tda

I'm thankful to work in a team. As my IT dept has a habit of breaking stuff with AV and other crap-ware, I already asked if anyone else was having problems with Firefox after 5 minutes of trying to figure out what was wrong, after which someone pointed me to this thread

I am very interested in the "best-fit reduced palette of colors" approach, but then to create mosaics. Say you have lots tiles/beads/bricks/marbles whatever in a handful of colors (and not covering the entire color space, but say three shades of blue, brown and bright pink) how can you represent a full color image as accurately as possible using only that very limited palette (and in a fairly limited resolution, as placing 10k tiles is not fun).

I have had some success manually using Photoshop to generate a reduced color space image to only 5 distinct colors (probably optimally chosen by the algorithm) and then remapping those 5 colors to 5 the 5 colors I actually have. There must be better ways

Easy? No. Also highly unlikely and against every treaty etc. But bigger wars have been fought over energy security, so not entirely impossible. And with Russia, China and USA fighting injust wars left and right, it seems Europe is the only major power that still cares a bit about internationally acceptable.

Or we could just overthrow all their governments and make them vassal states. Sounds crazy? Well just take another good look at Saudi Arabia, crazier things happened in name of energy stability. If the choice is between unlimited renewable energy for Europe and sovereignty of the Sahara I know where I stand

If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.

Unfortunately cheese just requires a lot of milk in general. That's why the CO2 footprint of cheese is quite a bit higher than e.g. chicken meat [1] and only slightly better than red meat.

I have become a vegetarian largely because of the climate impact of meat production. And though I have limited my dairy consumption, I still consume a fair bit of cheese and chocolate and coffee :(

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane

I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly:

> in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.

Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?

The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission.

> In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

Those are pictures of a Cambridge roundabout, trying to imitate a Dutch roundabout. However except for very light traffic situations all (as far as I am aware) roundabouts newly constructed in the Netherlands are so called turbo-roundabouts [1]. Other than that, I agree that the standard of roads and infrastructure in the Netherlands is a fair bit higher than anywhere else I know of. Of course there are nice roads in every country, but in the Netherlands, there are almost no really bad roads, and every freeway is properly designed and maintained.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Turbo_roundaboutsle... turbo-roundabouts.

That's why you can add quotes to types:

    def attack(self, other: 'Creature'):

I managed to get halfway through level 2 on my phone. I think the screen is a 3x3 button grid. Center is 'action' for swords and potions.

I also don't have any numbers, so I can't comment on or how or low these are. But I do know that the circumstances in which these men are put to work is are more akin to slave labor then anyone can and should expect. And the conditions are truly extreme as the heat and humidity in the middle east can be enormous. And whilst I can't take the heat for more than a few minute walking, I see these laborers doing 12 hour shifts of hard manual labor every day. So not surprised if more than a few have suffered from fatal heat-strokes.

Of course you can't compare general mortality to mortality of people in the prime years of their life. I have personally seen the circumstances in which Indian men work and live in the Middle East and it is not pretty. Whatever comes out/is reported officially, the truth is probably a lot worse

I love the way the hills are drawn. Very different from the now common hillshade + isolines, but very clear nonetheless

Did you perhaps mean you changed the geometry instead of topology? Your comment got me wondering if you can change the topology without changing the schematics and I now think you can, as a schematic only defines the electrical connections and the topology is I think also the non electrical relations (what component is next to what). As far as I know topology is strictly dimensionless; size and distance are properties of the geometry. If I were not on HN I would apologise for the pedantry, but here we are

Perhaps, and then I hope they will be made obsolete as all the essential parts for making e-bikes are becoming commodities. 250W electric motors (max allowed in EU dor normal e-bikes) are not exactly rocket science. My jigsaw even has a 300W motor (though probably not rated for hours of continuous use)

Until very recently Stromer was just about the only available e-Bike in the Netherlands that could reliably do to 45km/h,and thus quite popular. The retail prices for the 618/814/987 kWhr batteries are 1190/1650/1990, which to me indicates that the retail price is not at all related to any costs they make but that they are doing pure value pricing (whatever consumers are willing to pay). Their monopoly on proper speed pedelecs is rapidly coming to an end, so hopefully prices will soon get down to something more directly related to manufacturing costs.

It is already happening for normal e-bikes, where 3000+ used to be the starting range for a somewhat decent e-bike. This is currently about 2000+ but in a few years it will hopefully be possible to get a somewhat decent e-bike for 1000 - 1500.

But for anyone that can break the protection and manufacture a somewhat descent generic replacement battery the potential profit is enormous. I am sure some Chinese are well aware and hard at work on circumventing the DRM

Meanwhile a 1kW/h battery for an e-bike can still retail for $2000 (thinking of the Stromer BQ983).

