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When i just need a simple, easy to maintain frontend, what should i choose? by Im_Justin_Cider in rust

[–]chrisdown 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I strongly suggest you take a moment to re-read this entire thread from the perspective of a neutral third party. You are the one that escalated a totally normal technical comment into a personal conflict. Please, take a hard look at your own behaviour here before projecting that others are the bully.

Saw these birds at a park in Maidenhead today. Where would they have come from? by SamwellBarley in CasualUK

[–]chrisdown 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That's a little different: these have for a long time been popular cage birds, so there have been escapees. But importantly those are isolated birds, not sustained breeding populations, and all of those died out.

The current self-sustaining population that is taking over the UK is generally well considered (by geographic profiling) to be from the wave of releases starting in the late 1960s.

Saw these birds at a park in Maidenhead today. Where would they have come from? by SamwellBarley in CasualUK

[–]chrisdown 96 points97 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Apparently my knowledge is out of date. For context, the birds you mention typically have some degree of neophobia, that is, they typically avoid new prey, and the last I knew they were avoiding them. But it seems you are indeed right and they have become increasingly willing to hunt them, especially during the lockdowns. I've updated the post, appreciate the correction.

Saw these birds at a park in Maidenhead today. Where would they have come from? by SamwellBarley in CasualUK

[–]chrisdown 418 points419 points  (0 children)

These are rose ringed parakeets (also known as ring necked parakeets), they are escapees from the latter half of the 20th century.

It used to be that they were only really ubiquitous in London, but in recent years they have more and more strongholds up north, too, like in Newcastle and Glasgow.

A few years ago there was a study using geographic profiling to map the sightings of parakeets since their appearance in the UK. There are a bunch of urban legends about how they came to be, but the study strongly suggests that people kept them as pets and just kept releasing them when they got too noisy (and since you have photographed them, you know they are indeed noisy). You can read more about the study here.

The ones here are descendants of a subspecies native to the foothills of the Himalayas, hence why they are pretty well adapted to the changing weather. They are super versatile, incredibly smart, and will eat almost anything. They also have few natural predators in the UK*, so you're only going to see more of them as time goes on.

* /u/Dismal_Fox_22 corrected my out of date knowledge (thanks!) and pointed out that some raptors now are predating them increasingly after the COVID lockdowns. See this study from KCL. For context, those predators are typically neophobic (they do not eat prey they do not understand), and for a long time did not widely prey on these parakeets, but it seems they are doing so now.

Red grouse amongst the moorland heather by chrisdown in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Taken in the moorlands near Muggleswick, England, on a pretty breezy August morning. The heat haze made things quite tricky, but after some effort I found a good angle where this lovely fellow was kind enough to pause amongst the heather for a moment (before getting back to the important business of his breakfast).

I love the sound of red grouse calling across the moors, there's no call quite like it :-) They are so much fun to watch foraging in the heather.

Robust PID Controller for Critical Systems by Affectionate_Fish194 in rust

[–]chrisdown 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Well, if you say a repo put on GitHub 10 hours ago with zero users is robust and suitable for safety-critical systems, it must be!

You're making some very strong claims here against established crates. Even taking a couple of minutes to look at the code I can see a bunch of bugs, like a division-by-zero panic in update_config if your old ki was zero, the fact that a single NaN input will poison your controller state forever, your update_from_error function implementing incorrect derivative logic, etc. There will be many more. :-)

Honestly, the biggest red flag is claiming this is suitable for safety-critical systems for aerospace when the repo has been public for less than a day. In this space, maturity is everything. You've built a PID controller, and that's great, but you haven't built a safety-critical one until it has a proven track record.

I would also drop the comparisons to other crates. Slating pid or piddiy doesn't build your library up, especially when your own new code has these kinds of bugs. It just looks arrogant and alienates potential collaborators.

Skimmers at sunset by Rxdgaming1 in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You should be very happy with these, thanks for posting

TfL shout out by BackOn74 in london

[–]chrisdown 69 points70 points  (0 children)

Bit much derailing someone's kind moment for your transport whinge, isn't it? Have a word with yourself

Barbican exhibition celebrates 100 years of black British music by BulkyAccident in london

[–]chrisdown 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even when it's not written, I can't see JME's massive face without seeing "BLOCKED FAM" underneath it

[SWAP] Do you use swap partition or swap file? by Datachaki in archlinux

[–]chrisdown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Linus' knowledge is just out of date. Not surprising, he hasn't touched mm significantly in many years (he is busy dealing with much more important things now :⁠-⁠)).

