>Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city
The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
Objectively false. The homeless camps are in Skidrow and near City Hall.
It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
There are nearly a dozen museums in DTLA including 2 world-famous art museums, an opera, 4 operational Broadway-style theaters that are still regularly in use, around a dozen smaller performance theaters, more than 200 restaurants including one of the world's busiest/most profitable restaurants, 3 bowling alleys, 3 karaoke bars, more than a dozen nightclubs, 3 arcades, 3 higher-ed schools (not including USC, which is technically outside of downtown in its own neighborhood), more than a dozen parks, around a dozen breweries, 2 large movie theaters (including one used to premier a number of Hollywood movies), events every weekend in the summer. Oh, and the food-cart phenomenon got its start in DTLA at the corner of 9th and Hope, where some of today's most famous restaurateurs got their start slinging fusion tacos to FIDM students.
If anything, there's too much stuff jammed into DTLA compared to the rest of the city.
Los Angeles is less downtown-focused than other big cities but I still don't think that's a fair representation.
You can go to a hockey game or a basketball game in DTLA, and you're near stadiums for baseball, football and soccer. If you'd rather see a symphony than a game of sportsball you can listen to the LA phil at Disney Hall (and if the architecture of Disney Hall is more modern than you prefer, there's plenty of older buildings worth checking out).
There's a bunch of museums if you're into that kind of thing. On the grungier side, there's Santee Alley and the fashion district if you want to get that "third world bazaar" experience without having to travel.
You can get food from dozens of different cultures, even without visiting enclaves like Chinatown or Little Tokyo.
I think this is just low cost/effort to reduce a particular problem. DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.
The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors (Sepulveda/405, the 5, and the 101 to San Gabriel Valley). Iirc from a recent report on KPCC there's like 600k daily commuters between the valley and the southland, and another 700k between the valley and San Gabriel Valley.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.
And Disney Hall, the Broad, and MOCA on Bunker Hill. Grand Avenue park for events. The Arts District and its many restaurants and breweries. Little Tokyo and the 3 museums there. FiDi's many restaurants. Historic Core and the old Broadway theaters, some still in use. The tens of thousands of new apartments constructed in South Park, Skid West, and Skidrokyo. For architecture nerds, nearly 100 years and a dozen different architectural styles spread out between all of the DTLA districts but especially in FiDi and HC.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
The sooner the Sepulveda Pass rail/monorail is built, the better.
>The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors
I totally agree with you on this. Lost of people in this thread are talking about how good/bad transit access in the LA area, but there is no doubt the valley is totally undeserved in that regard.
Hangouts is still around, and still available for consumer. It’s being replaced with Chat, which will have feature parity and consumer support. Most people won’t even notice, as it will continue to appear in Gmail with an identical UI.
Google’s communication skills are deeply lacking, and leaks made it worse. But no, Chat is still around for consumers.
I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.
I'm running a batch of SBCs which boot from SD cards as home or forgettable servers. None of them died due to SD card failure yet. A good SD card with a little optimization keeps the flash media wear out at bay.
Like writing logs to RAM and syncing back to disk daily or only on reboots/shutdowns, keeping high-write applications on a USB drive and providing the biggest cache possible by slimming down the OS memory footprint.
This two things reduce the hits to SD card substantially.
I think the point is more that there's nuance in preventing speech (like censorship) and punishing the actions as a result of speech. I get that some would call those the same thing.
In the context of 8chan, I think there's a difference between allowing people to say whatever they want online and punishing the people that use that freedom to incite violence.
The part where it gets blurry to me is the hateful rhetoric that doesn't directly call for violence, but the only logical conclusion of the position is genocidal or otherwise racial violence. Talking about "invaders" or "American cities under foreign occupation" for example.
FMV is pretty neat but there are scenarios where it's not ideal, so I'm not surprised to see it not used in what is meant to be a lightweight high performance library.
Notably the fact that the dispatching is done at runtime means you are trading off the convenience factor for code size and running extraneous dispatching code in your critical path. Additionally I've anecdotally seen on modern Intel hardware the power heuristics can penalize you for even _speculatively_ running some of the wider instruction sets.
Ah apologies, I only took a cursory look at his dispatching logic. It looks to me like it supports both modes, but you have to hand roll the dispatching logic if you want to use it at runtime (but he provides an example). If you _really_ need the runtime dispatch then yeah I'd agree FMV is probably cleaner.
If you don't actually need higher level math functions or it's prohibitive to implement something at the higher level. For example if you have an operation where you know the sparse-ness(?) of a matrix at compile time but the values of the matrix can change, you may want to implement the matrix multiplications by hand using SIMD ops.
I've always preferred to think of it as pumping water from the bottom of a (practically infinite) reservoir and dumping it at the top of a mountain then doing some work as it flows downhill, back to the reservoir.
