53 karma · joined December 27, 2015
Like many (I suspect), I have had several users provide comments that the AI processes I have defined have made meaningful impacts on their daily lives - often saving them double digit hours of effort per week. Progress.
1. huge programmer pool 2. tried and tested legacy code could be easily used / adapted 3. code quality / checkstyle plugins just worked 4. great testing tools
My main gripe was the compile time (often 2-3 mins)...whereas Adobe Flex would crank code out in 3 seconds.
Now, the new language models should help us push through the noise.
Folks might note 'In the 2010 book Stab Proof Scarecrows by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent"'.
Menulog and DoorDash appear to work pretty well. Sad to see Deliveroo go.
Today, we learned that we will no longer be using much of the "Power" Platform...but we have all wasted a year of our lives "trying".
Now that we are done, I look forward to getting back into the gym before using "traditional" tooling that actually works.
In the future I will be more careful with the projects I work on - with a preference for mature technologies. Erlang, Java, RDMS, Rust etc. sure. Latest shiny from tech company where people hate their jobs - NO WAY. They will bring us all down.
I have no love for what Android has become and where Kotlin is going. The web today feels like a PDF...huge amounts of movement but not necessarily progress.
I hope more than anything that Flutter continues to gain traction. To my mind it is perfectly reasonable for next generation tech to write to the canvas with the latest widgets as long as there is good accessibility support.
My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap.
This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave.
Anyhow, thoughts of one.
Flutter represents a great opportunity imho to uplift development capability and avoid needless fragmentation. It reminds me of Adobe's Flex in some ways and I can assure you that I have _never_ had such a productive client-side development environment since! Flex united developers, graphic designers, animators etc. 3 second build times...worked on everything even if the runtime was cough 'sketchy'. I'd love to see Chet Haase move onto Flutter and resume similar videos to his Adobe days.
As for all of the Kotlin noise, like much of Android this is "movement not progress" and yet another example of fragmentation. I certainly like many aspects of Kotlin _but_ Java 14 is very nice AND enables greater participation from different roles (e.g. lower barrier to entry for the Spring Boot camp). I'd love to see Google uplifting the Java / JVM community and support modern Java syntax on Android.
As for Google building a better SDK, clearly the Android and Flutter teams do not see eye to eye...but maybe there will be lessons learned for both. I will be keeping an eye on Fuchsia with respect to developer tooling.
Under about:config, it seems like network.trr.mode with values 2 or 3 are good choices, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver#network....
UPDATE: network.trr.mode with 3 is not working for me in Australia.
> And lastly to your point about lightweight desktop software, tiles don’t really have a place in the data process. They’re only really useful for the visualization aspect. And frankly, I think we’re reaching the capacity of the technique, we just might have some headroom in server efficiency.
Not totally sure what you mean on your last point...data can be feature centric (e.g. stored by feature id) or area centric (stored by area location) etc. Storing data by location is important far beyond visualisation and is abstracted in databases such as PostGIS/Postgres (a branded data structure). That said, I acknowledge that ArcGIS Pro, QGIS etc. have limited support for tiled data but of course that is changing. Safe funded much (all?) of the OGR MVT development afaik.
> I wish I could learn to build my own tiles, vector or PNG. I don't really understand where the data comes from, how is data gathered and assembled.
There are many data providers out there. You might be interested in OpenMapTiles, which is a pipeline from OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles
Also check out Maputnik http://maputnik.github.io/editor/
If you want to learn about "tiling schemes" then head over to https://www.maptiler.com/google-maps-coordinates-tile-bounds...
> I'm also really curious about the choices involving the zoom level, how do you decide to render things depending on the zoom level, when is data discarded, to have good detail or better performance and lighter tiles. I would really be willing to try build lighter maps so I can have my own mapping software on a desktop machine.
Lots of different considerations - is a human going to look at the map? If so then a cartographer will determine what is going to be shown at a given scale. There are other constraints too, such as limited space to show data and also hidden constraints, such as the maximum amount of data for a region (e.g. ~500kb per tile in the case of mapbox vector tiles)
> The data sizes and hardware requirements involved are generally pretty big. It could be interesting to see how much details one could achieve to make a "portable" map browser when limiting the data size to 2GB, 5GB or 10GB.
Lots of projects out there doing impressive things there. Quadtree tiles get you so far...k-d trees might yield other useful properties. Skobbler have some pretty impressive data compression technology (~12GiB for global coverage, routable and searchable...with some limitations - skobbler.com/apps). Of course the trick is to discard all that you don't need.
> I would really like to ask why, on some mapping software, you can't see names of large enough cities/places/regions that are obviously there. It often makes it difficult to browse maps properly.
If there is limited budget then the effort to create appropriate labels is limited. Data sources can be limited / incomplete...there can be nuances between jurisdictions etc. and of course label prioritisation has been a longstanding problem. What happens when you rotate a map and the text labels collide with one another...which ones do you keep...which do you discard etc. These things are also context dependent...why not include continent names? Or region names? Or province names? What about the difference between physical and political geography? A cartographer can help ensure that the right information is available at the right time...whilst acknowledging that they have to tell little white lies in every map they make.
Code: I make PRs, raise issues and open source my code where possible.
Can you comment more about "weak radio signal"? Perhaps one can deduce the a number by hearing a small sample of a sound...whereas W3W has a wider vocabulary? My guess is that if necessary, one could repeat each word several times (e.g. over a period of 10 seconds).
So whilst ChatOps might be fairly basic today I am open to it becoming very much more advanced in the coming years.
Whilst I have been involved in Android since the beginning I personally would not encourage younger folks to focus too much at the expense of new technologies (inc. blockchain tech for that matter).
That said, we hopefully have another 10 years!
At some point I think it would make sense to have a clean break. Personally, I'd love to see something like rust encouraged (possibly with JS frontend to ensure huge adoption). Probably never going to happen...so with that said, we'll probably end up with dart...suitable for writing macros around machine learning code.