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Oliver Blanthorn

@bovine3dom@masto.ai

mastodon 4.7.2

Tridactyl developer

All posts and own media are licensed under CC0

399 Followers

305 Following

50 Posts

Joined April 19, 2023

github:

https://github.com/bovine3dom/

old blog:

https://o.blanthorn.com

tridactyl:

https://tridactyl.xyz

location:

Nice, FR

Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 3mo ago

more progress on my uniform population projection maps. have fixed the holes in the previous ones this is showing population density as experienced by people - every square is approx 150k people, and the colour of that square tells you the density they live at (blue = dense, red = sparse) i particularly enjoy how you can see how unusual the US is - the only country that comes close in terms of sprawl is Russia now the next job is to understand why the mapping has gone up from 2MB to 150MB...

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 2mo ago

New map for you all: mean annual PM2.5 weighted by population https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=pollution/public_satpm_v6gl03_2024_h3_5.arrow&h3precision=false#x=13.7388&y=16.2597&z=1.2276 Stuff that jumped out at me: 1) by global standards the 'western world' is doing pretty well. australia for all the coal it mines has unjustly good air 2) london has some of the cleanest air in the country now. banning wood stoves and dirty cars seems to have done something? 3) the po valley in italy is shockingly bad, as ever 4) i had no idea east africa had such high air quality 1/2

compute.olie.science

H3-MON: THE MOST POWERFUL MON(itor) IN THE UNIVERSE

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 2mo ago

you've surely heard all the excellent¹ security advice about forcing people to use characters they can barely read and limiting password lengths to 19 characters and disallowing repeated characters and, of course, blocking paste but are you aware how much more secure your application will become if you force people to type in their passwords on an orthonormal azerty keyboard with no space bar? 1: actually, the most up to date advice says people should blink their passwords using morse

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jon@gruene.social "supposedly intelligent" is exactly how I would describe LinkedIn users

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jon@gruene.social

To minimise the knock-on effect on ticket prices, liability must reside with the seller of the tickets

omg this is amazing

Ouigo should continue to pay a ~0.7% commission on tickets
that 0.7% commission will surely be enough to cover any liabilities

But I do appreciate that they don't welcome the requirement to have the tickets sold in one transaction and instead highlight their support of AJC which has no such requirement. It's good to have an ally there

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@cycling_on_rails@mastodon.social official french websites are totally indistinguishable from phishing campaigns @stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social @partim@social.tchncs.de

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon although thinking about it every time there's problems at Gatwick/Heathrow suddenly Eurostar can be very agile indeed when it realises that it can sell every seat for €400

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@nyquildotorg@gts.nyquil.org a few years ago Mozilla accidentally (genuinely) was collecting telemetry about extensions from people who had opted out, either themselves or via their distros. When they realised and fixed their bug, 50% of my users disappeared overnight @po3mah@mastodon.social

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@tml@mementomori.social i have had multiple guards in different countries tell me i should have taken a screenshot at the start of the day when they are bored waiting for me trying to get the shitty app to work how does the delay compensation form work now btw? it used to ask for screenshots of the ticket from each day 😅 @interrailinfosvenska@mastodonsweden.se

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social @jon@gruene.social negative net margins for the first decade, i knew you were VC funded big tech

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 2mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.online/@Pepijn/116990877305503207 i saw one of these the other day claiming that ArcelorMittal near Martigues was on fire and i was like holy shit that's horrific, why haven't i seen that in the news? but no, it's just the biggest¹ single source of pollution in Europe continuing to be the biggest single source of pollution in Europe 1: you can probably argue about this but it is definitely in the big leagues

Quoting

@Pepijn@mastodon.online

There's a AI/LLM generated website and app called Current Wildfires (.com) doing the rounds on #Climatediary / #climatechange Mastodon. Just FYI if you use this: it's just a frontend for public ESA Copernicus Sentinel and NASA VIIRS data. And as so often with this "vibe coded" things it's not entirely what it says it is. Take the current fire in St. Petersburg for example. It's wild indeed, but Wildberries. Not Wildfire ;-)

Open quoted post

mastodon.online

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon crap paths are surely preferable than no paths, which seems to be DB's approach here?

