lbrindze

BEAM very much falls into the same camp as the author's description of Scratch does at the beginning of the article. You have a lot more granular control than Scratch, of course, but it also loosely follows the actor model

Raccoon Tycoon is great for 2-5 and I can’t recommend it enough.

Stan Honey other claim to fame (other than being literally the best yacht navigator, probably ever) was founding Sportsvision, the company that created the yellow 1st down line you see when you watch football on tv.

I keep my rpi in a pelican case that I modified to include an opening port for the NMEA connection. It gets all its power/data from the single connection which has a mechanical connection as well.

I have over 5000 nautical miles logged (thanks to a very nifty influxdb integration as part of open plotter) using this set up since ~2021, and so far it’s held up better than I could have guessed. I keep a spare pi and sds on board but have never actually needed them. My use case is long distance races, mostly in sub tropics/temperate areas, and I’ve had limited exposure to really hot air temp (say 90F and up in the tropics which is where I could see SDs starting to fail)

This is not a strong justification. If you switched out "arabic words and imagery" for say "blackface" would it still hold? There was a time where seeing non-white actors in film would have been considered distracting and off-putting, but we seem to have moved past that as a society, so why are we holding on to this justification now?

Moreover, distracting and off putting to whom? This article, in part, is responding to how distracting it is for fans of the books and readers to see the source material changed in a pretty crucial way. As others have said, its not exactly obvious to me that the use of these words and language are even possible to separate from the core story.

I get that this is a film executive's decision looking at the commercial viability of their product if they whitewash the story (or not), but at the end of the day we can't really say what the commercial success would (or wouldn't) have been if this language were preserved. To me this demonstrates more the entrenchment of the people who are in the position to make these choices rather than what audiences are willing to consume.

After all, consider the fact that Dune has remained important enough, despite the claim that Arabic (and specifically Muslim) imagery is used throughout that someone decided to greenlight two feature film adaptations so far.

This is true but if you add in some game scripts or download specific scenarios and add in the FIRS resource packs (with much more complicated supply chains) it can be quite challenging.

My personal favorite was doing 5min city builder blitz online. Wasn’t ever very good but would keep me occupied for hours on end!

I remember seeing this one and an ocaml versions while back.

https://gist.github.com/ttesmer/948df432cf46ec6db8c1e83ab59b...

Most of all models are resolved in some sort of projected space. It depends on the model (e.g GFS uses an inflated cube, the ICON global from dwd is projected on to an icosahedron, IFS just moves most of the calcs to a spectral space instead of point-grid, and many regional/meso scale domains use a conic projection). Also by and large it’s easier to assume the earth is spherical and then nudge any differences in datum to Mach your crs.

Most often, final global models are output on to an orthogonal (plate-caree) lat/lon grid. Data at the poles (singularity) is always a bit fidly

Wouldn’t an allusion to 20th century American poetry fall into the category of “curiosity satisfying”? Given they were not the only person who got the reference it feels kind of arbitrary to say this is frivolous entertainment when another person in the community (in this case, me) found it curious and also wondered if there was an allusion there.

If it was an intentional allusion, then it may actually add depth/meaning to the conversation but we may not know since it was already downvoted…

Dunno why this was downvoted, I came here to make a similar comment about the possible Wallace Steven’s reference.

Did anyone else click this link hoping it was an article about Pete Weber’s incoherent yelling?

Obviously every time it starts it becomes so traumatized by the events of the Butlerian Jihad that it simply can’t continue :-p

I wouldn’t discount AMD just yet. They closed quite a big gap in the server cpu market against Intel, most probably due to better leadership and management. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to pull that trick a second time with GPUs. 2 years isn’t short but it isn’t that long either.

People have said AAPL was overvalued perennially as long as I remember yet their market performance seems to ignore these opinions.

On the other hand, a big part of it also comes down to the tool chain, and NVIDIA owns CUDA. Until OpenCL or other gpu platforms catch up, it seems like NVIDIA can continue to corner the gpu market at large.

I love Elixir! One of the main reasons I haven’t been able to sell it as much was it’s lack of good numerical computational support, but with the release of nx now getting to a very mature point it’s really hard for me to not get excited about this ecosystem.

I also think that livebook has a couple of really killer features now that make anyone who spends a significant amount of their time in Jupyter notebooks to stop and take a second look (eg it’s so easy to share a livebook compared with sharing a jupyter notebook, or even easier to extract code from a livebook prototype to turn into a resilient production elixir module).

Yes there is still a ways to go to catch up to the maturity and breadth of the community that Python has in this domain, but that gap is closing way faster than I could have thought.

I think the biggest challenge for adoption is its functional nature. If you take the time to learn about elixir and the BEAM you are rewarded with a pretty complete runtime which ships with its own DB, in-memory Store and message queue (with a very easy path to adopting more battle tested versions of these when you outgrow what is included in OTP). This means spin up time prototyping new systems is spent less on vendor choices (which type of DB should I use) and more on solving your problem domain.

