Kris Law @greylaw89@qoto.org

Speaking of Flat Earths, here is a database of them: https://spatialreference.org/

You can find many flat earths, some in meters and some in feet for those of us who are still lagging behind on that front (thanks Brits)

For any who want to get into GIS, (especially using Open Source tools like QGIS) its helpful to start to remember commonly used SRIDs, or Spatial Reference IDs. A very common one I use is the code for "NAD83 / California zone 5 (ftUS)", which ID is 2229, covering the area of LA, my native Kern County, as well as a couple of other counties.

Flat earthers got nothing on me... my job is literally to make the earth flat... or at least a piece of it in a mathematical model. (who the hell wants to do a great elliptic arc for every relationship between points)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection

@freemo

Any political debate is always some cringe drama.

*Several years ago during a private conversation I misinterpreted what you said, which has little to no bearing on anything said today, but I've got nothing else of relevance so lets bust out this gem*

Trump won because "Fuck You" isn't a good argument, but it is a very effective one when there is so much empty noise in the air.

Other very awesome Open Source project - https://github.com/bitsed/qosmic

GUI based fractal editor

Another tidbit - Every line in GIS has direction. If you think about it, you really can't draw a line without it... you always start somewhere and end somewhere else. Sure you can reverse the line and have the same representation, but all that means is that its going to look the same. From a analysis perspective, (especially linear referencing) you should know the direction.

Especially if you don't want to do everything again. Because its "backwards".

I do so enjoy when people send me the PDF of an area that clearly has had some spatial data used to generate it, and then I can't get them to send me the underlying data, forcing me to manually draw it again like I'm 10 and using MS Paint.

Time to use the georeferencer, and suffer another 10 points of sanity damage.

@mandlebro

I'm not a C/C++/D programmer but I've been looking to learn. My understanding of D boils down to "C++ with garbage control built in"

To those who list "Something else". Please elaborate, if you would

@mandlebro

Have you ever tried D? And if you have what is your opinion between D and Rust?

How do people here feel about Nuclear Power, pro or against?

Using Chocolatey on Windows just makes me miss pacman all the more so

Well I'll try to make my contribution to the Channel with my favorite STEM topic: data analysis, specifically cartography! Which these days is pretty heavily focused on GIS.

"A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations."

- Wikipedia

There is really only one major player in the commercial industry, Esri with the ArcGIS program suite, which only runs on Windows. I've used it for about 10 years now for both basic and advanced tasks (advanced being somewhat basic compared to some of the more incredible things others have done) If you want it you are looking at a few hundred dollars for the commerical license or 100$ USD for the at home educational / non profit license.

Thankfully for FOSS there is a fantastic alternative, which is QGIS! QGIS is what I use currently for all my mapping and spatial modeling needs. It runs on Windows (which lets face it if you are working for the man you'll likely be forced to use). It comes with many basic spatial tools to use as well as the ability to write new tools with a Qt UI in Python. Its also in my mind more than a match for Esri for most GIS tasks. https://www.qgis.org/en/site/

@freemo @cowanon @retiredguru@social.linux.pizza

I imagine at that point one easily has a case to block based on spamming alone

@design_RG

I've never understood the fasination with who goes first on airplanes... seats are all preallocated so its not like you are going to get a better seat as part of boarding first. The only thing I've experienced is the minor annoyance of finding a place to put my bag.

If anything, I want to avoid being on the inside of a metal tube even longer

@design_RG @freemo

Capitalism requires constant growth in economies to be stable, and Socialism requires a high level of social trust to be stable.

You are really fucked when you just don't have much of either

Any fellow QGIS or ArcGIS users here?

@freemo

Yeah, it seems odd that they include the Python Pickle one. I get that its some complicated internal python VM state, but why would you want that compared to plain text? It even operates faster.

Does anyone know why you would use the Python pickle module over the json module? The json one seems to be superior in every manner

@jina

You take that back. Spaceballs had a real RV.