My understanding is that this will require new designing and consulting stages of phase 2. We have already spent about £2billion on Phase 2 which is likely not recoverable so you would need to respend at least a significant fraction of that on new design consultation and lawyers etc. So any cost savings you expect from different design requirements would need to be much greater than that (probably around 3-4% of total cost).

Yes slower services allows more flexibility with alignments but it comes at a cost of larger fleet sizes and likely more warehousing requirements(unless you reduce the passenger capacity to correspond). Speed was looked at in the original plans and found that reducing the speed somewhat did not reduce overall costs that much but did reduce the outcomes quite a lot.

The biggest problem is in the way costs have been amalgamated and communicated. HS2 had lumped in some really major project works that needed to happen anyway (notably rebuilding Euston that is currently not for for purpose for current passenger numbers) alongside at least two new stations to facilitate interconnections with the rest of the network. In other countries thought would come under separate budget lines and not look like one project.

The other big cost factor for HS2 was simply to demand more from it. We required it to be incredibly good at avoiding as much ecological disruption as possible and that meant more expensive tunnelling. It would have been the UKs only climate resilient line in the country partly as a result. So as another commenter said if its cheaper (which I would stake money it won’t be significantly) it will be at the cost of much less care towards the environment and offering a much less future proof outcome. If we wish to meet climate obligations we need massive increases in rail usage and that only begins to be possible if you free up this scale of capacity from the rest of the line.

The other thing to say is the cost is a bit if a fiction in itself. The cost is paid for by borrowing against future revenues of the service so to downgrade the service to save 1% of cost and you potentially downgrade the return even more which means you could actually cost the treasury more. This isn’t money that is available for anything else despite how its been reported.

Its just so tragic.

Such nonsense to suggest any new line could be built quicker than HS2. Any new route would need to go through the same consultation and design process HS2 did i.e. years delay. So its shovel ready HS2 or new line with uncertain risks and costs and time frames that’s the choice l.

If you want to review HS2 fine look at where there are issues you can resolve whilst building fine but don’t pretend there’s some mythical option which avoids all the issues inherent in a project of this scale.

Triple the cost and start building mixed use developments on them.

I think you misunderstand what a whole life CO2 assessment is. It factors in the carbon per longetivity. Often you will also be assessing other factors like cost per co2 too.

Rail is a predominantly upfront CO2 cost in infrastructrue for much lower operational CO2 costs and as such these questions are quite important if your job is decarbonisation of Rail.

We need decarbonisation across all sectors so minimising lifetime CO2 of infrastructure - even public transport infrastructure is absolutely a priority.

Discourage people using the train during a climate crisis.

I do think HS2 will just end up being finished. No other way.

Largely limited by government desicion if I remember. Hoping the new government make it substantially easier with the flick of a pen…

Still hoping a new government actually finishes the job…

Wild that no party has committed to finishing it. Its basic public transport literacy.

I think it would have been the only line that was designed for the climate we are heading to.

I won’t rehash the arguments around “AI” that others are best placed to make.

My main issue is AI as a term is basically a marketing one to convince people that these tools do something they don’t and its causing real harm. Its redirecting resources and attention onto a very narrow subset of tools replacing other less intensive tools. There are significant impacts to these tools (during an existential crisis around our use and consumption of energy). There are some really good targeted uses of machine learning techniques but they are being drowned out by a hype train that is determined to make the general public think that we have or are near Data from Star Trek.

Addtionally, as others have said the current state of “AI” has a very anti FOSS ethos. With big firms using and misusing their monopolies to steal, borrow and coopt data that isn’t theirs to build something that contains that’s data but is their copyright. Some of this data is intensely personal and sensitive and the original intent behind the sharing is not for training a model which may in certain circumstances spit out that data verbatim.

Lastly, since you use the term Luddite. Its worth actually engaging with what that movement was about. Whilst its pitched now as generic anti-technology backlash in fact it was a movement of people who saw what the priorities and choices in the new technology meant for them: the people that didn’t own the technology and would get worse living and work conditions as a result. As it turned out they were almost exactly correct in thier predictions. They are indeed worth thinking about as allegory for the moment we find ourselves in. How do ordinary people want this technology to change our lives? Who do we want to control it? Given its implications for our climate needs can we afford to use it now, if so for what purposes?

Personally, I can’t wait for the hype train to pop (or maybe depart?) so we can get back to rational discussions about the best uses of machine learning (and computing in general) for the betterment of all rather than the enrichment of a few.

It took a lot of campaigning by disabilities rights groups to get what accessibility there is on the Elizabeth line. https://www.transportforall.org.uk/news/disabled-campaigners-are-to-thank-for-accessibility-on-the-elizabeth-line/

Imagine spending £19billion on a project and argueing over £33million to make it more accessible.

Absolutely maddening a brand new line like this wasn’t made level-boarding for the sake of some penny pinching.

Cheap to do as you design and expensive to retrofit in after.

Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft’s climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).

Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn’t. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there’s also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.

Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can’t do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it’s accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn’t actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.

I was experiencing with both X11 and Wayland. I’ll give 555 a test. Thanks!

Were you having any kernel panics before this beta?

I was having this issue https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/series-550-freezes-laptop/284772/163 I disabled the GPU for the time being and was hoping the new driver would fix.

Me too. Noticeable Delay around 6s.

This makes sense in principle but none the less I still feel my self struggling to quickly see the difference between to points on these plots.

Right this is the thing I cant ever seems to quickly get.

They are common and yet I still really struggle to quickly understand what any points but the three extremes mean. I’m not sure there’s an alternative though.