Hacker News

Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale(blocks.manifold3d.ch)

482 points by theanonymousone 4 days ago | 221 comments

Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:

https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/

> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.

> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.

> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.

> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.

[–] INTPenis 4 days ago

I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.

Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?

[–] skrebbel 3 days ago

The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.

[–] mbesto 3 days ago

If thats the case, the parent's critique was oddly stated and confusing. The phrase "to do it" implies the "LLM puffery" was required to accomplish the task, which clearly providing LLM generated praise isn't required in either setting to create a world in minecraft.

[–] amiga386 3 days ago

Denmark presented the world with their entire country as a Minecraft map, and they did it without inflicting an awful marketing website on us. This Swiss project couldn't resist the urge to produce such an eyesore of a website while providing the world with another 1:1 Minecraft map of a country.

[–] orangedog 3 days ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with this website, just some people hate slop.

[–] amiga386 3 days ago

Compare:

"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."

"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."

The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

There's literally nothing wrong with the website, what are you on about.

[–] Spooky23 3 days ago

Some people get a rise out of dissing LLM stuff.

[–] mahboi 3 days ago

Was thinking, the automation to produce the map was probably not an LLM

[–] pluc 3 days ago

That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.

[–] spicyusername 3 days ago

Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.

    I don't get it

Because it looks cool to see the real world in blocks. And if it looks cool, it is cool, as they say.

[–] tantalor 3 days ago

People have been doing this for a LONG TIME

Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:

> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWAwWD47OE

[–] YeahThisIsMe 3 days ago

You're actually allowed to play video games the way you want to.

[–] INTPenis 3 days ago

"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"

You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.

[–] xylidszi 3 days ago

thank you for the wisdom INTPenis

[–] FrustratedMonky 3 days ago

Think you are missing a couple decades of Minecraft automation. Its been done since the beginning. This is just cool example of taking it to extreme.

[–] emdash 3 days ago

The game generates the worlds using automation even when playing normally. Have you even played Minecraft?

[–] mahboi 3 days ago

Yeah, but normally the world-gen is automated and then the rest isn't. I get the comment. Minecraft isn't fun when you automate everything. People have been hosting WorldEdit-spammed servers since the beginning that were always lame. The real-life to ingame map conversions were novel at first but are old news now. One famous example was the UC Berkeley replica, which was done in creative mode manually in 2020. Tons of people joined that server and explored the entire campus. Then Stanford auto-gen'd their campus ingame from real-life spatial data, and it was boring, and nobody cared.

These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.

[–] ecto 3 days ago

How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?

The world changing - no need to be rude about it.

[–] amiga386 3 days ago

If someone said that about a website I had an LLM shit out, that led with such inauthentic marketroid speak, I'd say "it's a fair cop, guv"

I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"

[–] jagged-chisel 3 days ago

“Puffery” is about the article, not the work

[–] Applejinx 3 days ago

That would be weird and disheartening BECAUSE I'm not using LLMs to work instead of me and have ideas instead of me and implement them instead of me.

If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.

[–] rossy 3 days ago

I'll never have to worry about that.

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

Because you never produce anything? Just consume?

[–] syshyk 3 days ago

The suggestion is they'd never use an LLM to do the work.

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

No, the suggestion is that no one will accuse their work of being LLM puffery - which as I'm sure you can appreciate, can happen whether you've used an LLM or not.

[–] mpalmer 3 days ago

Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.

[–] mahboi 3 days ago

LLM-written code is fine, but the slop docs are worthless. The world is changing. When LLMs went mainstream, managers were encouraging writing docs with those, but the novelty has worn off and people realize the output is bad. AI slop public websites are like docs, people get a whiff and bail out.

[–] _doctor_love 3 days ago

The Denmark reference made me think of a funny thing I heard about the Danish entrepreneur Simon Spies (quite a character).

He said he wanted a globe for the desk in his office, 'but to scale'.

[–] teddyh 3 days ago

Just turn the desk upside down. Now he has a 1:1 scale globe on top of his desk.

[–] _doctor_love 3 days ago

Holy shit that's genius!

(Edit: I mean it, that really made me laugh)

[–] osense 3 days ago

Denmark? Ah, so it's a 2D dataset only?

sorry, I'll show myself out...

[–] jbrnh 3 days ago

Denmark has a larger area then Switzerland, but Switzerland has a larger surface then Denmark.

[–] alasano 3 days ago

I'd like to subscribe to your Denmark vs Switzerland fun facts, cause I just had fun.

[–] xquce 3 days ago

How dare you! We have The Sky Mountain! …

Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill.. and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is.. And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..

Okay it’s 2D…

[–] epihelix 3 days ago

To be fair, Denmark is very flat and could probably be represented by a single block :)

Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?

[–] stavros 4 days ago

It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.

[–] stymaar 4 days ago

Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.

