bcks

What could go wrong?

A month ago. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/media/cnn-launch-digital-subs...

Unrelated, "Harvard cancer institute moves to retract six studies, correct 31 others amid data manipulation claims" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097031

Back in 2018, I ran a little test to see if I could push Google Cloud Vision to recognize objects, shapes, or patterns in clouds. No matter how I treated the images ahead of time, the answer always came back: clouds.

Would be interesting to see how much free-association and hallucination have "improved" the results with the current generation.

Damn, search for "Tardis" turns up zero results.

A text-based, multiplayer, real-time virtual world. Sometimes more group-chat, sometimes more adventure story scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon

When putting together a large RAR file that's been split into smaller files, one can use PAR and PAR2 files to repair and replace damaged or missing segments.

I had a lot of fun playing with the Flipper's Bad USB DuckyScript to automate some repetitive and tedious CMS workflow for a client, filling in a lot of input fields on multiple browser windows with a single press of a button. It improved my productivity and happiness. I've since graduated to Playwright, but it was the Flipper that sparked the idea.

Sure thing, check out NICAR-L: https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/

I lurk in an online community of journalist coders and some folks there are excited about PMTiles as cost-saving way to host your own custom-styled map tiles.

See, for instance, "How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions" https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-repl...

Ah, my bad - looking at induction forge images and links in this thread, the coil was probably closer to 3 or 4 inch diameter.

Maybe 6 inch diameter.

Took my daughter to check out a blacksmithing class in Brooklyn and was pleasantly surprised to find there was no open fire at all. The iron and steel are heated by an induction machine. Just use the tongs to hold up your material near the coil and press the pedal and voila, it soon starts to glow red hot. The space is small, maybe 3 students at a time plus a teacher, but it was bright, tidy, and clean. Not at all the dark, sweaty cave of fire and fumes that I'd imagined, and interesting to see tech slightly more modern than fire.

A cat would never. I'm just saying.

I really enjoyed this film, but in telling the story of the cultural power and ubiquity of Helvetica, I think it dramatically underplays the fact that variations on Helvetica have been pre-installed on most modern personal computers by default.

I started collecting images of interesting COVID-19 related posters, graphics and street art at https://backspace.com/covid19

There's a wonderful, interactive playground of variable fonts up at https://v-fonts.com. Most variable fonts let you interpolate font weight, width, or slant, but some go much further. See for instance, http://variableemojis.com

If you are looking to contribute meaningful edits beyond your local area, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager always has things to do that can help folks working in areas affected by natural disasters: https://tasks.hotosm.org/contribute

Off topic maybe: are there resources out there for teaching coders how to journalism?

The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement is a contract to do just that - for the artist to earn royalties from resale (if the price of the work has increased) and to have some control over public exhibition even after a work passes from owner to owner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist%27s_Reserved_Rights...

It was first published in 1971. Needless to say, collectors and galleries don’t love it, but some artists continue to use it.

Related: whatever happened to The Immunity Project, the AIDS vaccine funded by Y Combinator in 2014? http://www.immunityproject.org

The project is more or less abandoned.

It was scheduled to shut down last year: https://twitter.com/golan/status/976202325076467712

It's also open source, though the code hasn't been touched in a few years: https://github.com/CreativeInquiry/terrapattern

[edit: noted shutdown year]

I've been a volunteer for a couple of years now. It's so rare to get the ping for volunteers (maybe once every few months?) and you really have to be very quick to accept the call before another volunteer does, but when you're able to connect and help it's such an rush of joy. The project such a simple, elegant application of smartphones and real-time crowdsourcing.

It's not offline, but the Microsoft Seeing AI app for iOS uses ML to cover a lot of basic use cases like recognizing text, products, currency, describing scenes, etc: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/seeing-ai

Who's "beleaguered" now?

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16302416

This very thing happened with rats in French-occupied Hanoi in 1902: all you had to do to claim a bounty was turn in a rat’s tail. Rats without tails can still have babies and soon people were breeding rats for profit instead of killing them.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...

It's a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206287

Very brief, indeed. It left me wanting more.

In particular, I would have mentioned the explosion of independent printing shops in the 60's. There’s a great list of counter-culture and political print shops here: http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html

I would also love to see more on the role of experimental, underground comics in the psychedelic movement. But then comics are not quite as beloved by design historians and critics the way posters are.

Any idea what software stack he is using? I searched around on his site as well as learnsquared and couldn't quite figure it out.