Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale
blocks.manifold3d.ch479 points by theanonymousone 2 days ago
479 points by theanonymousone 2 days ago
Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.
Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?
The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.
If thats the case, the parent's critique was oddly stated and confusing. The phrase "to do it" implies the "LLM puffery" was required to accomplish the task, which clearly providing LLM generated praise isn't required in either setting to create a world in minecraft.
Denmark presented the world with their entire country as a Minecraft map, and they did it without inflicting an awful marketing website on us. This Swiss project couldn't resist the urge to produce such an eyesore of a website while providing the world with another 1:1 Minecraft map of a country.
I don't think there's anything wrong with this website, just some people hate slop.
Compare:
"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."
"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."
The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.
Actually is wasn't useless, I don't know the scale Denmark or where the data came from. So the bottom example is slightly bigger but includes more relevant details.
Without the "detail" of "Minecraft" you don't even know what "the data" is.
> I don't know the scale Denmark
What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?
"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"
Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.
They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.
I am mind blown at how long it took me to read that this was Minecraft. I agree, the wording makes you mentally skip Minecraft somehow.
Yeah, like a lot of AI stuff it gets worse the more you look at it.. eg. "Block by block" the 2nd sentence fragment in this very important intro paragragh.. and, it doesnt mean anything. In fact its misleading, if it meant anything I would take it to mean that this was made by a human without tools placing one block at a time, which is clearly not true.
Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.
I don't feel there's that much of a difference. It certainly isn't "awful" to me.
I'm not a fan of AI generated prose myself, but this was at least informative to me.
That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.
Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.
I don't get it
People have been doing this for a LONG TIME
Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:
> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!
"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"
You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.
Think you are missing a couple decades of Minecraft automation. Its been done since the beginning. This is just cool example of taking it to extreme.
The game generates the worlds using automation even when playing normally. Have you even played Minecraft?
Yeah, but normally the world-gen is automated and then the rest isn't. I get the comment. Minecraft isn't fun when you automate everything. People have been hosting WorldEdit-spammed servers since the beginning that were always lame. The real-life to ingame map conversions were novel at first but are old news now. One famous example was the UC Berkeley replica, which was done in creative mode manually in 2020. Tons of people joined that server and explored the entire campus. Then Stanford auto-gen'd their campus ingame from real-life spatial data, and it was boring, and nobody cared.
These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.
How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
If someone said that about a website I had an LLM shit out, that led with such inauthentic marketroid speak, I'd say "it's a fair cop, guv"
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
I'll never have to worry about that.
That would be weird and disheartening BECAUSE I'm not using LLMs to work instead of me and have ideas instead of me and implement them instead of me.
If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.
LLM-written code is fine, but the slop docs are worthless. The world is changing. When LLMs went mainstream, managers were encouraging writing docs with those, but the novelty has worn off and people realize the output is bad. AI slop public websites are like docs, people get a whiff and bail out.
Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.
Denmark? Ah, so it's a 2D dataset only?
sorry, I'll show myself out...
Denmark has a larger area then Switzerland, but Switzerland has a larger surface then Denmark.
I'd like to subscribe to your Denmark vs Switzerland fun facts, cause I just had fun.
How dare you! We have The Sky Mountain! …
Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill.. and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is.. And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..
Okay it’s 2D…
The Denmark reference made me think of a funny thing I heard about the Danish entrepreneur Simon Spies (quite a character).
He said he wanted a globe for the desk in his office, 'but to scale'.
Just turn the desk upside down. Now he has a 1:1 scale globe on top of his desk.
It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.
Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.
Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.
This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.
Doing something and charging money for it is how a lot of things that cost money got started.
Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".
I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey.
The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.
No one did this.
And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.
So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.
“No one did this … the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea“
If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”.
Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
I'm not interested in engaging with bad faith gotcha-style communication like this.
__
Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?
I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.
“I'm not interested in engaging with bad faith gotcha-style communication like this.”
It’s not that, it’s an effort to get you to drop into system 2 and think about all the steps it probably took to put this together.
“Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?”
Yes, I do. I’m not buying their product, selling it or in any way interested in it. I’m just pointing out that your dismissive comment about someone else’s work sucks.
“I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.”
Case-in-point. Stay classy!
Edit: as I’m reading other replies in this thread, I’m finding that I had no idea how sophisticated tools for Minecraft are.
This could’ve been an opportunity to teach someone something cool like your sibling post did, but you opted to be a jerk instead.
Maybe take a sec to examine that.
I have taken the sec and concluded - just like before it - that teaching is effort and energy is finite.
If bad behavior is validated by more good faith teaching, then we consequently just see more bad behavior in the future.
If you're genuinely interested in positive exchange, don't kneejerk gotcha people. Or, if you're not, don't complain like this.