I like how the author mentioned typing speed tests as a “warm up” to the day. I frequently find myself going to do a typing speed test when I’m at my desk but unable to work, and have often wondered why I do that and if anyone else does that.
Readit Newstrainyperson commented on A receipt printer cured my procrastination laurieherault.com/article... · Posted by u/laurieherault
The Barbican is one of my favorite places on Earth and this post in a simple way does such a good job of capturing the beauty and wonder I associate with it. Others have mentioned the greenhouse and the concert hall; I’ll the exhibition space which consistently hosts great exhibits including the only good AI-themed museum exhibit I’ve ever seen (and it was back in 2019).
For those interested / invested, they recently launched a Barbican renewal project: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/barbican-un...
trainyperson commented on Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/Tomte
Doing the puzzle with “pencil and paper” logic is actually quite approachable and fun! I recommend it. Hint: you don’t need to run constraint satisfaction! There are some insightful shortcuts to be made
> socially regressive robber barons
At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.
> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]
It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
The “Robber Barons” name is used now for the sketch comedy group on campus: https://youtube.com/@stanfordrobberbarons
I played, more than once, a few of the sound snippets. I think the Shazam "findings" are highly inaccurate. Fun project nonetheless!
walz, could you write more about the setup, maybe to propitiate others to replicate it in other cities?
Same, although I know Shazam does most of its work on very high frequencies so it’s possible we’re not able to hear the part that got matched.
The “Not Like Us” snippet (09/29 2:43pm) is easily recognizable though. And “Rockabye” can be heard at 3:05pm.
trainyperson commented on Beyond the route: Introducing granular MTA bus speed data new.mta.info/article/beyo... · Posted by u/Nelkins
Shoutout to Philippe Vibien for creating “NYC Subway Stringlines”, one of my favorite (and certainly most used) data visualizations ever. Made possible by the MTA’s GTFS RT feed.
https://pvibien.com/stringline.htm
Note: If you’re checking this out around 6 PM EST, look at the E train to get an idea of what a bad night on the subway looks like.
Each line on the graph represents a train with the Y axis as stations and the X axis representing time. You can follow the trip of the train and get an idea for how well the line is running based on the straightness of the line. If you see areas where the line is flat in the Y axis, you know that a train is being held at a station.
Here’s an example where “stringlines” provide information that a countdown clock couldn’t convey: https://i.imgur.com/u5VGqH4.jpeg
Because the “line” is not progressing past 5th Ave/53rd st, we know that that is where the issue is occurring. A countdown timer would simply either say static or start adding time, but you wouldn’t know how far the next train is from you.
Here’s another example: https://i.imgur.com/mrvrbUt.jpeg
What I can glean from this is that the E train is running with much lower frequency than it was an hour ago, so I should expect longer wait times.
It’s truly a marvelous invention.
I also love this visualization and remember being blown away when I first saw it!
Two notes: 1. These “stringlines” are also known as Time-Space Diagrams in the transit industry, and they’ve been around for a while. e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-space-diagrams-of-t...
In fact Vibien cites as inspiration the official NYCT stringline paper: https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/5936/
2. I’ve noticed that at least on the A, the viz is inaccurate? It’s missing a lot of trains.
trainyperson commented on The semantic web is now widely adopted csvbase.com/blog/13... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Are there any tools that employ LLMs to fill out the Semantic Web data? I can see that being a high-impact use case: people don’t generally like manually filling out all the fields in a schema (it is indeed “a bother”), but an LLM could fill it out for you – and then you could tweak for correctness / editorializing. Voila, bother reduced!
This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited to this task:
1. human stays in the loop by (ideally) checking the JSON-LD before publishing; so fewer hallucination errors
2. LLM compute is limited to one time per published content and it’s done by the publisher. The bots can continue to be low-GPU crawlers just as they are now, since they can traverse the neat and tidy JSON-LD.
——————
The author makes a good case for The Semantic Web and I’ll be keeping it in mind for the next time I publish something, and in general this will add some nice color to how I think about the web.
As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial support, the news is terrible: Patreon informed me that all creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use. The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time off, and only charge people when I release something, thus incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another platform, or come up with some other solution.
Does Patreon let you see what percentage of your subscribers signed up through the iOS app?
Most of my good thinking is done like this. Walking around the house talking out loud to myself about a topic without knowing where it's going. Over the years I've trained myself to try and speak more and more in this mode and I find it has good outcomes. It's not how it works but to myself I call it "putting my brain in analog mode". I also try to write like this for all my first passes. I also found it works for drawing, I will start drawing a random line and see where the hand takes me. I believe there's a term for art done in this way but I can't recall it now. I think Michael Scott was on to something.
The term (I think) is “automatism”, popularized by Surrealists.
trainyperson commented on A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g roitman.io/blog/91... · Posted by u/signa11
This article reasons that it is not a coincidence because of the “seconds pendulum” definition of the meter, which would necessitate the values being equal because of the pendulum time period equation.
That all makes sense to me, and I agree.
But here’s what’s odd to me:
We ended up not choosing the seconds pendulum approach (for reasons mentioned in the article). Instead they chose to use “1 ten-millionth of the Earth’s quadrant”. Now, how is it that that value is so close to the length of the seconds pendulum? Were they intentionally trying to get it close to seconds pendulum length, and it just happened to be a nice round power of ten? Is that a coincidence?