It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.

It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational.

Would love to see more of that type of thing.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y79Jf1nXW_4 (7+ hours!)

Players can place items and structures as they walk from place to place and you can see stuff placed by other players as you bring each in-game area "online". These items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle, or even entire roads/highways stretching across a landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can give them likes. Note that you never see another player's character.

It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's not much combat in the game because it's generally easier to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/227300/Euro_Truck_Simulat...

> Crazy Taxi

You must have been a much better Crazy Taxi driver than my friends and I...

I can't help but think how awesome it would be to do that as a means of learning about WWI and WWII for example.

The sequels have this too.

(And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).

Educational games are just games that also teach fun things along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly broad topic and not something you research, but rather focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side. Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings or works of literature. Games with some light math-based puzzling.

I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with low level concepts, something that games can bring across better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of schools.

"Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests."

Status is a public display of desireability. It doesn't have much to do with virtue, but everyone wants it anyway.

Don't blend those two concepts, they are separate. People who make a public display and performance out of their virtues, 'virtue signallers' miss the point. You do it in humility before God.

People who don't show off their status, get little benefit out of it.

It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.

While I don't wholly disagree, there's a lot of edtech out there premised on the notion that all subjects, even sometimes challenging ones, should be like playing a game for all people or you're doing it wrong. I submit that you're always going to have some percentage of students who pretty much hate math however you teach it and some percentage who don't want to read books even with relatively "fun" and easy options.

Can I find plenty of problems at all levels of education? Sure. Are there more engaging things we can do even in an environment that's largely not personalized? Of course. But everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal unless you just let kids do whatever they want.

Games do often promote the concept of winning and losing, however.

There are (and could be better) environments that can isolate and focus on that. The combo of interface and specific challenge can really help communicate what's magical about engineering. Ideally that would help motivate people (versus just being a dopamine hit source).

Highly visual environments with rapid feedback seem to hit that button for me. The old bridge building game Pontifex was great, as was Besiege. I'd love to see more like that (there probably are, I've not played many games in years)

This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.

There's a job I was considering recently that is space-related, I almost wanted to modify my resume with "I don't have professional experience with orbital mechanics, but I do have xxx hours in Kerbal Space Program on Steam."

edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe only if you were already inclined towards math

Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.

"Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50

"The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_a...

There is some really boring stuff to slog through on the journey of a formal education.

In school, people tend to choose subjects they are fascinated with, to the detriment of the other subjects.

I think some subjects like history either benefit from actual life experience, or need some additional storytelling to appreciante.

we really don't need the "wooden straightback chairs in schoolrooms" mentality

gamification might smack of spoonfeeding, but it also might allow a much richer learning experience too.

[1] statistically speaking

I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms etc.

IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I think edge case exploration is way to go but the gamification usually revolves around memorising.

There is the company called Assimil that has small books based on this concept, where first you are filling in the blanks (not choose from preexisting options) and as the book progresses you have to fill in more and more of the sentence.

E.g. learning Spanish from English on Duolingo is very natural, the course is built the way a baby learns a language, by practice and suggestion, with few small bits of grammar info strewn along the way. According to reports from my friends, learning Spanish from Russian on Duolingo is a completely different experience, all based on memorizing large amounts of rules before any practice even begins, and it works really poorly.

I assume that learning languages on Duolingo is all about building a chain of good courses based on languages you already know by the moment you consider another one. (Only partly joking.)

The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it.

It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.

Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky. Was very impressed.

Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books since infancy.

Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that as long as possible especially during the formative years has worked well for us so far.

Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012) https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU

Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017) https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A

So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.

I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.)

Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.

If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of all, you needn't feel so bad for spending all that time playing games!

I'm trying to play games with another language, and while sometimes it's ok, other times you really need to know the language to understand how understand mechanics that are introduced into the game. City Skylines was a super tough game to play in a learning language, but it would have been a nice learning exercise if I had the above feature.

Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.

Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise.

I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.

Emphasis on streams of thinking and constructing sentences in ways that make sense to locals, is different to the formal-ish and almost toneless communication we do online.

Internet communication flattens out cultural shortcuts and cultural deepening you can do with fellow speakers in the same nation and locale.

Everything has to be expanded out so that you can 'see all the moving parts', whereas local english can be a lot more intuitive and cultural.

I was never stressed out in terms of English language (I'm from Poland) because I've rarely (never) switched game languages to any other language than English.

