10 ms·
Geo Guesser identifies the location and seat number from an aerial shot
- freediver 3y agoWould love to see a modern AI trained on geo-guessing compete with a human.
- machdiamonds 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts5lPDV--cU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts5lPDV--cU
- upon_drumhead 3y agoImpressive, but I don't see the seat number?
- arkadiyt 3y agoIt's on this reply: https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1698554653854826984 https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1698554653854826984
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- minitoar 3y agoThe seat number is imo the least impressive part. The wing gives it away.
- praet 3y agoMore info on the actual flight and seat number in his video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CwybO1tvI0O/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CwybO1tvI0O/ The seatmap: https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/Southwest_Airlines_Boeing_737_Max_8.php https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/Southwest_A...
- glandium 3y agoHe wrote 17F on twitter, and said 18F in the video. Which is it? :)
- ExoticPearTree 3y agoThat's your question, that he might have been off 30-40inches or whatever is the distance between two economy rows in a737? :))
- bfung 3y agoNot that impressive. The post has flight # (you can lookup seat map, direction of flight), and wing photo. Ask anyone who’s been in consulting (like big4) and they’ll all have a good chance of getting it right.
- mousetree 3y agoBig4 is accounting
- tyingq 3y agoDeloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC would all have significant time around airlines and aircraft manufacturers, all of their various projects, diagrams, data, etc. For lots of projects that have nothing to do with accounting. And also a lot of miles sitting in those aircraft.
- op00to 3y agoIt's because you need to be logged into Twitter to see more than the single linked tweet. I don't care about who runs the web site, this change in behavior is a horrible experience that's different than any other link on HN.
- Breza 3y agoI totally agree with you. I deleted my X account and only find myself on the site when I click a link without noticing the URL. I don't miss it, but it would be nice to have more context for what people are discussing.
- op00to 3y agoI read the tweet, realize there’s more, realize I can’t read it, and feel sad for a second because it was probably good info. Twitter is such a negative place that even FOMO isn’t strong enough to draw me back in. I feel like I’m missing on a lot from my local community by rejecting FB, Twitter, etc, but it is bad for me, and I feel much better without it in my life.
- aaron695 3y agoNothing stopping a smart person recording every sparce tree and building on earth at home and automating this. Except time, and maybe Google Earth blocking the scraping
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swyx 3y agothis guy is such a meme. i wonder if anyone is out there keeping track of his hit rate, because social media only serves up his biggest wins. i'd be very curious how his hit rate improved over time.
- iambateman 3y agoTry watching him on YouTube. He’s definitely on another level from other high level players.
- xmprt 3y agoI was under the impression that he's a high level player but far from the top of the leaderboard. Although he's currently the best GeoGuessr content creator and makes the most interesting videos in GeoGuessr adjacent topics such as finding locations from tweets and other viral videos.
- vintermann 3y agoGeowizard will always have my heart on those. It's true he's not as extremely good as the current leaderboard, but he's also good at these adjacent topics such as finding the location of historical photos, locating fan-submitted challenge selfies etc. And I mean, no one would come up with the scheme of crossing countries in a straight line without a pretty passionate love of geography.
- kaesar14 3y agoYou can watch him livestream some incredible shit. He's absolutely the real deal. Yes, he's big on social media, but every niche hobby like this has a standout who's great on media (Hikaru comes to mind for chess) that does great things for promoting the community.
- rgoulter 3y agoI think the majority of Hikaru's popularity comes from how dominant he is at chess, particularly faster time formats like blitz/bullet. Seems to me he still commonly demonstrates a level of sportsmanship such that the online chess "Sportsmanship Award" is named after him.
- mabbo 3y agoMy former manager at work posted a photo out of the window of his condo. I correctly identified his building, floor, apartment number, and which room he was in when he took it. He was impressed and slightly horrified. I'm no rainbolt, but the are a few neat tricks you can do. In my case, I was able to identify two landmarks that overlapped, and used Google Earth to extrapolate a line from them to his window. Still, nothing compares to that time 4chan identied the location of a terrorist training camp from a photo and gave it to the Russian military who promptly bombed it (https://imgur.io/N7DwWP1 https://imgur.io/N7DwWP1).
- networkchad 3y agoThe Shia LaBeouf “He Will Not Divide Us” 4chan geo-location is my favorite. Never underestimate bored autistic shitposters lol.
- filoleg 3y agoThe initial couple HWNDU challenges were solved through rather boring means. They tried geolocating based on stars, but what ended up giving away the solution was a tweet from a local diner waitress posting a pic with Shia. Once they narrowed it down to a small town, then it got a bit fun, with one anon driving around and honking, so they could determine the location of the flag based on the volume of the honking sound on the livestream. And the whole drone usage to "alter" the flag was pretty unexpected. But one of the latter ones was kinda crazy. I am thinking about the one where Shia placed a flag inside some wooden cabin (in Finland iirc), and they managed to find it based on a pattern of the woodgrain[0]. 0. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-cabin/ https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-cabin/
- jszymborski 3y agoI think about the indoor HWNDU flag every time I post pictures online that were taken in my house.
- mabbo 3y agoThe one I recall was when Shia finally pointed it at the sky with no landmarks visible. So they tracked jets flying overhead, and combined that with what birds and bugs they could hear. And that got them the location.