It provides a nice visual for why current always makes it back to ground, just like water always flow downhill. It also removes the tendency to anthropomorphize electrical current and say things like it "seeks out" ground. When something falls from the sky we don't say it's trying to find the ground!
This analogy doesn't work so well for AC, which involves both pushing and pulling on electric charges.
It's more like pipes full of a gas like air. The power plant has a big reciprocating piston that is pushing and pulling on the gas, creating a pressure wave. One side of the cylinder is "aired," meaning it is in contact with atmospheric air. These pipes make their way to clients, who attach the pipes to equipment of their own, for example a piston that converts this wave back into mechanical energy. Again, one side of this piston is in contact with atmospheric air, which is the reference pressure for the piston.
Sometimes the pipe develops small holes, and if a hapless worker gets too close, they can either get cut from an out-blast or hurt from smashing against the equipment when the air is sucking in (both being from the difference in the pipe's pressure relative to atmospheric pressure). As a safety protection, everything is enclosed in another layer of air-proof material, and when a leak is detected the main air supply is shut off.
Special attention is made to make sure the average pressure in the pipe is the same as atmospheric pressure, since the piston motors depend on this to function.
(In real life, steam plants use direct current since there are a lot of losses due to condensation, and also since a lot of the point is transmitting thermal energy.)
Yes water is a great way to describe electricity in a lot of ways. I'm just struggling with the "returning to where it originates". For instance the electricity didn't originate from the grounding rod it came from the transformer. Earth is providing a very low electrical potential that the electricity is "attracted" to or "falling" to in the reservoir example. Am I wrong in thinking that all electricity is flowing back into earth?
> Am I wrong in thinking that all electricity is flowing back into earth?
Yes, sadly, you are wrong. But it's not a strange error.
Electricity always flows in a circle(circuit).
And, in fact, in medical devices, transformers are often used to completely isolate devices from the line that they are plugged into. Electrons on the device side of the transformer will NOT try to flow back into the line side or an earth. They only want to flow back to the device side of the transformer.
Now, the issue is that when you want to create really strict isolation like this, suddenly all manner of things that normally you don't pay attention to suddenly become relevant. Is the device side of that transformer really not connected to the line side anywhere? No goop on the board? No water vapor? No lines that are a little too close? Is the hospital bed not connected to anything?
Guitar players who use tube amps and vocalists who use condenser microphones wind up with this issue all the time. Both the amps and the mics are "isolated" with relatively high voltage signals floating around--300-400V for amps:48V for mics--and consequently strange paths cause lots of "buzz" in the signal.
When it comes to AC (even discontinuous DC), closed loops are not necessary for current flow. A basic example is a capacitor, which can permit current while it builds up an electric field between is plates. A related example is an antenna, where AC radiates energy that can vibrate electrons in a far away antenna. (Radio telescopes are proof an antenna doesn't need a ground or a closed circuit to receive.)
Closed loops ("circuits") are part of the paradigm, so yes they are necessary at the level of abstraction we generally analyze electronics in. Sure if you came from Pluto with a metal sphere teeming with excess electrons, they would disburse themselves on our planet and never return home, but that isn't circuit analysis!
For example, the current into one terminal of a capacitor does equal the current out of the other terminal. Yes electrons are building up on one plate, but they're being depleted from the other - the net charge of the capacitor remains zero. If this weren't true, differently-charged capacitors would be physically attracted to one another!
If this goes against your intuition, it's because you've become so accustomed to this abstraction of ground which (mostly) lets you forget about the current flow on the other leg of the capacitor.
(In the electronics realm, the use of the term "ground" is much more casual compared to the NEC. To put it in terms of OP, "ground" in the electronics realm is more akin to the "grounded conductor", but alas could actually refer to anything you feel like thinking of as the reference.)
I only brought up ground (in the Earth ground sense) because I've heard people think that antennas in general work by using the Earth as a second conductor, with EM radiation as the first. Antennas are conductors that are part of an un-closed electrical network, relying on the capacity of a conductor to hold an oscillating non-equilibrium charge (though they can be modeled as an RLC network). My previous comment was written out of a reasonably common conception of a closed circuit being a loop with constant current flow, but capacitors break such a circuit. (I don't mean to imply what bsder said was in any way wrong, just not necessarily the whole story depending on how it's interpreted.)
The realm of electrodynamics is pretty interesting, and it's where seemingly basic concepts like electric potential begin to fail -- it becomes path-dependent!
> The realm of electrodynamics is pretty interesting, and it's where seemingly basic concepts like electric potential begin to fail -- it becomes path-dependent!
Not really. The problem is that we have sort of an "electron abstraction" which is incorrect in the Heaviside-Hertz pedagogy when fields start to store energy. I recommend "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead as a modern formulation without the silliness of an Aether:
https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Electrodynamics-Quantum-Fo...
