Onno (VK6FLAB)

Ashland VA has a recurring problem where non-Tesla drivers turn onto the tracks, there’s dozens of cases.

Virtual Railfan YouTube channel will give you most of them.

Makes you wonder if Tesla used YouTube as a training tool.

There’s a whole range of cli tools to extract and query structured data like that, but you might consider loading it into something like sqlite3 and treating it as a database because those formats are really not intended for queries, they’re designed for sharing data.

For some workloads it’s true that you can do the heavy lifting on a more powerful remote machine and transport the results back to an endpoint device like a phone. Websites are a good relatable example of that, as are services like YouTube.

It’s not universally applicable for many activities that computers are involved with, data analysis, record keeping, simulations and a myriad of other processes.

Blurring of the lines between these different orders of magnitude is made possible by faster and faster networks, but that’s physically not able to beat processing done inside a single device.

The more powerful we make computers, the more complex problems we use them for. I suspect that this is unlikely to change as computers evolve.

One of the fundamental differences between phones, laptops, desktops, and beyond is size. While that sounds obvious, it also means that the amount of processing within the device is constrained by that size.

The constraints relate to how much energy can be used by each device and more importantly, how much cooling is available for the system.

It means that there’s a physical limit on how much work each device can do without being unusable.

While miniaturization is a factor, it’s not linear and you can only get so small before you fail.

So, depending on what you want to do in any given time, the device you use will dictate what’s physically possible.

This is a lesson that the religious fundamentalists currently running the USA have weaponised.

A search engine?