frasermarlow

They are all "no profit" companies at this stage.

I agree that a system in which we reward one man for building a vast loss-making empire is fundamentally broken and will eventually need to correct course. Elon Musk is not the problem, the irrational valuations of his (and his team's) work are. This said, the article is not terribly articulate in it's arguments and clings to an anachronistic view of how capital markets currently allocate wealth (and I am deliberately avoiding saying "how capital markets work" because I can't see this model working too long past this current wave of massive hyped up IPOs). Also, just to throw spice into the conversation, I bought into the IPO and cashed out above $160. So thanks for that.

Your chance to make an early investment into the Empire before they build the Death Star, at $135 a share.

"That’s equivalent to an estimated total of more than 11,000 microplastic particles in each Danone Happy Baby Organics pouch, and more than 5,000 particles in each Nestlé Gerber Organics pouch." - Wow.

On that topic: this is both entertaining and scary, especially the bit that says they fast-tracked into the NASDAQ 100 so whether you like it or not you have to buy into Elon Musk's financial house of cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

Remind me to come check this tracker after the SpaceXAI IPO.

Ha ha.

At the moment, the economics of software are out of whack. It's not about agentic replacing traditional painstakingly coded applications, but more about the massive influx of capital, and the subsidies from the newcomers to try and gain ground and demonstrate aggressive growth. In the early 2000's, Facebook's growth was described as "selling dollar bills for 90 cents." That is where we are now. Nobody will know for sure where all this lands until companies have to demonstrate their worth through real profits and stable growth.

I recall running this on my TRS-80 back in the 80's - there is a web version available here: https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/

"Among the biggest customers for car data are insurance companies, and they're using it to charge some people higher prices. But there's no telling where your information is going. Some car companies admit they sell your data, but they don't have to say who's buying. That's to say nothing of the fact that you might find it a little creepy. Most consumers, experts say, have no idea it's even happening."

And to think not long ago, Japan had the smart toilet market cornered. Another great victory for China.

Well hopefully it we be useful on your 3rd read :-)

Thanks. Performance will depend on your internet connection as it progressively loads the tiled images.

Ugh, yeah, I see what you mean - much of the project is running into backend errors.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Yes, i literally threw the faux-satellite version together in response to suggestions on this thread. Plenty of room for improvement there! Thanks for the notes on marker positioning. Let me look into that. Each source map has its pros and cons, but Fonstad's canonical version would be ideal. Copyright could be an issue as you point out.

Yep. When I get some time I will do a metadata layer to clarify water vs land vs prairies vs forest etc... then I will rerun the process with that additional Context. Should be fun. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks, I will check it out. Good news is, web hosting tech aside, the content should not go out of date!

I added some notes above on the tiling technology. As for the base map itself I posted a link to the original file. I hope that helps but happy to answer any other questions you might have.

I totally get that. Sorry if it was a letdown. In reality I built this map as part of a personal exploration of the lore and background of Tolkien's lore, because i am fascinated by it. This felt like a productive way to share my learnings with others in a fun way. I certainly learnt a lot from going through the process.

Ha ha. Yeah. That was a first wild attempt. If I get time I will figure out how to fine tune the mock-satellite imagery to properly reflect ocean, lakes, trees, castles etc.

If you put in a credit card, look out, the Google maps API can get very expensive very quickly!

Yep, that is correct, well spotted. See the thread with blevinstein below on some more details related to that.

I added a comment above about the use of https://leafletjs.com/ if you are interested.

I added a comment above about the use of https://leafletjs.com/ if you are interested.

PS: There have been a few questions about the tiling system used. It's based on https://leafletjs.com/ and you will find it all in the Github repo. Its one of the more interesting parts of the project:

https://github.com/frasermarlow/middle-earth-map

The tiles were pre-generated from the source image using generate_tiles.py — a Python script that slices the big map into 256x256 JPEG tiles at three zoom levels . Leaflet loads them with zoomOffset: 2, so directory zoom 0 = Leaflet zoom -2, directory zoom 2 = Leaflet zoom 0 (the highest native zoom). Below and above that range, Leaflet scales tiles up or down automatically.

The satellite tiles were generated by generate_sat_ai.py using Stable Diffusion img2img. It assembles the zoom-2 tiles into a full image, processes 512x512 overlapping patches through SD, blends them back together, then slices into the tile pyramid.

Open to ideas on how more 'interactive' we can make it. But yeah, fair point. Maybe it's just more 'annotated'

Ah. Yeah sorry. I could add a "spoiler alert!"

Sure, it's public; https://github.com/frasermarlow/middle-earth-map

Hey @pants2, I put something together for you. It's pretty rough, but if you take the time to respond here, that will be the motivation I need to clean this up and make it work properly. https://middle-earth-interactive-map.web.app/index.html?view...

LOL