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I think it'd be reasonable to keep uber, but I had dropped it because it wasn't in /usr/share/dict/words on Linux or Mac. That was a quick&dirty way to filter out proper names, but it misses some other words too.

I added the word list to the main article. The rule is for two words, ubiquitous and ubiquity, so maybe the rule should be tightened to word.startswith("ubiqu").

Uber and Ubuntu are not in my word list (which attempts to exclude proper nouns), but maybe I should add uber, uberant, uberous, uberously, uberousness, uberty, uberties.

I had a self-imposed time limit of 1 day for this side quest, but there are lots of ideas in the comments here so someday I may come back to this project and give it another day.

*hones

Good catch — "homes" wasn't in my /usr/share/dict/words for some reason so I missed this case!

That is my favorite podcast of all time!

Bookmarked! I love the interactive diagrams! I love that you have a touch-point larger than the drag handle. And I'm impressed that the label placement takes care to avoid the axes. Some feedback:

You have vector s in blue, and then vector u in teal, and then vector v in orange.

In the diagram, it's "Subject", "First Reflector", "Second Reflector". I think it'd be better if these labels were "Subject s", "First Reflector u", "Second Reflector v" so that we can match up the text to the diagram even without color.

Later you have "The pair of vector u and v is called a rotor". But these colors do not match the earlier colors, and it makes it hard to connect to the diagram.

In the 3D diagram, I think it would be better if you used the same color scheme as for the 2D diagram. Same for the circular reflection diagram.

Suggested colors:

- subject s - orange in every diagram (currently blue, blue, blue)

- first reflector - teal in every diagram (currently teal, magenta, pink)

- second reflector - blue in every diagram (currently orange, teal, orange)

This makes the rotor colors more similar to each other than to the subject.

Thanks — yes, I'm still struggling to find a good way to explain the colors. The landmark is green. The blue tiles are the savings — the difference between using the landmark and not using it. I'll work on a different wording or maybe a visualization.

Changing the graph is another optimization that's commonly used. A graph of rooms is far smaller than a graph of tiles, and you can precompute paths on the small graph. The landmark heuristic can work on that graph too, although with the small examples on the page you probably wouldn't need to.

Yes, it's a bit weird! There are also optimizations that do what you describe, with landmarks along the way, but at least at the time I learned about it, road map pathfinding was using landmarks behind the target.

Good catch. I was thinking people would read that after they have moved the green L but I should handle both before and after moving L.

The landmark data can be calculated in a background thread. For DF I imagine you'd have a background thread running all the time, updating one landmark every so often. But what happens if you look for a path before the landmark data is updated? I haven't tested this yet but I believe this is how it'd work:

1. If the cost of a tile decreases, the precalculated heuristic will be too high, so A* might find a non-shortest but ok path. In game, you can think of the dorf as following the path they already know about, because they don't yet know that there's a shorter way.

2. If the cost of a tile increases, the precalculated heuristic will be too low, so A* will find the optimal path but it will take a little bit longer (still not as long as if we weren't using this heuristic). In game, you can think of the dorf as following the path they already know about, but running into a wall, so then they find a path around it.

I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rAXF_btvE to be more balanced than the LTT video, but I think it mostly depends on your expectations of the cameras. The videos themselves are stored locally, not in the cloud. But if you have thumbnails turned on in the notifications, then the thumbnails have to be stored somewhere temporarily (I think this is an Apple/Google requirement), and they're being stored on a cloud server rather than in your home network (which would require opening up a port).

Slug preserves the vector shapes. MSDF first converts to a texture, which can lose small details. How much depends on the size of your texture and the complexity of the font. I expect MSDF will never look better than Slug.

However, MSDF can handle lots of distance-based effects (glow, shadow, outline, gradient, etc.)[1], and I don't think Slug does that. And MSDF is constant time whereas (I think) Slug is going to vary depending on the complexity of the font.