Surprises me how long it takes for these prices to tickle down into normal consumer goods. But they will, the true revolution of electric assisted urban transport has only just begun. Really exciting to see all the wacky new transport modes that are created left and right, I wonder which ones will stick

I recall a colleague googling Prince Albert in front of his boss whilst discussing a potential project in Monaco. That was before either before safe search was a thing or he had it switched off.

I can assure you surface compaction is still a thing. Never seen sheep's foot rollers, but I have seen really big square rollers. A square doesn't roll very well, but that is the point: every tumble it makes it crashes into to soil. Problem is it is extremely uncomfortably for the operator, even if pulled by a really big tractor. These rollers are called impact rollers.

Also in use are rapid impact compactors, basically a crane pounding away. Vibro compaction, where 30m long vibrating needles are driven into to soil. And best of all, Dynamic impact compaction: lift a big chunk of concrete 50m in the air and let it free fall. Then do it again and again... See https://vimeo.com/415927984 @ 3:15

And now how I imagine it would go:

> Look Mr. C-level, I built this amazing tool that makes unicorns excrete rainbows. It is a PoC built in my own time cause I don't have time/money or a project.

> Wow, great! We need this, it fit right into our strategy for Digital! Just go talk to Mr. Bozo, our head of Digital Innovation Strategy Management.

> O, so you have an idea and want budget. Please write a two page memo describing how you can add value, who the internal client will be. Make sure you get steering council approval too and approval from our CISO. If you succeed I will present this to the board as something cool I am personally responsible for! O, and please ask the internal clients for funding, cause you are providing value right? They will be happy to put you in their year plan. The plans for 2022 have already been sent to the board for approval, but this can be the first thing for 2023! In the meantime I will buy an off the shelf solution with <big vendor> and pay a fortune to let them customize it so it doesn't work anymore. Before anyone realizes what a waste of money that was I'll be long gone, haha. Off to the <big vendor> sky box, they invited me to come watch the Super Bowl again.

> Yes it's absolutely infuriating watching them somehow gain the confidence of the C-level folks, obtain a lot of resources, and burn everything to the ground all while claiming plausible deniability.

Thanks for summarizing my biggest gripe with my current employer so clearly! It is going on, and all the senior all the engineers see it and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Only make sure you stay away from whatever these bozo's fancy, as someone will have to clean up or take the blame when everything falls apart.

Anyone know an alternative GTFO? After a few years of complain/ignore/avoid if feel that is my only option.

nice idea, I think it is somewhat more in line with the keep it simple option, as I e.g. have no idea what a hilbert curve for an arbitrary size rectangle looks like. And you still get compression for x and y directions (though no run length encoding the vertical, perhaps a further addition).

I quite like this approach of defining a few compression methods, see which one works best, and apply that one. I used a similar strategy for time series compression where I would take a chunk of data, apply z few different compression algorithms on it (RLE, delta RLE, etc) and just keep which ever one was smallest. Of course here it is done on a per pixels basis, and I used arbitrary size chunks. The latter is trivial to parallelize. Same could be applied here though, split the image in half and compress both parts independently

I was about to post the same idea about a locality preserving pixel order. I was thinking about hilbert curves, never heard of z-curves. Would be nice to see if/how that affects the compression ratios. How surprising that a few simple principles can give quite a good image format

> Since landing in New South Wales, 4BBRW’s tracker has intermittently gone offline, which is common as birds rest because their feathers can cover the solar charging panel.

So surprising you can run a GPS on a solar panel of about 1cm2 (my estimate), see picture in article

This is the talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RSht_aV7AU, it is a full hour. Quite enjoyable but light on in depth technical stuff. Don't recall hem mentioning how git python running technically, it is more about how he came in the position to do so in the first place.

I just saw a nice keynote by David Beazley on how he installed python on a CM5 at Los Alamos, very entertaining

Yeah, same for me. I know my commute by bike will be 60-70 minutes, regardless of conditions. By car it is 25-90 minutes, depending on predictable and very unpredictable circumstances. If speed pedelecs work depends hugely on where you live, if there are proper "bromfietspaden" or if you have to go through an inner city. Also in some cities (e.g. Rotterdam) you can take the bicycle path and local law enforcement doesn't care. In others the police is much more vigilant. Being the slowest vehicle on the road is not fun. That's why for my situation a normal 25kmh e-bike works best, especially because mine is accidentally set to the US speed limit of 20mph/32kmh, oops

It is not the weight that is the problem (though the bike is heavy), it is that the fancy hub drive will not let the rear wheel spin freely when powered off. I have had to cycle home up to 20km with at about 18kmh, so slower than a lot of normal cyclists, while sweating, wearing my ugly helmet and illegally riding on the cycle path. The last time that happened I decided to sell the bike.

That was worst case, I ride in all weather conditions. 7 Bft headwind in winter would deplete the battery from full to 0 on my way home. Also it was difficult to get to max speed witb strong headwind, but 40kmh was always achievable