Show more

@allafarce Treatment is simple. Great civic tech thinker Dave Guarino is on fediverse tonight. Go and discuss with him.

@brennen My only advice (and I could be wrong; I’m really not a JS person) is to lean heavily on MDN.

As a non-JS person who wrote a moderate amount of JS a long time ago and a little JS in the last few days, it feels like it’s been kintsugi-ed. It can never be so completely fixed that you won’t see how it was broken, but it can certainly become an open meditation on the nature of repair.

I think this is important work done well, but I will complain about the headline: it’s really hard to define “visible from space” in a way that makes sense and matches what any two people think it means. Stop using it this way. npr.org/2023/10/06/1203372829/

I am very internet-oriented and generally think it’s good when things are available digitally, but the idea that someone has to use expensive hardware, proprietary software, etc., to receive the official time signal is sad.

Show thread

Trying to get all the household’s clocks and watches synced to the CBC/NRC time signal was an extremely entertaining project in like 1996.

Over-the-air civil broadcasts that require only amateur radio knowledge to decode from scratch seem worth keeping alive. I hope that tide comes back in one day.

cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/cbc-

@kgjenkins This approach has much to recommend it. You could also save space by adding them.

At its core, doing anything with geodetics is basically (1) very straightforward math that you can derive in your head from the Wikipedia illustration of trigonometric functions, plus (2) several hours of figuring out what φ means in this case and which definition of “up” the author is assuming.

Show thread

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.

Show thread

Notation for latitude and longitude is easy and people should stop being annoyed by it.

Simply use order (either the lat, lon convention or the lon, lat convention).

If you need cross-linguistic symbols for an equation, use the Greek letters (either the θ = latitude, φ = longitude convention or the θ = longitude, φ = latitude convention).

Personally, I find it clearest to just abbreviate them, so l = longitude and l = latitude.

@isagalaev @nikitonsky All I’m saying is that the length of a string as a reader would understand it (not only as a hard drive would understand it) is a useful concept that should be exposed by at least some string libraries. I strongly agree with you that it’s not worth optimizing for at the cost of, well, almost any other operation.

@isagalaev @nikitonsky Think of emoji reactions or status fields. They could be implemented in such a way that it is reasonable to check that the user only submits one emoji at a time, or at least that only one is displayed at a time. Or consider CSS use cases like developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do

Show more
Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.