> I only brought up ground (in the Earth ground sense) because I've heard people think that antennas in general work by using the Earth as a second conductor, with EM radiation as the first.
Really? Most of the time I describe antennas as sort of really long range transformers. And, while you need each side of the transformer to be a circuit, the two sides of the transformer don't have to interact other than through a field.
> My previous comment was written out of a reasonably common conception of a closed circuit being a loop with constant current flow, but capacitors break such a circuit.
Yes and no. Capacitors have the hand wavy notion of "displacement current" in classical electrodynamics--but most of the issue is with the fact that we use the Heaviside-Hertz pedagogy which was formulated back when everybody believed in the Aether.
The real issue is that to deal with capacitors you must deal with fields rather than just the notion of electrons. However, if we kind of squint and wave our hands the "electron formulation" can be kinda sorta made to work. (Side note: Capacitive dividers are even more annoying and you have to be really careful.)
Classical Heaviside-Hertz electrodynamics also has a lot of issues dealing with motors and generators, as well. Again, the key is that an "electron formulation" isn't really enough when fields start holding an appreciable amount of energy.
Thanks for the pointer, and I look forward to checking out that book.
(Re "not really": with Maxwell's equations, the curl of the electric field is generally non-zero, so scalar potentials are not well-defined, which is all I meant. My experience is having gone through Purcell long ago, and by now I have some familiarity with [mathematical] gauge theory, but really I'm only an E&M dilettante.)
Yes instinctivly it wasn't making sense as I knew the circuit needs to be "completed". So if that's the case then what is the point of the ground rod that the neutral bar/wires in your breaker box are connected to?
Essentially, the ground rod acts as an "anchor" holding the neutral wire and the ground at the same electric potential. If there was no ground rod, the earth and the circuit would be "floating" relative to one another, and a dangerously large voltage could develop between them.
When you talk about "electricity" you need to distinguish between "current" and "charge carrier." Current is the amount of charge that flows through a point per second. The charge carriers are the electrically charged particles that actually move. Where current goes is a matter of what we're trying to do with a circuit, where charge carriers go is why we need ground.
What a voltage does is pull or push the charge carriers. When lots of them flow, you have a current. Conductors, like a wire or ground rod, are full of free electrons to act like charge carriers (kind of like a pipe filled with water, the voltage is a pump that moves it).
The duality of pulling/pushing charge carriers is why we need a circuit. In order to push charge carriers, we need something to pull them from (a source) and somewhere to dump them (a sink). When we have no source and no sink, charge carriers have nowhere to come from and nowhere to go.
Ground is a convenient source/sink for charge carriers because it's roughly uniform in charge and huge, so pulling tons of charge carriers from it doesn't impact it greatly.
And it's not that charge carriers are always flowing back to earth, but back to their source. That's why ground is sometimes called a "return path." To move a charge carrier, you need to give it potential. It will lose that potential and return to the point of lowest potential difference from its origin - which is its origin.
But that said, for things like AC power, the charge carriers aren't actually moving very far at all and have a net displacement of 0. They vibrate adjacent charge carriers, and we convert that vibration into unidirectional (DC) voltages that can push/pull from local sources/sinks, be it the literal earth (mostly for safety ground) or a small plane of copper on a PCB.
Hmm okay starting to make more sense now. Do you know a good visual explanation that shows the "path" electricity takes from the transformer to your home and back out to the ground rod. Note: I fully understand in AC the electrons aren't actually moving along this path. But I guess I don't see how the circuit is ever "complete" or a circle.
It doesn't go "back out to the ground rod," it goes back to the transformer. Note this paragraph in the parent comment:
> And it's not that charge carriers are always flowing back to earth, but back to their source. That's why ground is sometimes called a "return path." To move a charge carrier, you need to give it potential. It will lose that potential and return to the point of lowest potential difference from its origin - which is its origin.
Electric potential is created by a difference in electric charge between two points. Because it's a measurement between two points, it is never absolute -- "a very low electric potential" is meaningless unless you've defined what it's low relative to. A battery/electric outlet/transformer creates a potential difference across its terminals, and that's why electricity wants to flow from one terminal to the other. Usually, the terminal with the lower (more negative) potential is defined to be the 0V measurement, but this is arbitrary and out of mathematical convenience -- we could call it 1V or -1000V, and the circuit would still work the same (all that matters is the difference between the two terminals, not the absolute value of either terminal).
The neutral lines of circuits are often tied into Earth, making the voltages of the neutral line and the earth equal to one another at what we've defined to be 0V (for reasons of convenience and safety). There's no intrinsic property of Earth that gives it a low electric potential, and electricity doesn't intrinsically want to flow back into Earth.
The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.