@@vintheguy what is cisgender please? Edit: I didn’t know what it meant and was very lonely at the time, asking here in hopes of conversing with kind, respectful people. But turns out this is the internet, and someone always need to be the scapegoat. I find it funny that not only IRL have I been used as a punching bag, but online as well. You can say absolutely nothing wrong and have know-it-all nobodies try to shut you down and make you feel like trash, for no reason other than to boost their own ego!
Right? "No, I don't want to watch a two hour movie, that's too long. I'll just go on youtube. Oh, a two hour video essay on why we should all worship cats. I'll watch that."
Oh God yes. At this point I'm like, a bottom floor TH-cam user, and it used to be a point of contention if you had to make more than one 10 minute video in response to something.
Just trust the police and the private company that they have suspiciously close ties with that also tracks your location at all times with closed code. Don't worry about it.
@@MiaMulder My sneaking suspicion is that it's because UK plod is recruiting ever thicker people (despite recruits now mostly having degrees) and is finding it difficult to ram basic map-reading and navigation into their heads. I've certainly encountered constables who don't know how to use the UK's Ordnance Survey maps and don't seem to be able to grasp the concept no matter how patiently you explain it.
I think you should have pointed out that both Android and Apple smartphones have a built in method that can automatically send your lat/long coordinates to the emergency services. Plus there are systems in place in many countries that, when you phone “911” it automatically sends your location. Also, I doubt if these emergency services are paying What3words anything.
wow, the first 25 minutes were interesting, but after that you just unleash everything that's been on my mind as well and it just feels good to have someone seeing the same issues in the world
Dammit, I was rewatching a Mia Mulder video only to get a notification for a new Mia Mulder video. Obviously, I had to stop watching the Mia Mulder video in order to watch the Mia Mulder video
oh this was a great video--I work in natural sciences/biology and there's always an issue with getting accurate locality information for data and specimen collection out in nature. I found out about w3w a while back and thought it was pretty neat and then scraped just past the surface and backed away very quickly based on all the issues I found haha. You sort of went into it but what makes addresses and latlong useful for locations is also that they are relational--that places near each other are named similar to each other, and that places have nested location info (street number, street, block, city, county, state, country). That your address doesn't totally change because your whole street/whole block/city/country is moving all together. Lat long is the same way in that you can get 'close' and work your way from there--with w3w they advertise it that blocks with similar names could never be confused for each other (and you obviously showed that isn't true) but what that also means is that if you don't get the block exactly right, you have no clue how close you are to where you should be! Being able to be 'close enough' is actually really important when talking about geospatial relationships and mapping.
Thank you for taking my vague concerns about W3W and actually doing the work to look into it and putting it into a coherent form. I have to make a lot of phone calls to a government helpline as part of my job and I've got a copy of the phonetic alphabet taped to my wall in order to get through those calls without a whole lot of miscommunication and repetition. And the reason the phonetic alphabet works? None of those words sound anything alike and while a couple of them could be mistaken for something else if you don't know the phonetic alphabet, it's unlikely. This is an easy system to implement when you only need 26 distinct words. Not so much, when you're trying to map an entire planet with three word phrases.
Which is exactly why the emergency services have adopted and continue to use the phonetic alphabet for internal communication - especially over shithouse analogue radio channels.
I have a complicated name and have had, and currently have, public facing jobs in countries that do not have familiarity with the names. Phonetic alphabet is great.
Alpha, Bravo Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. Yep, not too hard to memorise too. That said, it should be noted there are some variants on it in different fields. And there are some questions about numerical digits, ITU and NATO handle those a little differently while the main set are the same for letters.
What3Words isn’t even a good reinvention of LatLong. I can tell that 40° 26′ 46″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W is near 40° 26′ 47″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W. In fact, I can even say that 40° N and 79° W defines a large region that contains both of those coördinates. Ideally, a 3 word address system would have some sort of hierarchical system where I can say, I’m in Sleepless-Green, and have that define a scope of area, where the third word specifies a more specific location. An perhaps, that I can tell that Sleepless-Green-Ideas is kind of close to Sleepless-Green-India, but further away from Sleepless-Green-Zebra. This sort of system would make it clear that you cannot just also use plurals, and then an analysis should also be made to eliminate potential homophones or even those that just sound kind of similar. Most places that do alphanumeric license plates will go through great lengths to avoid using 0, O, and D, instead opting for only one of them. Sure, this cuts the pool of available characters down, but it ensures that sight-reading license plates don’t have issues of ambiguous characters. AND EVEN THEN. I guarantee, that if I had my ex-husband tell me a W3W location right now, his app is going to give him the English words, while my app uses the German words. This would have been true while we were still married back in the USA, as well as us now here separated in Germany. Why? Because my phone has always been in the German language, that’s how I do, while for my ex, he’s learning German, but he’s still largely doing everything else in English… (I try to cut him some slack, it’s hard to learn a new language in your 40s.) But he lives here in Germany, and if he tried to do anything with W3W, it’s going to be in English, because he simply cannot operate within German. So, W3W is like, “f- immigrants who don’t speak the local language.” because of course they do.
Any old equipment that responders will use in very remote locations will have the ability to use lat/long too, even if they have 30yo equipment... its there. The oldest of old car sat navs uses it as well.
You know what's actually funny about delivery apps ? It's that not even they make money, so basically it's a system where every single actor loses. Drew Gooden made a great video about this.
I think there's at least one actor that's winning. At least in the UK, the delivery apps are all advertising heavily, particularly on TV and radio - each trying to outdo the others to make sure they get on top. The TV and radio stations are probably getting a decent amount of advertising revenue. That's where all the money they're skimming off the restaurants is going.
Hey Mia, I just wanted to let you know that you have given me the courage to finally come to terms with the fact I am trans. You are truly an inspiration and as always this video was fucking amazing. Thank you so much for helping me come to terms with my true self.
The Veritasium video keeps making me madder the more I think about it ever since I first saw it. What absolutely kills me is that the video spent so much time giving the example of how automated landing software on planes works particularly well in bad weather...but then he never mentions that Waymo's own safety document stated they did not run the cars during heavy rain or dust storms! He used an example of automated landing in bad weather (which is a VERY different problem than driving in a city) to try and convince us that self-driving is ready for cities outside of literally the sunniest city on Earth! The only blink-and-you-miss-it concession he makes is some areas don't have sufficiently well-maintained roads for self driving, and then didn't even hint what level of road infrastructure would be needed! At least the standards for saying when something is paid content meant the bias was trivial to spot but this was still an absurd video that directly cut against the typical channel lesson of "don't just trust people, question, test, and then learn".
He made basically the exact same video just shorter and sponsored by BMW instead of Waymo 3 years ago and still cites the same easily debunked statistic of 94% driver error (while its true that a large majority of accidents involve some level of driver error there are often also other factors such as poor road conditions, which these car companies are going out of their way to avoid) in both videos meaning he either didn't put in enough effort to even google a statistic before using it in his videos or happily misled his audience while being paid to do so.
I feel the same way about that video, it just makes me angry. Also about autolanding, doesn't airports have a bunch of infrastructure that make automatic landing possible? Like radio beacons for local positioning? It's so much less complex situation - it's just a plane approaching flat ground - compaired to a car in busy traffic in a messy city environment. The two situations completely different. And that's not getting into the problems with AI and how it doesn't actually understand anything, and doesn't necessarily detect the patterns we think it does. And how there are other better solutions that don't need AI like good city/regional bus and train service. Sorry, I also needed to vent my frustration.
@@SarahScratches You're absolutely right! And while I don't know this for sure, I'm willing to bet at less well maintained and resourced airports auto-landing isn't an option. The key is computers work well IF you have a very well defined set of goals and variables. When things aren't as well defined they not only have errors, but consistent errors. Some of the issues with driverless or partially driverless vehicles is that while they avoid some errors humans occasionally make, they ALL have the same errors crop up consistently until/unless some patch fixes the issue. Which because road ways even in developed areas are constantly changing can come up a lot! Airports change far less frequently and in far better defined ways than our streets do (especially streets where winter weather makes frequently maintenance a must...aka areas Waymo hasn't tested yet). And then the earlier elevator example was just insulting since that was a problem solvable (and solved) so simply computers aren't required! It was such a frustrating video.
Whenever I watch videos I sorta turn off my brain and I was like, yeah sure self driving cars you made a good argument, but I kept thinking 1. what can these self driving cars do that properly maintained, well designed, accessible public transport can't and 2. isn't this dude going to talk about the environmental impact of everyone switching to cars. My brain categorizes "science stuff" and "humanities stuff" separately, but maybe I'm gonna have to learn to apply marxist theory to everything
Yep, it pissed me off too. To the point where I unsubscribed. It's not the first whiff of BS I've gotten from his videos but it strikes me as powerfully misleading.
@@Superbouncybubble the maps of colonizers are more widely recognized and taught? Maybe? Indigenous populations may disagree about their lands inclusion in such nations. Or about the loss of control of their land?
@@Superbouncybubble there's also the issue of "hello, new friend. This place is called X." colonizer: "ah. Good. This will be called Y now." "Waitwut." The Romans were _huge_ fans and originators of this douchebaggery. So not just the arbitrary lines (borders) but also the very names themselves of the land itself. Colonizers are the worst.
