> The customer/user can't tell the difference between a good working app and a poor working app.
Come on man, this is the whole reason Duolingo was people's favourite language learning app, or people claim they like iPhones over Android phones or Photoshop over Canva. These apps and devices all work, but which one is good or better is a debate. People have preferences; some apps in a category are easier to use than others, and some apps have branding that signals status. Now, those things become more important in differentiating your app than "It does what it is supposed to do". Until now, just getting an app to do what you wanted it to do was a competitive advantage, that's becoming a smaller advantage day by day
I find it shocking that a reputable resource such as this is still displaying the size of Greenland or Africa wrong (Mercator projection) in relation to other land masses in its marketing material and documentation, like here. It just brings doubt to the whole project, which is a shame considering all the time they must have put in. Why show the map that way when majority of its users will never use it for nautical navigation?
https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-...
I’m not sure it’s very useful to rehash an argument with very tenuous relation to the OP here. The normal reason to use the Mercator projection in these situations is (a) it’s what people are used to and (b) it preserves angles so if you zoom in on a street then up will still be north and roads that are at right angles in the real world appear to be at right angles on the map. The latter property is pretty desirable and hard to achieve without doing some weird transition between projections as you zoom. This matters more for Europe (and I suppose parts of British Colombia) where there is a high population density at latitudes that are pretty extreme in much of the world.
I think Apple Maps has a pretty reasonable compromise here of transitioning from a globe to Mercator as you zoom, but this is a less nice UI with a mouse as you need to click to rotate the globe instead of pointing and zooming only. I don’t think there’s anything in this data that would make that unachievable – you just need to reproject the vector data a bit as you zoom out – but it takes some tricky mathematics to get right and so hasn’t been done yet.
For most uses of web maps (navigation on foot, by bicycle or by car) the angles seem to be close enough with Web Mercator, and the map is zoomed in to a small area so there's no concern about the area.
No-one is zooming out the "Find your nearest Tesco" map to see Greenland.
If two lines are at right angles in the ground and, say, outside the arctic/antarctic circles, what range of angles might be between them in a web Mercator projection?
It's on our roadmap to support alternate projections, but as you can imagine it's a big project that so far nobody has been willing to pay for to implement unfortunately.
MapLibre GL JS does support globe mode. https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-... May we should update our examples to use globe mode when showing examples, especially those that show a world map. We will take that feedback into consideration!
MapLibre's globe mode is both fantastic and performant. Also, it's literally just the one option to change it, and your tile formats/CRS don't need to change either.
It's the easiest way to escape from web mercator projections with no real downsides that I have discovered yet. Also, there is a built-in control if you want to offer a button to toggle between web mercator view, and globe view, since it's all just rendering changes.
Web Mercator is the standard projection used on the web, if you think the we should use a different projection on the web then that's a completely separate argument
It's actually worse than that because the Web Mercator projection is unusable for navigation too - it doesn't preserve angles or area! (Angles are nearly preserved).
Well done Google. Slow handclap.
The NGA advised it's likely to cause geolocation errors of up to 40km near the poles:
I would not use such strong rhetoric as the GP, but I believe they probably mean we should lean towards using the Gall/Peters projection, which maintains lengths and areas, but not angles.
(There are of course other projections with other interesting features; or you could take the same projection but center the world differently etc.)
Why? Why is lengths and areas more important than angles? You have to choose one, its essentially arbitrary. Personally I find it more useful to know what is parallel to what and what is at which angles from what, than some size. We have globes, so we know what the "real size" of Greenland looks like... this has always been a silly argument from the overzealous online looking for right wrongs that don't exist.
> Why is lengths and areas more important than angles?
Well, of course the answer is "it depends on what it is you want to learn from the map. If you're driving around and want to navigate, you'll take Mercator probably. But if you want to compare sizes of objects (like lakes or forests or islands or world states), especially when zoomed out, you'll prefer Gall-Peters.
Many argue, and I tend to agree, that when looking at a map of the whole world, you are typically better served with Gall-Peters in terms of what your interest is, and in fact, people _do_ use Mercator maps to semi-consciously compare sizes of things - and have false impressions about geo-politics because of it.
This comment is inaccurate! Web Mercator causes such large errors in geolocation that the NGA had to issue an advisory about it [1].
There is a whole science behind map projections and Google ignored it entirely when they created Web Mercator, which was a hack to divide the world into a quad tree. It was vaguely clever and utterly stupid at the same time.
