What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
Political soothsaying has been a mug’s game for a long time now but I will, with absolute confidence, say this: the @trussliz years are going to be truly spectacular.
Both 10/10s compared to what has just passed and what comes next.
So why did they comprehensively fail to win their argument and are no longer mps
Because the Conservative Party has been hijacked by populists. You can see this in the current leadership contest. The more outrageous the red meat pledge the closer Truss gets to Number 19.
I am no Tory, as you know, but Sunak has a calm authority that most of the nation is comfortable with. His candidacy has been poor but his calm be authority has been drowned out by the excitable proclamations of La Truss. Much the same happened when Johnson prevailed over the broad church Conservative Remainers and kicked them out of your party. Remind me how that worked out.
80 seat majority? Calm can be overrated.
I apologise. Remind me how that worked out AFTER an 80 seat majority had been won.
I’m meeting friends for a picnic in Hyde Park on Friday. I just texted one with my suggested exact location in the park, down to the specific deckchair, using what3words
It’s hype.closer.dozed if you want to join us
His response?
“Wow”
When people respond to an app with the single word “Wow” then that app is a *significant investment opportunity*
Political soothsaying has been a mug’s game for a long time now but I will, with absolute confidence, say this: the @trussliz years are going to be truly spectacular.
Both 10/10s compared to what has just passed and what comes next.
So why did they comprehensively fail to win their argument and are no longer mps
Because the Conservative Party has been hijacked by populists. You can see this in the current leadership contest. The more outrageous the red meat pledge the closer Truss gets to Number 19.
I am no Tory, as you know, but Sunak has a calm authority that most of the nation is comfortable with. His candidacy has been poor but his calm be authority has been drowned out by the excitable proclamations of La Truss. Much the same happened when Johnson prevailed over the broad church Conservative Remainers and kicked them out of your party. Remind me how that worked out.
The Remainers you refer to in the conservative party, who are no longer mps, tried to subvert the referendum result and I have no sympathy with them
No they didn't. They tried to subvert the will of Lord Frost, which appears more egregiously unacceptable.
You quote the two extremes of the issue and why a middle way is needed
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
I’m meeting friends for a picnic in Hyde Park on Friday. I just texted one with my suggested exact location in the park, down to the specific deckchair, using what3words
It’s hype.closer.dozed if you want to join us
His response?
“Wow”
When people respond to an app with the single word “Wow” then that app is a *significant investment opportunity*
I’m meeting friends for a picnic in Hyde Park on Friday. I just texted one with my suggested exact location in the park, down to the specific deckchair, using what3words
It’s hype.closer.dozed if you want to join us
His response?
“Wow”
When people respond to an app with the single word “Wow” then that app is a *significant investment opportunity*
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
They should make a checksum and encode it as a swear word to put between words 2 and 3.
What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
Has anyone mentioned the OS Maps ap yet? For about £25 a year you carry the entire OS database on your phone and it will tell you exactly where you are. I found it useful recently on the South Downs trying to locate a bridleway that had been overplanted with rape. It was still impassable, though.
What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
You are underestimating the wit, guile and general academic genius of PBers stranded on a desolate and windswept mountainside.
The words have no pattern to them so you can't say whether two references are near each other or on the opposite side of the world. Same problem applies if you mishear one word.
If I have a paper map in the UK I can give you an OS grid reference without recourse to any technology. For this I need a stupid app.
Yes. Let’s all go back to paper maps. They’re brilliant
Then, if you’re lost and want someone to find you, in a hurricane, you can get out your paper map and have a wild inaccurate guess as to where you are, circle that roughly wrong 12-mild-wide place on the map then, er, take a photo of the scribbled-on map and send the image to a friend so they at least know you’ve got a map?
Or you could text “for.fucks.sake” and they’d know which specific tree you were sheltering by, but that’s too easy and also you might mistype
If you are carrying a GPS phone you can read a grid reference too. It is only the means to pass on location information that has changed, not the ability to get it.
As someone (like Eabhal) who might actually need to call Mountain Rescue in a white-out for myself or others I would ALWAYS have a paper map (and a non-smart phone) as backup, as using your primary phone as both a map and an emergency device is a bad idea.
I have no real objection to using it to find a pub but it is the overselling that I object to.
I think Liz Truss - with her promises of tax cuts and golden uplands - is another example of how, in democracies, the population get the politicians it deserves.