The Slug paper [2] says:

  All of the techniques that store data in a texture atlas are inherently using a discrete
  sampling of what is actually an infinitely precise description of a glyph outline. This
  inescapably leads to limitations that can be mitigated by increasing the resolution of
  the texture atlas, but that can never be completely removed. For applications that
  need to render a wide range of characters at potentially large font sizes, a texture atlas
  capable of producing glyphs at an acceptable level of quality may have prohibitively
  large storage requirements.

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf-fonts/#demo

[2] https://jcgt.org/published/0006/02/02/

Thanks!

I originally had that near the top but in one of the rewrites I moved the papers to the end — https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf-fonts/#appendix

Some of these banks are ridiculous. HDFC bank insists that I send them my photo id, address, phone number, and my Indian id number to prove that I'm not their customer. I tried explaining that I don't have an Indian id number because I don't live in India but they insisted they can't help me unless I provide all of this. Then they sent me legal notices threatening me for not paying "my" bills. I send all their stuff to spam now.

Also, emacs M-x from 1980 or maybe TECO's extended command from 1978 (learned these from Bobbie Chen who wrote https://digitalseams.com/blog/why-do-sublime-text-and-vs-cod...)

Nice interview! I didn't realize there was inspiration from Theme Park [1], a game from Demis Hassabis (DeepMind).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game)

BTW in the next article the author goes into wind, evaporation, orographic rainfall, rivers, biomes. But not ocean current or tectonic activity.

There's a different blog series that does go into plate tectonics: https://frozenfractal.com/blog/2023/11/13/around-the-world-2...

Coincidentally Civ 7 just announced they're using plates with voronoi for their new map generator.

Love it! For typescript, esbuild has been my favorite tool for turning typescript into browser-readable js, and then I check type errors separately using the ide plugin.

I love having comments on my site/blog. I learn so much from some of them. For example, on my hexagon page, someone said there's a connection with "Eisenstein integers". I had never heard of them, and they were fun to learn about. Another example, I don't know "doubled coordinates" that well, so some sections of the page are incomplete. In the comments people have pointed to resources and code that fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Most recently, someone pointed out an inconsistency in something I wrote, and they were right — I have updated the page to resolve it. Before that, someone pointed to an emacs package that might make my life easier, and it looks like it will indeed partially solve the problem I had posted about.

I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.

I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.

Suggestion: canvas.addEventListener('dragstart', (e) => { e.preventDefault(); } );

At least on Firefox/Mac, sometimes while dragging it "picks up" the image to drag it. This should prevent that.

BTW this author also has a fantastic YouTube channel in which he live-draws geological diagrams with MS Paint https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeoModels

Agree. Weatherspark is great too — https://weatherspark.com/map?pageType=4&yearNumber=2025&ids=...

Each of those icons is a full year of weather data. Left to right is Jan to Dec. Bottom to top is the hours of the day. The pixel color tells you cold vs hot.

There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff)

And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:

> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts

> Check back later for more updates

With the older tree-sitter package[1], I was able to use it with the existing major modes. The new built-in emacs tree-sitter seems to be more ambitious, involving new major modes.

[1] https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/

(author here) I agree, the `type` example could be done with regular expressions. In part 2 I'm planning to describe the real reason I was using tree-sitter here. I wanted to highlight certain combinations of operations based on the naming conventions I use in one of my projects. In particular, I want to catch a function call where a function named "x_to_y" has an argument with a name that does not appear to be an "x". However, while writing part 1 I realized that I could probably do that with a regular expression…

Cool!

A large part of the reason I'm using these other services instead of hosting my own is because of mobile apps + browser extensions.

Fantastic article! I've been trying to figure out antialiasing for MSDF fonts, and have run across some claims:

1. antialiasing should be done in linear rgb space instead of srgb space [1] [2]

2. because of the lack of (1) for decades, fonts have been tweaked to compensate, so sometimes srgb is better [3] [4]

Do you have advice on linear vs srgb space antialiasing?

[1] https://www.puredevsoftware.com/blog/2019/01/22/sub-pixel-ga...

[2] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12023985

[4] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

I love this page. Thank you. I bookmarked it in 2018 but still haven't used it, doh!

https://wwwtyro.net/2019/11/18/instanced-lines.html is also nice.

Thank you for Grapher! I love Our World in Data.