The Swiss Rooftop Explorer is a cloud-native web app that retrieves Swiss building roof heights without a GIS server. Using PMTiles, Geoparquet, and DuckDB-WASM, it enables fast, low-maintenance geospatial queries. This post explores the data pipeline and its benefits of cloud-optimized formats, and how static files can replace traditional GIS infrastructure.
Use Tailscale to build your own gated community (a.k.a. VPN) within the public internet: bypass geo-blocking, remotely control your smart home, and quickly provide services as a developer.
Use Spliit App (open-source, web-app, mobile app) for an easy way to track and split expenses with a group.
The post discusses AI hallucination - when AI generates incorrect information. It explores two main problems: user frustration with incorrect outputs and uncertainty about managing these errors long-term. Using a geodetic network analogy, it explains how AI errors can propagate like measurement errors in surveying, suggesting we need better frameworks for detecting and managing hallucinations.
In this experiment I used AI to automate architecture documentation by testing Aider (an AI coding assistant). After just 5 minutes and 5 prompts, I generated a decent C4 diagram for a Streamlit web application. While not perfect, this experiment shows the promising future of AI-assisted documentation.
"Playground" by Richard Powers explores the interplay of technological ambition and environmental concerns, highlighting tensions between progress and preservation through diverse characters on a remote island.
In 2025, research on the web involves using ChatGPT for specific technical queries while considering sources and environmental impact, as Google's search has become less efficient.
This article describes "star-collector," a tool for automatically publishing web favorites using GitHub Actions and AI-generated titles, leveraging transformers for title creation from Mastodon posts.
Introducing Topoprint.ch, a platform for creating personalized, 3D-printable topographic models of any location in Switzerland, accessible through social media bots. This post explains the "what," the "why," and a bit of the "how.".