Oi. Don't blame "the population" for the next prime minister.
More accurately a significant proportion of the population. British politics is forever stained by the turd that is Brexit and the piss that was Corbyn.
If the idiots in the Parliamentary Labour Party had not thought that "it is important that all wings of the party are represented" then Corbyn would never have been made LoTO. With no Corbyn then Labour would have coalesced around Remain and the result might well have been different.
Political soothsaying has been a mug’s game for a long time now but I will, with absolute confidence, say this: the @trussliz years are going to be truly spectacular.
Both 10/10s compared to what has just passed and what comes next.
So why did they comprehensively fail to win their argument and are no longer mps
Because the Conservative Party has been hijacked by populists. You can see this in the current leadership contest. The more outrageous the red meat pledge the closer Truss gets to Number 19.
I am no Tory, as you know, but Sunak has a calm authority that most of the nation is comfortable with. His candidacy has been poor but his calm be authority has been drowned out by the excitable proclamations of La Truss. Much the same happened when Johnson prevailed over the broad church Conservative Remainers and kicked them out of your party. Remind me how that worked out.
I’m meeting friends for a picnic in Hyde Park on Friday. I just texted one with my suggested exact location in the park, down to the specific deckchair, using what3words
It’s hype.closer.dozed if you want to join us
His response?
“Wow”
When people respond to an app with the single word “Wow” then that app is a *significant investment opportunity*
It's the revenue model you need to look at. They have 1,000 customers - not you, you are a user - and a large proportion of that is the rescue services. Hence stories which say "rescue services cautious about w3w" are problematic for them. They are worth $250m having been going several years which suggests that people think the barrier to entry is not that high, the market is limited, or the revenue model unsustainable or vulnerable.
As I said, I use it and love it - albeit when I was once stuck on the motorway and its use would have been textbook perfect, the RAC said they didn't use it as a means of location identifier and asked me to see (in the dark, it was raining) if there were any landmarks that they could use.
Professor John Curtice is generally held in high regard on this board. Does the rule hold today?
The next Tory leader "won't keep the Union safe" by following Boris Johnson's blunt refusal to allow an IndyRef2, the country's top pollster has said.
Professor John Curtice claimed whoever enters Downing Street next month would be better off trying to persuade Scots of the benefits of remaining in the UK.
“My own view is that if Unionists have any sense, they will get involved. Whatever happens, whether we have a referendum or not, Nicola Sturgeon is going to spend the next 12 months trying to increase the level of support for independence.
“If you want to make the Union safe, by far and away the best thing to do, is to actually make the case for the Union and persuade people.
“The reason the Union is in trouble is because, at the moment, only half the people in Scotland want to stay inside it.
"If you can change that fundamental, the Union will be safe. But so long as you don't change that, it won't be.
"I would submit that the attempt in the last two years to simply argue about process has not got the Unionists anywhere."
“… if Unionists have any sense…” The man is a comedian.
I agree with him. The government needs to run a positive case for the Union consistently. Help for those struggling with heating bills is as good a place as any to start.
Just remind folk how terrible indy would have been.
What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
Has anyone mentioned the OS Maps ap yet? For about £25 a year you carry the entire OS database on your phone and it will tell you exactly where you are. I found it useful recently on the South Downs trying to locate a bridleway that had been overplanted with rape. It was still impassable, though.
It's incredible value. Shame the route plotting function is so slow and clunky.
The words have no pattern to them so you can't say whether two references are near each other or on the opposite side of the world. Same problem applies if you mishear one word.
If I have a paper map in the UK I can give you an OS grid reference without recourse to any technology. For this I need a stupid app.
Yes. Let’s all go back to paper maps. They’re brilliant
Then, if you’re lost and want someone to find you, in a hurricane, you can get out your paper map and have a wild inaccurate guess as to where you are, circle that roughly wrong 12-mild-wide place on the map then, er, take a photo of the scribbled-on map and send the image to a friend so they at least know you’ve got a map?
Or you could text “for.fucks.sake” and they’d know which specific tree you were sheltering by, but that’s too easy and also you might mistype
If you are carrying a GPS phone you can read a grid reference too. It is only the means to pass on location information that has changed, not the ability to get it.
