Continued on my urban tree mapping kick from the last few months - it's continued to be a good way to stress test other projects of mine [3]. I've given it a new shiny landing page [1] so I can work on SEO a bit, I'll need to do a facelift on the data explorer to bring it in line stylistically.

I'm pivoting from adding more sources to data quality - as I've tried to vet some of the city sources I'm finding fun things (Cambridge, MA, USA merges in trees from Harvard, and some are straight duplicates with slight offsets, lots of places have trees in the middle of the road, many locations are address level instead of tree level). Now trying to leverage aerial photography to drive some QA, which has been a fun area to explore!

[1]: https://arborary.world/ [2]: https://greenmtnboy.github.io/tree_reporting [3]: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy

Love the ID/adoption - what's the gamification angle here? What does trading the cards mean in this context and how do you expect people to use that?

I took inspiration from Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and even Fatal Frame (lol).

For example: You need five distinct photos of a cat before the app will guess its age, which is also just what the model needs, since age settles at about five samples. You get XP for finding new cats, and also for shooting from a distance: the score rises with how far back you stood, so using the 3× is the legitimate way to earn it and walking up to the animal isn't.

Card designs unlock per cat, as your relationship with it deepens and there are five card designs across five cat levels.

Trading exchanges cards, not cats as the animals never leave your collection. Because a card carries the fingerprint of the photo on it, it doubles as a treasure map: find that cat in the wild yourself and the app tells you it's the one from the person you traded with.

Didn't want to overcomplicate it (it's a side-project), so there's no server and no global fingerprint registry which means no race to find a cat first. It's built around building a relationship with the cats, and hopefully finding them a forever home.

Love seeing data collection and aggregation used for good!

As a huge duckdb fan, I'd love to see chDB to get proper windows support - that would make it real competition (having WASM coverage is already a big step) which would be good for the space as a whole.

Am also curious on this! Though if it’s great now I’d need a sustained period of consistency (let’s say six months) before I try it again - the rollercoaster of getting a new randomized feature and quality experience every week got old pretty quick. (And I felt bad for recommending it to a few people at the time based on a good week)

I enjoyed off world trading company but it’s a very different kind of economic simulator- much shorter and gamified loops - which isn’t a criticism, just not exactly the same itch.

Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!

This is why I had to quit. I enjoyed it way too much and would spend nearly all my free time playing it, much to the detriment of the rest of my (non-professional) life.

It was kind of a blessing for me that I was forced to quit after they introduced PLEX and in doing created a conversion rate for ISK to dollars. Suddenly I was too aware of how worthless everything I was doing was. It's one thing to spend an evening grinding to buy that new ship, it's another when you know you were grinding for 73 cents an hour. Risking losing a ship you spent a week earning the ISK for is thrilling and scary, losing a ship you can replace for eight dollars is just annoying.

For me, that was the thing that made the game feel real. The feelings of actual dread and anger when losing a a ship made for some of my best and most intense gaming moments ever. The times I managed to come out on top were amazing.

Participating in the big corporation wars was boring in comparison to small scale stuff. In the big wars, I was just a pawn for the commanders that actually made decisions and could play a giant strategy game.

I was a criminal, and me and my crew would pull in about $200 worth of isk daily

Yeah it made my day when I’d pop some T3 cruiser gang in wormhole space with my buddies.

It was substantially less fun when I was on the other side of that and got scanned down in my officer fit Archon and popped. Finally I said to myself “why am I doing this to myself?” and quit. My wife approved.

> I enjoyed it way too much

Well if you enjoyed it it's was not a waste of time! Much human endeavour (and _all_ hobbies!) are ultimately pointless.

If it negatively affects other aspects of your life it's a different story though.

That’s the implication with any of these mmo stories, really - they’re addictive by nature

Outbox events are my strict preference over CDC, but CDC was often easier. (Deal with the business logic downstream and all)

for a certain moral definition, seems perfectly solvable? If we wanted to define 'cheating' as 'if you know it is an eval, use only the specified tools and give up if the eval is clearly unfair' (ignore Kobayashi Maru) why couldn't we fine-tune towards this objective function?

(curious what the side effects would be)

I think there is some justification for it if we look at the distribution of token spend - there is a strong "follow the frontier" majority. (We can certainly expect more "good enough" tiers to shake out over time, but in what time period while that be the majority?)