I think I may have fallen victim to a GP midflight edit - I agree with you fwiw, it’s a stone cold fact.
9,514 karma · joined January 4, 2010
I run CrimeRate, an independent UK crime statistics platform that tries to do street-level crime rates properly so a quiet cul-de-sac with three incidents doesn’t get painted as a hotspot, using walking-distance isochrones instead of arbitrary admin boundaries, and counts stored first with rates derived as late as possible. Always happy to talk spatial stats, messy public-sector data, or why most crime maps are quietly lying to you.
Most of what I build ends up named after cows, which you’d reasonably take as a nod to treating servers as cattle rather than pets, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice I’ve been doting on every one of them like the family dog; tom@moomoomoo.com if you want to say hello.
Also, these days, a terrible pianist; classically drilled at sixteen, accidentally fluent at sight-transposing thanks to an electric piano with a stuck middle C, forever pining after Rachmaninov and properly in love with Brubeck, and once upon an A-level I could get through Blue Rondo à la Turk intact, though what comes out of me now is more of a nervous 9/8 stagger than anything Dave would recognise.
https://crimerate.co.uk
I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?
Tho really need some car population per road segment stats to drive the most out of it IMO.
Welsh for river.
In practise, this doesn’t work out as visually pleasing as you’d like; labels repeat, or render partially or not at all, or become interfered with by other labels, or only work well at one given zoom. It’s easy to end up in a visually dissatisfying place that’s taking an unfathomable number of magic rules to get to.
The secret sauce to fixing this is creating separate label layers of perfect point locations or lines for labels to follow in advance. Added bonus is faster render and interaction times due to fewer rules.
Never heard of it. The food there good?
> The other devs with less moral can then outperform you.
I long for the days where it’s only my moral compass holding me back.
Claude is noticeably poor for my use case on this particular issue. That said, I imagine I’m not alone in refusing to continue paying OpenAI. We’re in for a wild ride.
Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)
I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.
My biggest worry is that the private jet class of people end up with absurdly powerful AI at their fingertips, while the rest of us are left with our BigMac McAIs.
While I could’ve written that better and with less attitude, gotta confess - and thx for pointing out my smugness - the AI stuff of the last few weeks really got under my skin, think I’m feeling all rather fatigued about it
Astute readers will note what’s been missed here.
Fascinating, really. Your confidently-statement yet factually void comments I’d have previously put down to one of the classic programmer mindsets. Nowadays though - where do I see that kind of thing most often? Curious.
BERT isn’t a SLM, and the original was released in 2018.
The whole new era kicked off with Attention Is All You Need; we haven’t reached even a single decade of work on it.
For myself, it’s the feeling of: thank fuck; the grownups have arrived. shoulders lower, everyone takes a deep breath
This might be a slight missing woods/trees moment but that aside - there is precious little open geospatial data in the uk that establishes see this dot here? That’s a fuel station, that is. That dot there? Oooooh no, that there’s a pub.
The uk govts of the time managed to hand both the address data and the this-is-what-it-is data off to separate commercial enterprises in the name of privatisation, and I genuinely believe it was by accident as it’s… err… quite a niche topic of knowledge.
So anything - anything! - that brings some of that back and truly open to the public is very much welcomed.
My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.
On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?
The NSA and GHCQ and basically every TLA with the ability to tap a fibre cable had figured out the gap in Google’s armour: Google’s datacenter backhaul links were unencrypted. Tap into them, and you get _everything_.
I’ve no idea whether Snowdon’s leaks were a revelation or a confirmation for google themselves; either way, it’s arguably a total breach.
I believe that there are also indexing opportunities (not necessarily via eg hive partitioning) but frankly - am kinda out of my depth pn it.
> How could I not use the cloud?
Funnily enough, one of my side projects has its (processed) primary source of truth at that exact size. Updates itself automatically every night adding a further ~18-25 million rows. Big but not _big_ data, right?
Anyway, that's sitting running happily with instant access times (yay solid DB background) on a dedicated OVH server that's somewhere around £600/mo (+VAT) and shared with a few other projects. OVH's virtual rack tech is pretty amazing too, replicating that kind of size on the internal network is trivial too.
And not from a lack of trying, and definitely not because you don’t care?
Because to me, that’s what masking means: constantly checking yourself because you do care, and you do like people, and the last thing you ever want to do is hurt or upset someone, and yet sometimes you do, and that sucks, and you learn from it, file it away in your mind for next time, and wake up the next day with the same happy-go-lucky optimism you do every day until the world beats it out of you.