If you haven't read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M's backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):

# Assuming df is your DataFrame

# Show the plot
plt.show()

That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn't actually think about the code at all.

What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there's bigger issues to watch out for?

https://programming.dev/post/20491311/12787623

Might be an LLM-generated response? Kind of bizarre. If it's not OK to link to other posts on Lemmy, will take this down.

Mindustry dev has had enough

I've encountered some conflicting usages of Tag:landuse=residential. Some areas are very specific, and broken down into individual blocks, while some areas cover multiple blocks. Here's an example of both styles adjacent to each other:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/653823458

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/652122607

The wiki doesn't really say much on the topic. Does anyone have opinions/rules of thumb on how to tag them exactly? It seems like all adjacent areas not separated by major highways should be joined together?

I've encountered some residential areas that are broken down into mapping each block, and literally follow the curb, rounded corners and all. That seems too specific?

I'm looking at Tag:crossing=marked, and it's a little vague. It says:

Set a node on the highway where the transition is and add highway=crossing + crossing=marked.

If the crossing is also mapped as a way, tag it as highway=footway footway=crossing crossing=marked or highway=cycleway cycleway=crossing crossing=marked as appropriate.

Doesn't that violate the principle of One feature, one OSM element? For example, here's a crossing from where overpass-turbo defaults to showing:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/7780814396

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/833493479

You've got a way with these tags:

crossing=marked
crossing:markings=yes
footway=crossing
highway=footway
surface=asphalt

And the intersection node with the street it's crossing has these tags:

crossing=marked
crossing:markings=yes
highway=crossing
tactile_paving=no

Shouldn't that be one or the other? It makes sense to me to represent the crossing as a way with all the tags, and leave the intersection untagged. I noticed though that StreetComplete doesn't really like that, and will give you quests to add tags to the intersection node even if the way is properly tagged.

Original comment:

I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?

Previous discussion

I've got a patio for a restaurant tagged as leisure=outdoor_seating. That page says you can add operator=* as a string, but I'm wondering if I can add a Relation between the patio and the restaurant. This is really for semantic reasons, because if the restaurant changes its name or gets a new owner, it would be nice if the patio didn't then have out-of-date information.

I don't see a Relation type that's relevant. I don't want to just start doing my own thing, so does anyone know of a way to use a Relation here, and if not, is that something that can be proposed?

Thanks for all of the responses on my other questions, btw. This community has been very helpful.

I'm taking a look at traffic circles like this:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=19/33.790043/-118.142392

The main traffic circle has been split up into 8 different segments, so that individual segments can have Relations added to them, such as the "Long Beach Transit 174" bus route. I'm new to mapping, so I don't really know what to expect, but it seems odd to split it up like that. It ends up adding noise to StreetComplete, in that I can't just say "yep, this traffic circle is asphalt", I have to go to a bunch of tiny segments and mark each one of them as asphalt.

I've also seen this for items generated from Lyft data, where a single road gets split into tiny segments so that one part can be marked as "no u-turn" or "no left turn". StreetComplete wants me to mark each tiny segment individually.

I'm looking to tag a simple 4 way stop with typical US red/yellow/green traffic signals. I was wondering what the difference between signal and traffic_lights is in iD, and the wiki page just says this about traffic_lights:

A typical traffic signal. This value was the second most common value as of 2021-09-15 despite being undocumented until that point.

Looking at the talk page there, it links to this post, where an iD dev seems rather annoyed at the wiki:

I took a look at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:traffic_signals and now I'm furious.

Forget it.

There is no way I'm going to support traffic_signals=yes for pedestrian signals, after the wiki folks aren't even ok with iD using traffic_signals=signal for a normal traffic signal - a tagging that was accepted just not very widespread before iD started doing it.

The OSM Wiki needs to end. Seriously. It's ruining this project.

I'm using iD, so should I just leave it as the default signals and leave the fighting up to the devs? As an aside, does anyone know why there seems to be so much animosity there? Kind of surprising TBH

I've encountered a bus stop that still exists, but has a sign from the city saying that no busses stop there. There's the disused tag on the wiki which seems relevant, but I'm not sure how to tag it exactly. There's lots of tags like ref, route_ref, operator:wikidata and so on. Should all of those tags get prefixed with disused:?

I'm trying to correct local buildings on OSM. I've noticed that some of the buildings were traced before according to one set of satellite images, but are off according to others. One of the options for a background while editing that I've got is called orthoimagery. Can I assume that that is the best set of satellite images for tracing buildings from?