[–] well_ackshually 4 days ago

Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.

This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.

[–] cadamsdotcom 3 days ago

Doing something and charging money for it is how a lot of things that cost money got started.

[–] stavros 4 days ago

Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".

[–] hypfer 4 days ago

I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey.

The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.

No one did this.

And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.

So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.

[–] jnovek 3 days ago

“No one did this … the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea“

If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”.

Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.

[–] well_ackshually 3 days ago

Deal! Let's go!

Here's Chicago (assuming their preview is always the same): https://map2minecraft.com/for/developers#world-demo. It took zero effort.

Picking Providence, New York on a map took two minutes to render, and I was walking around it. Paying 20 bucks gets me the whole 88km². Is it steep? Yeah, a bit. At least they get to have the excuse that it takes some actual CPU time to render because it's all on demand, but they don't have the gall to pretend that they "need it to improve the peaks".

But if you don't want to pay a single cent, feel free to download https://arnismc.com/, it'll fetch the data from OSM, terrain elevation from Tilezen, and you can get absolutely any area in the world you want. It'll cost you... The electricity and the time.

You don't even need to prompt it. cargo run --release --no-default-features -- --output-dir="C:/YOUR_PATH/.minecraft/saves" --bbox="min_lat,min_lng,max_lat,max_lng" is right there. It's a single command.

>it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.

It _is_ the sum total of work the author put into it. Prism Launcher (https://prismlauncher.org/) handles the modding part of it. OptiFine makes it playable. Cubic Chunks removes the height limit. Can't be arsed to download 1GB of test data, but arnis or equivalent open source software is used to voxelize it. Leeching off of free work, through and through.

Also the "author" is trying to pass this off as a small, funny little independent artist stuff, when the company behind it quite literally sells 3D prints of the same areas of Switzerland. The entire goal is to be a profiteer, a leech. Literally a dropshipper.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

I'm not interested in engaging with bad faith gotcha-style communication like this.

Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?

I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.

[–] aacid 3 days ago

Art is subjective, you not liking it doesn't mean it is bad. You just do not like it and that is ok.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

I did not say that I wouldn't like it.

[–] convict 4 days ago

The LLM puffery referring to the website and the texts on it, i guess

[–] petterroea 4 days ago

Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money.

I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.

I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.

[–] palata 3 days ago

> they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself

Deal! Make a screen recording of you doing the same thing (well, instead of Switzerland let's say Austria, since Switzerland is already done) and I'll pay you 15 bucks.

[–] gb2d_hn 4 days ago

Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself. Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify. Why do we give anyone any money? Why don't we just do everything ourselves?

[–] petterroea 4 days ago

That's not really how it works, because in all your examples there is a pretty reasonable amount of work being put in that you are paying for.

Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.

A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"

[–] andybak 4 days ago

So do it. Everything AI assisted I've made has involved a ton of work. The only difference AI has made is that I've increased the level of my ambition and avoided a ton of things that were previously blockers.

[–] erfgh 3 days ago

I think whether it requires a lot of work is not the most important factor. The important factor is how easy it is to replace it. If it was made with AI I expect it to be easily copiable with AI. Therefore it doesn't make much sense to spend a lot, if any, money on it.

[–] FeepingCreature 3 days ago

There is no problem and no contradiction between your views.

If you want it, and you think it's easy to replace, try to reproduce it with AI.

If you find that it is harder than you thought, then go back and pay for the original.

[–] cman1444 3 days ago

It is surely much easier to replace a potato than to recreate this. Yet we still pay for potatoes.

[–] slopinthebag 3 days ago

no it's not. for one, potatoes take months to grow. secondly, they require land that many of us don't have.

generating an ai image of a potato is a better comparison.

[–] dewey 3 days ago

> Many AI projects are just a few prompts away

"Just a few prompts" is the new "can do that in a weekend". In reality it still takes a while to build everything, think about what features you want to have and how to prioritize them, how to build a good UX / UI, set up payment providers etc.

[–] hansonkd 3 days ago

Not saying you are wrong, but I just wanted to share that if you build the software for yourself, a lot of requirements just vanish. like you dont need payment providers or support multiple users, etc.

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

Well, then do it! If it's so simple and so offensive to you that you might actually copy this project and publish it for free, then PLEASE do it - I'll happily download your copy for free. Just make sure you fit it within an hour.

[–] donohoe 3 days ago

  "Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify."

It is more like "Why do I give money to someone playing a track on Spotify when I could play that track on Spotify."

[–] malikNF 3 days ago

Thats a DJ

[–] well_ackshually 4 days ago

>Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself.

Because growing fruits is hard.

>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.

Because playing music is hard.

This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

[–] FrustratedMonky 3 days ago

AI generated web sites don't magically appear out of the ether.

Just like someone had to grow the potato.

Someone had to 'use' the AI to 'do something'.