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mario@eupolicy.social the french attitude to debit card PINs was particularly mind blowing to me the most secure PIN is one they choose for you and no you're not allowed to change it like what

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon if you're curious, all my routes >6,300km are here most of them are going via Vigo and i had accidentally started them all at 4am local time rather than 9am. I don't think I have your Nurmes weekend train https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=scratch/longest_routes.geojson#x=-7.0603&y=39.2384&z=6.8638 if you hover over routes a tooltip tells you the start end. i've added jitter so they don't overlap but it's not exactly the most user friendly thing (Paris works fine with my 'you are allowed a 5 minute walk between trains' rule)

compute.olie.science

H3-MON: THE MOST POWERFUL MON(itor) IN THE UNIVERSE

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon after all this i think i prefer geodesic 😅 this is too timetable dependent. "who can travel fastest between the furthest apart geodesic pair" has an attractive simplicity to it

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@HaTetsu @ptrc @jon i saw a lot of this stuff, yeah. but i am fairly happy with railways making mistakes and learning from them cf. SNCF Connect putting the departure and destination boxes the wrong way round and refusing blind to ever change them despite universal dislike of it

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jon@gruene.social @sintzoff@mast.eu.org @R1Rail@pouet.chapril.org lol it seems this is also a case of the SNCF using different minimum connection times to what they communicate to everyone else Scotty finds a faster, physically shorter route via Toulon with a sub 15 minute change Presumably, also, an old fashioned physical ticket machine would give you a cheaper prix kilométrique between the two stations than the modern SNCF's "two train tickets" approach

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jon@gruene.social curious that they don't mention anything about the 5 month booking horizon?

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon it's a classic GTFS issue where people decide to cut their data off at the border because if it crosses a border then surely it's someone else's problem and in this case the person on the other side of the border doesn't give a shit. so the service to/from Entroncamento starts/terminates at Elvas i pinged Transitous about it here https://masto.ai/@bovine3dom/116471059937740106

Oliver Blanthorn: "@transitous@en.osm.town are you aware btw that th…" - Mastodon

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe where's the fun in being sure? world records are there to be broken :)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe @jon also, it is bad that i can see borders on this. the changes in colour should be smooth germany, france, spain, portugal, sort your timetables out

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MartinJBreen they shouldn't even be collecting this data tickets linked to passport numbers is what totalitarian states like China do an initial, a surname and maybe year of birth should be plenty whatever data you hold will eventually leak. stuff is just too difficult. especially if it's not your core business. so don't collect data you won't want to leak

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@wnd@fosstodon.org it doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm when they hold up the rail data marketplace as a great success when it's one of the worst data sources i have come across 🤔 the "API first" approach always makes me a bit squeamish because it's only really useful for real-time data or if you're gluing some pipeline together what i want is some files to download and - i know this is asking a lot and could cost 0.01% of the budget - a few years of previous versions of those files

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@utopiah@mastodon.pirateparty.be it reminds me a bit of Wolfram Alpha where you had to pay extra to understand why something was the solution ~15 years ago but at least it wasn't sycophantic or dangerously addictive

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@wnd@fosstodon.org 🤷‍♂️ velocity of compromise -> distribution increases the threat. glibc etc pretty safe by that metric when i was doing the research i was only considering dependencies that could be seen by each language's package manager

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@wnd@fosstodon.org i did vaguely related research on this a while back! the kind you get a special hat for js dependency trees are insanely deep compared to other languages which makes them extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks other languages have sensible standard libraries, so their packages' dependency trees are much more shallow, which means they are much more robust to these attacks @Solemarc@mastodon.social @jbz@indieweb.social

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@cycling_on_rails@mastodon.social you mean "as with all French things it's very Paris-centric", surely :) @jon@gruene.social @stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@cycling_on_rails@mastodon.social the only one i know that is not European is Trip.com which is part of the Chinese-owned Skyscanner group one to watch but they're definitely challengers Big Tech is nowhere to be seen and I would be surprised if bumping commissions from 0.7% to 3% would tempt them... @jon@gruene.social @stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jon@gruene.social @stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social in the UK where ultra-flex tickets are the norm (including across days of departure!) they just have to trust you took the trains you said you took lying about the train you took is fraud and there are plenty of laws against doing that already i am thoroughly against adding rules that prevent people from doing things that are already crimes and make everyone else's life worse they could of course instead make such fraud impossible by running all the trains on time

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gholk fwiw i find all these "you only need one file" formats are always much slower than having a million or so files. i would always go for the latter if you can manage it :)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Stoori so there's no way out northwest of Nurmes? @jon

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe i included all routes yeah. the fastest routes to bulgaria all go via romania anyway afaict

