flowerbreeze

The data sources listed for UFOs are from US and Germany:

National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) witness reports (US, via the CC0 TidyTuesday project, 2023-06-20)

and

GEP e.V. UFO/UAP Falldaten (Germany, Zenodo 18071015, CDLA-Permissive-1.0), 1925–2025.

They are unlikely to include data from many other locations.

I don't know if the above post had an edit, but it says "distributed on SD cards" now. My cheap ~5yo car is the same, I can only update the maps via USB. The navigation still works, but is a lot worse/more out of date than any smartphone app where I live. Although even google maps barely works around here.

Oh, that's a great name for it! I'll need to start using it.

When writing code for end-user applications, I think it's mostly true. When it's writing code for a database engine, a game engine, a 3d renderer, or anything else that involves heavy data processing, optimization is the core "thing" often and it might not even be a good enough solution without it. Although, a lot of time even then C++ is good enough even then when picking reasonable data structures to represent the data.

Thank you for the article! Do I see a Turbo-C screenshot there or am I imagining it? It was my first IDE (I didn't know that's what it was called) when I started programming. I sometimes miss it, it was really good, especially the help system.

I agree with the article of course. I think most confusion comes not having learned about the purpose of having them be defined based on the architecture in the first place. It took me a long time before I stumbled upon how they really worked and why, because while I started it was either x86 or nothing. When x64 showed up, suddenly it became relevant and everybody started learning about C types more in depth as they ran into issues with sizeof.

Also, misuse in data protocols is where I think the bad reputation of the flexible type sizes came from. stdint was desperately needed for that reason and it came a bit late.

I think being able to define additional rules in a language is a reasonable feature and sometimes would make life a whole lot easier, but I think when implemented through text macros rather than rewriting the underlying program graph along with accounting for all the constraints, that causes most issues.

Program graph rewriting is of course more complex, but can be better defined with regards to acceptable inputs and more defensive as opposed to letting the next step of compiler or interpreter handle it.

The other problem is that most IDEs don't offer an expand macro (or similar) option for the rewritten parts (or I haven't seen them doing that), so observing what the final code looks like requires additional steps. In some ways its similar to functions, but most languages have functions that have a well defined input/output structure whereas macros can do some unexpected things depending on the inputs.

I am not convinced mortgages is a net benefit to the society in any way.

Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.

Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...

Yes, it's possible. For me it went like this.

1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.

The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.

Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.

2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.

3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.

I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.

Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.

If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.

Being cynical, I'd think probably to squeeze out some personal data first. Best let the questions remain unanswered.

The guidance provided about CRA is difficult to follow and does not in any reasonable way cover proportional guidance for SMEs as it claims to do, but it seems websites/server side products are not subject to CRA as they are not considered digital products executing on consumer systems?

The only websites that should require it are the ones that provide downloadable software or software that is used on digital products. And it seems that European alternatives site lists primarily (pure) SaaS and only a few others?

It'd be the sensible non-surveillance option. All that would be required is that the OS or SIM sold is a tiny bit different with a flag that the browsers/apps respect and that each website that accepts underage users sends a header that browsers can check and allow/disallow access. Compliance with child friendly legal requirements would still be with the company owning the website.

Of course it's not as attractive to the governments as putting in place a full scale surveillance aparatus that puts KGB to shame.

Maybe it all works, but the paper is not trivial to decipher and the GitHub repository does not seem to exist. It doesn't seem to define what are the inputs to the system (what is a query? UTF-8 text? tokens?) and what are the outputs. It'd really help if the algorithm was written out step by step with all the expected type information included.

At first I thought it was similar to something I've built before as a long-term slowly degrading cache for augmenting an FFN by caching well-learned answers, answering by performing a beam search in the key space resulting in located key accuracy measure (how well it corresponds to the input query) and answer confidence (has it been a long time since verification?), but that's not quite it? It feels similar in some way, but is it?

Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free!

Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text.

Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravating? Almost anxiety inducing for some reason. Maybe it's just because it is a new thing and I'm not used to it.

Also, as others have mentioned, the controls took a bit of time to figure out.