I always felt like Jim was a dick here. But I agree in this context.

That’s fun, and it’s a much better use of heatmap since it’s just a binary scale (least-most similar). When we’re showing discrete options rather than a continuous “similarity” we don’t want to use heatmaps because they cause undesirable blurring.

Really what the OP is trying to do is show which areas use which phrases. A heatmap could have been used where we have multiple visualizations - one for each phrase - using “Popularity” to show smooth distribution. I assume that the source data is not by county level and instead aggregated so the choropleth never would have worked great.

This is a terrific example of where a choropleth (Ideally by county) would have been much more effective than a heat map.

The copium is strong here. There are better apps if you didn’t know….

It depends on the source. Lemmy uses “pict-rs” as the built in image hosting mechanism, this includes a way to fetch small thumbnails. But other hosts, like catbox.moe or Imgur or anywhere else might not be being fetched efficiently.

Additionally, pict-rs uses imagemagik to transform the image on request. If that transformation doesn’t already exist (cached), or the host is over-loaded or under-spec’d, then you might see a delay in the request response

Your best bet is to use your developer tools to check network usage and response times if you are interested

Dave might kill it, you don’t know!