[OSM-talk] What3words

Frank Villaro-Dixon frank at villaro-dixon.eu
Tue Jul 12 16:13:35 UTC 2016


On 16-07-12 11:04:59, Jóhannes Birgir Jensson, wrote 2.4K characters saying:
>The circle-jerk is strong here about w3w, they have a human readable 
>solution for GPS-coordinates (which OPL isn't sadly), they've pledged to 
>offer the source code if their business goes belly-up and seem to doing a 
>lot of good things. I'm slightly perplexed at the extent of vitriol they 
>suffer here.


I didn't knew about W3W before yesterday. When I looked-it up, I thought:
``Yay, this system is so cool. It's easier to remember words than numbers, 
so it should be useful.''
Then I looked at the coordinates of my house. Something like 
"pudding.speaker.table". Okay, that's definitely easy to remember. But 
when I looked at the coordinates of my neighbour (I expected something 
like "pudding.speaker.Z"), and they were completely different. There's 
absolutely no way of knowing adjacent coordinates form the tile you're in.

And that's fucking shit! Could you imagine in a city ? If you're in 
"Boulevard Jacques", next to house number 42 and you want to reach the 
"1324 Boulevard Jacques", then it's easy: it's sequential.

But with this revolutionary new system if you're in 
"pudding.speaker.table", want to go to "completely.broken.system", and 
your phone no longer has a charge, then you're fucked.

More importantly, the system is completely "brain-inefficient". If 
everybody adopted this system you would then have to remember all the 
codes for all the places whereas of now you don't need to. Your brain only 
remembers the road and then a number for each house.


I won't even talk about the fact that their magical algorithm is 
completely closed..


Frankly, the system could be interesting if they didn't implement their 
magical "error correction", and thus made the addressing sequential (like 
first column is some segmented space, second column is latitude, last is 
longitude) or something logical.

I can already see an elderly people reacting to their idea: ``Meh, who 
needs that shit ?''


A shame…



Cheers,



-- 
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