When I was ~10 years old I've played through whole Final Fantasy 8 which I was obsessed at the time thanks to my older brother with a PAPER dictionary on the desk (I was translating stuff that I didn't understand) and I think that was the most effective way and time when I've learned most of the English language in my life.

Now I'm trying to encourage slowly my kids and I switch game languages they play from time to time.

They pay 0.1% of what other, non-education customers pay. Because that's all they could spare and allow.

Needless to say, the servers alone cost more than what they pay. Not to talk about the massive amount of support they consume.

So if you wonder why it's not widespread - that's why.

I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where would it go in the store?

There’s no educational section in the store. So can I get any sales for an educational app?

Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would have a much lower risk and cost less.

Games are limited in the sense that they teach frozen symbols and mechanics. Great for learning a large number of mechanics, engineering concepts and 'settled science'.

Getting your hands on broad concepts, blank paper and a relationship with a master/teacher/prof will always be necessary to teach higher concepts.

I will also note that youtube, khan acamedy, and comment sections have done a lot of education, intentionally or otherwise and do a decent job at conveying the master's perspective on the topic being discussed. Video is education that can be done at a low cost vocally and visually, rather than developing it into a game, one of the most expensive and difficult art forms.

There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone.

I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.

This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers.

So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%.

Sorry, had to get this off my chest.

I built a math program in Newark that worked stunningly well because it took the level assessment/lessons/testing from Khan and gamified it.

Not gamification in the electronic badge/"you did it!!!"/points sense, but contests between kids, with teams rooting each other on and parents helping run the show.

Education needs genuine praise and involvement to inspire children to put in the necessary effort. But videogaming the experience is a solution in search of a problem. We need less isolation and more coaching.

For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)

At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges.

At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).

To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people.

Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.)

Life skills, in short.

(Though of course, 2015 was seven years ago... old enough to remaster again?)

https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/

The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.

I did play many MS DOS learning games as a kid and i think they were helpful. (math blaster would be one that i remember the most)

[1]: https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science

So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part).

I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.

[0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst

https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learni...

So the “decreasing attention span” is a myth.

I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.

"attention span is short" -- b/c we have stopped rewarding its development. The answer is insisting people develop longer attention windows, not trying to stuff real learning into atrophied attention windows.

I remember loads of educational games from my youth.

Fix that first. Because without that, education only serve to create decoys/rubber stamps/plants.

With skill you can put a lot of information into a shorter song. Chain those short sentences together and you can educate and entertain across a rythym.

Just saying it's possible.

- Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising documents and extracting failure reasons / equipment names / spare parts / processes involved and making associations between them for pareto analysis, better search or process improvement recommendations

- Recommending the next steps to fix something / remote intervention / do something etc. Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.

- Enabling operators to become data scientists by enabling to train AI models via their day to day activities / analysis. Building better UX in general and providing simple tools that even a toddler could use.

- Autonomous factory use-cases / supply chain automation.

Would love to discuss with people who find these things exciting

- Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it with a glove on it, or your hands are dirty, and it's hard to get grease off tablets. But they need the info out on the floor. Also, it can be noisy on the floor.

- The team tends to be very visual. They don't like tapping on computers a lot. Literacy ranges from pretty good to kinda OK. Sometimes they refuse to get (or wear) reading glasses for whatever personal reason.

- They're working on proprietary hardware, but technicians with the right knowledge are not nearby to come in and look at it. You really need to be able to see the issues visually. Sometimes even hear them. AR might be interesting here. (I spend $10k to fly a tech out for a few days to look at a machine. The bigger issue is that I lose $10k a day from one machine being down, and a tech might not be available to fly out for a week.)

- Predictive maintenance. The fancy sensors and whatnot mostly don't work. Tech people try it in a clean, quiet office and it works, and they can raise money on it from clueless VCs, so money keeps getting set on fire with smart AI machine learning magic motor sensor companies.

- Preventative maintenance. How to schedule, how to verify it was done, how to check whether it revealed an issue that needs a follow-up. Getting people to do it, and verify it was done, can be a challenge, but there are huge returns to preventative maintenance (for example: checking gearbox oil levels, verifying lubrication line function, checking valve temperatures.)

- Diagnosing machine problems. Using prior problem documentation helps team members see most likely issues. But many of these people don't really want to sort through a database of prior similar issues because they "know" what the problem is. How do you provide this information to them in a way that feels more approachable to them?

