable exceptions using in-cab signalling or computer-based train control.
> suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way
I'm in no way affiliated with the website, but in areas that follow track circuit block principles (much of the heavily-used main GB railway network, excluding many more lightly-used outlying lines), the "signalling information" that article indicates the site derives from is almost certainly Network Rail's Train Describer (TD) feed. This feed reports the headcodes for signalling berths across the layout. The signalling system will normally step headcodes automatically as the train activates successive track circuits or operates axle counters in the track.
The Train Describer can only report headcodes in berths, and berths might be quite long! It certainly doesn't provide second-by-second train progress, so this site's mapping engine is likely doing some proprietary interpolation to make the train position indicators appear to "move" in real time to give the illusion of trains making progress. (Whatever the inputs to their algorithm/model are, their calling it "AI" loses all technical specificity.) This interpolation may be based on line speed, perhaps the observed average time a headcode normally remains in a given berth, allowing them to derive a typical 'average speed' for that berth or section.
If it was me designing this, I'd expect a mixture of the train class, the rolling stock and line speed to give a good estimator of the train's current position in block. You then have to make a product decision to decide what to do if you miscalculated train position – do you make staccato jumps of the train position indicators on the map if you got it wrong, or do you somehow try to smooth your error out over another period to avoid indicators suddenly moving?
In other areas of the country, train position may be reported by GPS on equipped units, or in some areas, the passage of trains is dependent on manual reports by the signaller, so the map may not have much real-time data to infer train position from. I find it highly unlikely that they're deriving much accurate data in real time from smartphone apps, but it could be a (noisy, incomplete) set of inputs to improve their model of how trains typically make progress through particular berths.
Thanks for following up! I had another play and I see what you mean about par, makes sense.
It would be great if the 4r perhaps isn't introduced until the game gets into the later stages of editing buffers – I think that would avoid repetitively introducing the same ideas before they can really be used.
Neat, but the (presumably AI-generated) provenance of this means it has regrettable gaps and errors:
On "There and back", it says par is 6 – it's solvable in 4.
On "Rush hour", it describes an invalid motion 'r': "type a number first to repeat a command, e.g. 3j or 4r"
It isn't clear why certain motions are being introduced where they aren't relevant, and therefore aren't going to be immediately practised at point of introduction – "Rush hour" introduces gg to go home, but then doesn't need it.
If I'm going to use something to practice and hone my vim motion, I'm going to need it to be an accurate resource. I closed it at this point.
Or the supermarkets who replaced checkouts with customer self-service under the guise of convenience, and now subject us to more surveillance capitalism to try to protect their losses given people don’t feel so bad about stealing from a machine than a human.
Yeah, they exist. I’ve also been to places where they take your order in the conventional way, but then allow you to scan a QR code to pay and go.
Sure, the process of asking for the bill and doing the dance where you check it, they come back with the card machine etc. can be mightily inconvenient especially if you’re in a rush. But I can just walk up to someone and pay there and then.
Whenever I’ve tried to use them, these QR code payment flows normally try to charge me, the patron, a service fee for the convenience, so I’ve never actually gone through with it.
A friend of mine passionately believes engineers need an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath to guide our morals and principles about what we should and shouldn’t build.
At least in the UK, Sonder also wasn’t cheap and some of their properties left a bit to be desired. Plus there were often people (staff) sat in the reception anyway, so I don’t really understand what they were doing or there for, or where the supposed benefit of their no-reception model comes from.
I’d far rather speak to a real person and have some interaction when I’m travelling than mindlessly do everything through my phone and an app. I actively seek that. What we perceive as “the future” in terms of our phones as the interface undoes the basic social fabric that has developed over thousands of years. I’ve had some of the best conversations with random hotel receptionists - and isn’t it these secondary connections over the course of our days with people we’re unlikely to meet or socialise with again that can really help us feel better connected to society?
> I thought parliamentary elections in UK worked like in most of Europe: you vote for a party, not a candidate.
They are. It's a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. Nobody votes directly for who will become PM, who is ultimately selected by the monarch as the person who can best command a majority of the House of Commons – normally the leader of the biggest party, of course, but not necessarily. Perpetuating this view is frustrating because it's not what the system is designed for, and I feel a common misconception among voters that they are "electing the PM".
With the increasing breaking of two-party politics, it would not surprise me if we see this precedent of the monarch choosing a PM who can command a majority tested in close outcomes in future GEs where no party gains an overall majority. I'll be particularly interested to see how the press describes such an outcome, if it occurs, especially if the result is that the party with the most votes doesn't go on to join such a coalition.
Nevertheless, it frustrates me when these changes are described as "undemocratic", as that's a common talking point perpetuated by a poor understanding of the constitutional basis of UK elections. If there is a desire that the PM should be directly elected, that would mean a substantial rewiring of the UK constitution more broadly.
Fascinating. Also fascinating to see the relative importance they attribute to wildly different geographic abstractions – US/Canada/Australia called out, meanwhile Europe and Asia bucketed together, despite those being the more instructive studies for how to operate mass transit given how well-developed it is in some of their major cities. I'd love to have seen more granular data for those two continents as I suspect it will reveal interesting trends and reasons for fare capture that this analysis doesn't identify.
> His idea is to turn hub-and-spoke transit, in which most lines go downtown, into a grid so that people can get anywhere in the region with just one change of bus
Anyone who has played any simulation of building mass transit systems (e.g. see the game "Mini Metro") knows it's far more efficient if the system is designed such that any origin-destination pair can be reached with only a single change.
Disappointing that it seems difficult to actually sign up for – "real-time view" hidden behind layers of legalese and licensing, although it's pleasing to see the fees are effectively nothing for individuals or small firms. They're not exactly in the SaaS-era of live demos or trivial sign-ups for immediate access, are they?
Why do we insist on actually useful interfaces into the economy and banking system being hidden behind such bureaucratic complexity? It's like the Open Banking gift that keeps on giving – if it were truly "Open", I'd have an API I could actually use to talk to all of my banks, rather than what feels like a closed shop (certainly for the average retail individual who just wants a feed from their bank).
Not commenting specifically on the companies and VC/PE firm discussed there, but this and the comments demonstrate just how many firms exist to do things other than make a profit. I think I understand why people with the big bucks can play these games and why it's tax-efficient for them.
I often reflect on how much I've grown personally in companies that are clearly not going anywhere. Trying to do more with less can lead to... interesting... technical solutions. And in every company I've worked in, I have at one time or another been on a "cloud costs reduction" squad, which normally shortly precedes my deciding to move on from said company.
I've also worked at the opposite end of this scale – companies with so much cash and no desire to turn a profit any time soon - and that's more problematic, as there's just no pressure to actually ship anything and every problem (and I mean _every_ problem) is solved with money or by hiring specialists.
There's sometimes a fine line between a legitimate business pursuing ambitious goals that are ultimately doomed to failure and one that exists to commit fraud. And it's often not possible for an employee (even a fairly high-ranking employee), who often has limited information, to determine which is which.
* with some notable root certs that I have… questionable… trust and confidence are not simply controlled by certain state actors.