ygra · HackerTrans

10 hours agodiscuss

I guess the moral of the story is: Don't use Unicode characters blindly for appearance.

This isn't even in the same place as the other fleurons, but in this block: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+10AC0, so you have to kind of look for it (especially in the SMP).

As a sidenote, the blog styling, mimicking a book's typesetting is quite nice. It's a pity that this breaks down quickly where screenshots are visible. And fun usage of Ruby for annotations in one footnote. Haven't seen that in the wild yet (likely rare in non-CJK scripts, anyway).

ygra

3 days agodiscuss

There's a companion app, StreetMeasure, that uses Google's AR measuring capability on compatible phones. Personally, I carry a laser distance measure.

ygra

4 days agodiscuss

Wikimedia Commons also requires more up-front work by the uploader to categorize the image properly, which can be daunting if you're new to how things are organized there. But yeah, for well-known objects, adding Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons links can be awesome and there are plenty of apps making use of it to show additional information.

ygra

4 days agodiscuss

> think for crossings StreetComplete now only asks about the actual crossing nodes, so no more duplicate quests.

It can be confusing for roads where both sides are separated or where there is a traffic island in the middle. There you have two crossing nodes (and sometimes even the footway leading over the road). But in general, I think it is very hard to actually cause trouble with StreetComplete. Furthermore, not every single quest has to be answered, although they typically only exist if there is an obvious correct answer the vast majority of the time (to not annoy users).

ygra

4 days agodiscuss

The overlays are intentionally a bit hidden, since they're more of a power-user feature and I appreciate that StreetComplete retains beginner-friendliness as a core tenet. But the overlays are indeed awesome for survey-type walks where you just want to make sure that all sidewalks are mapped correctly, or to see which shops are still missing.

ygra

4 days agodiscuss

Google can cheat a little, especially for new roads since they notice when someone is driving over it. When there was a redesign of an intersection near here, someone marked the road as completed in OSM maybe half an hour after it was opened (we have a few quite active mappers), and Google had it open about two hours later and I suspect no one changed the data directly.

ygra

5 days agodiscuss

As a frequent contributor myself I love StreetComplete and I wouldn't worry about it perhaps generating a few changesets more than strictly necessary (it tends to make one changeset per quest (with multiple amendments for individual answers) and also only during a certain time frame. Sure, that means that adding information to a staircase creates multiple changesets (incline, step_count, surface, handrail), but that doesn't really matter.

What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.

And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.

ygra

5 days agodiscuss

Some apps don't edit OSM directly, but rather add a note on the map for others to edit. Maybe that's what they meant.

E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.

But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.

ygra

5 days agodiscuss

Nota bene: those end up as notes on the map which another mapper has to input manually. There's a lot of spam and dubious entries so I often no longer bother entering them, especially in places I don't know or where I cannot verify the information.

ygra

6 days agodiscuss

Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.

Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.

ygra

2 months agodiscuss

Looks to be this building at that address and I can see the solar tiles on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ECbTUVwiUuDEPy6SA

The article from which I've linked the image is here (in German, though): https://nabendynamo.de/unser-neues-produktionsgebaeude-steht...

The roof is from Sunstyle, as detailed in the article: https://www.sunstyle.com/

Gemini seems to have read that article, taken a few details, embellished a few more, and not answered your question.

ygra

2 months agodiscuss

This is the roof of an industrial building near here which seems to go with that idea:

https://nabendynamo.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210426_1...

While not quite panel-sized, it's much larger tiles and there's not another roof underneath. Probably makes most sense with a new roof, though. The problem is that when a roof lasts 50--80 years, that's not a very big market just for new roofs.

ygra

2 months agodiscuss

Euro NCAP will also only give the highest safety rating to cars with physical buttons for common functions.

ygra

2 months agodiscuss

Trucks need a lot more infrastructure in a lot more places than ships, though. I guess that's not often factored in.

ygra

2 months agodiscuss

This concerns Widerrufsrecht, i.e. the right to cancel an order or contract shortly after signing it. For certain services you also waive this when you get to use it immediately (cellphone service, for example), and for custom-made items it also does not apply, as in this case.

This is independent of warranty (which is something the manufacturer may or may not offer), or Gewährleistung (which concerns the vendor and is typically the easiest way of dealing with damaged or defective goods).

ygra

3 months agodiscuss

We first need to get rid of the current one in a few billion years. That won't end well for Earth, though.

ygra

3 months agodiscuss

That only helps with multiplications by statically known word sizes (4x, 8x, etc.) and not arbitrary x·y. It can help with many smaller constant multipliers if the complete is clever, but it has to be known at compile time.

ygra

3 months agodiscuss

So, like edit.com and QBasic. What is old is new again.

ygra

5 months agodiscuss

> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?

Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.

ygra

6 months agodiscuss

Oh, that's something I also did in QBasic ages ago. I since lost the source code, but it basically worked by querying the screen from bottom to top, finding snow pixels (white) and moving them down, unless there was an obstacle. The initial snow on the ground (and the snowman) were using a different color that was almost white so it wouldn't detect as snow. It worked fairly well in 320×200 at the time.

I've tried the same approach in Turbo Pascal with BGI in the hopes of having a faster language and higher resolution available. It turned out to be quite a bit slower, likely because drawing and querying pixels was a bit more involved when using an adapter layer like BGI.

A few weeks ago I tried rewriting all that in TypeScript for fun and also trying to integrate it as an easter-egg with our graph drawing library (which renders with SVG) and first had to figure out how to efficiently support arbitrary obstacles that are initially SVG as well as a potentially changing viewport of the whole scene. I got sidetracked and didn't finish it, but proper collision handling was so easy back then (just look at the pixel color), but now with vector graphics and reading pixels being a very slow operation in many cases, it was surprisingly complicated.

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