geokon

the number of gotchas involved in bash scripting indicates to me it's very hard to make robust solutions using the terminal. Trying to understand how things like colors work in the terminal makes the whole thing look very duct-taped together

the video claims it "Steam Ship" and not "Screw steamer". But later claims TSS is "triple screw steamship". So I'd be hesitant to trust the rest of the video's content.

Was strangely difficult to find on Wikipedia what the "SS" actually means

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_steamer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_prefix

terminal emulation keeps playing a central role in "computing" not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a clean-slate replacement

I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it

very cool!

and yeah, I dunno what's with Java apps being clunkers haha. I've come across games in Java that didn't feel bloated, but for some reason desktop apps almost always have a certain bloated feeling to them. Though I feel the same with Electron/VSCode (the input delay to me is very noticeable)

thank you for the work you do :)

> the JVM isn't the only reason Clojure starts slowly, but it's still a major contributing factor

In case you didn't actually look at the links, but the evidence seems to point to this not being true (JVM startup is ~10% of the time)

> you're still hauling around a heavy runtime

> around 8 to 13 megs in size

I think if you jpackage a Clojure app with no GUIs or anything (that then bundles only the strictly necessary parts of the JVM) - it's around 50MBs. It's still embarrassingly slow to launch, involves ugly installers, doesn't provide crosscompilation and the memory usage makes Electron apps look lean.

That's to say, I think Jolt has a very valid place in all of this :) If I could plug in Clojure code and get out small fast executables for all major OSs (cosmopolitan?) that I can then share, that'd be useful for the rare situation I don't have any JVM dependencies

Oh interesting! So they manage to not watermark their maps. OSM seems to heavily imply you should watermark, but as I understand it, it's not strictly required

I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.

I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here

The subtext seems to be a hostility towards people making money from what you've shared.. which I find sort of baffling - but is very on-brand for the general anti-capitalist sentiments in the memesphere. People building on your work feels like something to be celebrated, but I guess it's a difference of opinion. I'm just generally skeptical that this would be "killing the project" at all.. it feels like it'd be the other way around? If OSM data were for instance used by Google and Apple Maps.. it feels like it'd just have made it more foundational and would get people even more excited to contribute. It'd be the world's central repository of map data everyone builds off of.. like the Debian of maps. Instead it's a parochial project for map nerds.

Can you imagine if GIMP has a similar policy to watermark all it's output with a "Made my GIMP!" in an effort to "attracts the flow of new contributors" and to make it hard for people to build a product with it?

A license notice and attribution are not the same though? Furthemore, it's a bit different when it's buried in the meta data somewhere.

The OSM situation seems more akin to GIMP insisting you have to watermark every image with "Made thanks to the GIMP Corporation!"

I understand that there is precedent and there is a logic to it... but to me it rubs me the wrong way. I think text and code are not very analogous situations. If I think in terms of software licenses..:

- I sort of respect the copyleft ethos. You put out a thing with the understand everything it touches is also going to be openly available. I think attribution isn't really part of the central idea there.

- I also respect the MIT/BSD style thing where you're just putting stuff out there in the public domain and it's part of the corpus of human knowledge. You leave your mark so to speak.

The middle ground of "You can use this but you gotta promote our service and stamp our name on it" just feels icky. I don't want to contribute to that. I feel I'm helping OSM the organization and.. I don't know them .. are they good stewards of the data I'm giving them? Are they going to be good stewards in 10 years? Hopefully that kinda makes sense? I guess the same can be said for Wikipedia, but Wikipedia for better or worse is very siloed. You have to attribute stuff you copy from Wiki but ..

A: Realistically nobody is actually copying wiki articles other than lazy high school students. It's just not very reusable outside of Wikipedia

B: This is more of a plagiarism issue. It encourages people to disclose it's not their own words (this is not an issue with maps.. nobody thinks you surveyed your city to draw the map)

If Wiki became CC0 tomorrow nothing would really change. If you needed to fork Wiki and put an attribution in the footer, it'd be very innocuous..

click on the link:

> Licences that are not compatible

> Licences that require downstream attribution

> For practical reasons we require that users of OpenStreetMap data attribute the project as a whole and we in turn provide attribution to third parties via the "Contributor" pages. Licences and terms of use that require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works are incompatible.

"require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works" is exactly what OSM requires. It's hypocrisy of a sorts

Usually government data is CC0 or public domain while OSM is not (maybe Germany is different?), so I thought they'd be allergic to OSM's licensing. OSM actually has a lot of problems ingesting data b/c a lot of map data can't be relicensed under their license.

https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility

Ironically.. you can't contribute map data that requires attribution to OSM... even though they require attribution..

It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral. Maybe trying to emulate Wikipedia. But text and map data are just fundamentally very different. It's really unfortunate. I hope an alternative emerged eventually

Is there evidence that LLMs generate better code in more popular languages? I get the sense the "experience" translates between languages and it can reason in any language just fine. I write Clojure code using a rather esoteric framework (Pathom3). There is probably very little similar code out there (it's definitely a tiny fraction of the training dataset) but it seems to do just fine

Not saying you're wrong, just curious if there are numbers backing this up.