@@FaeQueenCory It's not a coloniser thing, it's a "I can't pronounce half the sounds in qrt-hdsht" thing. That's why it's called Germany and not Deutschland. Even if no one had colonised the Americas they wouldn't call most things by their local names. Chocolate not kakawa. Raccoon not ärähkun.
Wait, I just realized this is a new video!! The other day I was telling my boyfriend that this is one of my favorite channels, and I'm so happy to see something new and interesting on my feed again!!
Makes me kinda glad how relatively "backwards" my country can be to the point that, unless you're in a handful of metropolitan areas, relying on food ordering apps actually gives you less options than just googling up a place and calling personally
I could probably get a good 2-hour essay out of how JP's use of the term turns out to actually be pretty horrifying under the surface in how it distorts maps, meaning, and communication in ways that seem singularly devoted to promoting hierarchy and domination.
Love your commitment to sensible, human technology that works for everyone, for free. The major problem with the push to turn life in to a fragmented series of things we rent is that most of us start to be unable to pay for big swathes of it.
as someone genuinely interested in cartography, i was so interested in the first part of the video that I completely forgot about the capitalism part until it started happening
24:31 Actually, Tom Nicholas had a livestream recently kinda digging into the video you are talking about. Turns out that it is not true that most accidents are caused by human error, or at least that the statistic in said video is heavily missused. Ultimately, most accidents are caused by bad road designs and such, and it's not clear how much better self-driving cars would be at driving in them---at least, for now.
It would depend heavily on networking between cars IMO - accidents caused by bad road designs etc are problems of incomplete information, and sufficient networking could erase that problem. But this also requires the assumption of perfect systems - vehicles: all automated, all networked, all functional and connected. The environment needs to be in good working order. There need to be decent safeguards. All that needs to go wrong is one vehicle going "invisible" to nearby vehicles, and accidents will happen. That is - for self-driving cars to work, the tasklist is more insane than any silicon valley company wants to admit.
I work in this field, I can tell you that self-driving cars rely on data sets generated by human driving, and therefore cannot exceed the quality of the data set they are given.. which means that if a road is designed badly for a human driver it is also designed badly for a self-driving car. In terms of SAE automation levels, 5 is not possible, 4 is the gold standard, and 3 is probably where most companies will end up due to fragmentation of datasets.
There were people that following orders of gps guide did , not sure i it was drivcing off a cliff or in something that is obviously not a street. Ther are uses, its good to have but i am team yeah its good for directions, but dont do it uncritical or without trying to read the map too if ther is a better way that the sytem is too weird to mention. Hell ilove it, but yeah i dont see selfdriving cars solve things where AIs arent good to begin with, think critical and creative.
Does the video talk about the tendency in certain corners of the tech world to go from "this solution will theoretically have less problems than the current situation once we've designed, built, tested, refined, and distributed a whole new approach" to "the new solution is better" without actually bothering to take the relevant steps in between?
@@kevinroscom chess bots are also based on human data... nobody is able to beat a fully-powered chess bot, haven't been able to for years. Not sure where you got the idea that just because something is based on something else, it must be inferior.
To be pedantic : GPS sattelites are essentially beacons, they do not "find us". The GPS _receiver_ determines the position of its own _antenna_ based on the distance to between the antenna and each visible satellite (pseudo-distances computed from radio-wave flight time, requiring all GPS satellites to be synchronized, which is why they all carry an atomic clock). From those distances, the math to find your coordinates is essentially trigonometry. Just so you know.
is it somehow possible for gnss satellites to NOT have internal atomic clocks but somehow receive periodically 'beamed' clock-sync pulses from much more accurate ground based master clocks? if possible, it should significantly reduce the size, weight and cost for the satellites, right?
@@the80386 It's better to have them on board the satillite. These devices are used to guide million dollar missiles, you don't want to be constrained by a signal on the ground that could be destroyed or intercepted
I'm land surveyor and cartographer by profession and I really appreciate that you used the actual historical context for the Mercator projection. I was back in the day very excited about What3Words when I first hear about it. One problem with first responders in Finland is that many cities and municipalities have streets with same name and I'm under impression Sweden has a bit of same problem. I was quickly soured to What3Words for falling for same problem on completely different and much worse level. Finland being bi-lingual was a problem too, then I started hearing the rough critiques from other professionals who are way more experienced and/or trained than myself.
As a software engineer and leftist who has been told _since 9th grade_ that silicon valley is where i need to be if i want to make the world a better place (and also make shitloads of money off of it), this was super cathartic. the “there should be an app for that” mentality that startup culture floats on makes me so mad on every level. thank you mia, for always speaking truth to power 🙏
I'm really excited to watch this! I've heard a lot about how what3words can end up leading first responders to the wrong place through similar sounding space names but I'm interested to learn more
There are ways in which a version of this is a good idea. Take, for instance, the Navaho lands where everyone doesn't have a "traditional" address because lots of areas aren't located on and near roads. This is called "Plus Codes", look kind of like British or Canadian postal codes It's open source, based on latitude and longitude, so addresses some of the worst things about What3Words - anyone can use it, freely, nobody's getting sued, and while it's not as "sexy" as finding the funniest What3Words in your lawn, it's also not language-based, so "Pizza.Stone.Seal" won't get confused with "Pizzas.Tones.Eel" on a noisy 911 call with a bad connection. It's also not trying to gamify anything, or be cool. So the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC is at " VXW7+X25", but the square just north of it is " VXW7+X29" and the one just west of it is " VXW7+X24", so you can tell a few things - it's using alphanumerics to keep the innate unfriendliness of a long string of digits in check, and the similarity in results means that it's not trying to randomize things - in fact, "VXW7+" is a square about 250 meters wide that encompasses the White House South Lawn, and part of the White House, go one north, it's "VXX7+" for the rest of the WHite House all the way up to Lafayette Square, etc. Go out a bit and "87C4 VX" is a square that goes from National Airport to the National Mall, etc. etc. etc. This means the full code is "87C4VXW7 +25", incidentally. This can be useful to "addressize" homeless people, rural people as I mentioned, etc., without it either replacing traditional addresses for those who have them, or being a cash grab for some Silicon Valley app slinger. The process is open, as is the conversion from lat/long since that's all it was intended to be, unlike What3Words' intentional obfuscation.
@@sageinit Yes and no. It's a Google initiative, but it's open source - they tell you how you can program the process of geocoding from lat/long into the system they've created, so they're not limiting what you can do with it, it's not a black box system (you can code it, develop off it, use their implementation, develop your own, nobody's going to sue you for "cracking the code" because there's nothing to crack). So it's Google, but not a product, in that there's nothing to buy, and could still be supported even if Google didn't put another second of effort into it. So that Navaho addressing project didn't have to pay anyone at Google a licensing fee to use it, for instance.
Importantly it's also, like lat/lon, hierarchical - so similar plus codes are near each other, they change in a defined way (instead of being random noise) and a shorter plus code is just less precise. Which, whatever what3words claims, is in fact a feature.
@@keisisqrl Yep, and the thing is, even if you needed more precision - and I think you can definitely make a case for that in certain particular use cases - you can just break up the grid one more hierarchy deep, developing a fork and effectively using the same system to do so. In most cases, this would be overkill, but if it served your use case, you wouldn't have to wait on w3w to sell you a solution to do so.
In the UK we have something called a grid reference, two letters like NZ or SE and then a series of numbers. A big grid would be 4 numbers, but then you can add numbers to get more and more precise. It's very useful (shitty that it's only UK and hard to convert to coordinates but) which is why my partner was flabbergasted at what3words getting pushed to be used when we have gridrefs which are superior
I mean... that kind of killed all the credibility of the video for me. How can you claim to make a video on a mapping service and completely seriously claim to be able to walk and end up in Yugoslavia
I've been feeling off ever since I saw a what3words ad on yt of that exact emergency service scenario- thanks for doing the research and vindicating my suspicions!
I was just scrolling through my TH-cam feed and suddenly this video appeared. I didn't know this channel existed but as soon as you did the plant thing I subscribed and I'm here for it. You're awesome and such a nerd! 🥰
I broke a rib when one of the scooters, badly repaired, threw me head over handlebars on the way to work. No one came and helped me. I had a bruise the size of my hand and was winded for 10 whole minutes. I live in Australia and the public transport is not consistently great. I hate those scooters
Didn't expect a thrilling and in-depth study of the song Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but exploring the sociological and philosophical underpinnings of a desperate song for someone's partner to just please stay really livened my mood. Thank you! (I'm also just joking, sorry! I did enjoy the video loads though, thanks!)
Spoken as one of the newest inductees to the Cult of Silicon Innovation (I have to move there this year 😭), this was a refreshing snap back to reality. A reminder to remain critical of every company I see here, scrutinize where the money is going and where it is coming from, and seek to identify and avoid zombie ideas. I wish there were a way to cut through the bullshit and determine if an idea, any idea, is a zombie idea or if it is actually doing something that makes things better. How would you do that?
11:30 FYI You can open google maps anywhere... It uses cellphone data to triangulate your location, and when you hold down on the map you can generate your lat/long. Send out a text message with your lat/long to your emergency contacts as text messages can queue to send. This will give potential aid an easy means to find you.
Ironically, I think this might have a higher error rate than what3words. Many people won't be able to do that, especially in an emergency situation. Can you people at least be consistent with your criticisms?
