Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Lest anyone think I’m making up the Greek letters.

And to be fair, sometimes you also see λ. That’s great because λ is equivalent to l, so it stands for the one of longitude and latitude that starts with l.

I don’t like what the Blue Angels think they are but I do kind of enjoy their chaotic vibes, and I feel roughly the same about my bargain-basement 500 mm mirror lens that focuses about as well as a weed grinder, so here’s a picture of the one with the other.

Very slowly converging toward the GNSS observatory dashboard I’ve imagined for years.

YouTube’s front page in an incognito window. I did look up SimCity videos from this IP recently, so that one’s on me. I think this is bad.

Gently closing the Desmos tab where I’ve been trying to build some kind of trigonometric intuitions about … ah … circles, maybe?

Lots of tinkering left to do on both the hardware and software sides, but I think my indoor GNSS setup is already picking up tidal signals on its test run.

Okay, fine, @jonty cajoled me into it. Lighter is more traffic; warmer is more positive anomaly for the day.

Now, certain nerds and haters might squint at this and say “It looks like you did this in oklab color space and then tried to half-ass some gamut mapping when you remembered that a lot of the highest z scores are in places with very low traffic counts!” and I would rebut that in scrupulous detail with one simple argument: Good night.

When math looks like this, with a lot of sub- and superscripts, it’s in tHe SpOnGeBoB mOcKiNg VoIcE.

Well, that’s enough of that.

Same general idea and source data, but this time it’s just z-score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score), with red positive and green negative. Hard to say that this makes it easier to spot the interesting anomalies, but it seemed like the common sense thing to try. You can see the the OceanGate incident, the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, probably some festivals, etc.

Inspired by @pnorman’s animation, here’s a year of daily OpenStreetMap tile traffic. One frame per UTC day, from the start of September 2022 through end of August 2023. It’s from the public log aggregates, so some low-traffic tiles are left out for (I assume) efficiency and privacy.

Could get half a dozen of these for about $200.

Made a little thing to take fast approximate multivariate medians, at no small cost to my sanity, and it turns out that when I apply it to pixels in California Landscapes time lapse videos (e.g., https://onewilshire.la/@CALandscapeBot/110699293237082262) it’s mostly just Compression Artifact Finder 2023 Pro Edition.

@merrysky Do you consider these discontinuities (on late Tuesday, here) a bug, or a more or less acceptable artifact of merging models?

OAK, my local airport, wants to expand. I encourage other East Bay people to submit comments: https://www.oaklandairport.com/terminaldevelopment/

Here’s my draft (open to phrasing advice until I send it): https://gist.github.com/celoyd/e0d6fd9cd43d5b18517e8a62cea0f19f

Avoiding thinking by mapping: an easy, sustainable mental health strategy.

The bit where the guy in charge repeats a factoid this thin as if it’s persuasive and illuminating, because he thinks it’s his vision that matters more than his money, is something that I think most reasonably experienced tech workers would recognize as an even bigger red flag than the parts where he’s like “And now I will use unrated equipment in a safety-of-life application against the strong objections of experts!”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan-submersible-was-an-accident-waiting-to-happen

@merrysky Yo, I’m seeing big discontinuities in my forecast (in this case, late on Sunday), presumably from models not matching up. Is this expected?

This was a clever idea! Signals should have approximately standard normal distributions, and you mix two Gaussians of the same σ by doing a×sqrt(t) + b×sqrt(1-t) to get output with the same σ at any t. This gives you a nice compromise between concatenation (information-preserving but wasteful) and addition (vice versa). Great!

It didn’t work at all!

Sign up for my course to learn techniques such as SLRBTH (Setting the Learning Rate a Bit Too High)!