The AI just cut out some steps, -> Just Like the Plow did.

[–] rfgplk 4 days ago

> This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.

As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?

[–] fzeroracer 3 days ago

> Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work.

It's interesting that you immediately call them an AI detractor because they refuse to pay for something that's low effort. You're not entitled to someone's money and people certainly aren't required to pay for something if they think they can just make it themselves. You're complaining about a bed of your own making, where you want to act like it requires a lot of effort while people replicate it effortlessly.

[–] bluebarbet 3 days ago

This is a silly debate you're both having. Money is not real, and a price is whatever a buyer is willing to pay. Emotions are best spent elsewhere.

[–] cman1444 3 days ago

It's not just their refusal to pay for something that's low-effort. It's the fact that they are criticizing the creator for charging anyone at all.

You're not entitled to dictate what someone else charges for their product, no matter how easy it is to make.

[–] fzeroracer 3 days ago

I'm sorry, I didn't realize we're on a forum where you're not allowed to criticize how people price things. My mistake, I'll be sure to tell other people to censor their posts ahead of time.

[–] slopinthebag 3 days ago

you're allowed to criticize. criticism is not dictation.

[–] slopinthebag 3 days ago

"ai detractors" and it's people saying they won't pay for something they could build themselves using ai...

[–] well_ackshually 3 days ago

Because if you're a talentless hack, you could have least have the decency to not charge for open data (that Swiss taxpayers have already paid for). There is nothing original, creative, new to this project.

[–] rfgplk 3 days ago

So Google shouldn't charge for API access to maps either according to you. It's all open data

[–] well_ackshually 3 days ago

Google Maps is absolutely not open data lmao. A single read of their terms of services threatens you about twenty times about the consequences of copying, caching or looking the wrong way at their tiles, metadata, map styles, reverse geocoders and any other service.

[–] IncreasePosts 3 days ago

They aren't charging for open data. They transformed the data, using AI.

[–] j1elo 3 days ago

Go to the fundamentals. Assuming that this is low effort, if this is low value, it will die sooner than later. If this is high value, soon there would be incentive for someone to do a clone and charge $1 less to compete.

[–] tiborsaas 4 days ago

Why do people go to restaurants and pay significantly more when they can just buy the ingredients and cook at home? Those damn chefs make my food in 15 minutes.

[–] samus 3 days ago

Just tally up how long it takes to shop, cook at home, and clean up, and multiply it with the rate at $dayjob. I am pretty sure for most people on Hacker News the figure will be significantly higher than at a restaurant, and we would have to adopt a similar working style to bring the cost down, like buying and preparing in bulk, focusing on a few dishes, cooking for multiple people at once, etc.

I am not exactly a fan of this kind of comparison unless one can actually freely allocate one's time, but it is illustrative.

[–] adrian_b 3 days ago

What you say is right in principle, but the difference in cost between raw food ingredients and ready-to-eat meals from a supermarket is huge (ten times or more) and in comparison with the same food bought in a restaurant it is even greater, of up to 50 times or even 100 times.

Because of this great price difference, it is not very difficult to optimize how you cook in order to reduce the time spent with that down to a level that would save money even by your accounting method. Moreover, when you cook your own food the greatest advantage is that you know precisely the quality and the quantity of the ingredients that are included and that may be enough to make it worthwhile.

For instance, I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, but I spend little time for that. I buy some ingredients from a supermarket once per week, which requires about a half of hour. Other ingredients I order from an online shop and they arrive at my home.

Cooking requires each day about one hour, i.e. about a half hour for each of the 2 meals I eat, but most of each half hour is waiting for food to be cooked in a microwave oven or for it to cool down, when I can work or do any other activities. Only about 10 minutes are needed at each meal with things like paring and slicing vegetables, mixing ingredients and washing dishes. I bake even the bread that I eat, instead of buying it. Cooking with a microwave oven allows a lot of shortcuts in comparison with traditional methods, e.g. many dishes that require stirring when done on a stove do not require it when done in a microwave oven, which frees you to do other things. The same is true with bread, which does not require the traditional kneading of the dough when done in a microwave oven, but you can use an excess of water (or milk) that makes the dough fluid enough to mix it easily and this is sufficient and the bread will grow tremendously anyway.

Years ago, I was wasting much more time with cooking, so I typically cooked in a weekend day the food for all week and I just reheated it every day, but after gaining more experience I could reduce the required time until I could afford to cook only immediately before eating, because the time needed for that is short enough.

Nonetheless, when cooking for an entire family while having a job that occupies most of your time, probably only the method with cooking in a weekend day for all week is feasible.

[–] amiga386 3 days ago

Why do people go to real restaurants, with chefs who actually cook things, when they can cook at home? Possibly the quality of the food, atmosphere etc.

Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.

Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.