@@justinfung4351 why am I a "you people" and how the fuck am I inconsistent. Furthermore. You don't expect people to be able to OPEN A FUCKING MAP? THAT'S SOME DORA THE EXPLORER LEVEL BULLSHIT
@@Q269 You expect everyone to know how to do that? You expect everyone to already know to do that? A big part of the video was against the 5% error. You expect that people who cannot sufficiently tell the same 3 words in an emergency situation due to similar words (despite being able to spell them out) will be technologically advanced enough to find their own lat/long using Google Maps? Be fucking consistent.
When it comes to capitalism a good idea that's free and makes the world a better place will always be beaten out by a bad idea that makes peoples lives worse but can be monetised. And if a successful idea can be made more profitable by making it worse it will be
Hm... I think What3Words works well on paper. It could be useful in very specific scenarios, it is a shame to see it being screwed up. As autistic person I really appreaciate not having to call restaurants. The biggest silicom valley advantage is convenience, and thats the real problem.
The thing with people like Veritasium is that they really do believe the stuff they get paid to shill for, it's the case of "if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting". That applies to BMW, Bill Gates, and Waymo.
Capitalism breeds innovative methods of pushing costs to parties unable to avoid them. It's is very, VERY good at that, and if you're a party who CAN avoid the cost, that's wonderful. On a higher level, it's good at increasing the number of people unable to avoid paying the costs.
Except capitalism is what killed this app... it tried and failed because the capitalist system allowed it to fail. It could not compete therefore it died.
Minor correction: ABBA didn't say money makes the world go around. They had a song called Money Money Money, but the song where money is said to make the world go around is Money Money from Cabaret. I know... hardly the point of the video. Which was excellent.
I remeber in swedish middle school teachers told me to have an atlas (Map book) remember pages and the grids for when needing help of an emergency to be able to say: page 25, B 4 or something
I will say that in terms of usefulness, the food delivery apps vastly outclass things like The Loop or other mindless "reinvents public transportation but worse for the fiftieth time" projects. Calling up restaurants is really difficult for some people - particularly people who live in countries where they don't speak the majority language very well - and building an entire online ordering system is currently expensive and janky for individual food shops. There is an actual need that these apps fill - but they usually fill it in a bad and exploitative ways. :p
Yeah but good luck waiting for an uncentralizable(≠decentralized, uncentralizability implies decentralization, but the converse ain't true!) FLOSS[S] (Free, Libre, Open Source Software [System]) solution for that sort of problem. (in b4 BLAWKCHOYN high octane fridge horror nightmare fuel BS)
Agreed. I live in a Chinese speaking country, and while I speak well, talking on the phone makes me really nervous, and I avoid it whenever possible. Apps have made it possible for me to get delivery easily when I'm stuck at home with my disability, or during lockdowns. I do wish they were better though, and I try to avoid using them when I'm mobile, and can go out myself.
It's useful because not all restaurants are open or accepting orders at all times, and the app gives you alternatives. But a lot of places do give a flyer when you've ordered from them on the app, so next time you can order on their own website instead. And once you've found a few good restaurants to order from, it could then be worth it to order from them directly. Also, most restaurants do employ their own delivery drivers.
@@DaedalusYoung However, this assumes people are going to stick to one or two restaurants. There are often HUNDREDS of restaurants to try, and the old methods don't work very well for that. If I were to work with flyers or menus for the restaurants I regularly order from, I'd have to deal with about 30 individual menus and/or flyers. AND remember who sells what, even if I've only used them once or twice. I'd prefer a better system for everyone, but, to be frank, the world has generally grown out of the simple.
@@davidlathrop9360 Yes, so like I said, the app is useful for trying out these restaurants. I have done that and I'm down to about 3 or 4 restaurants I generally like ordering from. With some of them, it's cheaper to order directly from their own website, but for others, I still use the app.
Yeah the Elon Musk loop really feels like it's meant for rich people to get around safely after the climate apocalypse comes to a head / if we finally revolt
Mia, I'm pretty sure veritasium is American. In America, suggesting public transportation is good actually is like saying magic would make your daily commute immediate, both are true but we have no access to either and cannot conceive of a world where we do have access to either.
Thank you Mia! what3words has been bugging me ever since i was subjected to their advertisements a month ago. and by god those electric scooters bring me to a boiling rage.
Have to say the self driving car video almost had me thinking it was a good idea again even though I went in thinking "umm buses are *right there*". Big "you are not immune to propaganda" moment
Buses and self driving cars solve very similar problems, but not the same problem. Buses and other public transport are best when there are enough people who want to go in roughly the same direction as each other. Cars are best when people want to go (or come from) more obscure directions or at times when it would be wasteful to run a bus (eg 3am).
@@theMoporter That's a complete non-response. What's your intent? "Sure, some places compromise between car-centered and other concerns, but wherever spaces are designed to favor cars, people who can afford to externalize the costs of driving cars drive cars"? I was replying to someone who implied that markets respond to instead of creating desires, and your response was "well, people still want to drive cars" as if that's a settled and immutable reality?
Stopping by to give a comment to boost the engagement. Really loved the video. One of my faves from you in recent months. Not saying your other stuff hasn't been excellent, I just found this one really fascinating.
A 5% chance?!?!! I just rolled a D20, and it only took 10 rolls to get a natural 1. That’s the equivalent of someone dying here, so that is FUCKING TERRIFYING
I also feel let down by Veritasiums self driving car ad and Physics Girl also has an ad for a car manufacturer up, what a marketing department streak 😔
One thing I keep asking myself: Wouldn't it be much more useful to have the squares not random but deliberately have similar ones next to each other? Yknow, like house numbers? So if you get it wrong, you're not THAT far off?? (that in addition to everything you mentioned)
First of all wow, loved this video so much, second of all “zombie ideas” is a perfect term both in that it is accurate to what it describes and also in that it sounds just eerie enough to match 🎶that funny feeling🎶 that comes from watching a billionaire invent a worse version of a public library
As someone who has been programming for a while, I learned a skill when anyone comes up to me with new requirements to say no, and then to ask them to justify why they need this new thing. Maybe silicon valley is just a bunch of college dropouts with limitless resources.
I'd never heard of this channel before, but someone shared this link. As a GIS developer, this kind of stuff is like catnip to me. I think you did a great job and I'm going to check out the rest of your channel now. Great work!
I really loved the final section to this video and how you explore this pervasive idea that technology is a solution to all of our problems. Even when it comes to something as huge as climate change, we already have the tools to solve it and they just need to be implemented thoroughly rather than looking to new technologies to fix it (and arguably technology is responsible for it).
It's important to read "technology" broadly, and include in it sheer discovered practical techniques and all the gizmos we've developed and implemented since fire. It doesn't just mean the things we've sunk venture capital and advertising into in the last ten years.
@@jeffengel2607 Yeah I agree - I think I was using it a bit simplistically, but it's more to do with what Mia was saying about 'new' being better that we need to get over. Innovation is probably a better word for it, where it's seen as a solution to many of our problems when we already have technologies that aren't being used enough, e.g. renewable energy, public transport.
great video! I've recently been so annoyed with all these food-apps, they just make everything worse for both the consumer, workers and the restaurants
We here across the border in Finland also recently started getting those electric scooters in all the larger cities, and it's just as bad idea here as it is over there. Can't help but think Finland saw big bro Sweden with cool gadgets and just had to copy them, regardless of whether it makes sense
The similar sounding name thing doesn't make sense - there are 3 words, not 1. If one word is similar, the other two are different. And you can spell it out, or say what the square next to you says. It's just such a non-issue
I'm so glad you basically took some of the internal screaming I've had ringing in my head for... way too long now? And articulated it into words. Also, I've been getting so frustrated by channels like Veritasium and Kurzgesagt because they are *literally doing the work of these people* (though the latter is more difficult to spot). Hence why I haven't watched them in So Very Long. (Also the reason I love Tom Nicholas's video on Johnny Harris.)
I've always found Kurzgesagt to be quite thoroughly researched, and I don't think they've ever created a video that is wholely sponsored in the way that some of Veritaserum's have been. Can you give any examples of them being as bad as you say?
uhhhh i hear people especially second language english speakers using plurals when there doesnt need to be a plural all the time??? its perfectly reasonable to assume that someone might say "lull" when theyre in a "lulls" square wtf
"Hey, can you give me some instructions how to get to the cinema?" "Sure, just take a left on hair-thesis-sleeve and continue on that road until you reach channel-structure-gradual. Turn right and eventually you'll see the cinema on your left at depart-patience-jaw." "Ok, can I park there?" "The parking lot is just a bit further North of eternal-bundle-deviation." "So at about time-epicalyx-tongue then?" "No, the square North of that, hotdog-willpower-customer." "Oh, of course!"
I loved most of the video, (25:07) but how exactly are electric bikes "ruining the environment"? I'd agree with you about Tesla cars, but bikes are MUCH MORE efficient. But scooters can be a bit annoying - especially the monopoly of rented scooters in the UK.
I believe it's the fact that they are dockless, so when the rental period stops they are just dumped anywhere - often left strewn across the pavement - so while they may be green, they are damaging the local environment by making it difficult for pedestrians and those with reduced mobility to navigate footpaths, and of course with the wheels locked and I suspect they are probably alarmed so trying to move them is more problematic then it should be.
A personal electric bike makes sense. You own it, you'll use it (I presume), you'll take care of it. These electric bikes are rented, or more often, thrown in rivers and dragged up trees (because someone thought it was funny).