As someone (like Eabhal) who might actually need to call Mountain Rescue in a white-out for myself or others I would ALWAYS have a paper map (and a non-smart phone) as backup, as using your primary phone as both a map and an emergency device is a bad idea.
I have no real objection to using it to find a pub but it is the overselling that I object to.
I go OS maps app, OS locate app, Harvey's mountain map + compass in the rucksack for emergencies.
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
Fair enough. Disappointing because you would have thought the algorithm I was assuming would be pretty easy to write..
It's genuinely weird: 20% of the words in their english corpus are plurals (so that means 40% of words have a trivial misspell/hear problem) and the shuffling algorithm is, as far as researchers can tell, hugely deficient.
Like you I had assumed it would be trivial to either write a decent (but very slow) algorithm as it's just a constraint satisfaction problem _or_ have a completely random algorithm plus a bunch of quality gates for checking the end result to ensure the output was good and run it a few billion times until you got a good distribution.
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
I get that… but w3w have done all the work and are already scaling up extremely fast. From 11m downloads to 30m downloads in one year
Quite soon they will be THE standard for this kind of app/tech. Then all Google can do is buy them. Which might well happen
W3W reminds me a bit of Vivino in its early days. That sense of “wow so simple but clever”. I always wondered if they’d prosper or get bought out, or die
Russia has called a UNSC meeting about it for tomorrow.
How about this mate. Your lot move your occupying troops away from every nuclear site in Ukraine to a radius of 5 miles. And instead an international force secures the sites, with the UN team then able to safely ensure there's no risk of radiation leakage. Prevailing winds can change direction you know.
If the Russians left the power station, they would have to unplug the Dynamo….
Political soothsaying has been a mug’s game for a long time now but I will, with absolute confidence, say this: the @trussliz years are going to be truly spectacular.
Both 10/10s compared to what has just passed and what comes next.
So why did they comprehensively fail to win their argument and are no longer mps
Because the Conservative Party has been hijacked by populists. You can see this in the current leadership contest. The more outrageous the red meat pledge the closer Truss gets to Number 19.
I am no Tory, as you know, but Sunak has a calm authority that most of the nation is comfortable with. His candidacy has been poor but his calm be authority has been drowned out by the excitable proclamations of La Truss. Much the same happened when Johnson prevailed over the broad church Conservative Remainers and kicked them out of your party. Remind me how that worked out.
80 seat majority? Calm can be overrated.
I apologise. Remind me how that worked out AFTER an 80 seat majority had been won.
Not a very liquid market but interesting that Tucker Carlson is second fave to be Republican Veep nominee on bf.com
Dudes heavy into UAP. Makes it far more likely that Trump becomes the Disclosure President if he chooses him as running mate.
Dude is heavily into neofascist tropes, which is rather more consequential.
Yes I gather he is a bit of a Putinist still too. I used to come across people admiring of Putin over the years. Always a similar type. Respected "strength". Generally pretty un-pc and rich. You don't tend to hear from them much anymore in the UK at least.
Still it would be nice if we all finally got to read the JFK and Roswell files so there would be that.
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
I get that… but w3w have done all the work and are already scaling up extremely fast. From 11m downloads to 30m downloads in one year
Quite soon they will be THE standard for this kind of app/tech. Then all Google can do is buy them. Which might well happen
W3W reminds me a bit of Vivino in its early days. That sense of “wow so simple but clever”. I always wondered if they’d prosper or get bought out, or die
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
I get that… but w3w have done all the work and are already scaling up extremely fast. From 11m downloads to 30m downloads in one year
Quite soon they will be THE standard for this kind of app/tech. Then all Google can do is buy them. Which might well happen
W3W reminds me a bit of Vivino in its early days. That sense of “wow so simple but clever”. I always wondered if they’d prosper or get bought out, or die
I heard about this app yonks ago. I remember thinking it would be great at a musical festival. And then the govt went all Oliver Cromwell and outlawed music festivals and I forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.
Russia has called a UNSC meeting about it for tomorrow.
How about this mate. Your lot move your occupying troops away from every nuclear site in Ukraine to a radius of 5 miles. And instead an international force secures the sites, with the UN team then able to safely ensure there's no risk of radiation leakage. Prevailing winds can change direction you know.
Even easier, how about all the Russian occupying troops move away from every site in Ukraine back to Russia?
