tppiotrowski

> Obviously, its not a good idea to bet your business on the courts not enforcing an EU fine

Right. Plus it might hinder your ability to travel freely in those jurisdictions as well which I'd like to avoid.

Can you name a provider? I personally use Stripe Tax for my business and while they will calculate the taxes you owe in each municipality it is totally on you to create an account with each country/state's Department of Revenue and fill out a form quarterly to submit your payments.

This paperwork is what I believe a marketplace like the App Store or Amazon do for you under their own entity that you have to do yourself if you bypass their stores.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

> Every company selling goods and services to European customers needs to collect value-added tax (VAT), even if their business is not established in Europe.

https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-eu-vat-and-vat-oss

You'd think so until you look into doing it yourself. It's more work than building a simple app.

> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason

Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.

I took the Andrew Ng Coursera machine learning course in 2015 and to this day I still remember him saying this in one of the videos. At the time he was talking about various versions/optimizations of gradient descent but he essentially said that tweaking the algorithm will only make your model ~1% better while doubling the amount of training data will have a substantially larger impact (use any old algorithm but just throw more data at the problem). That's why it was already evident back then that Google, Facebook, etc were sitting on a goldmine because in the long run those with the most data, not the brightest PhDs will win this race.

> A wet-bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C) is the theoretical limit for human survivability for up to six hours of unshaded outdoor exposure

Both the sources you linked say that 35 degrees is the limit in the shade as well.

> It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan

That's my understanding too. In fact, the hottest surface temperature recorded on Earth is much higher than the official temperature record because a surface gathers heat not only from air convection/conduction but direct radiation as well.

> Temperatures measured directly on the ground may exceed air temperatures by 30 to 50 °C (54 to 90 °F).[6] The highest natural ground surface temperature ever recorded may have been an alleged reading of 93.9 °C (201.0 °F) at Furnace Creek, California, United States, on 15 July 1972.[7] In 2011, a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) was recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measur...

Similar to my experience coming from JS into WebGL. I always use a framework (currently Vite + React + TS). It helps keep code organized as your project grows (and it will). I don't think there's any overhead as the GPU processing is independent and React does all its magic on the CPU as far as I'm aware. Typescript errors sometimes come from VSCode and sometimes from the node scripts and I can never seem to get my VSCode TS settings the same as my cli settings so errors will appear in the IDE that my build tools ignore or the build tools will error when the IDE says everything is fine but usually I just use some ignore flag because at the end of the day it's just tangential to what I'm trying to do

Take apart old junk, especially machines and electronics. See how parts fit together and what types of problems different parts solve (gears, latches, springs, molded plastic, wiring, PCBs, etc)

I try to follow this mantra on my website. I don't want user accounts so if you pay for something I email you a unique link to access it. No login and password and you can use a burner email address if you'd like. I don't care. I don't worry what happens with my user data if I get acquired because no one will ever want to buy a business with 0 registered users. :)

This idea has been around for a while. This company [1] was doing it a few years ago when I looked into it but there's definitely a lot of improvements to the process mentioned in this article.

[1] https://www.source.co/

A personal reason: I'm building a global simulator for shadows [1]. I started with SRTM based elevation data which allowed me to cast mountain shadows. I'm now offering some LiDAR data which also includes buildings, structures and trees (~50cm resolution). People use my website for sun mapping their gardens, real estate, farms, events, photography, academic research, solar systems. It would be nice to amp up that resolution by another factor.

[1] https://shademap.app

Edit: after reading the article it seems less about surveying the Earth's surface and more about accurate triangulation like GPS :(

Are you prohibited from owning a company or acting as the CEO of a company while employed by Google?

I recently set up a personal LLC and remember reading something about real estate investors making an individual LLC for each property as a way of limiting their liability. If you can't pay one mortgage then you still keep all your other homes. Those LLCs are then managed by another LLC.

I think there's concern that if you manage to buy 11% then you can keep expanding. We've all seen what happens when a company captures enough market that there are no alternatives left:

Netflix, Prime: commercials and limiting devices per household Gmail: no longer unlimited storage as promised OpenAI: still competing so remains to be seen

If these companies are being subsidized by investors to capture market those investors will want a return and things will get nasty.

WebGL2 and now WebGPU is allowing networked access to the GPU. That's new since 2014.

Edit: plus flexbox

Maybe the way to explain an LLM to the general public is to think of it as a child. The words that child learns and uses come somewhat from their parents. If the parents are fighting and saying f** and b**, the kid will learn those words. If they hear a catchy phrase in a cartoon, they'll repeat it. If their parents discuss how much they hate a certain person or issue, the kid will probably adopt those beliefs. And if their parents have CNN or Fox News playing in the background will also have an effect on the thoughts that child produces.

An LLM is just a product of its environment, mostly published books and the Internet. This content is skewed to being produced by the bourgeois. If we put a microphone on everyone from birth and feed it to an LLM, we'd get a more diverse output but we're not there yet.

I think if people took the time to understand how LLMs choose word weights based on training data, they would understand that these results are somewhat deterministic.

Instead, the preferred heuristic is to look for a bogeyman.

AI is replacing Google search, not programmers, at this point. It's great to see all the hype talk about replacing coders but the only "consistent" value it provides is answering questions quickly without ad spam.

I know once the investor subsidies end, monetization will once again stifle a great productivity tool. I'm old enough to have lived through Google's "Don't be evil" era.

Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.

What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...

Seems to only affect Firefox on Mac and it appears like a slightly different editor is used then in Chrome or Safari. It could be a feature flag or a browser specific implementation.

See: USGS 3DEP Program

OP doesn't say remove subscription, just charge $0 for months where users don't use the service.

I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled.

Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you never logged in once)

I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a service they're not using at all.

Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another "dark pattern" of subscriptions.

Very cool project.

I learned WebGL three years ago but before I dove into the underlying concepts I used GPU.js [1] to quickly prototype my project. Eventually, the abstraction prevented necessary performance optimizations so I switched to vanilla GLSL and these vanilla GLSL "shaders" were initially ejected from GPU.js.

Writing JS code then looking at the generated WebGPU output is a great way to get familiar with WebGPU. Thanks for this.

[1] https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/

I'm not sure what you mean by external APIs but is there a reason you're not using SunCalc[1] on the client to process the route after it's returned from the routing engine?

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/suncalc

https://jveuxdusoleil.fr/ is another fun one.

Interesting because the sun rises and sets from the north (NE, NW) during the summer in the northern hemisphere. The effect is more pronounced the farther north of the equator you are and Germany is quite far north.