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In Australia (at least 15 years ago) you sit your exams and get a score. The universities then set a minimum score for each program based on expected enrollment and capacity. If your score is above the program score, you're in automatically. You only go through the American style interviews if you come in slightly below the bar and are hoping for secondary consideration. These highschool students are probably going to have no problem with their scores, so this is a moot point.

I have no problem with people driving cars. I just don't want to subsidize them. Get rid of street parking, add congestion pricing. Set road taxes such that they actually cover the costs of the roads.

The reason it would be unreasonable in America today is because there is no alternative, and people are expected to be able to commute long distances. Bring in alternatives and it becomes logical.

Look at the cities in Japan, most people live within a 15 minute walk of a subway station, but people still drive.

I work in self driving and strongly agree with this. I may have had some of the coolaid, but I genuinely believe that self driving cars are the only thing that can pry Americans from their cars. Once ownership falls, people will stop voting against better options.

Yes, but something like 90% of the workforce is unionized, and 5 weeks vacation per year is by law, with a "sixth week" being a common perk.

I work in the US and every year I take 17 days off over the July period which works out (with another company holiday) to be 4 continuous weeks. The first year I did it I told my manager "I'm going to take three weeks off, but what do you think about four?". I got my three weeks and made myself indispensable enough to get the four the next year.

This stuff can be negotiable if asked for and planned correctly. It won't be offered.

The Danes do it best, they basically shut down the country for 3 months every summer and have an unspoken agreement that nothing will get done.

Sorry, but I giggled at this. A well designed urban environment would have no cars.

Conversely, if this is indeed true motivation and management has accepted it, kudos to them. It sounds like the engineers said that the situation is untenable and this is the cover we need to fix it, and they got what they asked for.

I think LLMs are really bad at writing tests. In the good old days you invested in your test code to be structured and understandable. Now we all just say "test this thing you just generated".

I shipped a really embarrassing off-by-one error recently because some polygon representations repeat their last vertex as a sentinel (WKT, KML do this). When I checked the "tests", there was a generated test that asserted that a square has 5 vertices.

AI statement: I didn't use AI to write this article (details).

Meta, but thank you for including this and suggest even putting it at the top of your articles. I'm now off to bother to read something that someone bothered to write :)

I work on the mapping team at Zoox (self driving) and we have c++ roles at the entry and mid levels. Requires onsite in the Bay Area though. Charles, if you're reading and would like to chat, I (Carl Chatfield) have sent you a linkedin request.

Thank you for your work on Wesnoth, I spent many hours playing back in the day. There's also a good android port.

The MacOS window manager is so bad that I've resorted to three monitors plus the built in screen. Two monitors have fullscreen terminal emulators and the last has the browser. The built-in screen handles all the distracting stuff whenever I can be bothered to look down at it.

With Xmonad I had 10 spaces on a single laptop screen (actually however many I wanted) with the flick of a button. And yes, I know about hacks like aerospace and the others that require disabling system integrity

I learned sed back in the day to show off. I wish I'd invested that effort in learning perl oneliners instead. For whatever reason I picked up enough awk along the way, and now that's what I tend to use if I ever need something beyond a simple substitution.

S2 has this property https://s2geometry.io

I have HW3, but FSD reliably disengages at this time of year with sunrise and sunset during commute hours.

Zoox | Full Stack Software Engineer | Bay Area | Hybrid (3 days)

https://jobs.lever.co/zoox/d4a324c6-8186-435f-a102-1ac7a69ab...

I'm an engineer on the HD Mapping Team at Zoox (autonomous vehicles) and we are looking for a mid-career full stack engineer with a flair for automation and dev tooling. The role is about helping us scale our map production and management systems. Geospatial data and 3D visualization (deck.gl) experience are nice to haves but by no means required.

If the role sounds like a good fit and you would like to talk to someone directly you can email me at carl chatfield gmail. (Please fill in the gaps).

Usual perks apply, but please read the linked job description for details.

Thank you :)

Disclaimer I work for Zoox, but here is us crash testing https://youtu.be/597C9OwV0o4

I'll jump.

I've been meaning to set up a bi-weekly dinner for hacker types who live mid peninsula, specifically near San Mateo. I have a group of 4 or so in mind and have a good place to host, but would like a slightly larger group.

If anyone would be interested in helping to get something stood up, send electronic post to carl chatfield snail (mail run by g)

The world of homogeneous coordinates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneous_coordinates) is magical and extends beyond just points and lines to conics.

The Multiview Geometry Book begins with a great deep dive on the topic.

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/comput...

Yes, people have done this

Haha nice, hanging in there by a thread

Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero" shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with search?)

As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq = sqrt((rxrx + ryry) / (qxqx + qyqy)). The if q < 1e-10 is also perhaps not necessary, since this would imply that the ellipse is degenerate. My method won't work in that case anyway.

For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot

Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100

Thanks for the investigation:)

Edit: BTW, the sin/cos renormalize trick is the same as what tx,ty are doing. It was pointed out to me by another SO member. My original implementation used trig functions

Hahaha thanks, I never noticed that. If I ever print it out and frame it I'll be sure to fix it

It's been a long time, but here is the writeup https://blog.chatfield.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-elli...

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

This is how rooftop solar water heaters circulate water as well. Though these days you'd be better off with PEV plus a small electric heater.

Try running ipython inside a vim terminal (:below term). Being able to yank and paste between buffers and the terminal (which is itself backed by a vim buffer), and vice versa, is a big multiplier

I've seen a similar setup with an llm loop integrated with clojure. In clojure, code is data, so the llm can query, execute, and modify the program directly

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

To any Linux users, I recently bought a fully loaded M4 MacBook pro to replace my aging Lenovo and strongly regret it. I thought I would use it for playing with LLMs, but local dev on a Mac is not fun and I still don't have it fully set up. I'll probably replace it with a framework at some point in the near future.

Edit: okay, that garnered more attention than I expected, I guess I owe a qualification.

1. Everything is just slightly different. I had to split all my dot files into common/Linux/Mac specific sections. Don't expect to be able to clone and build any random C++ project unless someone in the project is specifically targeting Mac.

2. Not everything is supported natively on arm64. I had an idea and wanted to spin up a project using DynamoRIO, but wasn't supported. Others have mentioned the docker quirks.

3. The window manager. I'm not a fan of all the animations and needing to gester between screens (and yes, I've been down the hotkeys rabbit hole). To install a 3rd party window manager you need to disable some security setting because appearantly they work by injecting into the display manager and calling private APIs.

So my person takeaway was that I took the openness of the Linux ecosystem for granted (I've always had a local checkout of the kernel so I can grep an error message if needed). Losing that for me felt like wearing a straightjacket. Ironically I have a MBP at work, but spend my day ssh'd into a Linux box. It's a great machine for running a web browser and terminal emulator.

I also learned to program in the era of Internet and then early SO. I didn't learn to just RTFM until much later, and when I did it was an epiphany.