I could go on forever. Manufacturing is an interesting environment because downtime is usually hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars of hard cost per hour, depending on the operation, and they will spend quite a bit of money to stop it from going down, but culturally there's a vast gulf between the white collar SF tech bros and what actually happens in manufacturing plants, so innovation tends to be more limited.

HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics, planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a) estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining), (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to spread paying for it out over however many years before it's needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and collecting the funds, month after month.

People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so that either internal staff or external vendors (more common) can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track status and work in a fine-grained way.

Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-driving) and having enough data around that we can price and estimate everything accurately.

Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we just decided to build a payment collection product (for monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's in my profile in case you want to chat

How will you protect from incorrect estimates, insurance?

After typing up all that, I realise that most of this is applicable to every industry.

I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.

Then, the tech bros arrived and after a few abortive attempts to catalog things for themselves (webrings, portals, yahoo) the industry collectively shrugged and decided to ignore the problem, assuming that a search engine would always be able to pluck your favorite needle out of the haystack.

Except that, today, it cant. Intranets are essentially corporate graveyards of content. The public web is a webring of 7 or 8 megasites that vacuum up all searches and make it all but impossible to break out of their domain. That article you read in 2005 about XYZ? Forget it, you're never finding that with Google.

Search isn't enough because search doesn't help you if the philosophy behind how the information is organized doesn't make sense -- if what you need is spread around between 100 slack messages, emails, and unconnected unmaintained wiki pages. You need someone (or ideally a team) whose job it is to one one hand organize that information themselves, and on the other hand create a framework so it's easy for the non-librarians to put things in the right place.

But right now the majority of tech companies are like libraries without librarians, the patrons are just wandering around sticking the books on random shelves and wondering why nobody can ever find anything.

[1]: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

But I think we need more structure to how we represent knowledge get to something like a semantic web.

If the knowledge was easier to parse, it would be easier to break out of the megasites.

The academic literature itself (even review papers) was way too terse and (I believe, semi-intentionally) obfuscatory.

This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off that workforce.

Why is that important? Must every job be automated?

If it's something "artisanal", that not necessarily true, but even then, intentional "mistakes" can be added [1]. Having humans for the sake of having humans isn't a charity that non-luxury businesses can support (à la Snow Crash). It'll have to be something that governments subsidize or enforce tyrannically.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/04/24/new-yo...

If we need excavation, our worst-case scenario is that that we need excavation by someone who also knows

I think the long term best thing we can be doing is documenting the how and why of building, designing, fixing, working with etc... everything

Better and more granular documentation in a form that can be interpreted by humans and also machine readable would be a desirable outcome for any system. Especially true for systems in which the builders and operators are being replaced or EOLed

Better?

There's multiple parts to this field of work: networking to find leads, doing discovery to understand a potential client's problem, formulating a technical solution, creating/negotiating contracts, and implementing the solution. My experience in this area was at a company that was large enough so that these pieces were split into different roles within our organization, and I was mostly on the tech/solution implementation side.

But the real cost is that people generally don't know how things work anymore. They're just black boxes, even simple things like a coffee maker or a clothes dryer. Which further reduces the demand for repairability, which seems like a downward spiral toward everything being disposable.

If you live in a city, (nevermind the fact that you're probably renting and paying way to much in rent consider fixing anything yourself) you probably don't have the space and the tools to enjoy taking apart and fixing things.

In the suburbs, you probably have a garage and a side yard where you have the space to entertain these kinds of hobbies.

Just recollecting: the last thing I fixed was a bolt that broke off inside a nut that was welded to a pipe. Luckily I have a workshop table, a vice, and a drill with various attachments. All of this takes space.

The way housing is now, overpaying for rent is just “paying rent.” There is no special circumstance as a renter where repairs come faster or with less pliant and nuanced communication to the landlord.

The places are actually worse, because competition for below market single family homes, (which are basically always in need of repair,) is extremely fierce.

My experience is landlords don’t fix up anything and you have to pick and choose the most important stuff for them to fix.

Technically are they on the hook to fix everything? Maybe? But only people who don’t rent or haven’t rented in too long to remember think this is actually what happens.

And anyway there is some implicit understanding that since they are not absolutely gouging you like every other landlord, you owe it to them to not ask for too much.