@@CuterwithCatEars in Norwich, they have a solution: charge you continuously until you leave it at a diving station. If you leave it outside of one, you get an additional fee.
I was a software engineer and I took an experimental self-driving car through the Vegas loop to get to a wedding. I asked about 800 questions and exited the vehicle nearly missing the wedding and over the hype of self-driving as viable in the real world.
Funny thing: there's a niche industry of people who "tow" those scooters -- essentially just kidnapping them -- on the behalf of whoever's property they got ditched on.
l dont understand the point about Veritasium. All else being equal, a "self" driving car would be strictly better than typical car. Like if you want to argue that buses are a better general transportation solution, fine, but people driving is more dangerous than not.
that massively understates the argument of that video (which isn't talking about theoretically road-read advanced self driving tech, but the actual technology available today, which is "safer" than human drivers under very specific controlled circumstances), and ignores its purpose, which is to increase value for a company's shareholders. Also it's a solution which exists to evade the obvious solution to endemic auto accidents: reduce the number of cars, and create cities for human beings.
Amazing video. I yearn for the day when we as a society collectively realize that public transportation is a great and needed thing! I wish my tax money would go towards it! Also, every time I see the freaking Loop I get so mad. It’s such a dumb idea. It’s also a major fire hazard and there’s no way emergency services are efficiently getting in that tiny tube. It was also really interesting learning about what3words- I had actually never heard of it. But it also sounds like a terrible idea. A family member of mine is a firefighter, and I hear their pager go off all the time. The pager doesn’t have the best sound quality, and neither does the radio frequencies that the dispatchers use. If a dispatcher was trying to say the three words to describe the square location, the is a BIG chance that the emergency responders would mishear the words. Especially if the word was a plural. It could be disastrous if a square nearby the emergency had a similar sounding name- what3words sounds like a terrible system in my opinion.
Been seeing What3Words ads everywhere, this video showed a lot I certainly didn't expect from something that seemed to be entirely well-intentioned, great video.
Yeah, that self driving car video was pretty rubbish. E.g. comparing AI intelligence to human intelligence in the manner they were attempting is virtually meaningless; A human driver that was somehow injected with millions of hours of driving experience would not have problems identifying potholes, or traffic lights that had moved locations, or need millions more hours to understand snow. Its just a nonsensical metric, a marketing gimmick. and its a bit sad as well, because self-driving technology does have enormous potential, but there is a lot of nuance and alternative applications of it that an unbiassed video could really dig in to.* - Derek has been honest at times that he does videos he might not be quite so proud of because videos he has more passion about dont tend to make as much money and such, but Im not sure if being self aware about your shilling really justifies it. Tom Scott is a fairly good example of someone who managed to make fantastic videos often from around the world, and who is generally a lot better about sponsorships, even going so far as to pick apart some of the big sponsors and risk burning bridges. - I cant really speak to their respective financial situations but it does seem odd that a channel the size of Veritasium would need to do essentially full length advert videos to remain sustainable. - - *Though that video has nothing on his Bill Gates video, that was just sickening to watch as Derek helped launder the reputation of the man. Buying in to the baseless excuses as if any ol idiot would be making up vaccines in their kitchen, and likening people who find it profoundly fucked up that Gates directly blocked the planned open sourcing of a key vaccine to conspiracy theorists. It was just a disgusting display of someone I generally respect, prostrating himself before a billionaire who has repeatedly proven he has no fucking idea what he is doing, even as he steers national and even global institutions off a cliff. (In the case of the US education system in particular, so clear was the damage done that even Gates himself admitted theyd massively fucked it all up.) The man wasnt even particularly good at writing operating systems, why the fuck is anyone listening to him about health, education, etc? Oh... right... billions upon billions of dollars...
Almost every big science/edutainment Channel made a video with the Gates Foundation about different topics that Gates thinks are important. It was really disheartening.
I appreciate the small discussion about the why in the "earth is round thing", even though I knew the story I thought it nice that you went the extra mile and told it here. Lots of small details that amount to a big success (I hope).
I hope to one day find a partner who looks at me the same way Mia looked at that map at the start of the video.
💐
hey jessie!!
Jessie!!! 😍😍😍😍
Jessie Gender, knowing you watch Mia Mulder videos is yet more evidence of you having impeccable taste.
This is a fucking vibe
"And the British isles were correctly removed"
As a transgender woman in Britain, I support this statement.
Correction: A transgender woman in the North Sea/North Atlantic.
As cis man residing in the hell hole of the world (otherwise reluctantly known as ""England"") I support this statement far more
@@vintheguy what is cisgender please?
Edit: I didn’t know what it meant and was very lonely at the time, asking here in hopes of conversing with kind, respectful people. But turns out this is the internet, and someone always need to be the scapegoat. I find it funny that not only IRL have I been used as a punching bag, but online as well. You can say absolutely nothing wrong and have know-it-all nobodies try to shut you down and make you feel like trash, for no reason other than to boost their own ego!
@@Yuki-di2rb
Bro just look it up yourself
ditto
I love the fact that the Overton window of video lengths has so shifted that a 40 minute video can be considered a short one.
Right? "No, I don't want to watch a two hour movie, that's too long. I'll just go on youtube. Oh, a two hour video essay on why we should all worship cats. I'll watch that."
@@macaronimagpie where can I find this cat essay??? 🐈
Oh God yes. At this point I'm like, a bottom floor TH-cam user, and it used to be a point of contention if you had to make more than one 10 minute video in response to something.
The good thing about essay style videos is, that you can watch them at two times speed, compared to a movie, where that isn't really possible.
What. I'm not sure how this got so many likes, the Overton window has nothing to do with this.
Whenever someone says _only_ 5%, I know they don't understand probabilities. Ask anyone who rolls d20 (plays a number of roleplaying games) regularly.
whenever someone says "only 1%" I can tell they don't understand probabilities.. speaking as someone who plays fire emblem and did crafting in ffxiv
@@rhael42 what's that old expression? If it's not 100%, then it's 50%? Lol 1% happens way more than people realize.
@@rhael42 whenever someone says "only 1%" I can tell they don't understand probabilities.. speaking as someone who plays fallen london
Imagine rolling a nat 1 when you want firefighters helping you
@@SemicolonExpected a 99% change of succes in fallen london will fail about 30% of the time
I love the idea that ABBA is a single collective "philosopher" that has been around for almost 2500 years. This is the quality content I come for.
Mia was inaccurate about them. They actually date back to the Sumerians.
Can't lie thought this was about the bad maps
Same
Yea you're not alone, that's how I get ya. Trick you with the bad kind, make you stay with discussions about longitudes
@@MiaMulder good to know its dora the explorer time
@@tempesttossed6029 It’s not bait, this person actually is a MAP.
@MytheBe I'm very attracted to the idea of killing someone before I die, but it's best for everyone if I never act on it. Comprende?
"Norway is basically Yugoslavia" - Mia Mulder, 2021
All of europe is just yugoslavia when you think about it
@@MiaMulder Europa je Yugoslavia
@@MiaMulder That feels like a Map game waiting to happen.
_quisque est yugoslavius alio_
I want Tito to replace Ursula von der Leyen
Oh yeah, when the police say I should download an app, that's *just* what I'm gonna do, yeah buddy.
Just trust the police and the private company that they have suspiciously close ties with that also tracks your location at all times with closed code. Don't worry about it.
@@MiaMulder you make a good point 🤔
@@MiaMulder My sneaking suspicion is that it's because UK plod is recruiting ever thicker people (despite recruits now mostly having degrees) and is finding it difficult to ram basic map-reading and navigation into their heads. I've certainly encountered constables who don't know how to use the UK's Ordnance Survey maps and don't seem to be able to grasp the concept no matter how patiently you explain it.
@@MiaMulder yikes. Tin foil hatter
I think you should have pointed out that both Android and Apple smartphones have a built in method that can automatically send your lat/long coordinates to the emergency services. Plus there are systems in place in many countries that, when you phone “911” it automatically sends your location. Also, I doubt if these emergency services are paying What3words anything.
wow, the first 25 minutes were interesting, but after that you just unleash everything that's been on my mind as well and it just feels good to have someone seeing the same issues in the world
Glad you enjoyed it!
Big same here 🤙
It took me 25 minutes to not be distracted by Sweden on its side
Thank you for commenting. I'm at min 23 and am failing to see the point of the video
Litterally a chunk of the very issues I've been seeing too.
Deconstructing maps. A Descartesographer, if you will.
No idea when I'm gonna use this joke, but I'm definitely stealing it
:|
incredible
A hugely underrated comment. Brava!
If I remember correctly cartography is called that bc of Descartes, he was also a mathematician :)
Dammit, I was rewatching a Mia Mulder video only to get a notification for a new Mia Mulder video. Obviously, I had to stop watching the Mia Mulder video in order to watch the Mia Mulder video
That's okay, you can return to watching the mia mulder video after watching the mia mulder video
Wow, Mia Mulder sure is knowledgeable about Mia Mulder videos
@@MiaMulder good point. Now I can go back to the cat ears. This was a good video and I like the idea of alternating short and long projects
Breaking news: Mia Mulder
(40 minutes later...)
