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Posted by karakoram 2 days ago

A map of every lighthouse(mapped.earth)
140 points | 63 comments
plasticeagle 3 hours ago|
Aside from the incredibly low quality of the data, this jumps out as being vibe coded due to the unbeleviably stupid text.

"Rain as a surface; Height is millimetres of rain per day. Nothing else is encoded."

Why does AI generated ridiculous sentences like these?

yonatan8070 2 hours ago||
Because the previous iteration said "Rain and _____ as a surface; Height is millimetres of rain per day and encodes _____" and the prompt told it not to encode that into the rain layer... probably
ddlsmurf 2 hours ago|||
the zoom scrolling and camera navigation in general, here at least (desktop mac chrome), seems like no one even tried it
antonymoose 46 minutes ago|||
I checked my hometown “lighthouses” which technically exists and technically has a light but only exists as a tourist trap monument built in the 1980s. Well, it’s on there.
gradus_ad 1 hour ago|||
It's just their culture
LoganDark 2 hours ago||
I have a hunch that language models have a hard time controlling their voice depending on context. Like there are very particular voices used in certain locations in a user interface, and a model doesn't necessarily have an intuitive sense of that. You can instruct it to use particular voices, but it doesn't usually know to apply that intuitively, you have to know for it and tell it. To me, that example you quoted sounds like a potentially desirable quality (for the model trainers...) for communicating with the prompter during coding tasks, but I would not ever in a million years transfer that verbatim to a user interface. The way you speak to users is fundamentally different than the way you speak efficiently to prompters.

The reason why I consider it may be potentially desirable for communicating with prompters is that prompters usually need a way to verify the model has done what they asked, but without necessarily needing to review all the code or very long runs of text. They only need a bare minimum to know that their requirement has been met and not a full explanation of everything, so the super terse and efficient way of communicating how the constraints are implemented can be helpful. I understand that a lot of prompters don't need this style, or that some people just hate it unconditionally and need it to be different, that's just my guess for why it might've been reinforced during training.

Experienced prompters also typically know what they're doing, so they don't need the full explanation, only the bare minimum details that apply to this particular case. Again, users are different here, but the model doesn't know the difference in order to write it, so that's another way this can end up happening.

Waterluvian 5 hours ago||
I like the idea. But it was a bit jarring that panning with my finger took ages and then pinching to zoom insta-faceplanted me into the Labrador interior.

If anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.

bouchard 5 hours ago||
Even on desktop panning is remarkably slow.
xattt 2 hours ago|||
> I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.

… are there many lighthouses in the Labrador interior?

verandaguy 1 hour ago||
Funny enough I went into this site wondering if inland lighthouses were a thing; there are a few obvious cases, like the Netherlands using them to demarcate shoals and for navigation of inland waterways, but then there's whatever Germany's doing...
spuz 1 hour ago||
It's almost as if a human had no part in its creation.
bobosola 3 hours ago||
Lovely idea, and a nostalgia trip for me. The sweeping looms brought back some old memories. I worked on merchant ships prior to getting into coding and was the officer of the watch one night crossing the Bay of Biscay going north. It was a clear night with that almost unnaturally still air you get at sea sometimes. I gradually noticed the loom of a lighthouse flashing over the sky just off the starboard bow. I wasn’t expecting landfall so soon and quickly double-checked our position on the chart. I counted the flashes; it was clearly the Phare du Créac'h on the Isle of Ushant. It’s stated as visible at 32 nautical miles, but I was seeing it at almost 90 nautical miles away. The light itself was still below the horizon, but the loom was clearly identifiable (there were no other lights in that area with the same number of flashes and frequency). It must have been some weird temperature inversion effect, but I have never forgotten it. I never saw any other lighthouse from that far away in the rest of my 25-odd years at sea.
jvdvegt 3 hours ago||
Looks nice as already mentioned: pinch to zoom is broken (Firefox on Android here). Also: why am I shown a button labeled 'lighthouses in France' when I'm not actually looking at France?
aardvark179 3 hours ago||
Pinch zoom is also broken on Safari on iOS.
BrandoElFollito 3 hours ago||
Because we have the greatest lighthouses. A lot of people, great people told us we have them. It is true.
zX41ZdbW 4 hours ago||
I have a similar project (which I created in 2024): https://adsb.exposed/

Among various datasets, it has OSM data (all of it): https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=4&lat=52.3756&lng=2.5...

And here are lighthouses: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=3&lat=40.0444&lng=9.9...

rizonio 4 hours ago||
This seems like it maps way more than just lighthouses. Looking at puget sound, at least, it seems to mark all the navigation buoys as lighthouses as well.
katzgrau 3 hours ago|
Thought the same. This is showing highly concentrated “lighthouses” along a river in my area.
SkyeCA 5 hours ago||
Pinch to zoom on a macbook makes the entire map sweep across the globe. Makes it very hard to use even if it's a neat idea.
pixelesque 5 hours ago||
Happens on desktop with Firefox as well.

Looks like a bug with the view origin point being mis-matched with what the view's actually focused on - maybe high-DPI scale mis-match?

sixothree 4 hours ago||
Sounding like desktop/laptop with a mouse is the only way to interact with this site. It's a great first try though. I spent a few minutes poking around for sure.
bluebarbet 3 hours ago||
>desktop/laptop with a mouse is the only way to interact with this site

Lamentable if true. Speaking personally, I haven't touched a mouse in well over a decade.

alienbaby 5 hours ago||
What an incredibly annoying zoom/spin thing is going on there
frisco 5 hours ago||
Fun fact: lighthouses in a general area will all have different periods so sailors can easily tell them apart and know which one they are looking at
pixelesque 5 hours ago||
They also have different fog horn timings as well.
Razengan 4 hours ago||
I say I say
runarberg 4 hours ago|||
Here is the Icelandic list of lights (isl. Vitaskrá). It includes every light in Iceland. Sailors are supposed to know how to read this and identify a light from their patterns. It is very rear that sailors sail by lighthouses these days though, but an extremely handy skill to have in case your GPS fails for some reason.

https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101...

ricksunny 5 hours ago||
sounds like pulsars.
jcrawfordor 3 hours ago|
AI generated with all the attendant quality problems - worst of all the data. There are a lot of non-lighthouses listed on the map, and I can easily come up with a couple of real lighthouses that aren't present.

I really hate all these vibecoded map projects, because the (debatably) slick looking UI implies that the real work of getting the data has been done. But it hasn't, whoever made this just made a bare minimum effort to slap in some plausible looking (if you don't look too close) data and then walked away. The fact that a lot of it is wrong doesn't matter if it looks good, right?

kite42 3 hours ago|
Yea this project is complete vibe-coded crap. A lot of the lighthouses aren't in the correct locations and some or even missing.
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