61–70 of 72 posts
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w3w considers the disambiguity an asset. Almost like a check sum. If you enter an address, and it's in the middle of the Pacific, you know you wrote it down wrong.
They claim disambiguity as an asset. It turns out it's not that hard to find ambiguous pairs close enough to be problematic.
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Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead. Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead. Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different plac…
Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great. The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention. > verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi") '8aab9b999' > verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee") '8aab9b999' My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', neither 'ants' nor 'hence'…
neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
Did you notice how you can't "decode" the code without looking it up on Google Maps? That's not a location code, that's just using Google Maps.
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Telling a location over the phone when you are in an emergency comes to mind. Easier to remember than a series of numbers as is the case latitude/longitude.
> Easier to remember Non-rhetorical question: who has to remember it and why? Is this primarily a work-around for the problem of it not being possible for a mobile phone handset to display the location during a voice call? If so, maybe someone should fix that problem because there might be other things that the caller might want to refer to on the screen while calling. It's slightly hilarious, in a way. I can imagine…
I have used the major system for memorizing numbers including phone numbers. It's a very similar system.
Long streams of numbers are not great for memorizability or accurate entry or human communication. Did you ever try https://file.pizza/ ?
This is also why private keys are typically described as a sequence of words from a wordlist. Used in blockchains, PGP, keybase, etc. It does solve a real problem.
Cybergibbons: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications (2021)[1]
HN discussion here[2].
[1] https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...
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Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead. Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead. Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different plac…
Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great. The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention. > verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi") '8aab9b999' > verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee") '8aab9b999' My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', neither 'ants' nor 'hence'…
But does it accept 'flour' in lieu of 'flower' (or indeed 'floor' since I could well understand someone getting that from a slightly garbled / heavily accented phone call...)?
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Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great. The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention. > verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi") '8aab9b999' > verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee") '8aab9b999' My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', neither 'ants' nor 'hence'…
> My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', But does it accept 'flour' in lieu of 'flower' (or indeed 'floor' since I could well understand someone getting that from a slightly garbled / heavily accented phone call...)?
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I agree that this is a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever and fun. But it also suffers from a lot of problems traditional solutions like street addresses and the use of landmarks don't. Those issues have been well-documented elsewhere. The biggest issue this type of solution faces is a lack of standardization. There's this, What3Words, other people's hobbyist versions, Google has so…
This is true, but only because none of the systems have critical mass. It'd only need a couple of car manufacturers to agree on a system like this for their gps and it'd take over pretty quick.
Mercedes, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lamborghini, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Lotus, Triumph & Tata Motors all accept what3words.
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Well easy they should use German. More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities.
> More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities. English is no more prone to the problem of "some words sound exactly the same as other words" than any other language.