Couple things to know about leap seconds, which have ceased to be as of this week:
* Unix timestamps are defined as seconds since epoch minus however many leap seconds have happened so far (!)
* There have been 27 leap seconds, with the last one in 2016.
* Negative leap seconds were a possibility and could have broken everything. No more.
Felt it to be impolite to present without any slides, so spent a morning charting the GTFS Binary format for the meetup. This + sharing the screen with some code and maps + sharing the phone screen with some more maps would do.
A side effect of that was that a user database grew to 6.5 GB and filled the free disc space on my server :)
With help and encouragement from Dorothea, finished the list of people I and Kristel from @kprod interviewed at #SotM2026 :
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2026/Interviews
Feel free to edit if you think something needs a better description!
(also I feel I could do better, but good enough for the first time! Thank to everyone who agreed to speak on camera!)
Looks like Level0 has fallen after LLM bots requested half the OSM ways and relations through it, and the OSM API has auto-banned it (I see HTTP 429 errors).
I guess I will require signing in before downloading data soon, which would make it less comfortable but more resilient to scraping.
Sorry everyone.
Ming has shared a wikidata page for @sotm with most of the speakers listed: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q136691456
My immediate thought was, wait, so given the wikidata tries to collect all the information, some people would be deadnamed there?
A quick search did not reveal any policies, but I found a reddit thread for wikipedia, and the comments had a link to Elliot Page: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/11js4p7/am_i_weird_for_thinking_wikipedias_deadname/
I open the wiki page, and first thing I see, his real name is highlighted once, but his dead name twice. Wtf.
It is a bit weird that most of the Mobifree grant time was spent on the research, the new binary format (two actually), and a server infrastructure. And planning more research. But then, it will make writing the actual app pretty easy!
Now a server that feeds off @transitous packaging metadata and converting feeds to GTFS Binary is up. The URL, the code and the documentation are here: https://github.com/Zverik/gtfs_binary_server
Thanks to @NGIZero for sponsoring! Pity the new cycle only includes core internet.
When a programmer offers a new tool to greatly simplify mapping #openstreetmap, I first go see their edits count to check if they even understand what OSM is.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/sky-is-here/diary/409355 (yes it's AI but doesn't matter, programmers have been trying to "help" us loooong before LLM).
Any Switch console owners here? Jacob, whom I've been sponsoring for years and who writes excellent game reviews, is giving away a couple hidden-object games about ducks: https://eshopperreviews.com/2026/09/10/ducks-in-disguise-giveaway/
Watching recorded talks from #sotm2026 with the AI-generated subtitles. Funny how when people speak with a thick french accent, it thinks they speak in French and _translates_ their English words into French. And for some it uses completely esotheric unreadable languages.
Looks like we have nothing planned for @sotm on Thursday and Friday. Any ideas folks? :)
My feed has been recently drowning in photos of this book by @grimalkina and I should say, it worked. Got my own now.
Opened at a random page and omg, too hard to put back. Definitely a recommended reading for anybody in IT.
Bought my plane tickets to @opentransport . Will present https://github.com/Zverik/gtfs-binary and everything relevant (the old protobuf version, my size and content research, the transit app with an open library). See you in Bern!
An excellent post by @maproomblog on LLM-generated maps and why it's important to know what's behind those:
https://www.maproomblog.com/2026/07/gatekeepers-luddites-haters-and-ai-generated-maps/
What touched me is the observation that it's mostly professional cartographers who post LLM-generated stuff. Which makes me sad, because I can no longer treat them as professionals, for obvious reasons.
It's the same with programming — you use LLM, you stop being a professional. Same with writing, painting etc.
Professional is to stand by every detail.
@VolkerKrause this might be of interest to you / @transitous people: I've downloaded all the GTFS feeds and run some stats.
(This is a part of my GTFS Proto project funded by @NGIZero — investigating an alternative file format. Planning to meet you all at the @opentransport to discuss the results!)
RE: https://mapstodon.space/@adamsteer/116860547249254319
In Estonia, I would love to work in geospatial, and we have many openings, but the advertised pay grade is always like 30% lower than I get at my current job. And I'm doing low-level hardware Kotlin programming with zero prior experience for both Java/Kotlin and hardware stuff, unlike decades for geo.
Started working on packaging GTFS feeds into something akin to cloud-optimized files (but for phones, so it's megabytes, not gigabytes). and feel out of my depth :I
On the other hand, GTFS in a protobuf was a success: 5 MB file + 28 MB vector tiles were all it took to make a 100% offline app that shows stops, arrivals for each, and routes for the entire Estonia.
It's just the initialization (binary → sqlite) took like half a minute, and that's unacceptable for a consumer app.
Thanks @NGIZero
I do support automating changeset summaries when mapping with a phone. Making people type comments by hand would deter so many mappers (probably leading them to JOSM).
Dear @foss4geurope attendees, you can download the conference schedule on your phone!
It's simple: for Android, install the Giggity app, and you will see the conference in the list.
For iPhone users, open this page and click on the iCalendar link:
https://sotm.osmz.ru/fe2026.html
The page also has QR codes for everything if you're reading this on a laptop.
Thanks to @jjimenezshaw for reminding me of the conference and to other orgs for hosting all of them in Eastern Europe!
RE: https://mas.to/@markwyner/116690681864274098
The reason I'm wearing a rainbow heart pin every day this week: commuting, working, travelling to another country, presenting at a conference, drinking beer at a crowded social place, riding a bike across the city.
I understand it's not enough, but nothing I do is ever enough. Just something is better than nothing. In our shared political climate, abstaining often means siding with the worst.