mootothemax

Ouch! I had a sympathetic shudder at your raster flashback, totally been there. I totally get your visual pattern matching instinct too - spooky cos that's how I do stuff too. Great minds.

For what it's worth, I use duckdb and its spatial stuff as my adapter. Works for my brain and if you force e.g. SQL files for each step, gets there in the same kind of way. Still some sharp edges, mind, but overall working well. And then Claude comes for my maths and I sob.

Oh don't get me wrong, it's a level-boosting monster even with that.

The worrying bit is if you're not keeping a close eye on it, very easy to think you're getting a solid system, but thanks to the internal madness it's used, your entire grid has in effect shifted 10 metres right, and any spatial measurements are far more approximate than it's letting on.

That was the bad old days for me. Nowadays I keep it locked down to specific systems for projections or actual spatial calculations, and that seems to keep it honest.

And the surprise is awesome when it happens! My favourite is all the QA steps you wish you'd had and that it reasons out on the raw data alone:

"oh hey, this one city has no data but it has a high population, oh right, that's because of this obscure lookup had a row chopped off, there you go, sorted."

I get to stand back and applaud it, honestly.

I reckon this type of task is crossing capabilities in a way that the LLMs (very quietly, mind) don't support.

An LLM can describe a photo fine, but it cannot tell you the exact coordinates of what it's describing. When I last tested this, you could sometimes get it to lie about the coordinates, but asking it to draw an approximate bounding box around a given feature - total fail, sometimes laughably so.

Ah gotcha, thanks - I know next to nothing about css geometry itself, but was curious to play with it, and think I had an imagine in my mind that was different to what you've created.

For what it's worth, I just skimmed the MDN docs and e.g. DOMPoint is using the right kinda wording to sound like it's not inherently cartesian-only. Could be interesting, that. Thanks for getting it into my head!

Honestly, if it’s geometry-only and doesn’t acknowledge the existence of anything other than Cartesian coordinates, it sounds like the type of feature that’s more of a support-ticket bomb than otherwise.

If it does support projecting differing CRSs though, please can you point me at it? I’m a nobody and nothing to do with qgis but I would love to have a play with it!

There’s something about geospatial work that seems to break LLMs. I’ve experienced it a lot with latest versions of both Fable and Opus, and it’s the classic nightmare of confidently-spoken-but-wrong.

Yesterday, I had a relatively trivial bit of work in play using distance-weighting to measure stuff, and Claude did really well / but right at the end, despite having a success metric and lots of great results matching it, Claude insisted my maths was wrong and needed changing.

When i asked why, and pointed out that the suggested replacement would cancel out the distance-weighting entirely, it immediately agreed with me and asked to write its fifth project memory about it.

The other big ones it tends to mess up on without strict guardrails are coordinate systems; and measurements, often converting back and forth between a given nation grid and wgs84 latitude/longitude in ways that lose good amounts of precision; and then custom-coding haversine-equivalents to measure a distance that’s otherwise be a simple subtraction via the national grid coordinates. It’s baffling.

>The UK census seems as good a measure as any.

Agreed, and it's a reasonable first reach for residential counts.

Problem is, it was last taken during 2021 - at the height of covid - and their estimates have been paying the price of it even since. Anything that touches on workday or employment they actively warn you away from, nowadays.

But then there's the elephant in the room: what if you're looking at somewhere like the City of London (the square mile one) where residential population is somewhere between 8,500 and 9,000 people?

EDIT: it slipped by me!

There is no single UK-wide census. NRS do Scotland's, last in 2022. NISRA handle Northern Ireland's census, last in 2021. And the ONS for England and Wales, last in 2021.

> town

That's where the problem lies. I spend too much of my life screaming into the void about UK addresses and what is and isn't a town :)

It's just about possible to create dataset of towns, cities, villages from mixing and matching and cutting up other geographies from the ONS (e.g. their Parished and Unparished data (though Unparished is its own nightmare), then the ONS Built-Up Areas dataset but... that one cuts out all the non-built parts so Milton Keynes is bunch of big blobs around the residential areas).

But if you frankenstein it, you lose all of the formal connections that define other links, and if you try to cheat via geospatial join, you will link police forces to areas they don't actually serve.

For Swindon, you're kinda stuck glueing together (going from memory here - please correct me if I'm off) the Parishes of Central Swindon, South Swindon and West Swindon. But these will overlap with some villages so it's not a true count.

And that's a natural moment to lead on to the next critical point: how're we measuring population? (I always get that Father Ted speech scene in my head thinking about this, start speaking - then twelve hours later "And now, we move on to liars")

For what it’s worth, once I figured out I could say something like “I’m going to buy this, would you like to call it my birthday present?” At pretty much well any point in the year, I found that the people around me really appreciated the chance to show care AND see me using something I like which they got for me.

Thanks for taking me in the spirit I intended; I wrote more aggressively than I’d intended, on reflection.

You’re not a dick and you weren’t being a dick, I totally agree about writing on the internet - it’s tricky to feel and to tell, and I imagine I must be insufferable at times.

I can see your point now and I think we might agree on more than either of us first thought. I can see how much you care for your family in every word you’ve written, and I’d be a bit surprised if one of your kids was at home, told you it’s their birthday, and your reaction would be to laugh about it, and then carry on with your day as normal with no further reaction or acknowledgement of it.

So - Ii’s not about remembering, or about the card or presents or cake: it’s what you do with the information in front of you. From the sounds of it you’re demonstrating your care brilliantly every day.

(I have the same type of brain wiring you’ve described, incidentally. My extremely accepting wife would ask me to buy her some flowers, nothing showy, just something to brighten up the house and remind her of me. And I’d hear that as “she wants me to remember to buy her flowers sometime” and file it away. And several years later we figured out that gap in our communications and nowadays, when it’s important enough to her that she asks me to buy her flowers - I buy the flowers. Turns out that that was all it took to demonstrate that I care.)

I also wanted to add: wow, as a parent that sounds rough. You’re doing better for her than you think you are.

If one of your kids said, hey, it’s ok, I love you and your chaotic mind, can you please buy me a card if or when you remember - and it pops into your mind after 10 or 20 or 100 days, or even 5 years later - would you buy them a card or not?

Honestly - and I hope this didn’t happen to you - it takes a surprising level of indifference for kids to pick up a “this is wrong” signal.

I’m not going to speak for anyone else, but if I forget a thing and “fixing” it is as simple as saying sorry and doing it the next day, I’ll do it. And I will keep doing it on a loop if need be _because I care_.

And that’s often the easy sign for this stuff. Did your parents forget and _not even try_ to show that they care?

It’s the sheer indifferent callousness that stands out starkest to me. It doesn’t take much, I’ve found, for people to state outright “you’re wrong to expect me to care about you.”

Cool, you do you.