We now return to our previously scheduled programming: Mia Mulder
oh this was a great video--I work in natural sciences/biology and there's always an issue with getting accurate locality information for data and specimen collection out in nature. I found out about w3w a while back and thought it was pretty neat and then scraped just past the surface and backed away very quickly based on all the issues I found haha. You sort of went into it but what makes addresses and latlong useful for locations is also that they are relational--that places near each other are named similar to each other, and that places have nested location info (street number, street, block, city, county, state, country). That your address doesn't totally change because your whole street/whole block/city/country is moving all together. Lat long is the same way in that you can get 'close' and work your way from there--with w3w they advertise it that blocks with similar names could never be confused for each other (and you obviously showed that isn't true) but what that also means is that if you don't get the block exactly right, you have no clue how close you are to where you should be! Being able to be 'close enough' is actually really important when talking about geospatial relationships and mapping.
v interesting, thanks for sharing!
Mia smiling and saying MAPS has made my entire day
Same
yus
All caps "MAPs" made me double take when i glanced at ur comment lol 😬😸
Mia saying LOOP in the loopiest possible way is what made my day.
@@dwelsh226 oops
Thank you for taking my vague concerns about W3W and actually doing the work to look into it and putting it into a coherent form.
I have to make a lot of phone calls to a government helpline as part of my job and I've got a copy of the phonetic alphabet taped to my wall in order to get through those calls without a whole lot of miscommunication and repetition. And the reason the phonetic alphabet works? None of those words sound anything alike and while a couple of them could be mistaken for something else if you don't know the phonetic alphabet, it's unlikely.
This is an easy system to implement when you only need 26 distinct words. Not so much, when you're trying to map an entire planet with three word phrases.
Which is exactly why the emergency services have adopted and continue to use the phonetic alphabet for internal communication - especially over shithouse analogue radio channels.
It's worse when you realise that w3w has decided to use the words in the phonetic alphabet as part of its word bank.
And a string of just 10 of those words can describe any location with as much specificity as W3W. (edit: 9 words if you allow numbers in the code).
I have a complicated name and have had, and currently have, public facing jobs in countries that do not have familiarity with the names. Phonetic alphabet is great.
Alpha, Bravo Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
Yep, not too hard to memorise too. That said, it should be noted there are some variants on it in different fields. And there are some questions about numerical digits, ITU and NATO handle those a little differently while the main set are the same for letters.
"if you walk for 45 min, you can end up in Yugoslavia."
Mia, I think you need a new map lol
To be fair, Mia has long legs.
@@jeffengel2607 haha, true!
@@jeffengel2607 Legs so long they take you 20 years into the past.
XD i think my parents have a globe with it(thats not used)
I always thought that Europe was lousy with time portals.
What3Words isn’t even a good reinvention of LatLong. I can tell that 40° 26′ 46″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W is near 40° 26′ 47″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W. In fact, I can even say that 40° N and 79° W defines a large region that contains both of those coördinates.
Ideally, a 3 word address system would have some sort of hierarchical system where I can say, I’m in Sleepless-Green, and have that define a scope of area, where the third word specifies a more specific location. An perhaps, that I can tell that Sleepless-Green-Ideas is kind of close to Sleepless-Green-India, but further away from Sleepless-Green-Zebra.
This sort of system would make it clear that you cannot just also use plurals, and then an analysis should also be made to eliminate potential homophones or even those that just sound kind of similar. Most places that do alphanumeric license plates will go through great lengths to avoid using 0, O, and D, instead opting for only one of them. Sure, this cuts the pool of available characters down, but it ensures that sight-reading license plates don’t have issues of ambiguous characters.
AND EVEN THEN. I guarantee, that if I had my ex-husband tell me a W3W location right now, his app is going to give him the English words, while my app uses the German words. This would have been true while we were still married back in the USA, as well as us now here separated in Germany. Why? Because my phone has always been in the German language, that’s how I do, while for my ex, he’s learning German, but he’s still largely doing everything else in English… (I try to cut him some slack, it’s hard to learn a new language in your 40s.)
But he lives here in Germany, and if he tried to do anything with W3W, it’s going to be in English, because he simply cannot operate within German. So, W3W is like, “f- immigrants who don’t speak the local language.” because of course they do.
Any old equipment that responders will use in very remote locations will have the ability to use lat/long too, even if they have 30yo equipment... its there. The oldest of old car sat navs uses it as well.
You know what's actually funny about delivery apps ? It's that not even they make money, so basically it's a system where every single actor loses. Drew Gooden made a great video about this.
We have come so far that we might as well start the United Fedaration of Planets right now.
Virtual economic growth is the future!
@@WhichDoctor1 _Tendency of the rate of profit to fall_ intensifies.
I think there's at least one actor that's winning. At least in the UK, the delivery apps are all advertising heavily, particularly on TV and radio - each trying to outdo the others to make sure they get on top. The TV and radio stations are probably getting a decent amount of advertising revenue. That's where all the money they're skimming off the restaurants is going.
The idea is eventually one or another absorbs the rest, and then they make a LOT of money...
Hey Mia, I just wanted to let you know that you have given me the courage to finally come to terms with the fact I am trans. You are truly an inspiration and as always this video was fucking amazing. Thank you so much for helping me come to terms with my true self.
hell yeah!! proud of you 💜 welcome to the trans gang
Not in the gang but still proud of you both :)))))
Hell yes, go you!
congratulations! 🏳️⚧️
That's a huge step. I am happy for you!
The Veritasium video keeps making me madder the more I think about it ever since I first saw it. What absolutely kills me is that the video spent so much time giving the example of how automated landing software on planes works particularly well in bad weather...but then he never mentions that Waymo's own safety document stated they did not run the cars during heavy rain or dust storms! He used an example of automated landing in bad weather (which is a VERY different problem than driving in a city) to try and convince us that self-driving is ready for cities outside of literally the sunniest city on Earth! The only blink-and-you-miss-it concession he makes is some areas don't have sufficiently well-maintained roads for self driving, and then didn't even hint what level of road infrastructure would be needed!
At least the standards for saying when something is paid content meant the bias was trivial to spot but this was still an absurd video that directly cut against the typical channel lesson of "don't just trust people, question, test, and then learn".
He made basically the exact same video just shorter and sponsored by BMW instead of Waymo 3 years ago and still cites the same easily debunked statistic of 94% driver error (while its true that a large majority of accidents involve some level of driver error there are often also other factors such as poor road conditions, which these car companies are going out of their way to avoid) in both videos meaning he either didn't put in enough effort to even google a statistic before using it in his videos or happily misled his audience while being paid to do so.
I feel the same way about that video, it just makes me angry.
Also about autolanding, doesn't airports have a bunch of infrastructure that make automatic landing possible? Like radio beacons for local positioning? It's so much less complex situation - it's just a plane approaching flat ground - compaired to a car in busy traffic in a messy city environment. The two situations completely different.
And that's not getting into the problems with AI and how it doesn't actually understand anything, and doesn't necessarily detect the patterns we think it does. And how there are other better solutions that don't need AI like good city/regional bus and train service.
Sorry, I also needed to vent my frustration.
@@SarahScratches You're absolutely right! And while I don't know this for sure, I'm willing to bet at less well maintained and resourced airports auto-landing isn't an option.
The key is computers work well IF you have a very well defined set of goals and variables. When things aren't as well defined they not only have errors, but consistent errors. Some of the issues with driverless or partially driverless vehicles is that while they avoid some errors humans occasionally make, they ALL have the same errors crop up consistently until/unless some patch fixes the issue. Which because road ways even in developed areas are constantly changing can come up a lot!
Airports change far less frequently and in far better defined ways than our streets do (especially streets where winter weather makes frequently maintenance a must...aka areas Waymo hasn't tested yet). And then the earlier elevator example was just insulting since that was a problem solvable (and solved) so simply computers aren't required! It was such a frustrating video.
Whenever I watch videos I sorta turn off my brain and I was like, yeah sure self driving cars you made a good argument, but I kept thinking 1. what can these self driving cars do that properly maintained, well designed, accessible public transport can't and 2. isn't this dude going to talk about the environmental impact of everyone switching to cars. My brain categorizes "science stuff" and "humanities stuff" separately, but maybe I'm gonna have to learn to apply marxist theory to everything
Yep, it pissed me off too. To the point where I unsubscribed. It's not the first whiff of BS I've gotten from his videos but it strikes me as powerfully misleading.
"Maps! Let's talk about something uncontroversial!"
Me: laughs in aboriginal person
I don't understand, are maps bad for aboriginal people?
@@Superbouncybubble the maps of colonizers are more widely recognized and taught? Maybe? Indigenous populations may disagree about their lands inclusion in such nations. Or about the loss of control of their land?
@@aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa9068 oh yeah I could see "who draws the borders" to be a source of a controversy
@@Superbouncybubble there's also the issue of "hello, new friend. This place is called X."
colonizer: "ah. Good. This will be called Y now."
"Waitwut."
The Romans were _huge_ fans and originators of this douchebaggery.
So not just the arbitrary lines (borders) but also the very names themselves of the land itself. Colonizers are the worst.
@@FaeQueenCory It's not a coloniser thing, it's a "I can't pronounce half the sounds in qrt-hdsht" thing. That's why it's called Germany and not Deutschland. Even if no one had colonised the Americas they wouldn't call most things by their local names. Chocolate not kakawa. Raccoon not ärähkun.
