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Just a proprietary algorithm looking for public problems it can claim to solve. Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. S

Just a proprietary algorithm looking for public problems it can claim to solve. Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. See previous discussions on HN for more background. Their one success story is how they managed to get the Mongolian postal services to adopt their tool. Can you imagine someone lost on a mountain side telling the emergency operator that he is located at 'snake.apple.dimwit' and getting asked to please just give coordinates or even a rough idea of where you might be in terms of local names, because the What3Wordsⓒ database is down?

another-dave 7y ago
> Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it. I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :) What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon. If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!

another-dave 7y ago

> Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it. I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :) What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon. If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!