• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

    Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

    Anyway, as a development snapshot I guess OM is pretty nice, but I can’t call it a finished product,



  • I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

    I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

    It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.










  • GPS decoding is less computationally difficult than you seem to think, and in any case, in phones it’s done by a hardware module. The Garmin Geko handheld GPS was made in 2003 and ran on two AAA cells for 12 hours or something like that. Today’s GPS’s fit inside wristwatches and use even less power. It’s just not that big a deal. The cpu load of mapping applications on phones is dealing with the maps, computing driving directions, etc.

    I wouldn’t worry about map updates by internet. The roads don’t change that often. You can update from a USB-connected computer once a year or so and be fine.

    The other stuff doesn’t sound too bad, though idk why you want a phone for the purpose. If the GPS is for road navigation you can get an old dedicated unit that runs on 12 volts do you don’t have to mess with batteries. Those were nicer than phones in some ways. I still have a couple of them kicking around.


  • Browsing on a phone or with Debian works ok for me with Firefox, though I don’t like Firefox that much.

    I found Organic Maps preferable to OsmAnd but neither are that great. It should be possible to do something reasonable without a lot of CPU demands, given how dedicated GPS map navigation devices existed ih the early 2000s.

    Yes if you ditch Youtube and anything else that requires modern codecs, that solves another issue. I’ve found Newpipe has broken a few times but it usually works, so that is what I use.

    Modern apps and games (requiring GPU even) are another story, but let’s assume you don’t want to run them.

    This leaves the question: if you want a BIFL smart phone but you don’t want to make phone calls with it, don’t want to run a web browser, and don’t want to watch videos on it, what DO you want it to do?


  • SPJ left Microsoft a couple of years ago but I don’t remember what he is doing now. Does he still develop GHC?

    I wonder what he thinks of:

    • The idea of using AI for automatic code synthesis in dependently typed languages. The idea is that if the (human-written) types are precise enough and the code is effect-free, you avoid the hallucinations and other issues with current LLM-generated slop/code. Of course being able to generate code with an arbitrary type amounts fo AGI-level automated reasoning, but it’s ok to accept limitations on how powerful it can be.

    • Whether Haskell itself still excites him and if not, what does. Does he like Idris? Maybe Lean? And on the low level effectful side, what about Rust? What does he think are the current exciting ideas in PLT (programming language theory), and for that matter in general?

    • Is he familiar with Ben Lippmeier’s dissertation about Discus, formerly called the Disciplined Disciple Compiler (DDC)? It had a very interesting critique[1] of Haskell in its first chapter, that motivated the DDC language design, that used effect types to track memory mutation. The language never caught on and might not have really been usable, but the motivation for it seemed mostly valid to me. So I wondered if Haskell has any answers to that section of the thesis.

    [1] https://benl.ouroborus.net/papers/2010-impure/lippmeier-impure-world.pdf start at page 17.

    I may think of some other things to add.


  • You could try Organic Maps as an alternative to OsmAnd though it’s not so great either.

    The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing, because of the mutually recursive escalation of web sites’ and browsers’ appetites for machine resources. A 2005 laptop that tops out at 512mb of ram simply can’t run browsers needed to use the modern web. I’m still using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with 4gb of ram, but I have older ones that are no longer viable because of memory and CPU limitations.

    Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up, and the reasons for that are somewhat more valid than web bloat. The new codecs really do have better video quality at a given bit rate, in exchange for the increased cpu cycles.