The generated satellite tiles are interesting. The sea is very dry. And some mountains are looking very strange. At least for some places (e.g. Mount Doom) the AI should have been able to generate more "realistic" images.

Interesting project. I might "steal" that for teaching purposes.

Ha ha. Yeah. That was a first wild attempt. If I get time I will figure out how to fine tune the mock-satellite imagery to properly reflect ocean, lakes, trees, castles etc.

I do have an ancient Dr. Stika cutter plotter which works on an old WinXP with parallel port. I did try a few times to get it to work in a VM with an USB-Parallel adapter but haven't been successful so far.

"Fixed" it by replacing it with a new CriCut. But unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any open driver or software for CriCut - so I'm afraid I'll run into the same problem in a few years again :-/

As a Silhouette owner (for the plotter), same - I genuinely wonder whether the Chinese market have models... the type of Chinese-market product that seems to live on because it gets rebadged.

You cannot represent an arbitrary or fixed precision decimal number in a floating point format. Or to put it in another way:

"Most decimal fractions cannot be represented exactly as binary fractions." - from the Python tutorial

The word "decimal" does not simply mean "a number that consists of a whole and a fractional part".

I agree with OP that it's unnecessarily confusing. A "method" is a procedure. The floating point number is the result of that procedure, not the procedure itself.

"Decimal" implies a ten based system, even though it's perfectly fine to say "binary decimal".

Using your own replacement words, it would be clearer to write "A floating point number is a representation of a number with a fractional part".

Maybe it should've said "is a method of storing" instead of "for". It would make it clear it's not talking about a procedure, but a way or manner of doing something.

Maybe OP reacted because a float only looks like it is a way to store decimal numbers, when it's only an approximation of decimal numbers. If you really need decimal numbers you need something like mpmath¹.

As a shorthand to explain what a float is to someone, "a decimal number" is an OK start though.

But sometimes that approximation breaks down even for simple examples, i.e. 0.1 cannot be represented as a float. This can be quite unexpected if your mental model is that "floats are decimal numbers with a certain precision".

1: https://mpmath.org/

Some programming languages differentiate between floats and decimals. But yeah, for laypeople, a float is a decimal.

Very few numbers have decimals. They're not just numbers with whole and fractional parts, decimals are base 10 as well. .NET has them for monetary uses but I'm unaware of any other language(family) that has them built in.

And American prices are already insanely low. If I want to buy a RAM in Austria for $30k I get a used car with 150.000km. If I want a new one it's (much) over $100k.

Wow, is that because of tariffs or shipping costs from the US?

I do have set up different workspaces for different development tasks where only the necessary plugins are activated. If I do embedded development I open my platformio.workspace, if I'm doing Java I have a workspace and if I'm doing JS/Frontend stuff I have a workspace as well as for LaTeX. It really works well and isn't really difficult (although I'm not really sure that workspaces should be used for this)

Why not ban ALL ads?!?

Once in a rare while there's an ad which makes me want to buy something but I don't know if it's worth all the noise.

Something really sad is that sometimes you search for something you actually want to buy like, say, winter tire chains for your car... Then you end up buying them but for two weeks you keep getting ads: because the system has no way of knowing you actually now bought some at the petrol station down the street.

I run pi-hole now: works great and seems to at least take care of the worst offenders.

If you want to be informed of product suggestions you could sign up for a service like that.

I think we should ban all ads, but I would use such a service if it worked well.

Bold stance! I think it goes too far - there is definitely value for society in people being able to make services and goods they offer publicly known. No doubt we're currently too far in the "ads everywhere" direction, but within limits I think ads can have net benefit.

If that's the only reason for accepting ads, then they could be consigned to particular websites and stop polluting the world for the rest of us. Then, if you need something, you can go watch all the stupid ads.

Depends on the content. For some: yes, for sure.

For some others I should get money back because I couldn't find what was advertised before (for example recipe sites that contain mostly Blabla with interspersed ads and only a rudimentary recipe that isn't reproducible).

Nobody ever said the vaccination will stop transmission. It reduces the symptoms and hospitalisation rate (successfully).

How long ago was the second shot? There's a reason why Europe accelerated the start of the Booster vaccinations (third shots). Unfortunately there's still a lot of people that didn't receive their first shot willingly although it's freely available.

Looks great, just tried it.

One feature that is missing: "reload map" or something. It's only showing things near my "real location"; but I'd also like to explore different locations (e.g. a city I'd like to visit next weekend).

For example "Komoot" is doing that really nice for hiking routes and similar activites: explore at my location, explore near a given location, use the map, ...

Thanks! Adding the ability to browse around is something I’d like to do eventually. This is the MVP.

I'm still using my 12 (!) year old 17" MacBook Pro as daily work machine. Yes, it's not the fastest computer but for my usage it works. Granted, starting IntelliJ needs some time, but coding still works well (and compiling big codebases isn't done locally).

The one thing that really isn't usable anymore is Aperture/Lightroom. And missing docker because my CPU is too old (but docker it still works in VMs ...) is a pain.

I'm still using my 2014 16" MacBook Pro too - the SSD has made such a dramatic difference to the performance of machines that I think in general they age much better than previously.

I'm not a heavy user but that machine can easily handle xcode Objc/c++ programming quite handily.