So implicitly, you either have to learn to fix things or have a home that is sorta kinda broken / jenk six ways from Sunday.

Either learn how to fix stuff or live the life of death by a thousand paper cuts.

I feel it's my personality, but as soon as I fix anything I am overcome with anxiety every time I'm near it for fear the issue will return or that my repair was faulty and inevitably prone to cause further damage.

I don't know why I get this way. In spite of all my worries I've yet to truly fuck up an appliance I've repaired (furnace, microwave, dish washer, workout equipment, countless car repairs, electrical, plumbing, carpentry...the works).

As far as I've ever bothered to explore the feeling, I think I have an inherent trust that products are manufactured with care and attention while my repairs are often ad-hoc suitable replacements with salvaged parts, or even just duct tape and glue. Experience should tell me that things are often built to minimal passing standards so this idea that a manufacturing line that spits out dozens(?)/hundreds(?) of these products in a day are any better than my attempts. Lack of documentation is often a big one. If my repair seems to make more sense why wasn't it done like this before? Am I missing something that should be considered? What caused it to break that I haven't addressed? etc.

If it were socially normal and expected to try and repair things, and you did happen to blunder, that would be a normal blunder that everybody makes. But if you go against the grain and try to fix things yourself when it's becoming less and less expected to do that, that could make a mistake feel worse.

Of course one might quite naturally just feel more responsible for a possible mistake when doing things oneself hands-on rather than when delegating things to someone else in any case. Not saying you should, but it'd be quite natural to.

If it broke and I replaced it with a broken appliance then the manufacturer/distributor is to blame. If it broke, and I broke it worse (made it unrepairable) then it's my fault. Sure, I was trying to be frugal and save money doing it myself, but having to admit fault to a professional could be embarrassing.

Easier to displace blame instead of facing truths I guess? Despite repairing this much stuff, I still consider myself a pretty bad mechanic, maybe I'm just too hard on myself.

Just to be clear you don't always fix them yourself; it's more common to pay someone who knows what they're doing.

Would I love to deep dive into my fuse box and learn how to rewire it? Very much so. But the limited free time I have needs to go into side projects and life goals.

I say this having just come out the other side of a long period of learning how stuff in my house works. While it has certainly been satisfying, I'm looking forward to just paying people to do things in future so I can focus more on what compels me.

See also: "cradle to grave" manufacturing.

This is the big one for me. This will be very alien to a big portion of HN users, but I am NOT a hardware hacker. Browse the DIY subreddits and for every single impressive thing someone has done, you can read the comments about how they have somehow stumbled into building a death trap for themselves and their family.

I guess professionals are probably no better, but what else can you do.

Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of bad ideas in those systems, too. (Like why do I have to use "RUN" vs. "BRUN" on the Apple ][ depending on what type of program it is?) But finding and promoting the better ideas and teaching young people about them is, I think , important and risks being lost otherwise.

Learning about failures from older systems is always interesting, too. Why couldn't Atari and Amiga compete against Apple and Microsoft, for example? I think things like that are important to understand going forward, too.

There is stunningly little literature on any R&D in conventional freight rail transport, something I discovered when looking for any published research some months back.

High-speed rail, yes. Regular old freight, no.

Contrast this with autonomous and electrified trucking as alternatives, with which rail could offer considerable synergies.

I'd suspect that break-bulk, trainset assembly and disassembly, and routing might all offer opportunities.

But ... nada.

I suspect other modalities within the transport sector might be similar, notably ocean shipping.

I've always hoped that he was just yanking my chain and that they did...well, anything really.

I suspect when something is this obvious, yet we don't see a product, it has to do with someone in the industry fighting change and making sure it does not happen.

Freight's worked well for high-volume bulk commodities (coal, grain, tanker cars). Intermodal ("piggyback" or containerised cargo) works quite well, but still sees delays compared to trucking, and generally is not viable for distances under 500 mi / 1000 km (within the US). Sub-car shipping (equivalent of less-than-truckload or LTL for trucking) is a nightmare for shippers.

Rail doesn't seem to be integrated into much consumer logistics. Yes, the net flows are slower, but it's far less energy intensive than truck-based shipping (or air cargo), and should be far more economic. The logistics and scheduling though seem to be a real concern.

Trackage consolidation's been an issue, there's been a net decline of trackage for most of the 20th century AFAIU. That especially includes suburban and urban centre transport.