[–] tiborsaas 3 days ago

Interesting division you make there, I go to both "real", higher end restaurants and "low grade" pub restaurants. For me, the the reason is the same, convenience, laziness and lack of my expertise and willingness to cook.

Obviously I can judge a place based on the quality of service and food, but that's not the reason I've gone there in the first place.

[–] skybrian 3 days ago

They spent the tokens so you don’t have to. This is clearly AI-generated but doesn’t look low-effort, even with heavy AI assistance.

But if you’re sure it’s easy, why not give it a try?

[–] throwaway2037 3 days ago

How do you feel about AI generated music? There is an artists who calls themself "Nick Hustles" that makes a lot of funny soul/funk tracks. You can listen on YouTube or Spotify. It feels like a different type of Weird Al Yankovic -- the humor is a bit more adult. Honestly, I'm fine with it, but I can I understand if you feel different.

Here is a good tune ("Minding My Goddamn Business"), and the lyrics really make me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhvUJi01ng

The New Yorker also wrote about him here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/that-new-h...

[–] guitarlimeo 3 days ago

Not GP but the value of AI music to me is $0. It had its one time novelty moments ("look what AI can do") and can fill the background as any $0 muzak before could. But as anyone, me included can generate songs like that infinite times makes it so common it's lame. There's no scarcity of AI songs, why should I be impressed with any that come up?

Plus it seems Suno still hasn't managed to figure the static noise creeping up as the song goes on (compare the sound of the hi-hats at the start vs. the end)

[–] throwaway2037 3 days ago

This feels like the same argument all over again. Think about the open source projects who are posting new rules like: "No AI/LLM usage is allowed!" Yet, there are many cases where you cannot tell if AI/LLM was used. For the Nick Hustles track that I shared, you cannot tell.

I recall in the 1990s a big argument about using vocoders in the production of pop music to adjust the tone of a singers voice. Many critics were quick and loud to say the users were no longer "real artists". Really, those critics have been left in the dust. In modern music production, vocoders are now commonplace.

[–] guitarlimeo 2 days ago

I have come to terms with code being replaced by AI, even though some of it could be described as art created by a skilled artist (see: Animal Well). Most of it has utility first and foremost, and should be secure from attacks and optimized. If AI can do those things better than humans, then commercial software should move to that direction to be better utilized.

I do not share the same sentiment regarding drawn art or music and will try my best to support artists who don't need AI to perform/create. Modern music production already is using AI to its fullest extent for sure, its their loss. I've never listened much pop and instead have always tried to support people who actually have more skills in their toolset than just writing lyrics. My most listened genres atm include jazz, psychedelic rock and metal.

> For the Nick Hustles track that I shared, you cannot tell.

I accept that the future is bleak and there will be many cases where I won't know until someone points it out. It has happened a couple of times already. Always a big disappointment, then I shrug it off and go back to artists I know. I'm not alone in feeling this disappointment. [1]

> Many critics were quick and loud to say the users were no longer "real artists". Really, those critics have been left in the dust. In modern music production, vocoders are now commonplace.

How is this an apt analogy? Yes, those critics are better left in the dust, a signal modifier (vocoder) is just a signal modifier. Suno creates whole songs, skipping all the skills needed to even be a musician. Are you seriously comparing the two?

Also if that analogy worked, this "gotcha" doesn't really work for me as I never haven't really liked modern music production where playback is more and more common live. Multiple times I've thought of organizing a "live-only" festival where only simple setups are allowed to allow artists to show how skilled they really are, but I've realized that 1) most pop artists won't go there to show their lack of skills 2) jazz festivals exist for already skilled musicians.

I personally think there will be some "no AI used" label for artists, much like there is for organic food, and people like me who value human skills & craftmanship and want to support that kinda lifestyle can use that labeling when making purchases. Much in the similar fashion as with organic label nowadays I predict it will be gamed, there will be disappointments, but it will on a longer run be better than not having anything like that. It is to make a statement, it is to support local, smaller artists and reject the norm.

[1] https://business.columbia.edu/insights/digital-future/why-ai...

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

Right, but the value of the same music just generated by a human was also $0. If the tracks are effectively background music it doesn't matter how they are made - the value is nothing.

[–] guitarlimeo 3 days ago

No it isn't to me. It's infinitely more valuable to me even if its sold at $0.01 as AI to me is $0.

[–] tern 2 days ago

Were I thinking of giving money to a cause, I would consider it a good thing that $20-100k of it wasn't going to building a website that they could otherwise build nearly for free. I'd rather my money go toward solving the core problem they're raising the money for.

[–] weego 3 days ago

If your only measure of value is human labour just say that. Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance.

Obviously anyone can make anything once they've seen it implemented from someone else's idea. Maybe sometimes the idea is the value in itself, the action of taking it from zero to product is just a means to distribute the idea.

