tppiotrowski

I think language models will help us sift through the garbage. I have a hard time finding answers using Google (too much SEO garbage), but ChatGPT does a pretty good job of filtering the noise. It's not perfect, but it saves lots of time vs. Google.

> While we're on the subject, how many studies period are faked or flawed to the point of being useless?

Or how many studies are useless, period? It's like publishing a memoir to Amazon. You can now say "author" on your resume, or when you're introduced or at cocktail parties but nobody finds any value in what you have to say. You can also use ChatGPT because people might not notice.

Some would argue that a car highway prevents right of movement for pedestrians and cyclists.

I get what you're saying but you're very narrowly trying to define right of movement to make your argument and without your narrow definition it falls apart.

ICAO standard effective from 1978 to only duplicate identifiers if more than 600 nmi (690 mi; 1,100 km) apart

I think there's a segment of people for who depression and anxiety is an inability to quiet their mind. They're unable to go about their day or be present in their thoughts because they're ruminating on a thought that's evoking bad emotions.

Exercise is one way to break the thought cycle. Just holding your breath is another. When you're suffocating, your brain tends to shut down unnecessary thinking. I also think this is why people enjoy rock climbing. It's the potential for injury that shuts down rumination for a lot of people I know who fail to find the same focus through meditation.

How is GoreTex applied? Is it a chemical that you spray on fabric or a fabric itself?

I have an ongoing joke with my wife that GoreTex is a myth. We both spend a lot of time on trail and once I splurged for GoreTex trail runners. The first time I wore them on snow I was amazed. My socks stayed dry. Three outings later they were no different than non-GoreTex trail runners. Anecdotal evidence but there seems to be a huge spectrum of GoreTex effectiveness across garments. I'm not sure how these items are manufactured. Is it possible some items have "more" Goretex or have it applied in a specific way to make them last longer than others?

I remember reading the history of Windy and somehow they're able to get quite a lot of money through donations. Here's an example from 2019 [1]

[1] https://m.facebook.com/windyforecast/videos/windy-donations/...

A nice design would be: When you park the car, solar panels cover all the windows or open like flower petals from the roof for maximum power harvesting.

I just think it will realistically take Twitter more than two weeks to come up with this data. Seems like a long time but my experience at companies of 1,000+ is that things move very slow.

Here's the government attorney explaining how Twitter should do it:

> To the extent that Twitter does not, it should be a simple process. You have cookies associated with an account; you have the email for the subscriber information; perhaps you have the phone number; you definitely have the IP addresses. Control F that through your system to see what other accounts have come from those IP addresses, are linked to that email address, are linked to the phone number, are linked to the same cookies. I don't profess to be a technological wizard, but it does not seem to be a complex issue.

Reminds me of freelancing nightmares where the client would being with: "This should only take a few hours but I need a website with a simple store front and shopping cart...". The best response I came up with to these clients was: if you know exactly how long it will take then you must know exactly the steps involved and how long each takes so you can do the work yourself and you don't need me :P

Headline: "Wind & Solar WILL BE 25% of Total U.S. Generating Capacity Within Three Years as They Grow by Over 100-GW,"

Article: "ASSUMING THAT MATERIALIZES, in three years, wind WOULD account for 12.43% of installed capacity while utility-scale solar WOULD provide another 12.41%."

The headline seems certain but the article not so much. Capitalization mine.

> The police have a monopoly on the legalized use of violence.

Is this true? I thought killing for self defense is legal.

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and pandemics. People still have kids and get married and start businesses and hike and play the guitar, etc. History is just what we decide to deem important or not.

"The EMBO Journal wrote in a public post last week that it is reviewing the allegations regarding a 2008 paper about receptors within the brain for which Tessier-Lavigne is listed as the *third author of 11*"

11 authors? I thought the kickbacks of "I'll publish your name on my paper if you publish my name on yours" in Computer Science were bad...

For sure. Appreciate the link.

My main roadblock now is that my fiancé is off for the summer (she's a teacher) so we're outside a lot and it's also hard to find the LiDAR datasets online.

I think the Washington one has been out for a while but I didn't know it existed until a few weeks ago.

I'll probably do an ASK HN for LiDAR datasets at some point and hope we can crowdsource as much data as we can.

Good clarification. My understanding is that SRTM data did not include buildings or foliage (maybe they filtered out all data except the lowest elevation values?) but that's not "radar" in general.

