I am a robotics engineer/scientist and I do shit ton of visualization of all kind of high-fidelity/high-rate data, often in a streaming setting - time series at a few thousand Hz, RGB/depth images from multiple cameras, debugging my models by visualizing many layer outputs, every augmentation, etc.

For a long time, I had my own observability suite - a messy library of python scripts that I use for visualizing data. I replaced all of them with rerun (https://rerun.io/) and if you are someone who think Scipton is exciting, you should def try rerun too!

I use cursor/vscode for my development and add a line or two to my usual workflows in python, and rerun pops up in it's own window. It's a simple pip installable library, and just works. It's open source, and the founders run a very active forum too.

Edit: One slightly related tid-bit that might be interesting to HN folks. rerun isn't that old, and is in active development, with some breaking changes and new features that come up every month. And it means that LLM are pretty bad at rerun code gen, beyond the simple boilerplate. Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious. To make my life easier, I asked rerun folks to create and host machine readable docs somewhere and they never got to it. So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.

> So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.

Huh. Nice hack. I may have to give that a try for some of the more obscure stuff I deal with.

> Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious.

I'm really agog at this. Do your interns understand that if they're just an LLM prompt injector, their job can be done by anybody? I haven't bumped into this yet, but I think your reaction was a lot more positive than mine would have been.

I know that I certainly wouldn't be rehiring any interns that gave me that kind of grief.

Thanks for the shoutout!

We did recently add an export for LLMs[1], but weren't quite confident in how the big models handled it. The biggest issue we kept running into was that it would prefer using older APIs over the latest ones. I tested it just now with ChatGPT, and it seems to be doing a lot better! The export is kept up-to-date with the latest contents of our docs, which update every release. Sometimes a bit more frequently, if we're doing drive-by doc fixes.

For convenience, here's a GPT pre-loaded with the file: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-674702fde5948191a810bdf73370b6eb-rer...

[1]: https://rerun.io/llms.txt

I am impressed by the AI integration and simplicity of Data Formulator from Microsoft Research which runs one click in a Codespace so can't be much easier to get started throwing things together.

https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator

Just a note: ReRun works out-of-the box for a number of uses, but I ended up switching to my own (simple, visualization-oriented) engine based on WGPU and EGUI (ReRun uses both of those as well), so I had better control over the camera, visualizations, snapshots etc.

For magnet levitation project I am dumping data to a csv on a rpi and then reading it over ssh onto matplotlib on my desktop. It works but it choppy. Probably because of the ssh.

Could I drop rerun into this to improve my monitoring?

https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc

I've had rerun bookmarked for a few years and this comment is enough to persuade me to finally try it out. Currently I resort to notebooks for simpler stuff and just spinning up a quick GUI for anything more, I've always found the middle-grounds just as much work as having my own UI and less powerful. Using frameworks like IMGUI, spinning up my own high-performance video and plotting was as simple as <100 lines of code, and also gives me a base of something which can be shipped to a client if neccessary.

> So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.

i found with aider if you do README.md with a halfway decent "spec" it will try to comply in architect or coder mode. I've been messing with it idly, and i will try this tack - give it the spec for the library or whatever.

someday, and i threaten this all the time, i am going to launch a website where i put all of these little "tricks" that make sense post hoc :-)

Rerun is exactly what we have been looking for years. A game engine for the visualisation of multidimensional data without all the game 3D knowledge. I have so many questions!

(Can I access a mmap file, display it in real time with rerun and save a history at the same time?)

Wow I hadn't seen rerun before, this thing is amazing!