That's interesting. It must be that I associate rats with NYC. You used some terms that not everyone is familair with, I jump to the wrong conclusion, taking some guesses as to what you're talking about, and here we are.
Perhaps it's a social sign for being one of the NYC local. They also referred to a person by a single name, further emphasizing they were speaking to the select few who would know what they were talking about.
If only they could also write with a heavy NYC accent, their comment would be even cooler. Forget about it.
> It's even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens!
I came here to point this out. You have a pretty high dynamic range in the captured medium, and then you can use the tools you have to darken or lighten portions of the photograph when transferring it to paper.
I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self perpetuating echo chamber self dellusions. Perhaps this is why an outside perspective can see the painfully obvious. This is probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased opinion is, is very important.
I'll give DuckDB a shot and compare to postgis. Eventually, I think the issue for me would be that I use all the vector outputs via apps connecting to the same database.
You're right in that pretty much anything can be done via an API exposed via a database function. However, as they say... if it can be done, does mean it should? Now, I agree that having more sophisticated multi-dim calculations would be cool, but I've just rarely ran into needing or even wanting to do this, over many projects, some involving accurate simulations. In practice, database has always been for storing and querying data, which can be extremely accurate. I am probably the first person to abuse SQL and I've written some 3D ECEF rotation code in SQL, but it was a hack for a deadline, not because it was the right thing to do. All the projects I've worked with, had external models or components that did the "precise work" using complex code that I would never dare to make dependent on any database.
I'm actually curious, speaking for yourself, what kind of analysis you're doing where something like NAD83, or UTM does not give you enough precision? Is this actually "real world" geospatial data? If I have a soil model, I have a very localized analysis, and if I have a global climate model, we're talking kilometers for grid cells. In all these cases, the collected data has built in geolocation error MUCH grater than most decent projections...
So, what analysis are you doing where you need centimeter precision at global scale of thousands of kilometers? Sounds really interesting. The only time I've seen this, is doing space flight simulations where the error really accumulates into the future.
This is not really a problem, unless you’re trying to simulate some 3D space orbits, physics. The crossover from geo INFORMATION systems to geo simulation systems is a bit rough, but the projections and calculations on projected cartesian space are enough for many typical questions, like distance, area, routing. However, even topology support starts getting specialized, and the use cases are more niche. I think it’s asking a bit too much from a database/storage layer to do efficient calculations outside of those supported by GEOS. At this point, you might want to import the relevant data into higher level applications.
Yeah, if you want to work with GeoParquet, and you want to keep your data in that format. I can see how that's easer to use your example. That's not what a lot of geospatial data is in. You might have shapefiles, geopackages, geojsons, who knows? There is a lot of software, from QGIS to ESRI to work with different formats to solve different problems. I don't think GeoParquet, even though it might be the fastest geospatial vector data format right now, is that common, and the article did not claim that either. So, given an average user trying to answer some GIS question, some ETL is pretty much a given, on average. And given that, installing PostGIS and installing DuckDB, both require some ETL, and learning some query and analytics language. DuckDB might be an improvement, but it's certainly not as much of a leap as quote is making it out to be.
What do you mean by "provisioning a server"? That's a strange requirement. You can install Postgis on a macbook in one command, or actually on all 3 major OS's in one command: "brew install postgis", "apt-get install postgresql-postgis, and "choco install postgis-9.3". Does DuckDB not require a "server" or a "computer"? What does Docker have to do with anything? This is a very confusing train of thought.
> Prior to this, getting up and running from a cold-start might’ve required installing or even compiling severall OSS packages, carefully noting path locations, standing up a specialized database… Enough work that a data generalist might not have bothered, or their IT department might not have supported it.
I've been able to "CREATE EXTENSION postgis;" for more than a decade. There have been spatial extensions for PG, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, and SQLite for a long time. DuckDB doesn't make any material difference in how easy it is to install.