- armchairhacker 3y agoThis reminds me of when the FBI caught a child kidnapper using a blurred street sign. Law Enforcement and Search & Rescue would be smart to hire these people
- jonah 3y agoThey do. Someone I know had a bit of fame for helping find a lost hiker from a photo. https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1400806794667102208 https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1400806794667102208
- giarc 3y agoThere was a pedophile that blurred a photo of himself using the swirl feature in some graphic editing software. Police just simply 'unswirled' the photo to get a clear image of his face and arrest him.
- Phaedor 3y agoThis guy is accurate to a degree which I didn't think was even possible before seeing it. Here he is guessing locations based on just grass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOCR73U8t6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOCR73U8t6E The scary part of this being possible is that I would think AI could do what he is doing even better than him, and at that point there will be a service where you can upload any photo and get it's location. This seems like it will be abused, and I dont see what can be done about it.
- spdif899 3y agoHe has a few videos of him vs AI (that is specifically trained to play geoguessr) and it's quite impressive already just at that game-focused scale.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThere's an episode in which he competes with an AI, but it turns out to be narrowing down locations using data most (if not all) humans couldn't. Imagine for example that the camera in a certain locale had some debris on it, but it's a unique shape and location on the lens. Or perhaps there's rain on the lens in various patterns. The AI neatly organizes these locations by their coordinates, then if it sees any other images with similar terrain and the same lens anomalies, it will guess with extremely high accuracy. It left me wondering how effective it would be with current technology if it couldn't "cheat" in this way. I put cheat in quotations because in any situation where any metadata like this would be useful for location identification, it wouldn't matter how it worked. But, strictly using geological data, how would it perform?
- zimpenfish 3y ago> Imagine for example that the camera in a certain locale had some debris on it, but it's a unique shape and location on the lens. I believe Facebook patented a method for using lens imperfections (dust, scratches, etc.) - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18835377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18835377
- 3y ago
- blast 3y agoHere he is asking for help to figure out where an old photo was taken ("a follower sent this to me in december, she had lost her mom 5 years ago and wants to know where they took this") https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1698888344451867039 https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1698888344451867039 I like that he cares more about that than keeping up appearances
- throwaway290 3y agoThere's a wing in photo and flight number already given. Figuring out the seat is the easier part.
- lionkor 3y agoCtrl+F: AI Probably the biggest change AI has brought to my life as a developer is that every single thread turns into "what could AI do"/"AI can do this cheaper"/something something AI future. Much more impactful than any AI product. Identifying a location like this is absolutely a skill that humans can perfect, and that should be celebrated. Going so far as to train yourself to recognize grass and little details like this is absolutely some kind of mental athleticism. There ought to be some kind of a tournament!
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoHere's a challenge though: For every correct guess, how many wrong ones are there? From this person or someone else. Because all I'm seeing is people who are correct, always, which is suspicious. It's not exceptional unless it's actually uncommon to be so right all the time.
- yosito 3y agoWhy are people still posting direct links to X here?
- blastersyndrome 3y ago[flagged]
- rb666 3y agoCalling Elon a criminal is a going a bit far perhaps. But he does own it still.
- blastersyndrome 3y agoI did not call Elon a criminal and I do not think he is. I was specifically referring to Warren Buffett and a saudi prince, among other individuals on Twitter's former board of directors.
- Hamuko 3y agoIs it better to be privately owned by criminals? One of the parties that owns X Corp is Saudi Arabia, who famously don't see a problem with assassinating dissidents.
- jl6 3y agoI have a large backlog of photos taken before it was common for cameras and phones to automatically embed GPS coordinates in the files. It would be nice to geotag them. I would pay for an AI service that could automate this with >85% accuracy.
- netsharc 3y agoIt seems like the answer is to make a game out of it, and invite geo-guessers to participate.. although, it'd be hard to score since you don't know what the correct answer is. Maybe make it a crowd-source webapp..
- awestroke 3y agoSomething I never see mentioned about these Geoguesser streamers: what if they are cheating? It would be trivial to set up location extraction the Street View http requests and show it on another monitor (or even overlay window hidden from stream capture) that the streamer can glance at.
- mvdtnz 3y agoI feel like you're trivialising triviality. You may be capable of doing that but it's not "trivial" by any stretch.
- yreg 3y agoTo be fair it is trivial compared to the skill displayed if there is no cheating involved.
- yreg 3y agoRainbolt has made a video with an eye tracker which would be difficult to fake (I think): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD_rtwofvgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD_rtwofvgU In October there will be an in-person event: https://www.geoguessr.com/world-cup https://www.geoguessr.com/world-cup edit: in this video he also includes a third person view of his monitor – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izarzOXjZp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izarzOXjZp4
- Workaccount2 3y agoSome probably are cheating, but at least some are in fact this skilled.
- nektro 3y agoits a game. the site intentionally picks photos with regional identifiers so you can get good at it
- alex-moon 3y agoHonestly this just makes me want to give GeoGuessr a go again. Back when, I jumped in and the first shot I saw was like "What? No-one could guess where this is." Now I know someone can, I realise the game is playable.
- op00to 3y ago[flagged]
- galleywest200 3y agoBack when I used to do CTFs a common challenge was to set up a fake Instagram account and have the flag be the coordinates for the location in the image. Good skill to have, and to know how to protect yourself when you share images online.