@gdal We've had up to 265 attendees following the webinar about the GDAL CLI Modernization. You'll find the slide deck at https://download.osgeo.org/gdal/presentations/GDAL%20CLI%20Modernization.pdf , including a best-of of the Q/A session, and the video recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdrYm3TiBU

I asked ChatGPT what the distances from London to Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo were and then to draw a map to show the distances. What a wonderful time to be alive. #gischat

Web 1.0 = Info
Web 2.0 = Personal Sites & GIFs
Web 3.0 = Crimes & Grifters
Web 4.0 = Exclusively written by LLMs
Web 4.5 = Exclusively read by LLMs
Web 5.0 = The Resistance™
Web 6.0 = Info (on rebuilding society)
Web 7.0 = Personal Sites & GIFs

@EvenRouault

@waldoj I feel a platinum coin coming off the presses... with someone's mug on the obverse.

Obsessed with the amount of spite it took to make this map:

Another reasons to tut at the Mercator Map projection - how a circle with a radius of 5,000km, centred on Paris, looks according the Mercator map

@EvenRouault An object lesson about the limits of "the implementation is the specification" I guess?

@sgillies Narrowly escaped being creamed by a right turner on a downhill this evening... reevaluating my life choices tonight.

@ThomasGuerrero And once we have enough brick and a standard pattern, the economics of owning one of these start to make sense. https://newatlas.com/tiger-stone-lays-paving-bricks/16951/

@carnage4life The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord.

"You don't briefly interrupt a system like this one. Once professors and PhD students disappear, they can't be conjured again out of thin air. The pipeline of new faculty members is gone – altogether, or overseas, but certainly gone in America. We won't be able to rebuild the R1/R2 system in less than a generation. And the Trump administration has proposed no alternative to it."

https://not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io/not-invented-here-2/?ref=not-a-tech-bro-newsletter&attribution_id=67e03db985bae4000145b050&attribution_type=post

FOSSGIS 2025 is coming to Münster this week! Looking forward to meeting fellow FOSS4G enthusiasts.

We’ll be presenting a poster on spatial machine learning in R. Stop by and let’s chat!

🔗 https://fossgis-konferenz.de/2025/programm/

#FOSSGIS2025 #rstats #FOSS4G #MachineLearning #rspatial

@AngelaPreston @DeliaChristina I can only speak for the university I know, not Columbia, but almost the entirety of our endowment is made up of directed giving. So it supports useful things, like specific research areas, or student financial aid, but it is not available to be repurposed to things not enumerated by the donor. It is an impressive pile of money, but it's not a panacea.

@waldoj I met a retired highway engineer a few years back, and it was really weird to hear him say more or less exactly the same things about building highways as we do about IT. Government used to have in-house engineering and design. Then they outsourced it and all the projects became 5x more expensive for "some reason". There was nobody in-house to push back knowledgeably against the contractor team.

@waldoj Once all the development has been outsourced, where does the technical lead come from? Government ends up holding a stable of "architects" who are 10 years away from the rock face.

Got fed up with remote geospatial jobs where all I do is containerize Nominatim and OSRM. And this grant gig is not as fulfilling as I expected.

Now in talks with a local hardware engineering job. No maps, just sending signals to microchips. And hopefully saunas on fridays.

Still no money in OSM, 15 years gives you nothing except understanding how complex the world is and an urge to write a book.

R.E.M. led me to believe I would feel better about this.

@ianturton Makes sense, don't want the hoi poloi cluttering up the leadership of the Empire.

@kajord The US Speaker of the House (3rd in line to the Presidency) also doesn't have to be elected, just has to have support of a majority of members. Pretty much exactly the same, but since our executive is chosen by the legislature, not directly by the people, the PM (and any/all cabinet members) can be unelected. By convention they are all elected members too, but not by law.