I've never hit anything with Qwen. Very rarely it will silently switches from 3.8 to 3.7 (which makes it notably dumber) but you just click the drop down at the top to switch back. It's rare though. I have >week convos with no switching

The issue is that there is ultimately a limited market for having access to space. SpaceX's business model is premised that if you make access cheap enough that there will be a market for multiple launches a day. But to me demand seems very finite? You can make it 10x cheaper or 50x and it sort of doesn't matter.

There just isn't much to do in space. You have:

- Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations

- Telescopes looking up. This is limited by science budgets that aren't going to change much.

- Telescopes looking down. Those people have infinite budgets and already have all the satellites they'd want. If you're not in NATO then can't depend on SpaceX anyway - so they're not capturing that market.

- Tourism. Vomiting for several hours in zero-G will be a thrill for some for a bit, but I don't see this being a huge industry. Maybe on par with basejumping or something.

- Mining.. seems impractical scifi.. premised on wanting to build huge structures in space - but again, for what goal ultimately?

It's sort of like if you made access to Antarctica 100x cheaper. It'd be great, but it's hard to imagine it's going to suddenly open up a ton of demand.

But I'd love to hear counter arguments :)

I don't think you need to have it match the depletion rate. Even at say 10kW you'd doubling the effective range. The point is people want to be able to use their car for that twice a year road trip, or drive to the inlaws for Thanksgiving. If you can attach something that extends the range for these occasion then that's probably enough.

Furthermore, the generator can run 24/7, but realistically you will at most drive ~6 hours a day. So for a leisurely road-trip this may be enough to avoid needing stops at charging stations

Theoretically couldn't you take an electric car and put an off-the-shelf generator in your frunk and wire it up to charge the battery as you drive?

Oh huh, I guess it's pretty recent news. I wonder if it'll lead to new features. It's nice to see people are working on Native builds for instance, and that Graal integration is now an official priority of sorts.

Oh hmm, I'm honestly not super sure then. I know Gluon is the one that's seemingly has a business providing JavaFX support, while Oracle.. as far as I know doesn't offer a license or anything services in that direction? But I could be wrong. Gluon is mentioned in the article.. they have a very Qt-style confusing licensing situation where it's probably all free.. but you're never quite sure :)

The whole space is a lot more icky than one would like it to be.. Which is unfortunate b/c while it doesn't have a billion features, it's a nice composable reactive framework to use (at least from cljfx/clojure)

Thanks for writing this up! It still assumes a lot of prior knowledge, but it's a good starting point to approaching these problems. How JavaFX works on different platforms really looks like dark magic from the outside. I wrote an app in Clojure using cljfx. I can jpackage it and run it Linux/Windows/macOS .. it's quite easy to get working. But once you step outside of the standard platforms it gets complicated really fast. Trying to get it to Android or a native build and suddenly you have to be an expert in several build systems and JVM internals.

JavaFX is supported by Gluon and not Oracle

is there a good metric of model degredation over time?

Im a bit lazy and only use the free models different companies host and the biggest difference i see is that some models (Gemini, OpenAI) get progressively stupid in long chats. You end up having to start a new session every oncr in a while. Or they get really hung up on a theme and cant shift to a new topic.

By contrast, Ive been impressed with Qwen. I have some chats on research and code architecture that have stretched for weeks without any noteable change in quality (though occassionally it seems to "rush" to an answer)

Im just looking at all the listed benchmarks and im unsue which i should be looking at

oh interesting - I didn't realize PTCs can be used that way safely. I thought it hits a target temperature and then will continue heating at that temperature (which in your scenario would be unsafe). Maybe for my usecase it'll be hard to find a suitable actuator b/c I have a 5V system running of battery (looks like 12V ones do exist though)

Isn't HarmonyOS a fork of Android? I've never seen anything about the apps being half broken - do you have more info?

I hadn't seen the blog post at first and was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to upload data for a paper (uploads hang and will just reset periodically)

I found a nice workaround though. You can upload data to Github - though sometimes you need to split this across several commits b/c you can't push several GBs of data at once. You then link your Github account to Zenodo and make a release. The data is then copied over as a .zip (the Release "Asset"). Takes under a minute.

The Zenodo-Github connection is still working just fine.

Maybe this will be useful for someone!

thank you for the pointer!

I've struggled to protect eletronics. Waterproof enclosures all fail over time. Though I have some ideas for immersion in mineral oil. But finding actuators that could work has been a bit of a struggle. These look cool, though maybe not something one could run off 5V :) Ill keep looking around

how does it work for a door lock?it seem it works pretty slowly.

Mayne you know, are the internal components already designed with corrosion in mind?

Seems this would make it possible to make a relatively cheap waterproof actuator if you made it out of something corrosion resistant?

I've been looking for actuators to use in damp/wet environments and sealed actuators are rather expensive and supposedly don't last too long

furthermore, couldnt you do parallax from the multiple cameras as well as flicker the flash?

seems pretty easy to make it sufficiently difficult to trick the system