I'm guessing geology play a big part - Japan is mostly "new" rock, Alps mostly "old".
Sorry, I don't understand your point. Why is Japan considered "new" and European Alps considered "old"?
Readit Newsthrowaway2037 commented on Koralm Railway infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/... · Posted by u/fzeindl
The rock they dug through for Koralm is, no hyperbole, about as bad as it gets. It's the gnarliest part of what's under the Alps and required them switching back and forth between boring and blasting.
Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work. It's also ~25x deeper than Toei Oedo (4000ft vs 157ft). At 4000ft the rock itself is 45-50C!
Good point about "boring vs blasting". I didn't think about that. I remember reading about the longest tunnel in Japan between Honshu and Hokkaido (Seikan Tunnel). I recall that it was entirely hand drilled due to unusual soil conditions. I wonder if that would still be true today with state of the art tunnel boring machines.
> Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work.
Geography I guess[1].
Kanto is flat, it's the only region in Japan that could sustain feeding such a massive population and could allow building the first mega city on the planet.
Combine that with the massive engineering and rail experience Japanese have, and it's no surprise imho that combined with favorable geography they could build it quickly.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Topograp...
This is interesting analysis. Many good points. Regarding this comment: "first mega city on the planet": As I understand, in the modern era, Beijing was the first city in the world to have one million people.
Somewhat tangential: The second link says "System card": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/3a4153c8-c748-4b71-8e31-aecbde944...
Does that term have special meaning in the AI/LLM world? I never heard it before. I Google'd the term "System Card LLM" and got a bunch of hits. I am so surprised that I never saw the term used here in HN before.
Also, the layout looks exactly like a scientific paper written in LaTeX. Who is the expected audience for this paper?
I know its a small nitpick, but I got unreasonably annoyed at the two "Financed by EU fund x" banners having different flag sizes, paddings, fonts etc.
How is there no unifying design language for these?
First, this is a massive accomplishment. When I looked at the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Railway
... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.
Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel
It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.
throwaway2037 commented on The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video] youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4sD... · Posted by u/AareyBaba
One could say toolkits done in C++ use multiple inheritance because C++ doesn't have interfaces though.
This is a good point. It would be better for me to say pure abstract base classes... that simulate interfaces in C++. That said, I can say from experience that Qt does more than multi-inheritance with pure abstract base classes. I think the QPainter class is mixed into a few places, and that class is fuckin' major -- it is responsible to paint every (cross platform) pixel in the whole framework.
First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.
> disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now
Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)
throwaway2037 commented on Vibe coding is mad depressing law.gmnz.xyz/vibe-coding-... · Posted by u/dirtylowprofile
Willing to name “an LLM”?
Was this a local model?
Good question. It was not my intent to be evasive about the LLM. I should have included it in my origial post. I tried the free versions of both OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini. To be clear, when I say "free", I mean just go to the website and start chatting with the bot.
https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90098999.html
> It is the year 2035. The average "Hello World" application now requires 400MB of JavaScript, compiles to a 12GB WebAssembly binary, and runs on a distributed blockchain-verified neural mesh. To change the color of a button, we must query the Global State Singularity via a thought-interface, wait for the React 45 concurrent mode to reconcile with the multiverse, and pay a micro-transaction of 0.004 DogeCoin to update the Virtual DOM (which now exists in actual Virtual Reality).
This is all too realistic... If anything, 400MB of JS is laughably small for 2035. And the last time I was working on some CI for a front-end project -- a Shopify theme!! -- I found that it needed over 12GB of RAM for the container where the build happened, or it would just crash with an out-of-memory error.
> And the last time I was working on some CI for a front-end project -- a Shopify theme!! -- I found that it needed over 12GB of RAM for the container where the build happened, or it would just crash with an out-of-memory error.