Wait, I just realized this is a new video!! The other day I was telling my boyfriend that this is one of my favorite channels, and I'm so happy to see something new and interesting on my feed again!!
That is awesome!
Mia: "let's talk about something unproblematic" Narrator: "It was not unproblematic"
Makes me kinda glad how relatively "backwards" my country can be to the point that, unless you're in a handful of metropolitan areas, relying on food ordering apps actually gives you less options than just googling up a place and calling personally
Jordan Peterson always talks about maps of meaning, but does he ever consider the meaning of maps?
- dril
Depends on what you mean by "consider"
and Jesus.
"drum noise"
I could probably get a good 2-hour essay out of how JP's use of the term turns out to actually be pretty horrifying under the surface in how it distorts maps, meaning, and communication in ways that seem singularly devoted to promoting hierarchy and domination.
If he has, it's only in the context of which bits of the map are higher on the value hierarchy than others.
Love your commitment to sensible, human technology that works for everyone, for free. The major problem with the push to turn life in to a fragmented series of things we rent is that most of us start to be unable to pay for big swathes of it.
This is a really fantastic video - I was really unsettled by the veritasium video too, and as a map fan this had it all
Thank you so much!
as someone genuinely interested in cartography, i was so interested in the first part of the video that I completely forgot about the capitalism part until it started happening
That's a nutshell description of how capitalism works.
Isn’t that always the way…
im excited for 40-minutes-in-the-future me who will know what any of those words in the title are referring to
A mystery what the word, "map" means.
@@TheBoagboy especially that one
Actually if you read the video title and not the words on the Thumbnail you will find that the word map appears nowhere in it… spooped yet?
24:31 Actually, Tom Nicholas had a livestream recently kinda digging into the video you are talking about. Turns out that it is not true that most accidents are caused by human error, or at least that the statistic in said video is heavily missused. Ultimately, most accidents are caused by bad road designs and such, and it's not clear how much better self-driving cars would be at driving in them---at least, for now.
It would depend heavily on networking between cars IMO - accidents caused by bad road designs etc are problems of incomplete information, and sufficient networking could erase that problem. But this also requires the assumption of perfect systems - vehicles: all automated, all networked, all functional and connected. The environment needs to be in good working order. There need to be decent safeguards. All that needs to go wrong is one vehicle going "invisible" to nearby vehicles, and accidents will happen. That is - for self-driving cars to work, the tasklist is more insane than any silicon valley company wants to admit.
I work in this field, I can tell you that self-driving cars rely on data sets generated by human driving, and therefore cannot exceed the quality of the data set they are given.. which means that if a road is designed badly for a human driver it is also designed badly for a self-driving car. In terms of SAE automation levels, 5 is not possible, 4 is the gold standard, and 3 is probably where most companies will end up due to fragmentation of datasets.
There were people that following orders of gps guide did , not sure i it was drivcing off a cliff or in something that is obviously not a street.
Ther are uses, its good to have but i am team yeah its good for directions, but dont do it uncritical or without trying to read the map too if ther is a better way that the sytem is too weird to mention. Hell ilove it, but yeah i dont see selfdriving cars solve things where AIs arent good to begin with, think critical and creative.
Does the video talk about the tendency in certain corners of the tech world to go from "this solution will theoretically have less problems than the current situation once we've designed, built, tested, refined, and distributed a whole new approach" to "the new solution is better" without actually bothering to take the relevant steps in between?
@@kevinroscom chess bots are also based on human data... nobody is able to beat a fully-powered chess bot, haven't been able to for years. Not sure where you got the idea that just because something is based on something else, it must be inferior.
"I fell into a hole of misery", " I became lost". Some heavy Dante vibes here.
To be pedantic : GPS sattelites are essentially beacons, they do not "find us". The GPS _receiver_ determines the position of its own _antenna_ based on the distance to between the antenna and each visible satellite (pseudo-distances computed from radio-wave flight time, requiring all GPS satellites to be synchronized, which is why they all carry an atomic clock). From those distances, the math to find your coordinates is essentially trigonometry. Just so you know.
is it somehow possible for gnss satellites to NOT have internal atomic clocks but somehow receive periodically 'beamed' clock-sync pulses from much more accurate ground based master clocks? if possible, it should significantly reduce the size, weight and cost for the satellites, right?
@@the80386 It's better to have them on board the satillite. These devices are used to guide million dollar missiles, you don't want to be constrained by a signal on the ground that could be destroyed or intercepted
I'm land surveyor and cartographer by profession and I really appreciate that you used the actual historical context for the Mercator projection. I was back in the day very excited about What3Words when I first hear about it. One problem with first responders in Finland is that many cities and municipalities have streets with same name and I'm under impression Sweden has a bit of same problem. I was quickly soured to What3Words for falling for same problem on completely different and much worse level. Finland being bi-lingual was a problem too, then I started hearing the rough critiques from other professionals who are way more experienced and/or trained than myself.
As a software engineer and leftist who has been told _since 9th grade_ that silicon valley is where i need to be if i want to make the world a better place (and also make shitloads of money off of it), this was super cathartic.
the “there should be an app for that” mentality that startup culture floats on makes me so mad on every level.
thank you mia, for always speaking truth to power 🙏
I'm really excited to watch this! I've heard a lot about how what3words can end up leading first responders to the wrong place through similar sounding space names but I'm interested to learn more
It's useless as an actual address system, because I live on the 4th floor, and w3w doesn't do the vertical plane.
There are ways in which a version of this is a good idea. Take, for instance, the Navaho lands where everyone doesn't have a "traditional" address because lots of areas aren't located on and near roads. This is called "Plus Codes", look kind of like British or Canadian postal codes It's open source, based on latitude and longitude, so addresses some of the worst things about What3Words - anyone can use it, freely, nobody's getting sued, and while it's not as "sexy" as finding the funniest What3Words in your lawn, it's also not language-based, so "Pizza.Stone.Seal" won't get confused with "Pizzas.Tones.Eel" on a noisy 911 call with a bad connection. It's also not trying to gamify anything, or be cool. So the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC is at "
VXW7+X25", but the square just north of it is "
VXW7+X29" and the one just west of it is "
VXW7+X24", so you can tell a few things - it's using alphanumerics to keep the innate unfriendliness of a long string of digits in check, and the similarity in results means that it's not trying to randomize things - in fact, "VXW7+" is a square about 250 meters wide that encompasses the White House South Lawn, and part of the White House, go one north, it's "VXX7+" for the rest of the WHite House all the way up to Lafayette Square, etc. Go out a bit and "87C4 VX" is a square that goes from National Airport to the National Mall, etc. etc. etc. This means the full code is "87C4VXW7 +25", incidentally. This can be useful to "addressize" homeless people, rural people as I mentioned, etc., without it either replacing traditional addresses for those who have them, or being a cash grab for some Silicon Valley app slinger. The process is open, as is the conversion from lat/long since that's all it was intended to be, unlike What3Words' intentional obfuscation.
Isn't that actually a Google product?
@@sageinit Yes and no. It's a Google initiative, but it's open source - they tell you how you can program the process of geocoding from lat/long into the system they've created, so they're not limiting what you can do with it, it's not a black box system (you can code it, develop off it, use their implementation, develop your own, nobody's going to sue you for "cracking the code" because there's nothing to crack). So it's Google, but not a product, in that there's nothing to buy, and could still be supported even if Google didn't put another second of effort into it. So that Navaho addressing project didn't have to pay anyone at Google a licensing fee to use it, for instance.
Importantly it's also, like lat/lon, hierarchical - so similar plus codes are near each other, they change in a defined way (instead of being random noise) and a shorter plus code is just less precise. Which, whatever what3words claims, is in fact a feature.
@@keisisqrl Yep, and the thing is, even if you needed more precision - and I think you can definitely make a case for that in certain particular use cases - you can just break up the grid one more hierarchy deep, developing a fork and effectively using the same system to do so. In most cases, this would be overkill, but if it served your use case, you wouldn't have to wait on w3w to sell you a solution to do so.
In the UK we have something called a grid reference, two letters like NZ or SE and then a series of numbers. A big grid would be 4 numbers, but then you can add numbers to get more and more precise. It's very useful (shitty that it's only UK and hard to convert to coordinates but) which is why my partner was flabbergasted at what3words getting pushed to be used when we have gridrefs which are superior
Mia Mulder just doing a solo episode of TrashFuture and I'm here for it.
I think the point here is, as always, reject modernity, embrace tradition.
@@VinceWhitacre what about this video made you think "Yeah, being ultra conservative luddites will solve these problems of capitalist exploitation."
In more than a quarter century online I don't think I've ever been called out for posting a common meme. I'm usually the one who's confused. Weird.
@@VinceWhitacre Poe's Law reveals and misleads in equal parts.
@@VinceWhitacre and arrive on a tidal wave of horse viscera
oh, oh wait, that's wtyp, wrong podcast
The only way to walk 45 minutes and end up in Yugoslavia is time travel.
Sweden has some damn impressive transportation infrastructure, apparently.
@@jeffengel2607 Perhaps we now know where MarioKart got the idea for speedboosts.
Be carful where you step when walking on a Swedish walkway...? :-)
I mean... that kind of killed all the credibility of the video for me. How can you claim to make a video on a mapping service and completely seriously claim to be able to walk and end up in Yugoslavia
@@Bisonrulz16have you heard of something called a joke?
