Reappearing briefly from my Twitter hiatus to mention that there's a new post on the blog: "Automated Hachuring in QGIS." Many before me have digitally resurrected this old manual technique, and now it's my turn to give it a try. somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2024/07/07/aut…

i'm getting back into interactive learning and bringing my website newt interactive back, starting with a new series on systems biology: newtinteractive.com/series/systems… i've been reading Uri Alon's textbook and the analysis of how biological systems work is utterly fascinating..

# the nightmare bicycle imo, the most important idea in product design is to avoid the "nightmare bicycle". imagine a bicycle where the product manager said "people don't get math so we can't have numbered gears - we need to have labeled buttons for gravel mode, downhill mode,

There is now something new under the sun: you can literally experience a completely new perceptual color that no one has ever seen before

Tired: elaborate docs pages for your product/service/library with fancy color palettes, branding, animations, transitions, dark mode, … Wired: one single docs .md file and a “copy to clipboard” button.

If you take two piece of metal with no surface oxide and make them touch, they become one piece of metal. The metal can't tell the difference! Cold welding always felt like magic to me (Fig from link.springer.com/article/10.100…)

Rooms and other paths can also be snapped to the grid

New blog post: de-optimizing mapgen4 redblobgames.com/blog/2025-04-2… Over the years I've tried using my mapgen4 code for experiments but in the process of optimizing it I made it inflexible and hard to use for anything else. I'm starting to de-optimize it for some experiments.

✨ New samwho visual essay o'clock! ✨ Reservoir sampling is one of my favourite algorithms. It allows you to sample from a set without knowing the size of that set. I assume no prior knowledge, and use no math notation. Just beautiful visuals. Let me know what you think! ❤️

playing with band-passes at different scales - might be a way to create fractal patterns

2025 map of GitHub is live! 690K projects. 1,500 clusters. 500M stars. Every dot is a treasure waiting to be discovered! Explore and enjoy at anvaka.github.io/map-of-github

I just found this nice Shunting-Yard algorithm animation made by Christian Lawson-Perfect:

We have two identical groups of 8 gauges with anomalous gauge at position (3,1). The degree of anomaly is identical in both groups ~ 8 deg. Humans have extreme hyperacuity with respect to detecting angular orientation of line segments—needle gauge is so much faster to read. The

Today, working on the Delaunator guide. 1. what it looks like now — point and triangle diagrams showing a *subset* of the data 2. new version — diagrams showing *complete* data including edge cases 3. complete example — code you can copy, numbers you can see in the diagram

Programmers often ask whether query optimizers are really worth it. Wouldn't it be better to just manually specify index order? The developer has so much more information, after all. I have wondered this myself! But when I do the thought experiment even on our little zbugs app