I wish I had know about all this stuff 5 years ago…

I'm having issues with it loading in Safari (14.1.2) on OS X, but it seems to be loading fine with Firefox (111.0.1) for me. Its pretty zippy too, and this computer is no spring chicken...

Gmail doesn't charge me $850/year for an email address, but somehow they managed to avoid people squatting thousands of addresses and selling them on the after-market at an exorbitant markup,

They don’t charge you for Gmail addresses, yes this is true, but there is definitely a thriving aftermarket for people squatting on desirable “OG” email addresses and user names, just as an example -> https://www.playerup.com/accounts/gmailogusername/

Clearly $850/yr is a price people are willing to pay, since there are plenty of great premium names unavailable at these TLDs. Greed or not, people are complaining here about the fact they own hundreds of other names and don’t see these kind of prices, but to me the economics seem pretty straight forward. They just happened to price these domains better than other registrars in my opinion…

sure anyone can do it, but it takes a lot of computers to do it at a reasonable refresh rate. HRRR is 3km and available for free. no super computers required by the end user. then you can apply what ever AI/statistical downscaling you want without having to try and run a better/more reliable forecast than the NWS

I agree, this generally left me feeling skeptical. I know of Luca Delle Monache on the advisory team, through colleagues who have researched under him at Scripps and they spoke highly of him. But yes, there is a lot left to the imagination here.

With regards to the sfbay specifically I used to work with a fairly high resolution wind model for the bay (this was a more traditional dynamic based simulation) and it worked pretty well overall, but every time a storm blew through it would crash. This ultimately had to do with the relatively steep terrain in the bay specifically (and the physics configurations we were using in the actual model).

Even if they are using DL they still need initial and boundary conditions. As I said there are a ton of weather stations around so I could imagine a DL type approach that looked at terrain elevation, and recent + historical observations to initialize a forecast, but I still imagine that boundary conditions would have to be provided by nesting this in a larger model somehow. Then again, I'm not a DL expert at all so there are probably some newer stuff in this field that I'm just out of date on.

Its really expensive to run your own dynamic forecast model, at a refresh rate acceptable for an actual forecast, at this resolution. That's why I suspected its taking existing weather models and downscaling them with DL techniques, but I can't really know just by looking.

Given this is in the SF bay there a number of high quality observations that you can use to validate the forecast skill (unlike India and Africa). I have not bothered doing this here since… well that’s too much like my day job.

I’m always excited to see new forecast products, generally. If I were to guess (as an above comment did) it looks like they are applying some dynamic downscaling on top of either a custom WRF model (expensive and complicated) or more likely already available weather model data like the HRRR, which still would represent a 10x resolution increase.

I’m more curious what the refresh rate is. Anyone can get a super accurate forecast for the next 3 hours that takes 10 hours to run, but at that point it’s no longer a forecast by the time the data is available.

I still think that windy has set the standards as far as modern weather visualization goes. Not saying everything has to be particles but other things (like the inclusion of isobars) is really clean and not trivial to execute.

Either way this has definitely piqued my interests and I will be keeping an eye on it, their advisory board looks legit (at least in the meteorology end)

I do the same thing, but insist on calling all regular weekends "short weekends" and holiday weekends "regular weekends" or just "weekends". My hope is this catches on and we start thinking of 5 day weeks as "long weeks". (given that I stole this from a podcast producer maybe it already is?)

Probably not, but cruising is likely cheaper than you expect and (if you are currently living in a major US city) significantly cheaper than your current situation.

Everyone has different standards of what they consider “liveable” especially when it comes to boat maintenance and preparedness. I cruised for a while just fine with almost nothing in the way of systems or electronics (paper/home brew charts, no radar/ais, no ac or refrigeration) boat expenses were definitely my largest slice of expense after food/beer and it still only accounted for about $3-5k per year (amortized over a few years). Some larger maintenance items are only semi annual, other big ticket items (eg sails) can be procured used and last for another 5+ years.

Also I didn’t have an engine so I guess that costs money too to maintain but all of this is to say it’s like anything else… it’s as cheap or expensive as you make it

Yes, usually, but it depends on the country. On top of normal travel visa you also need to make sure your boat is documented from the country of origin and often are required to pay some form of tenporary import fee for the vessel as well. Different places have different rules, some (such as French Polynesia) let you extend your visa up to a year or more if you visit by boat but then you will need to sail elsewhere before you are able to come back.

I suppose you don’t have to declare that you are in a country you visit by boat, but the consequences of not doing so could be extreme if you are unlucky and caught by the local authorities

most objects like this I have passed in the water seem to be made of some sort of painted steel. I think this is a good combination of durability vs economical. I suspect your electronics will go long before anything corrodes away to nothing, since in my experience its always the electronics that fail first (even when properly sealed for marine use).

