I wanted a way to explore Unicode by visual similarity, not just by name or codepoint, so I built Charcutrie.
It lets you browse characters that look alike, search across scripts and symbols, and even sketch a shape to find matching glyphs. (pretty badly for now :D)
charcuterie.elastiq.ch#U+221E
Vintage infographic titled "Service ceiling (ft)" plots the service ceiling (maximum altitude) of various aircraft against their maximum speed in miles per hour. The data spans from 1916 to 1963, covering biplanes, monoplanes, and jet aircraft. The trend shows a steady increase in both speed and altitude over time as aviation technology advanced.
Beautiful vintage #infographic on the ceiling & speed of different aircraft
(via Reddit bit.ly/4c2bMCs)
The image is an informational graphic titled "NORTH AMERICAN POPULATION DENSITY," created by Visual Capitalist. The main feature is a three-dimensional, relief-style map of North America, where population density is represented by the height and color of the peaks. Highly dense areas are shown as tall, dark red peaks, while sparsely populated areas are flat and light tan. The accompanying text explains, "We map out where over half a billion people live on the third-largest continent, from clusters near coasts and warmer latitudes, to the more sparsely populated northern regions and interiors." Several key urban areas are highlighted with their average density listed in people per square kilometer, including: New York, US (11,314 people/km²), San Francisco, US (7,193 people/km²), Mexico City, MX (6,163 people/km²), and Port-au-Prince, HT (2,395 people/km²). The map visually demonstrates the dramatic clustering of the population along the coasts and southern borders of the United States and Mexico, with a notable density around the Great Lakes (Chicago and Toronto) and very sparse populations across Canada's interior and the western US.
North American population density map. Beautiful!
by @Civixplorer
Today I announce Cantrip: On summoning entities from language in circles.
In this book I unify the paradigm behind base models, chatbots, coding agents, RLMs, and RL agents, through the metaphor of magic. Code is provided.
deepfates.com/cantrip
A 1944 map by geologist Harold Fisk charts a 40-mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Friars Point to Gunnison, Mississippi. Fisk used aerial photos and maps to estimate the past and then-present channels. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mississippi-rivers-hidden-history-uncovered-by-lidar?fbclid=IwY2xjawQYXkdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFCZ2JBT2tWdVlXMmEzNU5Uc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsbjW-Yuubr_o_Kfeh0Elzc94geDwfXIZmeNL7NyljEBAOEjH53m2QLSo1NF_aem__4NkCIJ_D8J6mI1e8eMByg
Rivers are living beings.
Twelve diagrams show sketches of different curves and describe the message they send in a humorous way. An exponential curve for example says “Look, it’s growing uncontrollably!”
Curve fitting methods & what they say xkcd.com/2048/
A handwritten storyboard or script outline from Christopher Nolan's film "Inception." The image features handwritten text and diagrams, suggesting the film's complex plot involving a heist, an escape, and characters like Yusuf, Arthur, Eames, and Saito. The text includes notes about the heist, the escape, and various locations within the dream world, including Limbo.
Christopher Nolan's hand-drawn map of Inception
A detailed map illustrating the most spoken mother tongues (other than English) in Toronto. Different languages are represented by distinct colors overlaid on a geographical map of the city and surrounding areas like Mississauga, Etobicoke, York, North York, Scarborough, Vaughan, Markham, and Pickering. Large labels indicate areas where specific languages are prevalent, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Portuguese, Tamil, Urdu, Spanish, Persian (Farsi), Greek, Bengali, Serbo-Croatian, and Ukrainian. Smaller charts at the bottom provide statistics on the number of speakers for the top languages, including English. The map also shows the boundaries of residential areas and major roads. A legend indicates the language families represented by the colors, such as Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin, Cantonese), Indo-Aryan (Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Persian, Greek), Romance (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French), Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian), and others like Tagalog.