Hi - I understand you feel strongly; your Web Mercator input is interesting. I would just focus on the intellectually interesting part - people might not get it; you can't control that or compel them to.
You've been repeating essentially the same comment, writing in all caps (in some comments), complaining about downvotes, telling everyone they are idiots one way or another. None of those things are likely to be welcome.
Web mercator is fantastic map. It's well known of course, so very helpful to orient. Plus, its square and easily tile-able, which is good for performance. Shapes of countries are preserved. Plus, the lines are straight, which works great for on screen. Neat and tidy.
Who cares Greenland looks big when zoomed out. "Mercator distorts size" is one of those gis-nerd idee fixes, the first factoid they learn in class, and it overwhelms all thought.
I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories.
As a software engineer, I decided to build an app about side quests. Reading this article I realized I could not put a finger on what I was getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.
This is so nostalgic for me. In 1999, I watched a couple of movies, and I decided I wanted to be a hacker. I watched the movie Hackers, Swordfish and let's not forget The Matrix. These were all influntial to me, I went down a rabbit hole and found the Hacker Manifesto, which I resonated with. I slurped up all the information I could find (There wasn't much), and then came a realization that changed everything for me. Hacking was as hard as writing software to me, one was creating and inventing things and the other was tearing down what others had made...not to mention it was also illegal (White hat was not really big at the time). I was like, if I was gonna do one, I'd rather develop software and make things that made people's day and got praised for than ruin people's day and possibly go to jail. Hence my origin story as a software developer :)
The idea that criminals are not sophisticated is a weak excuse for this system.
Once the government starts mining data from iPhones, criminals will quickly adapt while every law-abiding citizen gets caught in the crossfire. It opens the door for abuse: officials could easily spy on their partners, dig up dirt on rivals, or target those they dislike without breaking any laws. Meanwhile, cybercriminals will have an easy target since every phone comes with this built-in vulnerability.
This system is likely to snag small-time offenders, not the real masterminds behind organized crime. This isn’t a smart solution for crime. It just sacrifices our privacy for a few token arrests.
Criminals don't need to be all sophisticated anyway. They just need to know how to reach one of the sophisticated criminals and pay them to extract whatever they need.
Incidentally, as a non US and non UKer, my data with the major tech firms has no protection anyway. Welcome to the club, US citizens :)
I think its crazy that we find a discovery like this in our eco-system that we barely understand and the first thing people want to do is mine them for profit. Like the race to profit with the disregard for consequences is mind-blowing
These metallic nodules on the bottom of the ocean - and the habitat they create that is teeming with life - are already slated for strip-mining actually. Finding out they are a source of oxygen may save them (or see them destroyed in a different way)
The "advantage" of deep-sea mining is that there are no neighbors to complain about the environmental effects of mining, and--since it's largely proposed in international waters--you get to choose whose environment regulations you follow.
The disadvantages are more numerous: the commercial viability of the extracted ore is extremely unclear; the seafloor is very poorly mapped, and with poor visibility, you could easily drive a seafloor rover into or over a cliff without seeing it; environmental effects are largely unknown [1]; the international authority meant to help guide these efforts has put a moratorium on it until these questions can be answered (which, given how long it's taking to answer them, has led many companies interesting in deep sea mining to advocate for ignoring it entirely).
[1] Although anyone who's had much of a thought about it would probably hazard that "insanely destructive" is the most likely outcome. Still an open question if deep sea mining is less or more destructive than our current mining techniques.
Is it surprising/crazy though? I feel like our entire capitalist mindset is to pillage everything you can stomach and to push your own boundaries because if you don't - someone else will and beat you with their profits.
It always feels like a morality race to the bottom. Clearly i'm a pessimist here, but it's obvious in my pessimistic mindset. Do you have a more positive outlook perhaps?
It's not just capitalism. The Soviet Union drained the Aral Sea in hopes of irrigating cotton farms and overfished whales whose carcasses went to waste to mindlessly meet quotas.
At least capitalism is good at extracting value from the pillaging, unlike the alternatives.
But, in the end, pillaging is inevitable. Thermodynamically, "there's stuff already there, and all we have to do is get it" is the simple sugar of industry. You'll never find easier Calories. It's too sweet to resist. That's how you end up in oxymoronic schemes like "biomass" (cutting down forests) in the pursuit of renewable energy.
Is it a capitalistic mindset? There have been many civilizations throughout history which pillaged everything they could, and I'm not sure very many were driven by capitalism.