Railyards are still large-area operations which are expensive in terms of locked-in real estate within urban regions. There are major crossing points and exchanges (including both ports and mid-line switching operations) which have been major choke-points.

The basic technology works. It's tremendously efficient. It actually is a largely un-sung success story in the US. And yet it seems it could be so much better.

Highway trucking as I-90, I-94, and I-80 converge is hellacious.

https://smart-union.org/our-priorities/legislative-issues/

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2022-15540.pdf

However there's R&D into cheap electrifying with battery railcars - which is IMHO a dumb idea outside of niche railroads, electrification pays for itself in the medium to long term, a battery bandaid doesn't get you far.

Ans there's also a kind of innovation from India - dedicated rail freight corridors.

But at a bigger-picture view, as I read what's being discussed for trucking, I keep thinking that far greater energy efficiencies are attainable by a switch to rail, though a huge problem remains in the flexibility and time elements. There have been expedited / express long-distance rail initiatives, though those have been on the range of ~14 days for coast-to-coast transit in the US.

There is a very small number of Class 1 railroads in the US: Amtrak, BNSF, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific. One of those is passenger-only, and two are Canadian-owned. That leaves five US-owned freight carriers. As with the broadband industry, these tend to operate independent territories and routes.

The decision had merits at the time. Side-effects may be overwhelming those now, though I'll note that with only five US majors, centralisation within rail remains a concern.

May have been Tim Wu's The Master Switch, though that doesn't quite seem right.

[0] https://moveparallel.com/

Cool that they are building the tech though, maybe it will get bought out by an actual logistics/freight company that can find a use for it.

https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/safety/artificial-i...

How much of it is fluff I don't know.

Unfortunately, the pay was too low and the company was having people come into the office in June of 2020.

That literature would be pretty opaque to me.

I'd also say that "preparedness" is generally something nobody is working on. Despite all the shit that happened with Covid, I don't feel like we're even slightly better prepared for an actual lethal pandemic, like with double digit death rates for example. It's not clear we've changed anything other than some political jockeying.

Another example is earthquake/ tsunami preparedness. Everyone knows the west coast is going to be destroyed, we just ignore it because its "boring" and nobody wants to think about it

As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on.

It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old diesel motor. Some people on HN might know that, I know some of that now. However, generally they are all older and their kids moved on. In terms of a generational knowledge gap I can think of no greater one.

https://www.richardperkins.co/about/

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220...

1. https://lifeinmind.org.au/news/high-rates-of-farmer-suicides...

Here, problem is that there are few newcomer to be a farmer. It's unpopular to live rural area. People in rural area are generally considered to treat newcomers unkindly. Local people grown by farmer also don't want to choose farming as a first career (but may choose after retiring, or help father's farming). Farming lands have been tend to be divided for small lands (partially thanks to WW2 lose), and generally Japan lands aren't so flat, so productivity isn't great thus income isn't great.

Some thoughts:

* Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side with existing equipment and grid voltages. That way existing rights of way can carry far more power over existing wires.

* Smaller more modular cheaper substation equipment that can be slotted in and rapidly replaced, eventually to replace the mega-transformers and stuff that are very hard to physically ship places. Today there are substations with equipment so unwieldy that it would be physically challenging to ship replacement equipment.

* Lower cost methods of stringing new high power transmission lines to bring distant renewable energy to cities.

* Make undersea power lines as cheap (or nearly so) as undersea fiber allowing "global supergrid" systems to share renewable energy.

* Protection equipment or techniques to reduce damage from solar storms or EMP.

The power grid is becoming more and more central and essential to human life, and we are about to drop tons more demand on it via electrification of transport and HVAC (heat pumps). Yet it seems like there's not much innovation there. Right now if everyone comes home and plugs in their car it crashes the grid in many places, and this won't do.

Batteries are hot, but they're still too expensive to back up whole cities or regions. The need for batteries can be greatly reduced if the grid can be made bigger, wider, and at least an order of magnitude more reliable.

The British National Grid says that already planned increases in capacity will cope with plenty to spare.

Your assertion is a very common one not backed by those in the industry.

But I guess there would also be industry willing to buy the excess immediately anyway.

My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art.

There are now almost two generations of working architects, those that learnt 2D CAD in the 90s and early 00s who still think in 3d and translate it themselves to 2d in cad (a little like traditional draftsmanship). And those since who have only ever worked in 3d and used the tooling to “project” 2d elevations and sections.

