@harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

On chatgpt.com some prompts will cause it to show you a little embedded map. It's OpenStreetMap data via mapbox. I notice they do not give any on-screen credit to OpenStreetMap or even Mapbox (Not even hidden behind an "i" icon) It's almost as if they don't respect copyright.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 2mo ago

Codeberg is set to discourage vibe-coded projects: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html That @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de blog post gives a good run-down of the familiar ways AI coding is messing up open source, but also the "The development team of none" section is describing a problem more specific to code hosting: "It seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg"

blog.codeberg.org

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News

In Brief: Two motions regarding

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

The BBC news keeps having these little segments about terrible e-bikes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05y9pe5p1jo I do wish they would include just *briefest* little mention of the annual ~400 pedestrians killed and ~5800 seriously injured... BY CARS Not denying there's a problem with bad scootering people. I'm sure enforcement/insurance can be improved, but isn't it actually quite weird the way we just automatically accept massive four-wheeled boxes zooming around killing people? It's not worth mentioning?

bbc.co.uk

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

The stupid things OpenStreetMap ops team have to deal with:
"Some lovely company thought the best way to check if this app is online is to do a very expensive query against OpenStreetMap... every 3 seconds... with hundreds of instances of this app" https://youtu.be/qhie14YKa-w?si=9_jsShC_IeJQFKWP&t=565
Great SOTMEU talk by @Firefishy@en.osm.town

#sotmeu #sotmeu25 #openstreetmap @osm_tech@en.osm.town

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@elena@aseachange.com I've been looking for a subculture of parents who get our kids to use open source and open licensed content and/or developing it for them. Not enough of that happening. I need more!

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

UK passport photos. The "no shadows on your face" rule gets enforced very strictly by the auto-photo-problem-detector. You can't have lighting coming in from the side (even if very diffuse). Light *must* be square on with the face, like using a flash. Except more diffuse than a flash because you're also not allowed any shadow on the wall behind you! An evening low-light photo looked OK to me, but it was detected as blurry. At this point I lost patience and put it through GIMP sharpen. Accepted!

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@chthonicionic@mastodon.online @Edent@mastodon.social @theolodian@mastodon.social @edavies@functional.cafe Yeah scooting the kids through the luggage gate is my life right now. Quite easy really, if you know how. I'm afraid things get *more* complicated as the family get older. For over 5s technically train journeys even quite centrally, require tickets for them (That's above ground trains, but not the "overground"!) and on uber ferries adults swipe on conveniently, but 5 year olds need the ticket machine. I'm about to start learning rules for 11 year olds!

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 6mo ago

RE: @gravitystorm@m.gravitystorm.co.uk

Oof! Just look at that vectory fluidness. It's gorgeous!
#geo #maps #openstreetmap #transport

m.gravitystorm.co.uk

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@baldur@toot.cafe An old friend has been tweeting about #VibeJam https://vibej.am/ I like playing the dinky little games that come out these coding contests, but it's not quite the same when I know the glossy bits of design are all generated from Large Leaching Models. It's also noticeable that they're pretty rough around the edges. We might hope that the AI coding revolution would allow these vibe coders to create bug-free smooth-intro slick gameplay experiences. But no. Not really.

vibej.am

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jonty@chaos.social Ah but look. It has taken the rendered image, put it through the genAI slop machine, and then... it layers on top the POI marker (Because what would we do without those paid for ads for "London Eye River Cruise"?)

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@idropyou @tayfonay Same. Where I work, maybe I'm the only one who harbours any scepticism about AI, but more likely there are others like me who feel that expressing AI scepticism may not be a good career move.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ellenmorrisprewitt@writing.exchange @lydiaschoch@mastodon.social That sounds super annoying! Interesting. So facebook sort of pretends to offer a way of creating a page on the public web, but in reality it's a sneakily enshittified experience.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tshirtman @peterfr @minego I worry that we may start talking less politely to our human colleagues, if we get in the habit of being short with our AIs. However I thought the tip in this post was funny, and tried it a few times: "Think of swearing as a probabilistic form of sudo" https://mathstodon.xyz/@njr/115547379010814888

mathstodon.xyz

Nick Radcliffe: "A Month of CHOP (Chat-Oriented Programming): my w…" - Mathstodon

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@momo@social.linux.pizza Sounds a bit like conversations I have with my 10 year old, except I thought the punchline was going to be... "Needless to say, my kid wasn't listening any more had gone back to watching YouTube" 😄

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

I'm voting #green. I wish my vote could be a clear signal to Labour, that they need to act on wealth inequality and engage with the wealth tax idea.
In reality, tomorrow morning Farage will be celebrating and Labour will carry on pondering ways to be more right wing/racist as they fuddle along towards general election defeat.
I'm already depressed by the results before I even see them

en.osm.town

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

I was recently doing phonics reading practice with my daughter. Reading "alien words". Words which don't exist (apparently a way of more purely practising reading sounds) But I was looking at the words thinking, they only don't exist because nobody launched a company by that name yet!

