Doctor_Fegg

Runbox with my own domain (which I've had since 1999). Support is great, prices are reasonable.

> what else is a map provider supposed to do?

Deferring to Government naming is only one possible approach. OpenStreetMap takes another: “the name that people use on the ground”. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico in OSM and will remain so until popular parlance changes.

No, as someone who writes a cycle routing engine by hand, this stuff is endemic when dealing with the trifecta of complex traffic regulations, inconsistent mapping data, and user preferences.

This. curl | bash has never nuked my local Postgres db, unlike one of the recommended package managers. Nor stopped my wife’s computer from booting, unlike a certain well known browser installer from one of the world’s biggest companies.

OSM has had in-browser editing since 2004.

> It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral.

OSM's sharealike provision has never been about making the project "viral". Free map data is enough to do that by itself.

OSM's sharealike provision is, and always has been, unambiguously aimed at stopping bigcos killing the project by scooping up the map data then contributing nothing back - the scenario where Schmoogle Maps takes all OSM's footpath data, combines it with their own motor-centric, sensor-fuelled dataset to create the one map to rule them all, and thereby attracts the flow of new contributors that OSM needs to survive.

Sorry, you’re saying people shouldn’t be allowed to write about their career changes on (checks notes) their own blog?

I had a brief chat with the dev at State of the Map (the OSM conference) a few weeks ago. I think he'd appreciate some help, maybe even a co-maintainer.

My 10-year old loved it. I'd shown him a few Road Runner cartoons on YouTube beforehand.

> The OpenStreetMap community operates under the “on the ground” principle, recording what is actually currently used in a particular area, giving pre­eminence to data collected in­ situ.

https://osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesI...

> No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place.

Lots of people did, in fact, consider this.

Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.

I worked for a public sector organisation around then that had the same chairman (not CEO) as Iceland, sorry, “the Big Food Group”. He was genuinely one of the most obnoxious, bullying people I’ve ever encountered - known internally as the Poison Dwarf. So none of this greatly surprises me.

I remember seeing a river cruiser called "Sir Osis of the River"

I edited a boating magazine (inland waterways, not sea-going) and we got article submissions like this all the time.

I ended up putting in our 'Notes for Contributors' something like "Write about what will be interesting to the _reader_, not what is interesting to you" because apparently this eluded people.

Bending Spoons are all in on AI development. Look at Komoot’s release cadence but also the skyrocketing number of bug reports in the Komoot subreddit.

Generally this means “national” and the sub-board on the OSM discussion forum.

Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth. If an import pipeline is causing problems, a higher-up can just say “stop doing that or we’ll stop your pay cheque”.

OSM doesn’t have that option. If it didn’t have these guardrails in place, a million CS students will see some open-looking data (or not even that, maybe something scraped) and throw it into OSM with a cursory Python script, resulting in an almighty mess. We need the process because we don’t have Google’s leverage of “we pay you”.

2018 Mac mini, running Monterey, for webdev and Ruby scripting and it’s still fine. The biggest issue, as ever, is that the OS can only feasibly be upgraded to a certain point and that ultimately limits whether you can run current browsers.

Xcode and Android Studio do, of course, necessitate a more recent Mac.

> There only seem to be two things that this “app” does, that a webpage might not have, and they’re both anti-features:

> It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers.

Fortunately webpages never do any tracking whatsoever, let alone “Gobshite LLC and its 1131 partners need your permission for (contd. p94)”

CRT data is not open - it has an (entirely pointless) non commercial clause.

Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.

Please consider diverting your efforts to OpenStreetMap! The TIGER-derived basemap still needs fixup, but your work will benefit everyone, not just the Google shareholders who ultimately own Waze.

Switching modes like that was common practice on the Amstrad CPC (which used the same 6845 video chip), but as time went on, people also learned how to change the base address of screen RAM part way through each frame. This gave you super-smooth hardware scrolling for the main game area while still retaining a static score display. Unfortunately it came too late in the machine's history to be used for more than a handful of games, but demo coders used it extensively (and still do).

> I’ve never actually had anyone complain about me sending them ODT or ODS files since even the said MS Office doesn’t have a big issue with those.

On a Mac, I can read .doc(x), .xls(x) and .rtf without installing any additional software. I can’t do that with ODT/S.

90% of open data spreadsheet downloads could just as easily be provided in CSV format (looking at you, gov.uk).

Luxury. I dialled into FidoNet with my 64k Amstrad CPC (contd. p94. Mein gott I’m old)

Mapillary is of course owned by Meta these days.

Ah, we haven't had an "ORMs bad" post for at least three days.

Disk was already the standard spelling in the UK by 1984 (in a computing context), just as program was used in preference to programme. But Amstrad mistyped it as disc on the plastic mouldings for their first CPC, and were too cheap to change them. Consequently CPC 3in disks were always called discs even into the 90s.

Interesting! I've recently plumped for UIKit (with bits of SwiftUI dropped in) for a new mapping app because, as you say, SwiftUI map support is virtually non-existent. Have you thought about adding Maplibre support as an alternative to MapKit?