[–] monsieurbanana 3 days ago

> Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance

The human brain works with pattern recognition. Regardless of whether I think that llms are great or not, right now they're vastly used to produce slop (I know it doesn't have to be the case), and because of the aforementioned pattern recognition we are largely being trained to recognize ai-generated content as slop.

There's really only one logical outcome:

If you're trying to sell something to me and you have a vibe-coded website, it doesn't matter how great your product is, I'll never even get to see it because it's slop-by-default.

And you don't even have to bring up AI at all to see how that's a bad idea. AI is flooding everything, isn't it a basic marketing strategy to differentiate yourself from the rest?

[–] olmo23 4 days ago

I disagree. What might be "a few prompts in claude code" for you, could be a lot of work for someone else. Not everyone is comfortable setting up a domain name and hosting etc... and if you provide value, why not ask for something in return?

[–] lionkor 3 days ago

It's incredibly sad that somehow knowing how to navigate websites made for complete idiots (domain registrars) is considered worth paying for. How many middle-men do you want to pay?

[–] busssard 4 days ago

i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service

[–] netsharc 4 days ago

This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.

Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".

"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.

How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!

What an exercise in convolution...

[–] rfgplk 4 days ago

> "Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

A mountain irl is, for instance 783 meters tall (sea level). A block in minecraft is always 1x1x1meters (according to the game engine def). Thus you make a mountain 783 blocks tall. You can also easily raise the sky limit if it becomes a problem.

[–] ricardobeat 4 days ago

The point is that this kind of prose is typical of LLMs. It’s like describing a driving game with “each car has four wheels and a suspension just like the real one”.

[–] lopis 3 days ago

LLMs still struggle with deciding what parts of a document or concept are more important. So documentation often trashes wildly around specificity, like "In this driving game the car moves forward and the glove compartment can be used to save the game". I think it's a big part of why reading unredacted and unedited LLM slop feel so much more tiring than reading human-written text.

[–] throwaway_7274 3 days ago

“…and does not have wings.”

[–] knollimar 3 days ago

The exactly for something with a scale and rounding hurts to read

[–] karel-3d 4 days ago

Oh it's Minecraft! I didn't realize what is this about for the longest time. I thought it's their own game named "blocks".

[–] woodrowbarlow 3 days ago

would've been kinda neat if they had generated the same map for multiple block games, like minetest/lunati.

[–] ckx 3 days ago

I've never played either of those games but there are probably conversion tools online, and if there aren't, you could try coding one with AI.

[–] masswerk 3 days ago

A model of Switzerland in 1×1×1m resolution. Are they trying to say that reality also comes in this granularity? Meaning, LLMs are telling us, the Planck constant h = 1m?

[–] abricq 4 days ago

Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !

Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!

[–] swasheck 3 days ago

I got home from a section of the Via Francigena last month and that walk from Bourg-Saint-Pierre to Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard is beautiful and also challenged my normal rate of walking. It would be fascinating to see this replayed in Minecraft.

[–] evrimoztamur 4 days ago

It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.

[–] herbst 4 days ago

That's the actual data it contains houses and structures

[–] Lukas_Skywalker 3 days ago

The Lidar point cloud has a classification attribute that lets you filter the data. You can take the class=2 points to get the ground [1].

[1]: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/de/hoehenmodell-swisssurface3...

[–] NetMageSCW 3 days ago

Wouldn’t you just end IP with holes in your map?

[–] Lukas_Skywalker 3 days ago

Point clouds usually are not equidistant or arranged on a regular grid. You are right that filtering Lidar data to only get the terrain does create gaps in the cloud. The conversion of the point cloud to a surface does deal with holes though (that's the whole goal), and it doesn't matter if some are larger than others. There are different methods to do so, for example delaunay tetrahedrization [1], or ball-pivoting [2]. You do get flat areas though, but that's often a good compromise to make.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_triangles

[–] dguest 3 days ago

It would be cool if they embellished on the buildings and towns a bit: realign them on the grid so that they actually look good, embrace the medium. Maybe even tweak some of the narrow valleys to be more aligned.

[–] shoobiedoo 4 days ago

I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.

[–] Rapzid 4 days ago

I never got being bothered too much by this.

Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..

The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.

[–] lotsofpulp 3 days ago

Is it in a different category than the electricity (or broadly speaking, any increase in entropy) flushed down the toilet making reality TV shows, or nonsense Tik Tok videos, or a mission to overthrow a government that doesn't bend the knee, or giving a 95 year old dialysis, or eating foods transported from far away?

[–] ckx 3 days ago

About 0.0000000001% of the daily global production.

[–] Pirut 4 days ago

I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.

https://github.com/pirut/earth-platform

[–] vidarh 4 days ago

Sounds worth posting your own ShowHN post for.