Major languages spoken in Toronto (other than English) by neighbourhood
by Alex McPhee
pronghornmaps.com/toronto/
One day the industry will recognize the drawbacks of AI agents and nondeterministic automation, and rediscover the UNIX philosophy of chaining together small purpose built tools in a low cost and predictable way, otherwise known as shell scripts.
MUST READ thread before Monday night's forecasted G4 / SEVERE geomagnetic storm. Auroras could be seen as far south as the U.S.-Mexico border at times. Widespread mid-latitude displays are possible. Here's what you need to know to have a successful aurora chase tonight! 🧵
#heliophysics #aurora
Agreed on what the actual ****.
This is reflected of a pretty fundamental failure to understand what historians do, because LLMs do basically none of my job and are completely incapable of most of it.
But they have the ears of the people that write the checks, so this is real bad news. 1/
"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪
No kings in this country!
...except a few of the nice people we found walking along the Venice Beach Boardwalk 👑
Presenting the BRAND-NEW season - @dimension20.bsky.social On a Bus! 🚌
DM'd by Katie Marovitch, and as players: Aabria Iyengar, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Jasmine Bhullar, and Mark Mercer!
Who's your favorite sexy Dropout car wash team?
❤️ 'Like' if Team 1 is your favorite
💬 'Comment' if Team 2 is your favorite!
You've never seen anything as satisfying as watching Trapp and Sam pull long strips of dried glue off of Paul...
If you love hearing oddly satisfying cracks at the chiropractor, Grant O'Brien has something special for you...
Forget having to choose between The Big Game and The Puppy Bowl - we've got the ultimate sporting event that combines them both: The Human Puppy Bowl! 🏈🐶
Can Jordan correctly identify three of their friends' breast milk?
Let's find out... 🤔🍼
Now everywhere Erika goes, a roast of Sam Reich follows... 🔥
The lady said $3,000 worth of animated buttholes, Sam! 🍑
Brennan's announcement
If there’s one talk you watch from #pycon let it be Cory Doctorow’s keynote youtu.be/ydVmzg_SJLw?...
panel 1: the terminal driver: an interface that hasn't changed since the 80s person: “I pressed an arrow key and it just printed out ^[[D???” terminal driver: “what's an arrow key?" panel 2: when you're typing text, there are two situations 1. by default: the terminal driver (part of the OS) is responsible "canonical mode" 2. the program is responsible “raw mode” panel 3: "canonical mode" is a terrible way to edit text because the terminal driver hasn't changed much since the 80s, you can only do: 1. backspace 2. Ctrl+W (delete word) 3. Ctrl+U (delete line) panel 4: how canonical mode works 1. you type "helll" + backspace 2. the terminal emulator turns what you typed into bytes 3. the terminal driver passes on "hell" and interprets the backspace 4. the program gets "hello\n" In canonical mode, terminal driver doesn't send anything to the program until you press Enter. In raw mode, the terminal driver just sends “hell\xFFo\n” without changing it panel 5: how to try out canonical mode Run `cat` and type some stuff! Interactive programs almost never use canonical mode because it's so limited. But if you run into it `rlwrap $COMMAND` can help
more terminal fun: canonical mode
wizardzines.com/comics/canon...
oh god, it’s true, we’re living in an era of Clippy Maxing
as a person who knows that banishing evil spirits by swearing at them is a common thing in multiple Slavic traditions, i am DELIGHTED by this tip
A screengrab from Twitter. HeatherLhaney @heather_l... asks: “Why do you think we have so many more kids with Autism” David Dennis Jr. @DavidDTSS quotetweets this reply: “Probably for the same reason there are so many more planets in outer space now than there were before the telescope was invented”
Staple this to RFK Jr’s forehead.
Imagine that the cost of Legos dropped to almost nothing, millions of bricks for a penny, and suddenly people were claiming that non-experts would now build all of our houses, bridges, skyscrapers, and infrastructure out of Legos.
"AI will replace software engineers" people sound like this.
Let’s be clear. When the President defies the Supreme Court, it is the role of Congress to remove him from office. Full stop.
