An Extremely Distorted Map of the US Election

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Following the publication of its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, the New York Times was widely criticized for visually misrepresenting the election results. Despite this backlash, the newspaper chose to repeat the error after the 2020 election – and has now done so again!The New York Times recently released its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election. According to the NYT, Maps Mania… more →
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Let’s Build a Web App for Pinecone

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Yesterday I blogged about Pinecone’s excellent RAG as a service system for quickly building generative AI systems: "Checkout Pinecone for Serverless RAG". It was so easy, I decided to take a look into what it would take to build a "real" application around their service. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick Flask application to demo just that. I’m still very new to Flask, so take this with a grain of salt, and design isn’t my strong point, but who cares, let’s dig in! First off, a quick reminder of what I demonstrated yesterday. I used Pinecone’s Python SDK to: Create an "Assistant", which you can think of as a collection of documents. I... more →
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Roads, Railways, Runways & Rivers

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I have been inspired by OpenSkiStats’ Which Way do You Ski to create my own interactive map for visualizing the orientations of roads, railways, runways, and rivers in towns and cities around the world.In Which Way Do You Ski, OpenSkiStats created a series of “compass rose” visualizations that illustrate the strong poleward tendency of ski runs across the globe. These ski slope orientation Maps Mania… more →
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GeoGuessr for History Buffs

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Can you guess the date and location of the historical event taking place in these two AI generated videos? If you can then you might just become the Time Portal champion of the world.Time Portal is a fun and innovative online game that challenges you to pinpoint the time and place of significant historical moments. If you’re a fan of history and love games like GeoGuessr, this one’s for you.At Maps Mania… more →
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Turn Your Weather into Poetry with GenAI

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I was struggling to get some real, productive work done (I just got back from a trip in Europe) and I thought I’d tackle something that’s been in my queue for a little while now. This is, yet again, one of my "bad ideas" that you should probably not ever use in production, but it was fun, it made me happy, and you get to see the kind of silliness I do when I’m trying to distract myself. The idea was simple – given a forecast, how well could generative AI transform it into something more fun, like poetry? As I usually do, I opened up Google’s AI Studio and tried it there first. I began with a system instruction: Given a forecast, rewrite it in poetry. Return... more →
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Global Ski Slope Orientations

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OpenSkiStats has analyzed ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel for ski trails worldwide. In Which Way do You Ski OpenSkiStats has used ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel of all ski trails in ski resorts around the globe. By gathering the coordinates of all trail segments, connecting these points, and treating each segment as a vector scaled by its Maps Mania… more →
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Next CodeBreak – Let’s AI!

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Hey folks! One of the things I promised to do better with the Code Break show was scheduling. With that being said, I’m here to announce the next event and I’ve got about 4 already on the calendar after that. Hopefully this year I can get a bit more consistent with schedule. That being said, we’ll see. Life is crazy at times. 😉 Ok, with that out of the way, my next session is Tuesday, January 21, at 12PM CST. I’ll be talking about AI, specifically Generative AI, with a focus on Google Gemini, but also client-side stuff as well (with Chrome’s built-in support and Transformers.js). I imagine this topic will cover two or more sessions. We’ll see how much I... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Simple Blog Example in Flask

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As part of my efforts to improve my Python knowledge, I’ve been looking at the Flask framework for a way to build Python-backed web apps. I’ve only been looking at it for a short time, but I’m really impressed with how simple it is. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of when I first saw Express. Before that, I wasn’t sure I was going to like Node.js as it felt like a lot of work to build a simple app, but Express handled a lot of the boring parts. The same applies to Flask. To get an idea of how easy it is, here’s the basic "hello world" from the quickstart: from flask import Flaskapp = Flask(__name__)@app.route("/")def hello_world(): return... more →
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