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@transitous are you aware btw that the elvas <-> badajoz link is missing? i keep meaning to report it :) cf. https://api.transitous.org/?time=2026-04-27T04%3A00%3A00.000Z&fromPlace=eu-blablacar-bus_ALE&toPlace=es-RENFE-Larga-Distancia-y-AVE_37606&withFares=true&fastestDirectFactor=1.5&joinInterlinedLegs=false&transitModes=AIRPLANE%2CHIGHSPEED_RAIL%2CLONG_DISTANCE%2CNIGHT_RAIL%2CREGIONAL_FAST_RAIL%2CREGIONAL_RAIL%2CSUBURBAN%2CSUBWAY%2CTRAM%2CBUS%2CFERRY%2CODM%2CFUNICULAR%2CAERIAL_LIFT%2COTHER&maxMatchingDistance=250&fromName=Lisbon+-+Oriente%2C+Parque+das+Na%C3%A7%C3%B5es&toName=Badajoz%2C+Badajoz and https://api.transitous.org/?time=2026-04-27T04%3A00%3A00.000Z&fromPlace=eu-blablacar-bus_ALE&toPlace=pt-Comboios-de-Portugal%28CP%29_94_57497&withFares=true&fastestDirectFactor=1.5&joinInterlinedLegs=false&transitModes=AIRPLANE%2CHIGHSPEED_RAIL%2CLONG_DISTANCE%2CNIGHT_RAIL%2CREGIONAL_FAST_RAIL%2CREGIONAL_RAIL%2CSUBURBAN%2CSUBWAY%2CTRAM%2CBUS%2CFERRY%2CODM%2CFUNICULAR%2CAERIAL_LIFT%2COTHER&maxMatchingDistance=250&fromName=Lisbon+-+Oriente%2C+Parque+das+Na%C3%A7%C3%B5es&toName=Elvas%2C+Caia%2C+S%C3%A3o+Pedro+e+Alc%C3%A1%C3%A7ova

api.transitous.org

MOTIS

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ignaloidas i think longest distance along route by sum of geodesic distance between all intermediate stops for the fastest route between two points would be feasible with a decent router then maybe you could link that to RINF to get actual lengths but I'm not sure i would care (also, are the lengths actually lengths or are they just markers like in the UK?) then the question is do you fix a departure time/day? because the longest fastest route will change quite a lot @h0m54r @jon

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon it's definitely plausible I've given up for now because the missing Badajoz - Elvas link in Transitous means everything has to route through northern Portugal on my router I could hack in my own personal charter service between the two stations...

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon is there a reason you excluded Nurmes? I have 7,160km for Nurmes and 6,950km for Savonlinna. Pocinho is definitely a plausible place to start. I have 6,380km for it (with Vigo open). I also have Vila Real de Santo Antonio with 6,430km, beating Lagos because of the hook. I don't like how sensitive my router is to the time of day, though. Guarda comes quite high up because the timetable makes it faster to go the "wrong" way. It doesn't feel right 🤔 Maybe we need the best time of day?

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@wnd@fosstodon.org hmm but those are just the immediate direct dependencies, no? the risk comes from the deeply nested dependencies no-one has ever heard of my knowledge is about a decade out of date (and half remembered) but a typical full python dependency tree was around 100 packages with standard depths of ~3 (i depend on a package which depends on a package which depends on a package which depends on a package). javascript more like 10,000 and depths of like 10. @Solemarc@mastodon.social @jbz@indieweb.social

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fishter_uk @jon i don't think they would be keen to encourage running in stations etc that said, these guys do pretty well and are apparently sponsored by Flixbus https://www.lupine.co.uk/race/2026-slovenia.html https://www.lupine.co.uk/race/2026-london-to-istanbul-race.html

The Slovenian Arrow 2026 | Lupine Racing | Where Travel and Racing Meet

Lupine Racing, Where Travel and Racing Meet

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gholk for servers, png and vector protobuf are the main ones. "one file" formats like PMTiles, MBTiles and Versatiles are really just containers for those i haven't looked much into offline formats but i suspect they're still just collections of protobufs

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@BertrandCaron you _should_ be able to add them to the basket separately. make sure they're different trains though, you're not allowed to stay on the train with multiple tickets in France. DB Navigator makes this easy with "stopovers" @jon

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe i was thinking picking one at random per low resolution hex would probably be a good start 🤔

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ignaloidas i tried to get some station data from them yesterday and found that my platform queries were no longer working but maybe you'll have more luck https://github.com/bovine3dom/route_tchooseur/blob/master/query.sparql @h0m54r @jon

route_tchooseur/query.sparql at master · bovine3dom/route_tchooseur

loading gauge data exp. Contribute to bovine3dom/route_tchooseur development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe the maps you're looking at include Greece and Bulgaria :) Unless I'm mistaken Greece has zero international rail services. Bulgaria has lots but isn't that far away

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fataqe every service is every heavy rail service that was on transitous in February when i last ingested it every day means e.g. the optima express runs every day the same edgelist (albeit with all transport types) powers https://compute.olie.science/fahrtle/ and you can explore it there to get a feel for what that means

fahrtle - Global Public Transport Racing

compute.olie.science

fahrtle - Global Public Transport Racing

Compete against friends to see who can navigate the world

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jon i don't envy you, those railway routers are really finicky, taking you on all kinds of crazy detours to avoid changing platforms

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@wnd@fosstodon.org how much is tom spending on his attic? £100/year buys you about 5TB with redundancy. stick it in torrents if you're worried about uptime or bandwidth. if i wasn't a dastardly foreign resident i could tell you that two months of Darwin compressed to 13GB, so that 5TB would be good for 50 years or so i reckon you're underestimating how much they spent on making that report :)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom@masto.ai

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ignaloidas this is why csvs are better

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