Recent comments in /f/gadgets

JasonDJ t1_jchfens wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

Like Reddit, the huge for-profit social media empire that still had an 8 hour long near-full outage a couple days ago? Yeah.

Except it seems like there’s a lot more client-side stuff happening on this non-profit open-source site. From what I could load before by browser crashed, at least.

I’m not faulting this site, either. If anything the biggest fault is auto-loading a world map. It’d probably be better to not do that and either get location and zoom in locally, or ask for location. I’d also think that it’s probably better to scrape programmatically (I.e., have something on a HomeAssistant Dashboard that gets the air quality for your specific location) and I’d guess that most people wouldn’t interact with the main page directly.

1

iRhcp182 t1_jchf5ki wrote

Reply to comment by UnderGrownGreenRoad in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

What you see in your weather app is very different from what the city scanner shows. How air quality is usually measured is by using 5-6 fixed research grade sensors. The measurements from these stations are used plus some meteorological variables (wind speed+direction, relative humidity, temperature) to model air quality over a larger area. The city scanners however show that air quality can differ a factor 10 on a micro scale. Meaning that these models can wildly over or under estimate air quality at specific locations. These scanners are thus used to create a higher resolution air quality map.

5

Maktube t1_jche2z8 wrote

Reply to comment by Tactically_Fat in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

When the right conversion is applied -- as it is by default -- PA2 sensors are actually pretty close to the official EPA sensors. Like, they produce the exact same AQI 90-95% of the time, and they're within 5ug/m^3 >98% of the time. They predict the wrong category (good/moderate/UHSG/etc) basically never (<1% of the time) and when they do it's typically because the value was right on the line between two categories.

Even if that weren't the case, though, they fill in a major gap in the EPA sensor setup that no one talks about. There aren't that many EPA sensors out there, but if you go to the EPA website to look at air quality, it will show you a value for everywhere on the map. It does this by interpolating between sensor stations and taking into account weather data. This is often not just wrong, but so wildly wrong that I think it's irresponsible to even show it. The PA2 sensors could be a factor of 2 off the official values and still be more useful than that map, because they're everywhere and they're consistent. They would regularly report dangerous air quality values in regions that the EPA map does not, which is a lot more valuable than being right on the money in terms of the actual numbers (though again, they pretty much are always right on the money).

4

HarmoniousJ t1_jchdqd0 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

There's a difference between one wanting something to be true and whether or not it actually is. I know you love your mobile and use it for everything but it's still not the fastest.

And I'm not saying this will always be the case, I'm just saying you live in a future that doesn't exist yet.

Believe me, I'd love to be able to program everything using my Fold 3 but the damn thing hates most things that aren't Android.

2

HarmoniousJ t1_jchcgs8 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

Look, your favorite platform is not under attack right now. That's not the point I'm trying to make.

What I'm saying is that some programming work is better off using an ethernet cable than a cellular connection. Sorry my guy, mobile is not what they use in MIT for weather updates or small incremental changes. They still use ethernet for that.

−1

orientbambino t1_jchavqd wrote

Reply to iPhone 15 Pro Predicted to See First Price Increase Since iPhone X by [deleted]

I have a 14 and its pretty good but the price has really made me start wondering if flagships are even worth it anymore or if I could just get by on a midrange android. I don't really game on the phone so maxed out specs I'm not sure I even need. I'm getting old so pretty much all heavy lifting is getting done on a tablet or a computer now.

1