jdranczewski

I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816

For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.

Finally, the previous implementations were very silly! OpenAI had a nice tool, but it only detected their own watermarks, and Google's process was "upload the image to Gemini and ask if it's AI generated", which seemed like a perplexing waste of tokens and breath.

(While a sibling comment points out putting the image through Google Image Search as an alternative, I don't remember this being signposted in the support article I've read, so I unfortunately didn't know about it)

https://jupytext.org/ may be what you're looking for! It saves Notebook files as Python/text files, and can open them as Notebooks. I've mostly used it for improved version control and easier file inspection, but they recently started advertising the agent use case on their website.

I have also spent an incredible amount of time looking at slowly moving Street View footage, but it was through https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/ - a "game" where strangers collectively vote to move around Street View coverage at slightly faster than walking pace.

It was a great community, and good fun to see so much of North America that I would never visit. It's still going, but I don't visit as much (it used to be basically permanent second/third monitor content while I wrote my thesis). A cool opportunity for programming too: I made a bunch of mods for the game (https://greasyfork.org/en/users/1473129-jdranczewski) and a basic ambient viewer where you can just watch the Street View go by (https://jdranczewski.dev/irt/viewer.html).

Yes, as someone who doesn't use Apple devices Pairdrop is pretty useful.

I think it's fair to say that if the wiki's intent is to share information with people, you want people (and not just the inner circle of those in the know) to be able to find it. And the way most people find things is on Google.

They were originally planning to not do hot staging, aiming instead for a somewhat funny approach where they spin the ship and booster slightly so they are passively separated by centrifugal forces. A bunch of things went wrong in the first test flight, so this was never attempted, and they switched to the "simpler" hot staging in flight 2.

I've really enjoyed reading the Grid World piece linked at the bottom of the post: https://alex.miller.garden/grid-world/

The article mentions this only briefly, but browsers already do this kind of heuristic protection! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending... or https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i... for a Chrome-specific blog post.

I think the lack of exploration of the context around the problem and current mitigations is an issue with the article - it spends a lot of time talking about the possible threat, but very little time on whether the attack is actually practical with modern mitigations.

On Android they've actually rolled out the 3D view in Maps recently! Took them long enough. I now have an "aerial" button in the bottom left corner when viewing Street View imagery that switches between the two.

If anyone in the comments is in a similar predicament to the author and would like a book logging app, I will say that I disagree on their judgement of StoryGraph - I've found it a pretty decent interface, the search function is very good, and the (anti)features mentioned in the footnote are incredibly easy to not use, as the creators seem to understand that many of their users have a very strong preference to avoid AI bloat.

For large communities, the very granular role-based permission system of Discord can be put to some good use, I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.

You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.

To add to the points raised by others, "just install LaTeX" is not imo a very strong argument. I prefer working in a local environment, but many of my colleagues much prefer a web app that "just works" to figuring out what MiKTeX is.

If you've managed to find more details about what process exactly they're implementing I'd be glad to see it - I assumed plasma-based growth, since the BBC article mentions that it's a plasma that is at 1000C here (making heat dissipation less of a problem too), but if they're growing ingots that would usually be done from liquid silicon, which sounds like a mess in space. So are they doing plasma-growth of ingots (which I haven't heard of, but I haven't heard of many things), or are they bringing wafers up and growing ultra-pure layers on top... The website is not super clear on this from what I've seen.

An interesting use case of OpenSCAD is open source hardware with many contributors - the reasoning being that we only have mature version control tooling for text-based files (say git), and so your CAD design should be text-based. I was introduced to this idea by https://openflexure.org/projects/microscope/ - they managed to build a fairly complex 3D printed microscope project on this principle.

I'm aware of Onshape having a git-like workflow as well, wonder how the two compare! A fully cloud-based suite would probably not work well for an open source project.

The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!

Following on on the DoD example, the field of astronomy is infamous for its terrible acronyms: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html

Yes! The ring reminded me of the Core too. Perhaps with voice processing and the infrastructure around MCP (which I haven't used myself, but Eric brings up in the blog) a fully headless, voice-based device like this is more feasible now than in those days

I may be misunderstanding it, but the examples shown don't seem to be illustrative? It seems reasonably obvious that the prints will happen in this order in any language, because in example 1 we are explicitly (a)waiting for the child to finish, and in example 2 both of the parent prints are above the await. So I don't feel like either of these makes the point the author is trying to get across?

I think in your first point the difference is between "calculation" and "conversion". For calculations, it's generally accepted that arbitrary numbers are possible and a calculator may have to come out. For conversions, it's nice to be able to say that 1250m is 1.250km - I bump into conversions much more commonly than having to do calculations, and it's nice to be able to do them in my head.

I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).

Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well

I've always found the weather argument somewhat unconvincing, because 0°C being the freezing point of water is very much a useful point of reference in weather contexts - it's roughly where one may expect iced-over pavements and rain to turn to snow! And then the higher temperatures are a question of getting used to it - 40°C instead of 100°F is very very warm, 30 is pretty hot, 20 is reasonably warm, etc.

But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!

I agree that having a reliable main environment for quick experiments is great! On Windows I just use the main Python installation as a global environment, since no system stuff depends on it, on Linux I tend to create a "main" environment in the home directory. Then I can still have per-project environments as needed (say with uv), for example for stuff that I need to deploy to the VPS.

Note that I'm mostly in the research/hobby environments - I think this approach (and Python in general, re: some other discussions here about the language) works really well, especially for the latter, but the closer you get to "serious" work, the more sense the project environment approach makes of course

https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.

Ah, my bad! I did not know these were a thing, but that makes more sense! Teaches me a thing about only quickly trying things in an online REPL on mobile and jumping to conclusions - I forgot curly braces were also a way to denote a set

I was rather confused by the dictionary comprehension syntax used there, because I wasn't aware that you could write one without the ":" to delineate the key: value pair. Turns out you can, but it just creates a dict with no values stored, just the keys! This works here because the returned dict is an iterable that returns the keys on iteration, and "update" accepts an iterable of (key, value) tuples - and the keys are just that in this case. So the effect is the same as if it was a list comprehension! Just slightly more confusing

A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.

The description of trying to use FontForge cracked me up, I recall trying it myself a while ago and it going very similarly!

I've taken to writing complex comprehensions like this over multiple lines (which I initially thought wasn't possible!). It's still a bit awkward, but the order of "fors" is the same as if one was writing nested for loops, which makes reasoning about it easier for me.

Allowing mass machine translation of Wikipedia articles into other languages is a problem, because it floods smaller language wikis with low quality text. If a user wants machine translated pages, they can machine translate them themselves.