I trained at university in the early 2000s in Industrial Design, we did some traditional drafting lesions (maybe three or four weeks). But then jumped straight to 3d CAD and never looked back. I suspect they don’t even do those lessons now, and in fact most kids have probably done some 3D cad at school, maybe only 10% had when I started.

In general, I've found books are an underrated source of technical information like this. The library of congress is probably doing a pretty good job of preserving the knowledge needed to bootstrap civilization.

For example, I have a few books on country wood-crafting that have enabled me to become pretty self-sufficient on a rural property. Even though there's no woodworking knowledge in my circle of friends or family.

YMMV depending on the craft, but the scope of knowledge documented in dead-tree mediums is both vast and deep.

[1]: For example, I found this with 40 seconds of effort. I know it's old, but that might contribute to it being more interesting: https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.easystepsinarch0...

I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.

I could see that being the case with 2d focussed cad tools such as AutoCad, however “3d first” tools like Revit for architecture or SolidWorks for product design are so far removed form traditional drafting I don’t realy see any alignment.

Everyone wants their own system and solution to be the single source of truth and that is a huge part of the problem. On a project of thousands of people there is never going to be a single source of truth. It's like expecting a globally distributed system to be in sync. Ultimately you have to chose between locking and eventual consistency and there is no other option. Having a single BIM system helps but is not a silver bullet. Because people will still get out of sync as other teams and tools are brought into play.

Also, not everything always needs to be “efficient”, what’s wrong with working slowly if you can then create an even better result.

(For housing, I want individualized so badly. If I see one more SillyValley SWE storehouse - excuse me, "luxury housing" - I'm going to vomit. They're all exactly the same. I'm fairly certain the firms involved have traded macros or something)

I'm not sure you can close that gap. I've done both drafting and CAD design (amateur level), and... you approach the space differently. Drafting almost forces you to have a plan, while CAD very much is "as you go".

To get housing back to the rates it was built (and the price you could buy it at) in the 60s it needs to be a hundred times faster and more factory manufactured, not less.

Luckily, if you wait a hundred years people will like anything. That's the only reason people like mass-produced Eichlers, SF Victorians, and NYC brownstones.

And what multi-level housing there is being built is absolutely devoid of any creativity already, it can't really get more factory-like.

I’m not sure what’s superior in the old approach.

You’re able to perform much more robust and detailed calculations using computers compared to hand. You’re able to iterate more rapidly. The only thing I can think of is that the designer or engineer has more time to ruminate on their design. Or there is no artistry in a computer generated print.

It’s probably the bias in my training (mechanical engineering tech and not architecture or industrial design) and what I’m trying to accomplish through drafting, but I don’t get this romanticism for hand drafting.

My program, in the mid-2010s, had 13 weeks of hand drafting. The program still does that in the 2020s. My program emphasized sketching and drafting as a core component of the engineering design process. So hand drafting is still taught, and there may be sampling bias at play in the other comments. Or my hand drafting isn’t “real hand drafting.”

Sketching allows you to iterate through different designs early on. You then move into the detailed design which results in the manufacturing specs. For example, hole sizing and location, material thickness. We absolutely did all of these calculations by hand in our courses, so you need to be able to draw something out. You’d simplify and not worry about completely accurate proportions, though.

I guess before the rise of CAD systems, you’d hand over a bunch of rough design papers with the final dimensions for a drafter to prepare the final print.

However, with computers we now do the detailed design through computer aided engineering (CAE) software. This requires a 3D model of what you’re building. You run the simulation and find out that the thickness of the material isn’t suitable, so you change the thickness in the model and re-run the simulation.

This CAE process gives the engineer the 2D print for “free.” All the information needed to create the 2D print are embedded in the 3D model. You just pick which projections you want in 2D and you specify the dimensions and tolerance. Now that’s done and there is no need to draft it by hand.

It truly is a lost art and there's a lot more hidden knowledge and reward that comes with knowing traditional drafting than it may appear on the surface. Patience, precision, a sense of intuitive aesthetics, and how to arrange a composition on paper to tell a story effectively ... thank you for sharing this comment, I'll have to tell him somebody else agrees. :)

I suspect an architect + engineer is all that's really needed these days, or perhaps even an architect that knows enough engineering, or an engineer that knows enough architecture.

P.S. I have no connection to the product or company (based in Budapest I think).