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location
You’re either a moron or a bitterly envious tech bro who wishes they’d thought of this. Perhaps both? Most people have a general sense of where they are, or where they are going. The problem is specifying exactly
This does it. With three words.
Can people still make mistakes? Of course they can. But they can also lose maps or Google maps can stop working or they can - for whatever reason - forget, or mistype “89.04676 degrees N and 0.3486 degrees E”
I used w3w to report a burnt out car to the plod last year. It was a Range Rover they’d nicked and they’d got it across a load of fields before getting it stuck in a ditch by the side of some obscure lane before setting it alight and totally gutting it.
I went on the website to report it and was pleased to see the option of using w3w cos it was tricky to explain how to get to the exact spot.
Next day I got a call from a copper. They couldn’t find the car. They’d parked miles away from where they needed to be. I gave you the w3w co-ordinates, I said, why don’t you use them?
Haven’t got the app on our phones, he replied.
Face palm by me, then proceeded to relay convoluted directions to get where they needed to be.
Never heard of what3words, though I assume it was the inspiration for Get.Brexit.Done. Disappointingly, the route was unclear, and when they finally reached the destination it was something of an anti-climax.
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location
You’re either a moron or a bitterly envious tech bro who wishes they’d thought of this. Perhaps both? Most people have a general sense of where they are, or where they are going. The problem is specifying exactly
This does it. With three words.
Can people still make mistakes? Of course they can. But they can also lose maps or Google maps can stop working or they can - for whatever reason - forget, or mistype “89.04676 degrees N and 0.3486 degrees E”
I used w3w to report a burnt out car to the plod last year. It was a Range Rover they’d nicked and they’d got it across a load of fields before getting it stuck in a ditch by the side of some obscure lane before setting it alight and totally gutting it.
I went on the website to report it and was pleased to see the option of using w3w cos it was tricky to explain how to get to the exact spot.
Next day I got a call from a copper. They couldn’t find the car. They’d parked miles away from where they needed to be. I gave you the w3w co-ordinates, I said, why don’t you use them?
Haven’t got the app on our phones, he replied.
Face palm by me, then proceeded to relay convoluted directions to get where they needed to be.
Yes it’s one of those genius apps that will only fulfil its enormous potential once everyone is using it, so it becomes universal and standard
Will that happen? Who knows. But I’d say it has a good chance. Then it could be worth squillions
Nice that it’s British and based in London. Well done UK tech
What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
Has anyone mentioned the OS Maps ap yet? For about £25 a year you carry the entire OS database on your phone and it will tell you exactly where you are. I found it useful recently on the South Downs trying to locate a bridleway that had been overplanted with rape. It was still impassable, though.
It's incredible value. Shame the route plotting function is so slow and clunky.
It will surely come in time.
"Plot me a 15-mile day hike around Alfriston with a pub lunch and a cream tea."
or
"Please get me off this bloody Monro and take me back to my car."
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
Yes. That might happen, though it often hasn't in the internet era where network effects have entrenched an imperfect implementation.
Get a proper linguist involved to select an optimal set of words, so that it's more robust to small errors. Maybe standardise the number of syllables or word length. There's a lot that could be done to refine the idea.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Morse code it's evident that was refined a few times. That didn't make the original idea crap.
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
Yes. That might happen, though it often hasn't in the internet era where network effects have entrenched an imperfect implementation.
Get a proper linguist involved to select an optimal set of words, so that it's more robust to small errors. Maybe standardise the number of syllables or word length. There's a lot that could be done to refine the idea.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Morse code it's evident that was refined a few times. That didn't make the original idea crap.
Indeed. Think of QWERTYUIOP
Absolutely imperfect. Yet still here. On my iPhone. As I type
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
I get that… but w3w have done all the work and are already scaling up extremely fast. From 11m downloads to 30m downloads in one year
Quite soon they will be THE standard for this kind of app/tech. Then all Google can do is buy them. Which might well happen
W3W reminds me a bit of Vivino in its early days. That sense of “wow so simple but clever”. I always wondered if they’d prosper or get bought out, or die
1 character errors have a high chance of landing you with a few kilometers of your intended location and so the autosuggest shows you the same general area.
The detail of their implementation might be poor, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't genius.
And there are lots of things that have been good enough that they've ended up being used very widely, even if they've been lacking in some detail.
