Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

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.

@richlv @kmetz I think it’s lower in most areas, but it would be interesting to find areas in which they are higher – areas with a lot of leisure services, presumably.

@kb As I look more closely now, I think you can distinctly see McMurdo due south of NZ.

@pnorman This seemed to work acceptably: ffmpeg -r 15 -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i "png10/*.png" -vcodec libx264 -tune grain -crf 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart osm.mp4

And the value scaling is basically log8, entirely ad-hoc.

@kb Certainly a few islands, but I think maybe also an Antarctic base or two? I can check in my morning.

@kmetz Yep!

@alan I feel like this could be the seed for a legitimate geography paper in like 1977.

Woops, the tag didn’t work in the original post. Credit to @pnorman for the idea.

The answers to your questions are:

1. Yacht and rally car races.
2. Yes, well noticed! We call it “Null Island”.
3. No, but it would be nice if it were practical.
4. People scraping tiles.
5. Yes, because the distribution of traffic follows Zipf’s law.
6. If I have time.

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.

The amount of high-quality open data in these releases is amazing, and it’s been consistently timely.

If I were doing disaster response work at the moment, I would be building heavily on this data.

Hard to think of another company giving out this much top-tier product, under CC-BY-NC and with no sign-up, just to help with disasters.

https://fosstodon.org/@marcpfister/111053289241223580

I wish to break my several-year streak of not complaining about software redesigns to say: The new Slack is in fact bad.

[clears throat] [looks around] The reinvention of potato.

[slightly louder:] The reinvention of potato?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-021-00542-5

(Via @alexismadrigal’s newsletter.)

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

Where can I order an enamel pin that says “The LLM discourse is really tangled up and unproductive in ways that are too annoying and complex to even outline on this pin – there are a lot of different aspects to the situation that it would be unfair to leave out of even a short summary”?