[–] Pirut 3 days ago

Posted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241619

[–] echoangle 4 days ago

How does this work? You need to somehow flatten the globe into a plane, right? Are you just using a regular map projection? It says that everything is real scale in the description and that can’t really be true at high latitudes, right?

[–] Pirut 3 days ago

I used Web Mercator to flatten the map, so its "1:1" scale, but obviously not perfect because it is on a flat plane.

[–] robot_jesus 3 days ago

Neat project! It's an understandable limitation you had to commit to, but I'm curious how you've found the distortion away from the equator with Mercator. Probably not really noticeable in any major way within the arctic/antarctic circles but obviously closer to poles it's going to get quite wonky.

[–] Pirut 3 days ago

Distortion isn't too bad until you get to the arctic, but by then its all white so you don't really have a reference point to judge against anyways

[–] adrian_b 3 days ago

When mapping a sphere, the main choice is whether you want to preserve angles or you want to preserve areas. There is also the third option of not preserving anything, but attempting to not have too great distortions in either angles or areas.

I consider the third option worse, because it is better to choose the right map for your application than a map that is not optimal for any application.

Mercator is an angle-preserving map, so it is appropriate for navigation, but not for giving you a global view of the Earth, for which an area-preserving map is more useful.

Because I do not know the purpose of your map, I cannot judge whether Mercator is a good choice or not, but Mercator and similar navigation maps are seldom useful today, when navigation should be planned by computers, not with ruler and compass on a physical map.

[–] chronial 2 days ago

I thought Mercator was shape-preserving but has a different scale depending on latitude?

[–] busssard 4 days ago

this is amazing! Now we just need a shared server that is accessible by anyone and see where that goes.

A world for anyone. should have more than enough are. it would be interesting to see if wars and terretorial conflicts arise here as well

[–] Pirut 3 days ago

Thanks! It is optimized to work on servers so if anyone wants to host it they can.

[–] Pirut 3 days ago

Also, great username my last name is Bussard :O

[–] throwaway219450 3 days ago

It’s funny that Claude picks the basically the same tagline for both projects.

> Every mountain stands at its real height

> The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one.

The models are RLd so hard to declare their own legitimacy. Everything has to be correct, genuine or real, no x, y or z.

[–] stormbringer_ 3 days ago

Hi,

This is my first post although I have been following Hacker News for years.

I have been building something similar except not for Minecraft but hiking maps on mobile (Android). This is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chessvorte...

I combine OpenStreetMap data for routes, satellite data from Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM GLO-30 for heights, resolution is around 10m/pixel for image and 30m for heights - those are the highest resolution datasets I can legally redistribute, although I am also including what I call hi-res maps building for some countries (USA, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Romania) which has image resolution at 1.5m/pixel instead of 10m.

I could have used higher resolution for hi-res maps, data is available at precision like 30-50cm/pixel but this being a mobile app I needed to consider storage for a map on mobile, at hi-res a 10x10 km squared area takes around 25MB.

The idea for this came from my own hiking trips, in many mountains there is not so good internet connection, so I can build an offline map beforehand and in terrain I can use this to see where I am in 3D - and just use the phone GPS for location, no data needed.

For building the map packages I have setup a linux server that combines all 3 data sources (OpenStreetMap, Sentinel-2, Copernicus GLO-30) so once an area is chosen it can build it in like 1-3 minutes. Since all OSM endpoints are giving lots of timeouts I setup a local OSM mirror with the data that I need - takes around 50GB of storage for the whole world data and I have a script that updates it weekly.

Coming back to the original post, seeing 1:1 ratio of Switzerland made my heart stop for a bit, then I realized it's 1m resolution. Switzerland was also my first choice for hi-res data, they provide good accurate image and height datasets. Pretty cool all this Minecraft voxel rendering, I intend to see how it would look in my own app.

[–] 0x_rs 4 days ago

This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.

[–] barrkel 4 days ago

Would the time you spend getting a model subscription, giving it an environment to work in, and figuring out how to enable it to operate safely, be less than 15 francs of your time?

Minimum wage in Zurich city is 23.90 chf/hour. About 37 minutes of time, at most.

[–] 0x_rs 3 days ago

If someone wanted this, and lived outside of Switzerland (where it's sold exclusively, presumably to avoid digital sales headaches), or did not want to pay the equivalent of a monthly subscription for the conversion to Minecraft, that's what they'd do. This could've been a GitHub page with instructions to follow. The dataset does not impose any country restrictions unlike the product.

[–] barrkel 3 days ago

Note that it is also a mod, to support the data model.

[–] lstodd 3 days ago

This is a trivial task for 20 year old ArcGIS release. Or an evening with python 2.4 and some docs on file formats.

Now, back then 1-m resolution DEMs were not widely available, but 10-meters were up for download, freely.

[–] FrustratedMonky 3 days ago

trivial .