Note that the main issue with any barrier coating (assuming there are no collisions) is going to be due to sea life living on/underneath your object and slowly breaking down the material. A copper based metal (read bronze) could be interesting (but expensive) since it tends to stand up fairly well in marine environments and has biocidal properties that prevent fouling/growth. Also very clear to visually inspect since green means good and red means bad which I always thought was very easy to remember.

edit: re-reading your initial comment it looks like you are describing an autonomous vessel of some sort. I used to work at a company that produced such devices and they were made out of composite plastics (which have their own issues that cause them to break down eventually in the water as well).

I was not familiar with these grades, very interesting reading and finding out about them. The most common grades of stainless I have encountered in the marine industry is either 316 (best) or 304 (budget, requires regular cleaning to keep rust free). Both have issues with crevice corrosion and are also very expensive compared to zinc-plated equivalents (which I would never use on a boat since they will effectively disintegrate over a few months). Marine grade stainless often suffers from crevice corrosion and hard to detect failures which is sort of terrifying when you really think about it (things look OK until one day they break without clear visible warning).

For bridges or large-scale industrial applications where you dont care how the metal itself appears, I agree that coatings (especially galvanization) is the best bang for the buck. All of my insights are purely anecdotal though, as a hobbyist...

Yes this was in the Atlantic. I saw quite a few in Bermuda. I’m not sure if they migrate or just live there full time. Either way it was strange and I often wonder how it got there.

One of the most interesting things I ever saw sailing was a singular monarch butterfly in the middle of the gulf-stream about halfway back from bermuda. This was over 300 miles away from any land (including bermuda).

It stopped for a very brief rest (a second or two at most) and then continued flying in the opposite direction. Very unexpected and surreal but this really speaks to the sort of distances they can travel without stopping.

Does anyone know how common these kind of sightings are? Very sad to find out that these butterflies are now considered endangered.

I think this is a perspective you can only really take with a fair bit of privilege since you continue to state that all of these are choices individual drivers are making. For what its worth I share that privilege to a certain extent in my response here. The reality is these choices are not as transparent as you are illustrating them.

Say you lose your job and your pension and all the things that make your life comfortable tomorrow. You have a choice to wait it out, maybe take some time to learn an advanced skill and find a new line of work. However, you need money now to take care of a sick family member. So you start driving Uber...

Yes the mechanics of the rideshare platforms are such that you can start earning money now, but the cost is as you pointed out, to you in the future. So then the question is this like a regular loan, or is it more exploitative like payday loan. I think the lack of transparency and the circumstances one has to be in to even consider these choices are such that make it appear, at least to me, more like the latter than the former.

I think what the person responding to you wants, I know what I would want, is for Uber/Lyft to pay a bit more to take these costs into account. However this would raise the cost to riders, which have already been artificially subsidized for some time [0]. Uber won't do this because it would, to your first point, cause the company to become insolvent.

The assumption that poor people are not making rational choices is just plain wrong. I think the reality is closer to - people are trying to make the best choice they can, but often have a limited number of really bad choices to chose from. Sure some drivers drive an SUV instead of a Prius, but that may have been a function of the incentives presented by the app itself (i.e. qualifying for more exclusive rides, the appearance of making more money from this vehicle, its the only car you have now, etc. etc.).

A company that takes advantage of limited choices, and then offers you an option that appears to temporarily solve your problem now, at great personal expense to you later is in my view acting in bad faith because they are to some effect misrepresenting the service they are providing to their drivers. it is this point, in my view, that makes it look more like the payday loan than a "regular" loan.

[0] https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r...

I worked remote while sailing. my personal advice.... cruising is relatively cheap once you leave the dock. turn off your computer and go sail a while and plan on taking contracts during extended periods in port.

Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.

Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.

I want to play a game that's like kerbal space program (in terms of technical detail), but where you instead run a national weather agency like the ECMWF or NWS/NOAA. It would be a simulation-like game where you invest in research and operational elements (installing sensors, running super computers) all while trying to improve the 'skill' of your forecasts in time to save your population from different natural disasters.

Each level could have different regions, terrains, and specific disasters you need to optimize your forecasting system for (e.g. hurricanes, fires, blizzards, etc.)

Here is my issue with all of this. It very clearly states on tesla's website that "Navigate on Autopilot is designed to get you to your destination more efficiently by actively guiding you from on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating motorway interchanges, and assist in taking exits."[0]

Its unclear which autopilot features the driver thought he had, but if believed he had purchased the "Enhanced autopilot" and that it was enabled wouldnt that mean the Tesla's system failed here? The intersection in question is at the end of a freeway[1] which would constitute an exit.

I do agree with most that the driver is partly to blame, but probably not as a felony manslaughter. Tesla on the other hand should be held criminally responsible since at best they are misleading customers into believing their car has features it doesn't and at worst they are claiming a level of system reliability in their product that just does not exist (something I would classify as gross negligence on their part).

My father has one of these cars with the enhanced self-driving enabled, and I am always gripped in mild terror whenever I ride with him, regardless of whether it is the car or my father who is driving...

[0] https://www.tesla.com/en_AE/support/autopilot-and-full-self-... [1]https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8715442,-118.2917755,17.35z