I feel like lots of these companies just dont understand the concept of "if it aint broken, dont fix it".
I've been feeling off ever since I saw a what3words ad on yt of that exact emergency service scenario- thanks for doing the research and vindicating my suspicions!
I was just scrolling through my TH-cam feed and suddenly this video appeared. I didn't know this channel existed but as soon as you did the plant thing I subscribed and I'm here for it. You're awesome and such a nerd! 🥰
Mia: "Reject Modernity (what3words, the Loop, Silicon Valley bus), Embrace Tradition (public transport, latitude & longitude)"
Here’s the thing. Innovation is great, but some new ideas aren’t very good. Some old ideas stuck around because they are very good.
I broke a rib when one of the scooters, badly repaired, threw me head over handlebars on the way to work. No one came and helped me. I had a bruise the size of my hand and was winded for 10 whole minutes. I live in Australia and the public transport is not consistently great. I hate those scooters
I FEEL EMPOWERED BY THE MENTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF YUGOSLAVIA
(elsewhere Britain cries)
Didn't expect a thrilling and in-depth study of the song Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but exploring the sociological and philosophical underpinnings of a desperate song for someone's partner to just please stay really livened my mood. Thank you!
(I'm also just joking, sorry! I did enjoy the video loads though, thanks!)
the song is an absolute banger though!
@@mishab4065 It is a genuinely fantastic song, same with Zero, Gold Lion and Heads Will Roll. They're just kinda amazing generally.
hearing the word maps just makes me think of yeah yeah yeahs lol glad i wasn't the only one (or at least that i shouldn't feel bad)
Spoken as one of the newest inductees to the Cult of Silicon Innovation (I have to move there this year 😭), this was a refreshing snap back to reality. A reminder to remain critical of every company I see here, scrutinize where the money is going and where it is coming from, and seek to identify and avoid zombie ideas.
I wish there were a way to cut through the bullshit and determine if an idea, any idea, is a zombie idea or if it is actually doing something that makes things better. How would you do that?
Thank you, I had the same issues with the video of Veritasium. Silicon Valley is dictating what we want instead of the other way around.
Adore this content. I'd love to see Mia collab with PhilosophyTube some day.
Has happened (sorta), check out Transsexuals and Suffering iirc.
Listening to your voice is so calming, I never thought I would watch a 40 min video about maps! Keep it going gurl, you are amazing
11:30 FYI You can open google maps anywhere... It uses cellphone data to triangulate your location, and when you hold down on the map you can generate your lat/long. Send out a text message with your lat/long to your emergency contacts as text messages can queue to send. This will give potential aid an easy means to find you.
Ironically, I think this might have a higher error rate than what3words. Many people won't be able to do that, especially in an emergency situation. Can you people at least be consistent with your criticisms?
@@justinfung4351 why am I a "you people" and how the fuck am I inconsistent. Furthermore. You don't expect people to be able to OPEN A FUCKING MAP? THAT'S SOME DORA THE EXPLORER LEVEL BULLSHIT
@@justinfung4351 Troller no trolling! Troller no trolling! Troller no trolling!
@@Q269 You expect everyone to know how to do that? You expect everyone to already know to do that? A big part of the video was against the 5% error. You expect that people who cannot sufficiently tell the same 3 words in an emergency situation due to similar words (despite being able to spell them out) will be technologically advanced enough to find their own lat/long using Google Maps? Be fucking consistent.
@@Q269 Haha they said the funny words.
I’ve been waiting for a video essay about this stupid app to come across my feed for a while. I get at least one of their ads a day across platforms
When it comes to capitalism a good idea that's free and makes the world a better place will always be beaten out by a bad idea that makes peoples lives worse but can be monetised. And if a successful idea can be made more profitable by making it worse it will be
I've downloaded those delivery apps to check what kinds of "restaurants" i have in close proximity
And then go there myself
Hm... I think What3Words works well on paper. It could be useful in very specific scenarios, it is a shame to see it being screwed up. As autistic person I really appreaciate not having to call restaurants. The biggest silicom valley advantage is convenience, and thats the real problem.
The thing with people like Veritasium is that they really do believe the stuff they get paid to shill for, it's the case of "if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting". That applies to BMW, Bill Gates, and Waymo.
whenever someone says "capitalism breeds innovation" im just going to send them this video
Innovative ways to screw over the workforce
@@fruitygarlic3601 tru
Capitalism breeds innovative methods of pushing costs to parties unable to avoid them. It's is very, VERY good at that, and if you're a party who CAN avoid the cost, that's wonderful. On a higher level, it's good at increasing the number of people unable to avoid paying the costs.
Capitalism does breed innovation. Or it fucks innovation. I can never remember which word it is!
Except capitalism is what killed this app... it tried and failed because the capitalist system allowed it to fail. It could not compete therefore it died.
Minor correction: ABBA didn't say money makes the world go around. They had a song called Money Money Money, but the song where money is said to make the world go around is Money Money from Cabaret.
I know... hardly the point of the video. Which was excellent.
I almost expected the 'map men map men map map map men men' jingle.
I took a map men out to see a movie
Didn't have to pay to get it in
I remeber in swedish middle school teachers told me to have an atlas (Map book) remember pages and the grids for when needing help of an emergency to be able to say: page 25, B 4 or something
I will say that in terms of usefulness, the food delivery apps vastly outclass things like The Loop or other mindless "reinvents public transportation but worse for the fiftieth time" projects. Calling up restaurants is really difficult for some people - particularly people who live in countries where they don't speak the majority language very well - and building an entire online ordering system is currently expensive and janky for individual food shops. There is an actual need that these apps fill - but they usually fill it in a bad and exploitative ways. :p
Yeah but good luck waiting for an uncentralizable(≠decentralized, uncentralizability implies decentralization, but the converse ain't true!) FLOSS[S] (Free, Libre, Open Source Software [System]) solution for that sort of problem.
(in b4 BLAWKCHOYN high octane fridge horror nightmare fuel BS)
Agreed. I live in a Chinese speaking country, and while I speak well, talking on the phone makes me really nervous, and I avoid it whenever possible. Apps have made it possible for me to get delivery easily when I'm stuck at home with my disability, or during lockdowns. I do wish they were better though, and I try to avoid using them when I'm mobile, and can go out myself.
It's useful because not all restaurants are open or accepting orders at all times, and the app gives you alternatives. But a lot of places do give a flyer when you've ordered from them on the app, so next time you can order on their own website instead. And once you've found a few good restaurants to order from, it could then be worth it to order from them directly. Also, most restaurants do employ their own delivery drivers.
@@DaedalusYoung However, this assumes people are going to stick to one or two restaurants. There are often HUNDREDS of restaurants to try, and the old methods don't work very well for that. If I were to work with flyers or menus for the restaurants I regularly order from, I'd have to deal with about 30 individual menus and/or flyers. AND remember who sells what, even if I've only used them once or twice. I'd prefer a better system for everyone, but, to be frank, the world has generally grown out of the simple.
@@davidlathrop9360 Yes, so like I said, the app is useful for trying out these restaurants. I have done that and I'm down to about 3 or 4 restaurants I generally like ordering from. With some of them, it's cheaper to order directly from their own website, but for others, I still use the app.
Yeah the Elon Musk loop really feels like it's meant for rich people to get around safely after the climate apocalypse comes to a head / if we finally revolt
it won't even be that. in the context of widespread civil unrest and natural disasters it would cause hundreds of deaths a year minimum
Dude "invented" an extra car lane. we already tried that, didnt work. build a damn train already
My echolalia is going to feed on Mia saying Loop for days...
löoup
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Mia, I'm pretty sure veritasium is American. In America, suggesting public transportation is good actually is like saying magic would make your daily commute immediate, both are true but we have no access to either and cannot conceive of a world where we do have access to either.
Thank you Mia! what3words has been bugging me ever since i was subjected to their advertisements a month ago. and by god those electric scooters bring me to a boiling rage.
As a European, I can confirm. One Saturday night I walked for 45 Minutes and ended up in the Balkans in 1991. Not my proudest moment.
We've all been there
Have to say the self driving car video almost had me thinking it was a good idea again even though I went in thinking "umm buses are *right there*". Big "you are not immune to propaganda" moment
+
Buses and self driving cars solve very similar problems, but not the same problem. Buses and other public transport are best when there are enough people who want to go in roughly the same direction as each other. Cars are best when people want to go (or come from) more obscure directions or at times when it would be wasteful to run a bus (eg 3am).
@@OriginalPiMan Cars, and car-centered urban design, also adjust people's urges towards (and concept of) location and travel.
@@M_M_ODonnell Yes, and? Places with great transit systems still have cars, just fewer of them.
@@theMoporter That's a complete non-response. What's your intent? "Sure, some places compromise between car-centered and other concerns, but wherever spaces are designed to favor cars, people who can afford to externalize the costs of driving cars drive cars"? I was replying to someone who implied that markets respond to instead of creating desires, and your response was "well, people still want to drive cars" as if that's a settled and immutable reality?
Stopping by to give a comment to boost the engagement. Really loved the video. One of my faves from you in recent months. Not saying your other stuff hasn't been excellent, I just found this one really fascinating.
anyone who's ever seen the "I'm at soup" skit can tell you what a terrible idea What3Words is
A 5% chance?!?!!