Can't tell if you are being sarcastic?

[–] 0x_rs 3 days ago

Why would I be sarcastic? Importing real-world data in whatever format it may be into Minecraft has been a thing for nearly as long as it has existed, either with custom tools, WorldPainter, or the dozen projects on github that do this. swisstopo gives you everything, and there's endless tutorials for what to do with it on YouTube also. You can point an agent at the problem and it will deal with it swiftly and effectively because all resources on this have been extensively worked on or documented. Lately, plenty projects have been working on this, arnismc.com has already been mentioned and seems to be the most ambitious one and freely available.

[–] Introhacker 3 days ago

in an age of endless information, this position can be made across many domains and projects. Just because tools exist to assist with building something doesn't invalidate an accomplishment. H8r mentality

[–] 0x_rs 3 days ago

My comments were all about how this can be replicated by anyone in the world at their own leisure and has been for a long time, and for other countries also, because everything needed is freely available. With some tools mentioned in this thread, it's just the press of a button. Don't conflate that and not caring about the nth project that does this and charges money for it.

[–] ShadowOfThePit 4 days ago

Funky stuff, nice use of government data.

It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.

Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?

[–] wmanley 4 days ago

> Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.

[–] amiga386 4 days ago

Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...

[–] barrkel 3 days ago

No, you download it then get an invoice in the mail with the bill, 30 days to pay.

[–] stabbles 4 days ago

See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.

[–] comrade1234 4 days ago

They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.

[–] qbane 4 days ago

Missing context: in Minecraft.

[–] barrkel 3 days ago

An ETH student's project apparently. Despite the naysayers, I think it's great someone had the impetus to get this done, and it has my son quite excited.

[–] barrkel 3 days ago

Also, it isn't just a map. It's also a mod to enable better rendering of the data at distance, with a couple of modes; faster flight; layered read mechanism; etc.

[–] BSDobelix 3 days ago

Wait is that not a 1 to 1 derived work from the official "swisstopo open geodata", taking 15.- is for sure not "fair use"

>>Obtaining and using the data and services is free-of-charge, subject to the provisions on fair use.

https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi#2.-Dat...

Am i wrong here?

[–] probably_wrong 3 days ago

Based on the earlier definition of "Fair use" I think it only means that the developer promises not to overload the geodata servers with too many requests and that the publishers reserve a right to rate-limit them if they don't behave.

[–] lmpdev 4 days ago

Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map

I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate

[–] FireInsight 4 days ago

I find https://buildtheearth.net/ way more interesting than this & the other autogenerated projects mentioned here. It's actually thousands of people coming together to build the actual buildings everywhere on earth, not just terrain.

[–] odo1242 3 days ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://buildtheearth.net/

[–] eolpin 2 days ago

Wow, fun coincidence! I recently visited Switzerland and hiked to the Hörnlihütte at the base of the Matterhorn. I saw the parent post and found myself wanting to re-live the hike in Minecraft, then the hero image that I see immediately upon visiting buildtheearth.net happens to be of the Hörnlihütte and Matterhorn :)

[–] StoutSnail05258 1 day ago

eu quero muito entrar, queria ajudar a fazer o mundo no manicreft. jogo todos os dias, tenho o tempo do mundo, e já fiz um mundo no manicreft, queria ajudar a fazer outro. please

[–] maelito 3 days ago

Related, though less artistic. See this French LIDAR data visualisation of buildings : https://batiment3d.ign.fr, and this other visualisation that shows France in 3D, measurable (measure heights, distances) : https://julesrumeau.github.io/Scopus

[–] mehwoot 4 days ago

I guess the map is the territory

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

If you are only interested in 1m scale, maybe. Even the open satellite imagery goes to 20x that resolution, though, and of course there are small features that can't be resolved even at 5cm resolution, like survey marks. And even at the 1m scale, they've done a bad job transforming the source data to Minecraft, there's tons of errors if you look and most of detailed features (like road centrelines) are faked.

[–] dguest 4 days ago

How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?

[–] mlmonkey 3 days ago

Steven Wright: “I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”

[–] stefanka 3 days ago

Wow. How can I view this on the meta quest? Can I import this into Godot and run smoothly? Is the licensee permissive to use it in a game?

[–] hotelsacher 4 days ago

This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.

[–] hybrasian 3 days ago

I do have a minecraft account since the alpha version of minecraft.

But since microsoft took over i exlusively play without an account using polyMCs client. You can play any version/modpack you want, you just can't play on official servers.

[–] alberth 3 days ago

> ONE BLOCK = ONE METRE

Aren’t most high-resolution aerial imagery (Google Earth), 1 metre resolution.

[–] taylorbuley 3 days ago

Makes me say "The map is not the territory." But the story I am thinking of most after readhing this is "On Exactitude in Science" ("Del rigor en la ciencia") by Jorge Luis Borges.

> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

> — Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

[–] imilev 4 days ago

This is cool af.

[–] 4ggr0 4 days ago

almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.

[–] koziserek 4 days ago

I assure you will be better served with SweetHome3d

BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!

[–] 4ggr0 4 days ago

sh3d seems like an actual CAD-like tool to actually plan your furniture. what i find fun about this minecraft map is to make my actual home my base in the game, try to make it looo like my home and then just play minecraft while exploring the surroundings i know already.

then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.

then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)

[–] xandrius 3 days ago

I also recommend sh3d to do exactly what you needed: got the plans of my home (straight out pdfs) fed them to an LLM and got the 3D version of it in minutes.

Then started plopping in furniture and such, wonderful experience. Then you can navigate your home as a "visitor" to get a better feel. Definitely more realistic than Minecraft for actual planning.

[–] 4ggr0 3 days ago

i think you and the previous person both approach it from a different angle than me. haven't played minecraft in a while and as a kid i used to try to build buildings i knew, and then play minecraft with them as my base. so go hunting, start farming, search for diamonds etc.

sh3d removes the whole game-aspect and acts as a room planning tool, which is of course also neat, but i have no need for it. i also don't need to navigate my home as a visitor in a software, as i can just navigate it in meatspace.

but, if or when i move, i think i'll actually come back to sh3d! just don't see the point right now. maybe claude can help me mod sh3d so i can fight off mobs with a bow and arrow, or blow it up with some TNT :D

[–] pkilgore 3 days ago

If you can't be assed to write even the marketing for a thing you want me to buy I'll never be assed to even try it.

[–] FrustratedMonky 3 days ago

Everyone is complaining that the web site was made by AI?

Why? It looks like a hundred other web sites. The text isn't different from any other generic sales copy that humans have been doing for ever.

People are so paranoid about AI slop, that they see it everywhere, even if it was just a human. You can't tell.

[–] bspammer 3 days ago

Just because you personally can't spot it, doesn't mean other people can't. There are a lot of very clear tells of AI writing, and this site is full of them.

[–] NetMageSCW 3 days ago

You are delusional if you think there are clear tells.

[–] bspammer 3 days ago

Count yourself lucky that you haven't read enough LLM generated text to spot these. Each one individually might not be a clear signal, but all together it's extremely obvious.

> Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

> Real mountains. Real valleys. All of it walkable.

> Every block is one metre

> Your browser loads the aerial image directly from swisstopo, only once you move the slider

> If it runs on your computer, all of Switzerland will too.

> the game builds the distant view itself on first launch

> the game builds the blocks from the world package

> You pay for the licence to the world package, the world calculated from geodata

> The world, however, fills the whole rectangle around Switzerland, including parts of the neighbouring countries

> the world is built by a program from open data, not by hand

[–] FrustratedMonky 3 days ago

You got me. Humans never use clear short bullet points.

[–] slopinthebag 3 days ago

the literal first line is an obvious tell

"MINECRAFT JAVA 1.12.2 · CUBIC CHUNKS · SWISSTOPO"

this is such a classic llmism

[–] JDups 3 days ago

Generic sales copy used to mostly just be a thing for business sites and Linkedin. I suppose since this site is trying to sell the map it basically is one.

[–] Markoff 4 days ago

AIDR

[–] IshKebab 4 days ago

Do we really need to post projects like this? It's obviously of no practical or even entertainment use. In the past it would have been a somewhat notable achievement due to the effort required. Today it's obvious that you can easily do this so what's the point? Showing off how many tokens you can waste?

It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?

[–] xandrius 3 days ago

Wow, how can you survive on HN I wonder? Nothing fun or not-profit-oriented must be liked by the plebs. Cmon relax, it's a fun student project.

[–] IshKebab 3 days ago

Not what I said at all.

[–] geekgod382 3 days ago

Even if this is some vibe coded slop, it's still really cool. Where do people find such powerful LLMs?

[–] xandrius 3 days ago

You're surrounded by "powerful" LLMs, just get a subscription or pay for tokens. Literally any recent LLM can do that.

[–] geekgod382 3 days ago

man I'm broke

[–] mclau153 3 days ago

https://github.com/zz85/slop-cities

[–] efilife 4 days ago

holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?

[–] jryle70 3 days ago

Because it's interesting?

[–] splatter9859 4 days ago

Welcome to life in the 2020s. Enshittification knows no bounds and cannot be contained.

"Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Collective." -- Borg Collective, Star Trek TNG

[–] numlock86 3 days ago

The one from Denmark (while not as cool looking, because ... you know, mountains and stuff) had much more appeal, though. Probably because it wasn't 1% blocks and 99% of Claudism rubbed against your face.

> B~ b~ but they would have used LLMs back then if they could, too.

"You're absolutely right."™ But they didn't/couldn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