Ruby is in the running, so to speak, so of course that means there are thousands of people who agree with you. I'm not one of them. The fact that Ruby did not take of as much as Python did, even though there was all that RnR hype, is a testament to that. I don't think your examples are readable. What is |x| x.odd? ? (question mark pun intended) This is just "cleverness". I, personally, want my programming language to use method to use a keyword like "is" instead of operand?[question mark operator]
... Perhaps what you're describing is having a niche opinion. If you had some opinions, like a preference for "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters" or "I hate indentation", it would certainly seem that the world is against you. But, perhaps, you just really smart and can remember the intention of all the complicated code you wrote a year ago, so you don't even need to write comments, and thats great. However, being special does not mean that some technolgoy is objectively inferior, unless you can actually come up with a provably objective metric.
Overall, the technology that is there, solving most of the problems for most of the cases is the technology that is superior, by the law of the universe, not the other way around.
I don't agree with any of your examples, but I have my own, like Pascal is a better language than C, by many metrics. I can also accept that C, is what people who invented unix, also invented. And that makes Pascal inferior to C, now, as choice for any project that requires that you hire embedded software developers. That's what the universe decided.
What kinds of problems are you talking about? There are problems that require you to learn new libraries and services constantly, accessing documentation, and there are actual software problems when you have to reflect on your own large code base. I work on both kinds of problems, and in the first case, the models are actually well versed in say, all of CloudFormation syntax, that I would have to look up. On the opposite end, I have written many features on trips, unable to be distracted by the internet, just me and the code, and being able to read library source code.
The fact is, programming requires abstract modeling that language models aren’t demonstrating the capability of fully replicating. At least, not that we can see, yet.
You flip the argument around, suggesting that calling something “conspiracy thinking” is itself a kind of brainwashing or programming, which is a common rhetorical move in conspiratorial circles.
It’s the kind of reasoning that’s impossible to argue with because it’s built to absorb any counterargument as further evidence of its correctness. It’s like playing chess with someone who insists that any piece you take was actually yours all along and that losing is just proof you never understood the real game.
That reply definitely reads like someone deep into conspiracy thinking or experiencing a break from reality. The mix of grandiose claims, secret knowledge, paranoia, and references to supernatural or mind-control phenomena often aligns with delusional thought patterns. The structure—long, winding sentences with shifting topics—also suggests disorganized thinking.
While it’s impossible to diagnose someone from a single post, and some people simply enjoy weaving elaborate fictional narratives online, this kind of response is common in communities discussing “targeted individuals”, government mind control, or other fringe beliefs. If you’re seeing it in a thread about PSI (parapsychological phenomena), it’s not surprising—such topics tend to attract people who believe in hidden forces controlling the world.
It’s best to approach replies like this with skepticism but also a bit of empathy—whether it’s someone having fun, deeply believing their own narrative, or struggling with mental health, getting into a debate with them rarely leads anywhere productive.
Does this allow the container access a hardware USB device? I have Mooondrop FreeDSP usb-c cable with an PEQ that only works with a terrible Android app, and it takes forever to change the EQ settings via an Android tablet I have, that has terrible touch screen. I wish I could just use my linux laptop to do it.
Okey, so the first thing everyone should learn is not to use "==" but use "===". Or, perhaps, just use TypeScript, right? I think that's what people call "effective JavaScript" these days.
Indexing, I give you this one... I think it was intended as some kind of a gift to a "non programmer", a choice many other older language made, by the history decided to go another way, unfortunately for Lua. Still, I haven't had any issues adjusting to this one, personally. It seems kind of like Python whitespacing, I think I forget about it.
On one hand, you do have JavaScript ubiquity, on the other hand, you have the JavaScript "WTF" equality and typing conversion matrix, "WTF" scoping, and dozens of other foot guns that Lua doesn't have. Some people would rather everyone learned Lua subtle differences and wrote less buggy code. I've had to use for the web for 20 years, and if I have any choice, I would avoid it.
Anyway, every language has some fans, and I don't mean to dismiss them, but ubiquity is not the top priority, all the time.
I actually much prefer Garmin watches, due to battery life, the workout app which has no analogues on iOS, in terms of how it tracks reps and sets, the readable screen, etc. However, its the iOS with it was just unusable. It worked great on Android, but I am used to be able to reply to texts, and I couldn't to pretty much anything on the Garmin watch with iOS, except see some notifications. I hope things get more interoperable, but it's been like this for a decade, so it probably won't get better.