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

RE: @jsonsingh@mastodon.social

I've signed up for "London Geo Meetup" tomorrow night.

Json Singh has been floating his ideas for a new London map/geo event when we chatted to him at @OSMLondon@en.osm.town and @geomob@mapstodon.space . And here it is! Looks like he's lined up an interesting pair of speakers.

mastodon.social

json singh: "Excited to announce the first London Geo Meetup! …" - Mastodon

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@xyla@shitpost.trade In my head "slop" means crappy AI output which is published or shared, so a "slopper" should be somebody who does that a lot. Not somebody who just makes decisions/finds out info. Also I prefer "sloperator" 😄

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@eco-g@stroud.social Meanwhile we've got the likes of Richard Tice who set up offshore trusts & dormant companies to avoid paying £600K in corporation tax, and who sneers at the suggestion he did anything wrong.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

Replying to

From Owen: "I'm keen to emphasise that I also asked for (and documented) permission for re-use under an open licence in each case. Disclosure under FOI does not by itself make data open, legally. I also haven't actually been trying to build a combined dataset myself though I suppose it's possible others may be."

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@amapanda @disorderlyf @mochabeau Yeah definitely. I sometimes worry about this with shabby shops in north London looking ambiguous as to whether or not they're still operating, but it's definitely better to have a row of shops added, and later we can figure out if one of them is a "disused:shop".

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@cmccullough First they screwed up the open web. Then they screwed up our coding jobs. Then they screwed up dog videos <-- THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR THIS TIME

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to on en.osm.town

@openstreetmap@en.osm.town Love the videos! Happy Birthday! #wikipedia! #wikipedia25 It's strange that wikimedia foundation don't have an account here on mastodon. (or not an active one. Maybe this is them: @wikimediafoundation@mastodon.social )

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@robinlovelace @AntoninDanalet I once attended an in-person meeting of the TransXchange committee. They were debating intricacies of their 300 page specification doc, but... at the time the only people using the standard were two or three big transport software providers. I said to them they should put out some FOSS software to serve as a "reference implementation", and as a tool that's useful enough to show off the data.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@RaffKarva@sunny.garden Interesting. I'll forward this to the guy at work who is in charge of data protection (unrelated company, but...) this guy also does a lot of running 😄

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

My son can get into our preferred secondary school if he can do well (and outrank other kids!) on an "11 plus Verbal Reasoning" test.
It's an intense business. I'm now considering whether to spend lots of money on a tutor (£70 per session). It seems like he needs it, but maybe it's going to make it more intense 😬 #parenting

en.osm.town

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

RE: @ReNatureLdn@ecoevo.social

Oh no. People dumping big pet snakes in London's parks, is a thing that happens quite often according to this 😮

ecoevo.social

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@realcainmosni @NudelnAlDente Yes. I was reading the replies looking for somebody acknowledging this. Target demographic. Also they're forcing people to find them on social media, to encourage promotion of the place on social media. There's a certain logic to that. Depending on just how trendy & busy the cocktail bar is, they may even *prefer* you to leave if you're the kind of person who doesn't have instagram, or (heaven forbid) you let your phone battery run out. Cool people don't do that 😄

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@normplum@fosstodon.org In ruby it's called "inflectors", and I see somebody's made an "inflectors" package in go: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/tangzero/inflector

pkg.go.dev

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@aral@mastodon.ar.al It bugs me sometimes when people react to dumb politicians with "This is a deliberate strategy to... " *insert theory here* (something about making us question the nature of truth is a common one) There's no mastermind strategy going on here. He is just as idiotic as he sounds.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