Yes, but what usually happens is that another company refines the basic idea, and that company is the one which ends up making the money.
Yes. That might happen, though it often hasn't in the internet era where network effects have entrenched an imperfect implementation.
Get a proper linguist involved to select an optimal set of words, so that it's more robust to small errors. Maybe standardise the number of syllables or word length. There's a lot that could be done to refine the idea.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Morse code it's evident that was refined a few times. That didn't make the original idea crap.
The idea isn’t crap, but the company might be. W3W have their words fixed, the real money is going to be for the next company which refines the idea with better words.
It's a complete nonsense to suggest Britain is a "failed state".
We're one of the wealthiest, safest, and most stable countries in the world and play a global role. We are in the top 5-10 countries (usually the top 5) for anything you care to imagine.
This self-indulgent whingeing is done solely by Brits. Speak to anyone who's moved here from a country with real problems, and they'll laugh in your face.
The words have no pattern to them so you can't say whether two references are near each other or on the opposite side of the world. Same problem applies if you mishear one word.
If I have a paper map in the UK I can give you an OS grid reference without recourse to any technology. For this I need a stupid app.
Yes. Let’s all go back to paper maps. They’re brilliant
Then, if you’re lost and want someone to find you, in a hurricane, you can get out your paper map and have a wild inaccurate guess as to where you are, circle that roughly wrong 12-mild-wide place on the map then, er, take a photo of the scribbled-on map and send the image to a friend so they at least know you’ve got a map?
Or you could text “for.fucks.sake” and they’d know which specific tree you were sheltering by, but that’s too easy and also you might mistype
If you are carrying a GPS phone you can read a grid reference too. It is only the means to pass on location information that has changed, not the ability to get it.
As someone (like Eabhal) who might actually need to call Mountain Rescue in a white-out for myself or others I would ALWAYS have a paper map (and a non-smart phone) as backup, as using your primary phone as both a map and an emergency device is a bad idea.
I have no real objection to using it to find a pub but it is the overselling that I object to.
I go OS maps app, OS locate app, Harvey's mountain map + compass in the rucksack for emergencies.
I tend to use a real compass instead of the phone for following a bearing as that's what I'm used to, and a different app (Locus) with an OS background, but yes, pretty much that. If backpacking I sometimes print specific portions of the OS map to cut down bulk and avoid page turns.
It is all a long way from counting steps with a mechanical counter (72 double paces to 100m) or box searching for the summit in a white out (on one of the innumerable Geal Charns) but most of the skill of navigation is still in reading terrain so it doesn't feel like cheating.
I know w3w isn't aimed at us but it does really seem like a battle between sales and actual practicality in difficult situations.
What a ridiculous criticism. It’s saying it’s “not always 100% perfect in every single situation”. So that’s a reason not to use an obviously life-saving app?
“Bromsgrove man urging everyone to download the What 3 Words app which saved his dad's life”
The location of my balcony of my favourite room in my favourite cheap hotel in the tiny village of Chorto in Pelion Greece is ///cathode.mitigates.hauled
Superb
It's a big problem for Mountain Rescue. Generally used by people who have no idea what mountain they are on, and heavily spammed into walking forums by well-meaning fools.
Two main problems:
1) The words can be hard to pronounce or hear over a radio/bad mobile phone reception 2) They make no spatial reference to anything. If you move a few metres, the words are completely different.
That's why your grid reference + actually knowing what hill you are on are best. Even "the knobbly one above Arrochar" is better.
While I agree to some extent, the twunks who need help don't know the grid reference and what lump they are on.
You have never been the hill in fog and rain with a gale blowing and a paper map and no pre existing knowledge that your precise present location was going to become of critical importance then. Navigation: easy in theory.
Has anyone mentioned the OS Maps ap yet? For about £25 a year you carry the entire OS database on your phone and it will tell you exactly where you are. I found it useful recently on the South Downs trying to locate a bridleway that had been overplanted with rape. It was still impassable, though.
It's incredible value. Shame the route plotting function is so slow and clunky.
I love it but wouldn't rely on it in the mountains. Did one of the Pen Y Fan horseshoes (from the south) last week. I have the ap on my phone and also the physical map. I downloaded the map to use off line too. For some reason the offline didn't work and there was no phone signal. Happily I had the paper map, and tbh the weather was so clear navigation was a piece of cake. But I would never rely on the phone alone.
