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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#451

Post by rangibaby »

fb03 wrote: post #437
nihonde wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for a MagLev train that achieves the fantasy of hyperloop (but is actually happening now). From my perspective, hyperloop and TBC are each 100% upside down in terms of their approach. America can only dream of 505km/hr interstate ground transport. I'm writing this from aboard the Nozomi express Shinkansen at around 300km/hr, by the way. Just left 名古屋駅.

Hah, amused to be able to read kanji after so many years (nagoya-eki :P) I have ridden on the Nozomi and it's a fantastically smooth ride. There are indicators of the current speed on the wagon passage doors and it is incredible when it achieves 270+ km/h and everything is passing by so quickly, and yet you can drink your beverage from a cup just fine, just like in an airplane :)

I actually get more excited about riding the Shinkansen than planes these days. Planes are like buses now...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#453

Post by photojosh »

Angostura wrote: post #200
cel1ne wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic: The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing) Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again. Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.

That's not businesses - that's humans. Or do you apply for a new job every two weeks whenever you see a higher salary advertised?

The assumption there is that higher salary is the #1 consideration. My metric is a blend of salary, lifestyle, and risk.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#454

Post by prawn »

ant6n wrote: post #343
prawn wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, it'd start with a user frustrated by a problem, then go to brainstorming with colleagues/employees/peers/friends and then go to industry experts and hires with direct experience. ;) Really the main difference is that someone without money and follow through would've just sat in traffic and complained.

Follow through = billions in the bank and oodles of connections

Obviously that eases the process but some people follow through and some don't. Some have big dreams and some just invest for themselves only. I can think of loads of rich people who aren't out there starting companies to push forward space exploration, car technology, tunnelling machines, etc. He has pretty serious runs on the board now.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#455

Post by photojosh »

patkai wrote: post #303
josephg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway? Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets? Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist w…

Alan Kay should remember that evolution includes random mutations that get you out of local extrema, and "interesting" recombinations. The rate of these is maybe low, but there are examples where large organizations renew themselves this way. But I agree with the conclusion that this is slow and unreliable.

If you are more on the side of accepting punctuated equilibrium, then this isn't true. Organisms will evolve to the local optimum and then stay there. By definition, since most mutations will result in lower fitness.

It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.

Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#456

Post by photojosh »

johnlbevan2 wrote: post #297
Confusion wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both the 'people' Kay refers to and Kay himself are right. It just depends on the scale you're looking at. Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima. If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.

Wouldn't Darwinian processes produce "just barely good enough" solutions? i.e. once you're at the stage where things are good enough to survive long enough to reproduce, evolution doesn't play much of a role. A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep an…

Yup. Until there's selection pressure working against you once again. Imagine if society broke down completely, so you had to fight for the limited amount of food that was available?

Somewhat related: it was interesting when my kids were born; they both had to be C-sectioned. I asked the obstetrician about it, and yes, bigger heads are becoming more and more common because mother+child no longer just die when they do occur. We really are removing selection pressures!

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#457

Post by photojosh »

mikeash wrote: post #357
erentz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

An interesting aspect of carrying cars rather than trains is that it makes an incomplete network far more useful. A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to…

If there was ALSO public transport that used the tunnels, that would be awesome. I'd be all over a Boring Bus/Boring Capsule...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#458

Post by lmm »

BurningFrog wrote: post #443
schiffern wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This doesn't apply to the centrally controlled car delivery system Musk is planning. How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.

I don't think they need any space between them as long as they're on the same path. They're parked on centrally controlled carriages. How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.

Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#459

Post by Piskvorrr »

ambicapter wrote: post #367
mikeash wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting aspect of carrying cars rather than trains is that it makes an incomplete network far more useful. A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to…

I was thinking the other day how sweet it would be if it was easy to take your bike on the subway.

Indeed. This was implemented here ~15 years ago. The initial fears "Just ride the damn bikes! Trains full of cyclists! Cats and dogs living together!!!" did not materialize, and it's a major improvement on a bike's radius.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#460

Post by Piskvorrr »

haihaibye wrote: post #373
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the capacity in mind, this project will end up having much lower throughput than a regular road, even when taking congestion in mind - unless they build dozens of parallel tubes, in which case the costs will become very, very large. I also don't see it becoming a long-distance alternative, again because tunneling is a slow and long process. It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop c…

I'd guess 1 lane at 200km/h without stopping is ~7-10 lanes rush hour traffic.

Without stopping and without merging. The proposal acts as if entering/exiting a tunnel at any depth is zero-cost and zero-size.
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