I'm thinking about the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Huns, etc.
Marx got you covered in Das Capital, this topic is being addressed explicitly. Long story short, you're right it's not specific to capitalism, capitalism is just the latest and most formally structured system to enable this fundamental human sin.
What's interesting is that societies are not bounded by destructive instincts: over time we've progressed a lot in limiting violence between humans. We will never reach a state with absolutely zero violence, but northern Europe or Canada shows that you can definitely reach levels that are incredibly low by human standards.
Now we need to do the same will pillaging and exploitation (of both nature and other humans).
It feels premature to say regions of the world have limited violence between humans. People are still alive from a time when there was some major European violence.
It was 80 years ago though … If you combine the lack of large scale war in the area with the very low level of inter-personal violence, you've had three generations there who have lived in a situation that most people from before would have deemed impossible due to the nature of men. And yet it happened.
Incredible to see how the nuclear bomb and welfare state were able to perform such an incredible feat.
I think that just means it isn't solely a capitalist mindset, no? Which i didn't mean to say that capitalism owned the idea, just rather that it's a core tenet of capitalism.
Your salary comes from that. So too is your Internet. Maybe you are being hypocrite? To be human, we destroy. The only way is to die out and let nature take her course. Agent Smith in Matrix said summed it best that we are virus on this planet that need to be eradicated.
That seems reductive. Are you a slave owner if your shirts were made in sweatshops? You certainly contribute to the problem, but i don't think your a hypocrite if you use modern features of life - nearly all negatively impact. The alternative is living in the woods off grid - and likely illegally, since you can't afford to buy the land without also being a hypocrite in most locations.
I think there's a middle ground where you acknowledge there's a problem, try in some part to mitigate your contribution and build the world you want to be.
We don't have to be all-in on sweatshops and environmental destruction just because we in some part contribute to the problem as well.
True, but it seems more than possible that we could self-regulate to minimize the harms done
More on point, it is absolutely critical that we self-regulate, because if we fail to do so, eventually, nature WILL regulate us into oblivion. Our existence depends on an insanely complex web of life. As with any robust network, many nodes and connections can be damaged and the system will still work. But keep damaging nodes and connections, and eventually, the system cannot recover — it will break down and may die off completely. When that happens, no human technology will save our species.
And the self-regulation is happening. We may very well be on a path where improving technology gets us through to a far less destructive life mode. More education, security, and rights causes birth rates to decline. Sustainable energy production is now cheaper than digging up fossil fuels, transporting them across the globe and lighting them on fire. Lighting is 10X more efficient, etc. etc. etc.. Intentional efforts to save species and ecosystems often see them recover faster than expected.
The only question is whether we have the luck and political will to make this transition happen fast enough to get to a sustainable energy & materials economy before a critical collapse.
I think it's crazy that we keep finding discoveries like this, and yet everyone continues acting and going about their way as if we now know everything.
The world's an incredibly complex place. Who's to say the consequences of harvesting these nodules are necessarily negative? If we're just finding out new details about them, how can you possibly assume you know how removing them will affect the environment?
Epistemologically speaking, we know very little, while we erroneously believe ourselves to know all.
Kind of like how so many will assert with unshakable confidence that human activities are causatively responsible for the bulk of climate change, when we don't even have an exhaustive list of the factors influencing it, let alone the ability to study whether the observed associations are merely correlated or causative (you need to isolate all confounding variables and have robust experiment design, including controls, to establish causality).
We don't even have true mastery over human-made systems (Rowhammer, speculative execution attacks were possible for many years before any human brain had ever conveived of such a possibility), how can anyone possibly have enough intellectual arrogance to assume we understand how human activity will affect ecosystems we barely even know about the existence of?
And to be clear - I'm not arguing that companies should be allowed to start harvesting these, nor am I arguing that human activity is not the primary contributing factor to climate change - just pointing out the juxtaposition between the immense cognitive hubris and the infinite scope of how much about reality we don't even begin to have an understanding of.
Some points I would argue are that our education system is gravely flawed, our understanding of the world is dangerously shallow, and the level of self-awareness that we, collectively, as a species, have about these shortcomings of ours is dangerously low.
We ought to be ceasing much of what we waste our time with and figuring out ways to organize society to perform much more robust research, not confidently making knee-jerk assertions about the impacts of proposed activity we've never studied in an ecosystem we've barely even seen, let alone studied. That includes assertions both supporting and opposing such activity.
