Somewhat off-topic: how were the diagrams in this article made? I find the handdrawn animated wobble quite pleasing.
1,267 karma · joined November 4, 2017
They've been invaluable - we've squashed some gnarly performance issues with some degenerate constructs, caught a few performance regressions post-release, and spent time polishing the type errors and semantics of the ones most encountered.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Now admittedly this is talking about about the cost of the military industrial complex rather than the cost of scientific pursuits. But I'm sure someone could make a case for the Apollo program merely being an ICBM manufacturing program in a trench coat.
It has changed dramatically.
For context, I am an _extremely_ happy user (and paying subscriber) of Rate Your Music . I find the genre classifications, album descriptors, user reviews and ratings incredibly useful and they have greatly enhanced my music discovery process, and my understanding of the music I come across.
Secondly, I simply find the API to be very tastefully built. The Geo API (https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/geo) is a particular highlight. I've used Plot for about 1.5 years for recreational side projects - it has genuinely kept me entertained for many hours in no small part due to its interface design.
A similar approach is being explored for Scala 3:
- https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/canthrow.h...
- https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/290885
- https://github.com/lampepfl/monadic-reflection (https://youtu.be/UmO-f0qTRSU)
Bit of a missed opportunity here to provide a cheaper subscription just for Classical. Apple could have captured Spotify users who would be willing to pay a small premium for a nicer classical UX, but would be unwilling to take out an additional full-priced music subscription. Inevitably some Classical only users would end up migrating entirely to Apple Music to amalgamate their subscription costs.
It's all very bespoke.
But the lock-in is less severe these days. The parser, runtime and standard lib are all open-source, so you can run a full notebook in VSCode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...
I've come to appreciate the non-standard extensions they've made to JS too - the reactive cell model has greatly reduced the amount of code I've needed to write compared to a hypothetical React equivalent. It's my #1 platform for my small side projects these days.
I'll quickly note for anyone uncertain - Plot is pure JS so it doesn't have to be used in an Observable notebook. Will run anywhere D3 does.
Turned out pretty well
~ ex-photos engineer
Uhh, no? https://takeout.google.com/ allows you to download your entire library at once.
There's even a transfer wizard where you can export your photos to an external service like Apple Photos! https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/9666875?hl=en
Q: With live public notebooks, is there a way to stage edits before making them public?
[...]
For Free users, we also recommend that they fork the notebook (which would be public), make the edits and merge the changes back.
Although the forked notebooks would be public, it would be a temporary notebook which could be deleted once merged.
Like fine, kneecap your free product if you really need to force people to fork over cash. But Observable purports to be a platform that is trying to democratise data analysis and visualisation for the masses. Feels a bit like Wikipedia adding its own paid tier.