> And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).

Hadn't heard about this! Interesting, and good idea to have a service for the games.

> So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.

This one would probably be quite busy. I had to fly Auckland-Wellington quite a bit as an engineer, and our managers & executives travel quite more (NIWA, a CRI that now I believe has merged with another one and changed its name).

Eventually I had to go to the capital to vote or for the embassy, or for a tech event. All these trips were always via airplane, but I'd be happy to get a fast train or a night train as in Europe.

> If you are serious about the Christchurch to Invercargill, there is now a private company offering the occasional weekend trip: https://www.mainlander.co.nz/train-trips/the-mainlander-rail...

Learned another new thing, thank you! I plan to go to Invercargill when I visit again to see if I can see the Aurora Australis or maybe check out where they have the MetService radiosonde launch. From what I recall MetService used to launch one from Invercargill near the airport (or I could be confused with a weather station or another climate monitoring station they had there).

What about options for those living up north? When I was still in Auckland some of my co-workers were looking into moving further West/North (there were too many people moving to South Auckland/Raglan/Hamilton at that time). But I remember the transport options involved one or more buses, and a ferry in the case of a co-worker that bought a house in... Hobsonville I believe. But the ferry didn't run all days, and had a limited schedule compared to the one for Waiheke or Devenport. Has that improved?

I always thought it'd be nice if there was a short train line connecting Devenport to Cape Reinga, as all the times I went to Cape Reinga or to take someone to Russel I'd have to drive or find a private shuttle.

Thanks!

I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.

And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.

I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.

I think the field is actually increasing with AI, digital twins, more industry projects (CFD, oil, models for fisheries, simulations for health diseases, etc.).

And even knowing OpenMP or MPI may not suffice if the site uses older versions or heterogeneous approaches with CUDA, FPGA, etc. Knowing the language and the shared/distributed mem libs help, but if your project needs a new senior dev than it may be a bit hard to find (although popularity of company/HPC, salary, and location also play a role).

> We focus primarily on temperature rather than precipitation or soil moisture, as water availability can be more readily controlled through human interventions, such as irrigation and paddy field construction.

Traditional rice cultivation normally involves flooding. So I am not sure how much one can rely on irrigation for rice. When I was younger, in Sao Paulo some Japanese immigrants were trying to raise Japanese rice species with flooding when I was young, but they gave up and moved to other crops as the weather in the southern area and Uruguay were better (that's what I was told growing up -- FWIW we had corn, sugarcane, orange until there was a huge pest in Barretos region, bamboo and lots of other fruits and veggies in the farm).

A couple of years ago my company (BSC in Spain) had an internal talk about impact of climate change in European vineyard. I don't remember the article they were talking about, but it was similar to this one: Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00521-5

From what I recall, what the researcher explained was that the change in water sources like rivers and lakes is already affecting wineries that are not able to grow certain crops due to the lack of water.

But due to the reduction in water levels, some wineries and types of grapes were not being able to be harvested in specific parts of Italy. The article above mentions something similar,

> Existing producers can adapt to a certain level of warming by changing plant material (varieties and rootstocks), training systems and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas.

I guess there might be some genetic modification, and other techniques that do not require flooding and use less water. But that will likely affect small/medium producers, as well as and communities that depend on rice cultivation in certain areas.

Even with genetically modified rice, it might not be viable to bring water, or move families to other areas. So higher temperatures and the reduction of area that is suitable for harvesting rice might make genetically modifying rice useful only to a few.

I guess larger producers may be able to afford workarounds but that may increase cost to end users. Which is already a lot higher in Brazil than 10 years ago for normal and for the Japanese rice.

I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.

I did the same also to stay close to my wife's family for a few years before returning.

It is pretty common I'd say, not big news. And living here in Spain, apparently the exact same happens.

Young people normally study and work here. Many choose an Erasmus program or find job that pay 2 or 3 times more, especially in Germany, The Netherlands, Poland. We find it really difficult to hire good developers, especially seniors. Juniors are not too hard.

> It would be cool to make a similar visualization for RISC-V and compare it with ARM64.

Or even compare a subset of the instruction set to see what's missing on different archs.

Glad to see the project of server I used is still running well. The maintainer was a really nice person to work with too: https://cantaloupe-project.github.io/

It helped me that I was already familiar with some OGC & GIS tiling technologies, as what IIIF is doing is not too different. The image processing layer is different though, as you can zoom in, out, rotate, scale, etc..

There were several JavaScript clients, the one I used was one adopted by a museum, but I cannot recall the name now.

I work with workflows and HPC, and the most common is multiple workflow managers in an hpc center, or even within a department. Which is not always necessary (sometimes it feels like just because there is budget and someone skilled they prefer to reinvent than reuse).

I hope this means that trend is stopping.

Another thing I hope I will start seeing more are workflow managers sharing libraries. Most workflow managers need to handle similar tasks like submitting tasks to cloud, slurm, containers. Or even performing graph operations, visualizing graphs.

There were issues like configuring Linux (extra monitor, logitech mouse, tablet, some software) but I found everything on Framework forums or googling a bit.

I found interesting to learn there are businesses around converting used servers into desktops. Sounds like a good initiative to avoid some e-waste (assuming the desktops are easy to maintain).