Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse
- charlie@planet.parts
- work
- geographical pixels
- where
- Xučyun/Oakland, Ohlone land, western Laurentian accretions
- who
- him
You know him on the internet. Eucalypt-adjacent; very occasional writer. Consulting and passively looking for work in geospatial, image processing, and related fields.
Joined Apr 2022
Charlie Loyd
boosted
When I scheduled this live session yesterday to discuss Western North American wildfire situation, neither catastrophic fire in Canadian Rockies town of #Jasper nor dangerous #ParkFire in California had yet occurred. I will discuss both today @ 3pm PT. https://www.youtube.com/live/B5wskkRpadg
Charlie Loyd
boosted
I am hilariously bad at going on vacation, but I was on the west coast and so I went to Cabo Pulmo, in Baja California Sur, to go scuba diving in the marine reserve. It’s kind of an incredible place — in 1995, the village (pop. 100 then, 150 now) worked together to get it declared a protected area. It’s now a UNESCO site and an absolutely thriving ecosystem, with careful ongoing oversight.
https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/solutions-success-stories/cabo-pulmo-protected-area
A great way to save on those summer energy bills is to simply have your fridge break.
Charlie Loyd
boosted
#PPOD: NASA's Curiosity rover ran over a rock and found crystals inside! They're pure sulfur. Elemental sulfur is something we’ve never seen before on Mars. We don't know much about these yellow crystals yet, but the team is already at work to figure it out! Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An old friend is visiting, and we were walking through Berkeley. He pointed at an old restaurant and said “Hey! St Jude¹ took me to lunch at that Burmese place once! She was really nice.” and I felt very connected to a past that is not remembered well enough.
Charlie Loyd
boosted
Draft Emoji 16.0 Design: Face with Bags Under Eyes #WorldEmojiDay https://emojipedia.org/face-with-bags-under-eyes
Charlie Loyd
boosted
So, I can not stress this enough:
Shut the fuck up. I mean this with kindness. Shut the fuck up. It is not a good time to run your mouth on public coms. This should be obvious if you think about what just happened for 30 seconds, but again, with all due care and respect:
Shut the fuck up.
One of the things that always delights me about people is how adaptable we are and how willing we can be to take weird things seriously just to try them.
The older I get the more I see this as the obverse of a terrifying susceptibility to a spectrum of groupthinky social problems that starts merely cringey but ends out in death cult territory.
Charlie Loyd
boosted
Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences.
https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment
Charlie Loyd
boosted
If you've ever wondered how math fonts are made, the Noto project commissioned this amazing article from @khaled to explain all: https://github.com/notofonts/math/blob/main/documentation/building-math-fonts/index.md
Charlie Loyd
boosted
Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a trusted observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!
Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a trusted observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!
Charlie Loyd
boosted
https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2024.3378121 the preprint has been out for a couple months but my first peer reviewed journal article is out today in its finished polished form and I am still pretty happy with it
Me, politely but firmly taking the jar of kimchi out of the shooping cart and putting it back on the shelf: Darling, remember we talked about how this isn’t authentically Korean because it contains an ingredient introduced in the sixteenth century? And how that means it’s not tasty?
When people get hung up on cultural authenticity, I’m reminded of the Korean botanists who publish papers stridently arguing the idea that Korean chilis are actually native to Korea and have nothing at all to do with the Columbian exchange. But they’re the only ones who care.
Charlie Loyd
boosted
Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.
What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?
This is obviously a problem that needs solving.
My solution? SHAsum hashing. We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:
Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y
Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y
SImple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.
I’m not a religious man, but I do believe there’s insight and value in scripture.
Some days I think a lot of people on social media are deliberately doing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology) in reverse because they think that’s what empathy means.
It’s like 23 layers of indirection before you find an actual string that will actually appear on the actual user’s actual screen, and I’m sure this is the right choice, and is based on a lot of hard-won lessons about internationalization and ease of contribution and stuff, but … the string I’m looking for doesn’t even show up when I search?
Seeing a typo in an open-source project, going to submit a patch, being unable to find where the typo actually lives in the codebase because contemporary frontend code makes me feel like I’m looking at Solaris from Stanisław Lem’s book “Solaris” (1961).
- charlie@planet.parts
- work
- geographical pixels
- where
- Xučyun/Oakland, Ohlone land, western Laurentian accretions
- who
- him
You know him on the internet. Eucalypt-adjacent; very occasional writer. Consulting and passively looking for work in geospatial, image processing, and related fields.
Joined Apr 2022
