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pithon

283 karma · joined February 4, 2012

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pithon··on World Capitals Voronoi
The framerate and latency on this visualization is absolute magic. Hover the mouse around over the sphere: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/
pithon··on Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts
I was at a beachhouse north of Boston and I thought someone fell out of bed or dropped something really heavy upstairs. It was loud and the whole house shook. All of us were scouring the internet for like an hour, finding absolutely nothing "official" or any mention of it on news sites- just tons of subreddits and other social media blowing up all over the Northeast wondering what the heck it was.
pithon··on Python Chart Examples
These look fantastic. If there's one thing I'd really like to automate with AI instead of hand coding, though, it would be making charts!
pithon··on Show HN: The Uncolouring Book
I sketched something in the first sky and then our started putting up blobs with a single word like "sun" and "banana." I have no idea what's going on.
pithon··on Office 365 Copilot Pricing: $30/month per user
Don't many engineers just use their laptop as a thin client to remote into servers?
pithon··on Why Is GPS Free?
The value of RTK is partially that they are stationary and can average out noise over time to get an accurate position estimate, but mostly that they're sending you their live signal measurements so you can cancel out biases common to receivers which are geographically co-located.
pithon··on Why Is GPS Free?
The almanac is not needed. The ephemeris is basically just almanac orbital data plus extra terms to make it accurate enough for meter-level positioning or better. I'm not sure what you mean by saying the orbital parameters change over days. Ephemerides are updated every ~2 hours to maintain precise positioning.
pithon··on Why Is GPS Free?
Discarding assisted GPS where GPS data messages are obtained through about channel such as cellular or Wifi...

Almanac gives coarse satellite position information (and some other stuff), good enough to know which ones are probably visible and therefore prioritize signal acquisition attempts which used to be very very costly in terms of signal processing. That's the message that takes up 12.5 minutes to piece together. Nowadays you can just brute force all possible satellite signals and there's no need to wait around for the almanac information. Each satellite signal broadcasts precise satellite location information (ephemeris), which takes maybe 30 seconds to get a few frames I believe. So that's basically the bottleneck for a modern chipset which starts with zero information and relies solely on the GPS signals to navigate.

pithon··on We should not be celebrating marijuana use
> cannabis-induced

I find that hard to believe. You could probably correlate many mental facility intake patients with those that ate yogurt for breakfast. This is ignorant fear mongering.

pithon··on Our reality may be a sum of all possible realities
You can take an amplitude-vs-time representation of a signal and via a Fourier Transform instead represent the same information as a sum of weighted complex exponentials in the frequency domain. It works mathematically, sure- but does that mean that- physically, at the core of existence- every RF, acoustic, seismic, or financial data ripple is actually a bunch of sines and cosines which are getting summed together to create the real phenomena?
pithon··on Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5
One is a human, the other is some AI hoovering up everything I say an adding it to their database which can be used in every other instance of Teams in the world. I'd say that's a meaningful difference.
pithon··on ‘I’d rather eat an actual burger’: plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the US
I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.
pithon··on Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2
In many ways, sites/tools like sourceforge and github made it much easier to publish and obtain open source software, leading to much more software being created and shared. I'm suggesting that "too much content" isn't a problem, and leads to good things.
pithon··on Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2
> It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already

Imagine applying that same perspective to software, pre-github.

pithon··on But life had other plans
(1) not all of them, apparently, and (2) it seems arrogant to claim that.
pithon··on Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)
OK then ban them from connecting to your active web services. But don't prevent their PC from booting.
pithon··on The Nintendo Switch has now outsold the Wii
See data here: https://displaylag.com/display-database/
pithon··on Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution
What about the impact of improved vehicle aerodynamics?
pithon··on Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
What do you mean by "the" standard LaTeX template?
pithon··on Reddit files to go public
I only last as long there as old.reddit.com does.
pithon··on Okta Outage
So glad that half my company's internal stuff falls apart when some external service goes down... I couldn't even submit tickets to my company's helpdesk about the other networking issues I was having. What a joke.
pithon··on A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland)
>26 November 2021 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about this Article and are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow after all parties have had an opportunity to respond in full.
pithon··on Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
I've heard people break the design/implement/test phases down to essentially equal parts in terms of cost. It's not a small task if you think about a government agency's testing capabilities potentially needing to be roughly 1/3 of what the private industry is throwing at it. I can see where they need to be pragmatic and adopt a stance where they're really just overseeing the vendor's testing and doing some spot checks. Not ideal, though.
pithon··on Gpsd bug may create a 1024 week time warp on October 23
This isn't even really a GPS thing, it's UTC time that bounces around because it wants to stay synchronized to the day/night cycle. GPS time is continuous.
pithon··on Data Structure Visualizations
Some concepts are infinitely easier to understand with an animation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-twister_mechanism

pithon··on Mysterious fast radio bursts come in two distinct flavours
Which is not a small amount- around 140 of your standard 15A home circuits in the US with 120V service. And this is listening, not a transmitter.
pithon··on Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research
Or upload an encrypted version of the file or just a hash of the figure ahead of time? Then release the descrypt key later or when the figure is published, you can point to the hash which was uploaded publicly a long time ago?
pithon··on Initial Stress-Derived Noun
It sounds strange when my colleagues refer to a class in Python having an a-TRIB-ute rather than an ATT-tri-bute. I'm familiar with the verb form stressing the middle syllable and the noun form stressing the first.
pithon··on Why programmers don’t write documentation
Writing is thinking and oftentimes just being able to explain in words what a thing does, should do, and should not do- has tremendous value as part of the design process before any code is written.
pithon··on Why programmers don’t write documentation
>> Not writing doesn’t block shipping (at least not right away).

>It should.

The rub is that it might not block what's currently being shipped. But that debt can come back to introduce headaches and delays for the next ship.

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