Hacker News

points by amiga386 3 days ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] everyone 3 days ago

Yeah, like a lot of AI stuff it gets worse the more you look at it.. eg. "Block by block" the 2nd sentence fragment in this very important intro paragragh.. and, it doesnt mean anything. In fact its misleading, if it meant anything I would take it to mean that this was made by a human without tools placing one block at a time, which is clearly not true.

Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.

[–] ckx 3 days ago

everyone spotted in the wild!

[–] XenophileJKO 3 days ago

Actually is wasn't useless, I don't know the scale Denmark or where the data came from. So the bottom example is slightly bigger but includes more relevant details.

[–] customguy 3 days ago

Without the "detail" of "Minecraft" you don't even know what "the data" is.

> I don't know the scale Denmark

What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?

"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"

Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.

They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.

[–] nidnogg 3 days ago

I am mind blown at how long it took me to read that this was Minecraft. I agree, the wording makes you mentally skip Minecraft somehow.

[–] orangedog 3 days ago

I don't feel there's that much of a difference. It certainly isn't "awful" to me.

[–] NBJack 3 days ago

I'm not a fan of AI generated prose myself, but this was at least informative to me.

[–] gambiting 3 days ago

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