I am surprised people are worried about 1Password getting this money and not caring about their users. How about at least they have money to be alive for the foreseeable future. I am worried about free password managers because they are broke and could sunset the app at any point and now I have to go find something else, or better yet, no financial incentive to do the best thing for the app. They do it for fun. My security is not for fun. LOL
I find the article disappointing. I would say this article itself is not what it says it is. Its title is written in click-bait fashion in that they are about to reveal something we don't know about blockchain technology and then the first paragraphs are written in the tone that they realize theoretically blockchain technology ideally runs a certain way but they want to tell us how it runs today and then proceeds to bash the implementation of the technology today even though they realize it probably wont work that way in the future.
It is like bashing the internet of not fulfilling the potential people pitched about it in the 90s. Blockchain is currently in the dail up stage of the internet, it is centralized, slow and needs adoption and lots of man hours to unleash its potential. There are second and third order effects that need to actualize before the "dream" of blockchain technology can be realised. The article purports the lack of this actualisation of the blockchain dream as if we are being deceived.
It's like when people bashed Tesla and said it wont work because there were not enough charging stations across the USA, as if world changing technologies are realized in a day. I find it boring that people push these kind of articles as think pieces. We can do better
It's like when people bashed Tesla and said it wont work because there were not enough charging stations across the USA, as if world changing technologies are realized in a day.
Tesla built a network of chargers to fix that problem. They didn't hand-wave it away with "it probably won't work that way in the future" - they came up with a real plan of action and executed on it. After that a lot of the skeptics came around.
The same is true for cryptocurrencies and NFTs I imagine. When devs in that industry come up with a workable solution and execute it people will change their minds. Until that happens it's entirely fair and reasonable to say that cryptocurrencies and NFTs have some serious problems, and claiming "it probably wont work that way in the future" is not an answer.
You can't just ignore problems by saying they're not problems. That doesn't work.
Same goes for Tesla's autodrive efforts. People are right to bash it while the promises are not delivered. When the cars can drive themselves properly, people will mostly forgive them.
The article makes some specific points, which you fail to address. Your objection is a generic "never mind that, just give it more time". You can do better.
We keep seeing this from the crypto crowd. "It's still early days" to solve these thorny social problems with yet more tech innovation. Always just around the corner.
Ethereum has been around since 2013. It's time to stop claiming "this is broken but we just need more time to fix it". Nearly 10 years later Ethereum still doesn't have a single app (or dApp) with more than a million daily active users (DAU). That's an extremely slow adoption rate for something that is touted as "revolutionary technology". For comparison, Facebook had about 482 million active users only 5 years after launch. TikTok reached 50 million daily active users in less than a couple years.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that these issues around web3 (immutability, decentralisation etc) will be solved in the future. Do I know how they’ll be solved? No! I could guess but doubt my guesses would be any good - but pretty much every single piece of technology or large tech company has started off with something that seemed a bit fragile or silly etc. It’s interesting that there’s so much scepticism around the future of web3 on HN (could it be mix of disappointment that marketing is running amok with the term “web 3”, that it’s currently over-hyped and under-delivering, that there’s so many scams and easy money-grabs going on?)
Actually it is because we are dealing with an factual data point (I), rather than someone using hyperbole by saying something is ONLY used for x. one data point proves that wrong
One data point disproves that it can't be used for purposes other than tax evasion and money laundering, it doesn't disprove that is commonly used for this purpose and little else.
so you'd accept one anecdotal comment about a transaction without any details as a fact, versus the well known numerous transactions bitcoin has gained infamy from in the darknet markets- which supposedly is evidential enough for the FBI?
I have to agree with you, as someone who lived in the US for 10 years and moved back to my home country, I see the influence of Western culture from TV and the internet, but in my absence the local culture also tweaked itself and started exporting it to neighbouring countries also via the same internet.
There will be influence of the West for a while, but I think other countries are using these mediums also to push their own thought simultaneously. I have watched more spanish TV shows via netflix that I ever would if there was only cable (for example)
Come on man, this is the whole reason Duolingo was people's favourite language learning app, or people claim they like iPhones over Android phones or Photoshop over Canva. These apps and devices all work, but which one is good or better is a debate. People have preferences; some apps in a category are easier to use than others, and some apps have branding that signals status. Now, those things become more important in differentiating your app than "It does what it is supposed to do". Until now, just getting an app to do what you wanted it to do was a competitive advantage, that's becoming a smaller advantage day by day
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