Coming up. I'm implementing some small bits of the COMTRANs plan, as it's politically relevant to our election cycle right now (https://www.transport.gov.lk/web/images/downloads/F-CoMTrans...). It won't be a full implementation - we're a small team, and I want to encourage other people to come on board with their ideas. We do have a reasonable "how we did this" section if you're interested! https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

Many, many years ago (2004?) I was on a NSF research project about participatory GIS, trying to help people (voters) make informed choices about transportation alternatives in a region—which road or rail improvements to make, and how to apportion funds between them. At the time, we dreamed about being able to let people run a simulation of the consequences of their chosen package, but that was definitely not feasible with the technology we had at the time. That's the background for why I'm so envious of what y'all pulled off!

That’s very cool! Do you have any papers I can read?

We had a similar experience with the university labs: this professor of transport telling us how he was working on letting people modify land use maps to their liking in the 90s and early 2000s, and wishing they had tools like this.

Hopefully we too will soon see stuff that makes us think “damn, I’m so envious!”

They've been surprisingly receptive. We've taken care to point out that the map is not the territory, but we've had conversations with urban planners and professors (especially the Town and Country planning department at the University of Moratuwa): they're very interested in using this as a teaching tool for students. I recently did a presentation to 150 students + urban designers and transport specialists, and they were super interested in a) trying this on smaller pieces at greater fidelity b) simulating other cities as well (like Kandy) and smaller towns where there is more planning leeway c) using this to illustrate effects of plans like COMTRANS (https://www.transport.gov.lk/web/images/downloads/F-CoMTrans...) which is why we built the thing in the first place.

I love to hear the reception went so well. Awesome to see this game used as a tool.

A crude 'digital twin` with detailed land use and zoning based on official city development plans and data centered around 2020; over a million virtual citizens, simulating population dynamics that reflect large-scale, real-world demographics and human movement; public transport based on actual route data.

A little tool that lets you ask questions from your pdfs, epubs, text files and word documents. Think Chatpdf.com or Box AI, but a personal librarian.

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary." - Taleb