Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Imagining if norovirus had been described in Normal IL instead of Norwalk OH and you could say “I can’t come in to work because I have normalvirus.”

@kissane Yeah. I think we should usually try to think of “X is a kind of Y” arguments as most useful when they tell us something we didn’t know about both X and Y.

Staying up another half an hour because someone (me) got weird with the epoch length.

@boxly If you find one, tell me? I’m going to open-source my code soon, I hope. Unfortunately pansharpening is really under-theorized. People mostly do it without talking about it in detail. There are research papers on arxiv, some with associated code, but to be blunt most of them are not very good. (Lots of undergrad-written Matlab.)

How different can two reasonable pansharpening algorithms be? Pretty different in pathological cases like planes in flight. Left is from Maxar, right is from Potato (the thing I’ve been tinkering with). Same underlying data, from the Maxar Open Data Program, CC BY-NC.

@aredridel Fair.

@aredridel Yeah, I have no problem at all being yelled at by a compiler. The list of things that my computer does that annoy me runs for thousands of items before “got an error flagged because I wrote an error” appears.

@secretasianman People think “portable assembly” is some kind of exaggerated zinger but it’s just a charitable description.

Comparing it to C, a language where the usual error handling mechanism is “rename some integers to things in all caps that start with the letter E and insert them in-band”, a system that a dead iguana could see the problems with, seems almost unfair.

Rust feels like it’s designed by people who actually care about what they’re doing and have paid full attention, which is the highest praise I can imagine giving software tooling.

@anji Every time someone refers to C as being well written, it looks to me like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_Man, except instead of injuries it’s code smells. But naturally this is a matter of taste.

@ian I may never know.

If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said I simply do not have fun writing in low-level languages, but I would have secretly thought: The actual problem is C, a bad language that is unpleasant to deal with. Now I feel the same way but am more confident in it.

Wrote a small amount of Rust over the holidays and, oddly, enjoyed it?

An analogy for what people are doing when they treat consumer imaging hardware like it’s perfect when it shows “orbs” or whatever: If you turn the volume way up on recordings made with even very high-quality audio hardware, you hear a hiss, which proves invisible hissing aliens are everywhere.