> Puzzles in commercial collections don't usually have that problem,
I would argue that puzzles in commercial collections are more likely to have that problem than ones made freely available by hobbyists, as commercial enterprises inevitably cut corners on things like labour costs for an actual human setter.
I have seen dozens of commercial puzzle games and applications that do not make any attempt to verify the (auto-generated) puzzles as solvable, but I don't think I've ever had the same problem on a site like LMD.
> Like how a streaming website will say "Hey, you're using a VPN. We don't allow that" - the user's recourse is to turn off the VPN, or find a new VPN that their service won't detect.
No, the user's recourse is to stop using the streaming website and go back to piracy instead.
Any speedbump to UX is a lost customer. You can not and should not assume that users are going to jump through hoops, because the overwhelming majority will not.
> you're just supposed to know what Kentucky number plates look like from a blurry image, and you're also supposed to know the logo of a sports club? Cool.
Knowing exactly what they look like would help, but the point is more that you're supposed to look them up and see if they match to rule out regions or confirm suspicions. You've got the wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips, use it - if knowing what a Kentucky numberplate looks like might be useful, you can just look that up in a matter of seconds.
> Also, picture has to contain all these clues of course, conveniently, including a couple of street numbers.
Given how many times this individual has narrowed down an exact ___location from a photo of a straight road with nothing but trees on either side, I think it's fair to suggest that he was picking an easy target for the purposes of tutorialisation.
It might take more than a couple of minutes to narrow down a photo with less obvious clues than this one, but it's fairly difficult to take a photograph outdoors that doesn't give away enough for someone with sufficient knowledge to identify exactly where it was taken.
I genuinely can't work out what part of this video you think is US-specific. America is far from the only country in the world that has municipality logos on infrastructure, house numbers, or OSM coverage.
There's certainly regions of the world where doing this would be much more challenging (e.g., Central Africa, China, rural India), but the stuff he covered in the video is going to be extremely helpful in the vast majority of cases.
One thing I noticed that doesn't generalize is exactly those house numbers. Depending on house numbering scheme, a house number may effectively be useless. Here in Israel house numbers are just sequential and most streets aren't that long, so what are you going to do with a number like "17" which appears in almost every street in the country?
> so what are you going to do with a number like "17" which appears in almost every street in the country?
Exactly the same thing that Rainbolt did in this video: cut down the amount of work you have to do on each street from checking dozens or potentially hundreds of photos/angles to just 1-3.
Of course if you've only narrowed the streets down to 20,000 candidates instead of 20 of them, that doesn't get you straight to the answer, but it's still a massive proportional improvement.
But the lesson being presented here is to use data that's available to you in the photograph. Maybe you don't have any street numbers (or any particularly useful ones) visible, but you can see the sun at the end of the road and therefore know that it's running directly East-West. That filters out tons of roads. Maybe you can see that houses are only on one side and a river is on the other, you can use that as well. In the video he mentions similar constraints with regards to local parks as being other options for this kind of search narrowing.
The point of that portion of the video isn't "hope the house number is really weird lmao", but to extract any geographical information out of the image and then query that with open mapping databases. House numbers are just one of the most common ones, and while they're typically not quite as powerful as was shown in this video, they're very often going to help dramatically.
Same here, and to that I don't think I know of any municipality logos, pretty sure that is not a thing. And all license plates in the country are going to be the same.
Not exactly US-specific, but Streetview isn't available everywhere. How would he have found the exact ___location without it? Would be quite interesting!
There's a few open data projects that provide similar features to Streetview and can very occasionally be useful in regions without coverage. But yes, typically outside of Streetview coverage you'll be relying on satellite photography, which makes things far more difficult. But that doesn't exactly make the advice here any worse, it just means that the problem you're trying to solve is fundamentally more challenging, so even good techniques might not be able to get you to the solution.
About halfway through this blog post the topic of LLM "personas" is mentioned, and while the given examples are mostly just jokes, the actual use case for that would solve the problem you perceive of this UX, in that you could simply use a persona that is more concise.
But to answer the "why?" - likely because this type of AI is a tool that is going to become universal very rapidly, and the overwhelming majority of the population has little to no understanding of the finer details of the technology. So the default persona has been fine-tuned to include the annoying "as an AI language model [...]" disclaimer very frequently, amongst other disambiguations, couched remarks, and clarifications that a power user would not necessarily require.
> Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
Pretty much every other social site of note doesn't have a rep for moderation, on account of not having moderation at all. A solid 20% or higher of the YouTube comments I see are straight-up phishing scams, Facebook and Twitter are complete cesspits where only content that's literally illegal to post ever gets removed, and the less said about imageboards the better.
Wikipedia is the only even remotely comparably large site I can think of that actually has anything resembling moderation, and you'll find the exact same crowd criticising them for enforcing their rules as well.
Years ago I had to manage SMTP servers. Of course a huge part of that is dealing with spam. Users were mad about how much spam they got and asked if "I was even doing my job". In one particular users case, they did get a lot of spam, and it was a pain in the ass to deal with and they always had lots of complaints. So I showed them for ever 3 messages they received I blocked somewhere near 1000 messages to their address.
If you've never been on that side of the system you don't know what 'not having moderation at all' looks like, but I can tell you it looks far, far, far worse than YT psts.
What you're describing is administration, not moderation. Very similar concepts, but there's an absolutely gigantic difference in the feel of a community with active moderation versus a site like YouTube where the overwhelming majority of all user-submitted content is never looked at by a single human with the ability to remove it. Often by design - an SMTP server does not have the same use cases as a forum board, and doesn't need the same kind of hands-on attention that a social service requires to be enjoyable.
In theory channel owners have the ability to handle that for YouTube specifically, but in practice the tools and incentives aren't there to make it actually happen.
The general unwillingness of people to do unpaid labour for a website that is actively working against them.
It's difficult enough to find anyone willing to actually put the hard yards in to moderation as it is, let alone when all of the resources and tools currently at moderator disposal get shut down.
Evidently not, since that's already a motivation that isn't sufficient to get enough people actually doing the work - and if anything, Reddit taking the step of unilaterally usurping community leaders for not being profitable enough would only reduce the perceived power of a moderator position.
I think the people that we are arguing with don't understand that being a moderator of a subreddit isn't just about being able to ban people. It's about being a leader of a community.
You decide rules and shape the "culture" of the subreddit. Yes, there are absolutely people who are moderators and on insane power trips. That's always been a thing, for every form of online community I've ever known of (IRC, forums, etc...) But there are also many who view the role differently. That's why moderators of subreddits like r/programmerhumor, a meme subreddit that is also a place for programmers (specifically newer programmers) to blow off steam and joke about things they're stressed out about believe they have the power to shut down the subreddit permanently and Reddit will not "bring it back."
If Reddit crosses that line and brings subreddits back, installing puppet leaders who on earth is going to invest time into building a community on Reddit again? Knowing it can be yanked from them at an arbitrary whim - not even for breaking moral rules, but for threatening profits. This is a much more delicate balance than the commenters are painting it as. They clearly don't understand why Reddit works and seem to think it's pure network effect that has consolidated things away from independent forums.
When people talk about googling something and adding "reddit" as a keyword, it's because they want to read authentic discussion from real people about a topic - and sometimes a topic that is somewhat obscure - not an SEO optimized landing page that's going to ask for their email and try to sell them something.
That only exists in communities that are curated and participated in by people who care about them. Removing that removes the core of Reddit's being.
It's not a matter of "wannabe", it's "wannado". Having a bunch of sycophants in the sidebar isn't going to restore a community unless they're actually committed to making the subreddit an enjoyable place to be, and if they were committed to that they'd already be doing it.
That's the trick: they didn't keep it at all. By the time that colour scheme arose, the Cold War was long finished.
The idea of colour-coding the parties at all didn't really become widespread until 1980, and the exact colours in use weren't standard until the aftermath of the 2000 election - ABC had initially used yellow for Republicans, and even as late as 1996 The Washington Post, Time, and NBC were all still using blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, in line with the colour schemes of most other nations.
I would argue that puzzles in commercial collections are more likely to have that problem than ones made freely available by hobbyists, as commercial enterprises inevitably cut corners on things like labour costs for an actual human setter.
I have seen dozens of commercial puzzle games and applications that do not make any attempt to verify the (auto-generated) puzzles as solvable, but I don't think I've ever had the same problem on a site like LMD.