This is a good idea. There are two popular encodings of elevation data into RGB tiles. They are both not optimal in size because their value ranges need to accommodate bathymetric data (negative elevations for mapping the sea floor)

height = -10000 + ((R * 256 * 256 + G * 256 + B) * 0.1) [mapbox/maptiler]

height = (R * 256 + G + B / 256) - 32768 [mapzen terrarium]

If you only care about elevations above sea level (0-8848 meters), you can pack the data into just two bytes maintaining a .13 meter precision (Mapbox precision is .1)

height = (R * 256 + B) / (256 * 256) * 8848 [shademap]

This is the encoding I'm going to use. I've already trialed it and it saves space (I'm not sure about processing time).

The best encoding would be to encode the min elevation for an entire tile in the header and then just store the delta between the tile's min elevation and the elevation for a given pixel. It would be the most space efficient but would involve loading the whole tile data into memory to find the minimum elevation (which is less efficient then streaming and encoding one pixel at a time)

Great points. Thank you for the links. The one trade off here is that uncompressed blobs will require longer downloads than PNG and I think usually the network transfer is slower than PNG decoding.

But maybe the sample gist takes a Tiff blob and encodes it to a PNG on the client and then maplibre decodes the PNG to canvas. That would be quite inefficient if that's what it's doing.

I think it's granular enough for solar. I put a tool together for annual sunlight[1] charts but haven't calculated the energy potential yet.

Some personal problems it solves for me:

- I hike/ski/climb a lot and want to know how late I can sleep in and still avoid the worst of the sun [2]

- I'm getting married this year and had wedding photos taken in a meadow in the mountains and we needed to set a time to meet with the photographer for a 2 hour session where we would still get sun but as late in the evening as possible.

- We're getting married in a back yard and want to place tables in a shady location for 5pm dinner

- I have a car I use occasionally and want to park it in a location that receives very little sun so the rubber/paint doesn't deteriorate as fast [3]

- We have a small van we take to the mountains and want to park it in the shade to keep it cool or sun to charge solar panels.

- etc, etc, etc

All these use-cases would be enhanced by trees and I can do it on my local machine but want to share if other people have similar needs.

[1] https://shademap.app/sunchart/#15/47.61754/-122.34365

[2] https://shademap.app/shadeprofile/

[3] https://shademap.app/@47.61767,-122.34993,16.13693z,16889544...

In a way, the problems I'm dealing with here are what my CS education prepared me for. Previously I did web development and you rarely had to worry if your webpage would fit into memory and you rarely used more than a few percent of the cycles your processor was capable of.

Ah. I hadn't even thought that I could do byte offsets on the fly. In general I would err on the side of over-sharing because until ChatGPT came along I struggled to understand what tools and options were to generate tiles as there wasn't much data I could find online.

One thing specific in my case: the LiDAR GeoTiffs are in imperial feet with a 32 bit floating point precision. If you take the elevation range from sea level to Everest in meters (8848) and pack it into an int16, you can get .2 meter precision. That's plenty for ShadeMap so converting from float32 to int16 should save half the cloud storage space in theory and more when taking PNG compression into account.

Thanks Andrew. Still struggling a bit with the business/marketing side of things but the idea appears popular and the work itself is fun and fulfilling.

Thanks again for your support.

Can someone explain the significance of this? I do WebGL development and I believe there is already an intermediate layer called Angle that WebGL compiles to. The Angle layer decouples the hardware from the software and allows hardware vendors to develop drivers that run Angle and shader languages to target Angle without the two needing to know anything about each other. (Not sure if that's right?)

This seems like another intermediate decoupling layer?

Do you want Apple and Google to record and archive your private FaceTime/Hangout/Zoom sessions? With your romantic partners?

I'd be very interested in the testimony in this case as it seems that the plaintiffs argue that 100+ deaths during 2021 PNW heatwave were caused by global warming.

I'm not sure what argument you make. Climate is different from weather and there have been extreme temperature events throughout history. Furthermore, how do you account for natural releases of methane or the whole cow farting angle? How do you establish responsibility, etc.

> What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.

> The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive.

There's a contradiction here. If you work on something that bores other people (small niches) it will not satisfy the desire to do something impressive.

For example: I want to tell my in-laws I work at Google, but I really want to create maps that simulate sunlight and shadow

I think this cognitive fallacy is actually called "labeling". Instead of labeling yourself: "I'm dumb", think "It was dumb when I forgot to turn off my car lights and the battery died".

You are not dumb, lazy, toxic, etc, but occasionally you do or say dumb, lazy, toxic things

"However, sometimes I find that it does not update properly. On days when I physically see a friend install it, the numbers don’t go up."

I have a hard time decoding the statistics dashboard. Every day my extension gets uninstalled more times than installed but the user count remains stable. Why?

Kind of curious what WebGL report [1] would be for one of these devices. Does the extra RAM make maximum texture sizes massive and allow for thousands of textures or is that a software limitation?

[1] https://webglreport.com/