Just spent 20 minutes searching in different areas of the company SharePoint for a document which I'm was sure had a particular word in the filename.
Gave up and eventually found a link to it by searching in teams chat and... it's right f&%ing there! In the first place I was searching. With the word in the name. In a folder with the same name.
Why can people not provide basic search matching by filename?? Microsoft sharepoint. Also MacOS I'm looking at you.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@keithamus@indieweb.social @emkingma@mstdn.social I feel like it needs a little instruction "Click on the line between colours" displayed before your first click. I was confused until I'd got the first one wrong.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@mvexel@en.osm.town I showed this to my 6 year old daughter yesterday, and I can confirm she enjoyed both the zoomed out globe with flags, and the zoomed in playgrounds and ice-cream! So who made this map? There's no "about" information anywhere.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@zymurgic The website interface designed for humans is the main issue I believe. See also https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/115974391032358572 So that's... stupid I'm not sure who hosts the main Overpass API instance, but I don't think it is the OpenStreetMap Foundation, so (while they probably do have similar challenges) it's not that we're talking about.

en.osm.town

OpenStreetMap Ops Team: "@utf_7@mastodon.social It is madness, start here:…" - OSM Town | Mapstodon for OpenStreetMap

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@HannahClover@mastodon.social Ooh. Congrats on being a Wikimedian Of The Year! So this happened mid 2024 right? If I try to scroll back on this official-looking account: @wikimediafoundation@wikimedia.socialt looks like they stopped posting between May and October that year. ...Mysterious

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@simon@en.osm.town @wikimediafoundation@wikimedia.social Ah yes! We just need them to post to it now!

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@aaron@cutie.city @yacc143@mastodon.social @anon_opin@mastodon.social It's not straightforward. We'd want to tax wealth holdings somehow, not just 100% on income. We need to shine a light on tax havens, and criminalise enabling lawyers/accountants. All this would work much better if many nations took measures simultaneously. Give them nowhere to hide. Of course all these reasons why taxing the rich is hard, are often presented as reasons why it cannot ever be done, which is bollocks. Governments should take steps in the right direction.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 7mo ago

What's My JND? 0.0023
Can you beat it? https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AOMhKH___zXd

keithcirkel.co.uk

What

Find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@pmdj @MarcelNBG @piyuv @stux Oh no 🙁 Maybe we need 10 browser tabs AND 3 different phones to find the best deal now

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ellenmorrisprewitt@writing.exchange @lydiaschoch@mastodon.social hmm when you say 48 seconds, d'you literally mean there is a time limit? Seems surprising! or d'you mean it pops up quite quickly in response to clicking/scrolling on things? Admittedly I'm normally logged in to facebook, so I'm curious what you see.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@russss Ah yes. Came across that before, but I was forgetting about it. Nice. Is that what you use for @OpenInfraMap then?

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

I've been using Sociabli to cross-post from mastodon->bluesky (in the spirit of "can't really be arsed with bluesky, but I might change my mind"). But today they're shutting down 😞

You're about to recommend Bridgy Fed. *Everyone* recommends Bridgy Fed, but... as far as I can see it doesn't let you cross-post to your own already existing account on bluesky. I'm surprised more people don't notice/care about this.
Sociabli was my little-known solution to this problem. I'm now seeking a new one.

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

RE: @lrug@ruby.social

Tonight! >

ruby.social

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@joeldn@en.osm.town Oh yes. I see this ties into your interest in UPRNs. I was just reading Owen's excellent "UK address data: a primer" https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr3.htm Which gives a run-down, firstly of the tangled web of overlapping products and data ownership (including how UPRNs fit in), and secondly listing various attempts to open the data, of which most have definitively failed. I guess Owen can add his FOI project to the failed list now 😞

owenboswarva.com

Owen Boswarva's blog

This is Owen Boswarva

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@krinkle@fosstodon.org @wikipedia@wikis.world ooh OK. lemme try this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:Mastodon#Happy_Birthday_Wikipedia

mediawiki.org

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@organicmaps German Transport Feed Specification

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@joeldn Bash script with all my GDAL commands is shared here: https://gist.github.com/harry-wood/cc3da38ab46ecede058ba3ad237536e6

gist.github.com

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Harry Wood @harry_wood@en.osm.town

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Di4na @lina Yeah I think that's right. It's the generic chatting magic trick that has everyone so beguiled. So... "you can totally train a useful base model for task specific fine tuning without stealing" I'm not so sure. There's quite a lot of content out there labelled public domain/copyright free, but maybe not *enough* to do the beguiling magic trick. But I agree it would be nice if more people were trying/discussing this, if only to underline the copyright theft of the main players.

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