Comments
It’s hype.closer.dozed if you want to join us
His response?
“Wow”
When people respond to an app with the single word “Wow” then that app is a *significant investment opportunity*
Dudes heavy into UAP. Makes it far more likely that Trump becomes the Disclosure President if he chooses him as running mate.
As someone (like Eabhal) who might actually need to call Mountain Rescue in a white-out for myself or others I would ALWAYS have a paper map (and a non-smart phone) as backup, as using your primary phone as both a map and an emergency device is a bad idea.
I have no real objection to using it to find a pub but it is the overselling that I object to.
If the idiots in the Parliamentary Labour Party had not thought that "it is important that all wings of the party are represented" then Corbyn would never have been made LoTO. With no Corbyn then Labour would have coalesced around Remain and the result might well have been different.
As I said, I use it and love it - albeit when I was once stuck on the motorway and its use would have been textbook perfect, the RAC said they didn't use it as a means of location identifier and asked me to see (in the dark, it was raining) if there were any landmarks that they could use.
20% of the words in their english corpus are plurals (so that means 40% of words have a trivial misspell/hear problem) and the shuffling algorithm is, as far as researchers can tell, hugely deficient.
Like you I had assumed it would be trivial to either write a decent (but very slow) algorithm as it's just a constraint satisfaction problem _or_ have a completely random algorithm plus a bunch of quality gates for checking the end result to ensure the output was good and run it a few billion times until you got a good distribution.
Quite soon they will be THE standard for this kind of app/tech. Then all Google can do is buy them. Which might well happen
W3W reminds me a bit of Vivino in its early days. That sense of “wow so simple but clever”. I always wondered if they’d prosper or get bought out, or die
They are prospering
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizthach/2021/06/03/vivino-continues-watershed-year-in-online-wine-sales-with-155-million-in-funding-and-ceo-appointment/
The potential for W3W seems greater than Vivino
Still it would be nice if we all finally got to read the JFK and Roswell files so there would be that.
I note they don't say what happens if it stays cheaper.
There could be a lot of trouble over people being ripped off on fixed rates. That's a reasonable case for a windfall tax, for a start.
Should be more like 100, but not really worth tying up the money, sadly.
“ 30m downloads are cumulative”
It’s still roughly doubling in a year?
Looks to me like it’s growing faster than Vivino at a similar stage
I went on the website to report it and was pleased to see the option of using w3w cos it was tricky to explain how to get to the exact spot.
Next day I got a call from a copper. They couldn’t find the car. They’d parked miles away from where they needed to be. I gave you the w3w co-ordinates, I said, why don’t you use
them?
Haven’t got the app on our phones, he replied.
Face palm by me, then proceeded to relay convoluted directions to get where they needed to be.
Gove Prat Muchly
Micron to Invest $40 Billion in U.S. with Passage of CHIPS Act
https://www.eetimes.com/micron-to-invest-40-billion-in-u-s-with-passage-of-chips-act/
Could be a particularly well timed piece of counter-cyclical intervention.
Samsung, SK Hynix face downside pressure amid falling chip demand
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2022/08/133_334214.html
Will that happen? Who knows. But I’d say it has a good chance. Then it could be worth squillions
Nice that it’s British and based in London. Well done UK tech
"Plot me a 15-mile day hike around Alfriston with a pub lunch and a cream tea."
or
"Please get me off this bloody Monro and take me back to my car."
Get a proper linguist involved to select an optimal set of words, so that it's more robust to small errors. Maybe standardise the number of syllables or word length. There's a lot that could be done to refine the idea.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Morse code it's evident that was refined a few times. That didn't make the original idea crap.
Absolutely imperfect. Yet still here. On my iPhone. As I type
We're one of the wealthiest, safest, and most stable countries in the world and play a global role. We are in the top 5-10 countries (usually the top 5) for anything you care to imagine.
This self-indulgent whingeing is done solely by Brits. Speak to anyone who's moved here from a country with real problems, and they'll laugh in your face.
It is all a long way from counting steps with a mechanical counter (72 double paces to 100m) or box searching for the summit in a white out (on one of the innumerable Geal Charns) but most of the skill of navigation is still in reading terrain so it doesn't feel like cheating.
I know w3w isn't aimed at us but it does really seem like a battle between sales and actual practicality in difficult situations.