I just rolled a D20, and it only took 10 rolls to get a natural 1. That’s the equivalent of someone dying here, so that is FUCKING TERRIFYING
I also feel let down by Veritasiums self driving car ad and Physics Girl also has an ad for a car manufacturer up, what a marketing department streak 😔
I love the fact that your "smaller videos" are still 40 minutes long!! Great video!!
One thing I keep asking myself: Wouldn't it be much more useful to have the squares not random but deliberately have similar ones next to each other? Yknow, like house numbers? So if you get it wrong, you're not THAT far off?? (that in addition to everything you mentioned)
i think it is very useful for telling your mates where you're meeting if it's in a rural area i wouldn't trust it in life or death
First of all wow, loved this video so much, second of all “zombie ideas” is a perfect term both in that it is accurate to what it describes and also in that it sounds just eerie enough to match 🎶that funny feeling🎶 that comes from watching a billionaire invent a worse version of a public library
pronouncing veritasium like a harry potter potion instead of an element is such a power move
As someone who has been programming for a while, I learned a skill when anyone comes up to me with new requirements to say no, and then to ask them to justify why they need this new thing.
Maybe silicon valley is just a bunch of college dropouts with limitless resources.
I'd never heard of this channel before, but someone shared this link. As a GIS developer, this kind of stuff is like catnip to me. I think you did a great job and I'm going to check out the rest of your channel now. Great work!
I really loved the final section to this video and how you explore this pervasive idea that technology is a solution to all of our problems. Even when it comes to something as huge as climate change, we already have the tools to solve it and they just need to be implemented thoroughly rather than looking to new technologies to fix it (and arguably technology is responsible for it).
It's important to read "technology" broadly, and include in it sheer discovered practical techniques and all the gizmos we've developed and implemented since fire. It doesn't just mean the things we've sunk venture capital and advertising into in the last ten years.
@@jeffengel2607 Yeah I agree - I think I was using it a bit simplistically, but it's more to do with what Mia was saying about 'new' being better that we need to get over. Innovation is probably a better word for it, where it's seen as a solution to many of our problems when we already have technologies that aren't being used enough, e.g. renewable energy, public transport.
I love your voice and the way you delivered information in this video! Very clear and informative while staying interesting
as a trained geographer who consistently designs maps using geodata in GIS programs, what3words makes my teeth itch.
great video! I've recently been so annoyed with all these food-apps, they just make everything worse for both the consumer, workers and the restaurants
We here across the border in Finland also recently started getting those electric scooters in all the larger cities, and it's just as bad idea here as it is over there. Can't help but think Finland saw big bro Sweden with cool gadgets and just had to copy them, regardless of whether it makes sense
The similar sounding name thing doesn't make sense - there are 3 words, not 1. If one word is similar, the other two are different. And you can spell it out, or say what the square next to you says. It's just such a non-issue
I'm so glad you basically took some of the internal screaming I've had ringing in my head for... way too long now? And articulated it into words.
Also, I've been getting so frustrated by channels like Veritasium and Kurzgesagt because they are *literally doing the work of these people* (though the latter is more difficult to spot). Hence why I haven't watched them in So Very Long. (Also the reason I love Tom Nicholas's video on Johnny Harris.)
I've always found Kurzgesagt to be quite thoroughly researched, and I don't think they've ever created a video that is wholely sponsored in the way that some of Veritaserum's have been. Can you give any examples of them being as bad as you say?
An amazing video! Didnt know anything about the subject previously but found it very entertaining and informative
"you have probably seen a map before" how did she know this
uhhhh i hear people especially second language english speakers using plurals when there doesnt need to be a plural all the time??? its perfectly reasonable to assume that someone might say "lull" when theyre in a "lulls" square wtf
and if you tried to send the location by text, autocorrect would probably change it to lol
Why are you so iconic + have you seen jay Formans mapman series?
I have! They released one that touched on a (kinda) similar topic just as I was editing this one!
@@MiaMulder Oh the longitude problem? Mr man and his pocket watch clock thingy! but honestly people nerding out about maps is just the best thing
Doesn't the plural thing also matter a lot in other languages where it might be even more ambiguous?
"Hey, can you give me some instructions how to get to the cinema?"
"Sure, just take a left on hair-thesis-sleeve and continue on that road until you reach channel-structure-gradual. Turn right and eventually you'll see the cinema on your left at depart-patience-jaw."
"Ok, can I park there?"
"The parking lot is just a bit further North of eternal-bundle-deviation."
"So at about time-epicalyx-tongue then?"
"No, the square North of that, hotdog-willpower-customer."
"Oh, of course!"
I looked up my address and the first two words are the same word, just singular and plural back to back
I loved most of the video, (25:07) but how exactly are electric bikes "ruining the environment"? I'd agree with you about Tesla cars, but bikes are MUCH MORE efficient. But scooters can be a bit annoying - especially the monopoly of rented scooters in the UK.
I believe it's the fact that they are dockless, so when the rental period stops they are just dumped anywhere - often left strewn across the pavement - so while they may be green, they are damaging the local environment by making it difficult for pedestrians and those with reduced mobility to navigate footpaths, and of course with the wheels locked and I suspect they are probably alarmed so trying to move them is more problematic then it should be.
A personal electric bike makes sense. You own it, you'll use it (I presume), you'll take care of it.
These electric bikes are rented, or more often, thrown in rivers and dragged up trees (because someone thought it was funny).
@@CuterwithCatEars in Norwich, they have a solution: charge you continuously until you leave it at a diving station. If you leave it outside of one, you get an additional fee.
I was a software engineer and I took an experimental self-driving car through the Vegas loop to get to a wedding. I asked about 800 questions and exited the vehicle nearly missing the wedding and over the hype of self-driving as viable in the real world.
really enjoyed the electric scooter rant, those things suck, they've ruined sidewalks in my city
Funny thing: there's a niche industry of people who "tow" those scooters -- essentially just kidnapping them -- on the behalf of whoever's property they got ditched on.
l dont understand the point about Veritasium. All else being equal, a "self" driving car would be strictly better than typical car. Like if you want to argue that buses are a better general transportation solution, fine, but people driving is more dangerous than not.
that massively understates the argument of that video (which isn't talking about theoretically road-read advanced self driving tech, but the actual technology available today, which is "safer" than human drivers under very specific controlled circumstances), and ignores its purpose, which is to increase value for a company's shareholders. Also it's a solution which exists to evade the obvious solution to endemic auto accidents: reduce the number of cars, and create cities for human beings.
Amazing video. I yearn for the day when we as a society collectively realize that public transportation is a great and needed thing! I wish my tax money would go towards it! Also, every time I see the freaking Loop I get so mad. It’s such a dumb idea. It’s also a major fire hazard and there’s no way emergency services are efficiently getting in that tiny tube. It was also really interesting learning about what3words- I had actually never heard of it. But it also sounds like a terrible idea. A family member of mine is a firefighter, and I hear their pager go off all the time. The pager doesn’t have the best sound quality, and neither does the radio frequencies that the dispatchers use. If a dispatcher was trying to say the three words to describe the square location, the is a BIG chance that the emergency responders would mishear the words. Especially if the word was a plural. It could be disastrous if a square nearby the emergency had a similar sounding name- what3words sounds like a terrible system in my opinion.
Been seeing What3Words ads everywhere, this video showed a lot I certainly didn't expect from something that seemed to be entirely well-intentioned, great video.
Yeah, that self driving car video was pretty rubbish. E.g. comparing AI intelligence to human intelligence in the manner they were attempting is virtually meaningless; A human driver that was somehow injected with millions of hours of driving experience would not have problems identifying potholes, or traffic lights that had moved locations, or need millions more hours to understand snow. Its just a nonsensical metric, a marketing gimmick.
and its a bit sad as well, because self-driving technology does have enormous potential, but there is a lot of nuance and alternative applications of it that an unbiassed video could really dig in to.*
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Derek has been honest at times that he does videos he might not be quite so proud of because videos he has more passion about dont tend to make as much money and such, but Im not sure if being self aware about your shilling really justifies it. Tom Scott is a fairly good example of someone who managed to make fantastic videos often from around the world, and who is generally a lot better about sponsorships, even going so far as to pick apart some of the big sponsors and risk burning bridges.
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I cant really speak to their respective financial situations but it does seem odd that a channel the size of Veritasium would need to do essentially full length advert videos to remain sustainable.
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*Though that video has nothing on his Bill Gates video, that was just sickening to watch as Derek helped launder the reputation of the man. Buying in to the baseless excuses as if any ol idiot would be making up vaccines in their kitchen, and likening people who find it profoundly fucked up that Gates directly blocked the planned open sourcing of a key vaccine to conspiracy theorists.
It was just a disgusting display of someone I generally respect, prostrating himself before a billionaire who has repeatedly proven he has no fucking idea what he is doing, even as he steers national and even global institutions off a cliff. (In the case of the US education system in particular, so clear was the damage done that even Gates himself admitted theyd massively fucked it all up.) The man wasnt even particularly good at writing operating systems, why the fuck is anyone listening to him about health, education, etc? Oh... right... billions upon billions of dollars...
Almost every big science/edutainment Channel made a video with the Gates Foundation about different topics that Gates thinks are important. It was really disheartening.
I appreciate the small discussion about the why in the "earth is round thing", even though I knew the story I thought it nice that you went the extra mile and told it here. Lots of small details that amount to a big success (I hope).