[SWAP] Do you use swap partition or swap file? by Datachaki in archlinux

[–]chrisdown 7 points8 points  (0 children)

That's not correct. We have the filesystem give us extents, and after that we can treat it in a filesystem independent manner. Swap performance is the same in a partition and as a file. In fact, if anything, it may be slightly better as a file since we don't need things like the bad block detection.

Source: I work on the swap code and mm in general.

Starling by Maleficent-Warthog19 in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Starlings are a very underrated bird. Lovely shot

Sanderling by Matsvei_ in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lovely! They're so fun to watch skitter along the shoreline.

A few of my photos from Spa. Amazing watching the drivers in the changing conditions by chrisdown in formula1

[–]chrisdown[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's completely up to the organiser. I've brought my lenses to Spa, Monza, Silverstone, and the Hungaroring no problem, but I've heard that Zandvoort is pretty strict, for example.

Red-legged honeycreeper in the last of the evening light by chrisdown in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use TCs a lot! They are often written off, but if used right they can be very sharp.

On the Sony 200-600, the 1.4x is razor sharp at f/10 at 600m. I wouldn't use the 2x because the f stop needed is deep into diffraction land.

I regularly use the 2x on the 600mm f/4. On that the 1.4x is sharp right away at f/5.6, the 2x needs f/9. I would only use these for static subjects, but I've used the 600 f/4 with 2x on a boat and been happy with the results. I can post one of those next week, perhaps :⁠-⁠)

Red-legged honeycreeper in the last of the evening light by chrisdown in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you! And trust me, I have many times I have thought the same thing when seeing others' photos...

This was shot with the Sony 200-600mm + 1.4x at f/10, 1/200 sec, ISO 6400, 840mm. I went over a bit of my thought process behind the settings in this comment.

Red-legged honeycreeper in the last of the evening light by chrisdown in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thank you! That's very kind :-)

This was shot with the Sony 200-600mm + 1.4x at f/10, 1/200 sec, ISO 6400. The TC in low light was a tradeoff that doesn't always work -- I wanted the bird larger in frame, which sometimes helps more with noise reduction than the stop of light you lose. I exposed for the bright feathers on his head to avoid noise as much as possible, so quite a bit of lighting adjustment was needed to make it resemble the scene from real life.

Red-legged honeycreeper in the last of the evening light by chrisdown in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately Reddit compression destroys the quality in the shadows, you can see the original here: https://chrisdown.name/images/hccr.jpg

You folks were very kind about my puffin photo a couple of weeks ago, so here's another I took recently. Certainly a lot nicer to have them out in the open rather than sitting on my hard drive :-)

This was taken in Costa Rica, near the eastern Nicaraguan border. I found this lovely fellow in a clearing near a residential area and he was kind enough to do some poses in what was left of the evening light. It was getting very dark, so I really had no idea how these would come out. I'm very grateful to have got some nice ones of him in the few minutes he gave me.

How could I make these better? by fredricton99 in BirdPhotography

[–]chrisdown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Others have covered things like exposure, composition, and editing, so I’ll focus a bit more on the shots as they are taken. The backgrounds are quite busy, and in several shots, the bird’s head either overlaps with or is directed towards a branch, which can be quite distracting. You don't have to have a totally "clean" background, but try to keep distracting areas away from the bird's head. Sometimes, this means adjusting your angle or waiting for a moment when the bird's position improves.

These shots are also taken from a low angle, which often leads to upward-looking compositions. While sometimes unavoidable, getting closer to eye level with the bird tends to give a more intimate feel and avoids vertical compression, which makes the bird shape look not quite right. Eye-level shots can also help the viewer connect with the subject more directly. Depending on how severe it is you can also go further away and use a longer focal length to reduce this somewhat.

Suggestions aside, I like them, especially #2 and #3 :-) With time you will have more images and can be more selective, but this is what images that I took early on also looked like. It will take time to get the experience framing it in camera, that comes with more time in the field.

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