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This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. The comic exists in this brief window of time where one task was fin

This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. The comic exists in this brief window of time where one task was finally "solved" and the other one was just getting started. I'll add that if you think training models takes a lot of energy, try launching fleets of rockets to maintain an artificial satellite constellation.

roomey 2y ago
That's a really good point. It only makes sense if we ignore the "standing on the shoulders of giants bit".
- aiaiaiaiaiai 2y ago
  "Self made millionaire" "Your parents made you; money had to be invented"
scarface_74 2y ago
I was just listening to a Planet Money podcast about GPS (https://overcast.fm/+AAYs-52QVys https://overcast.fm/+AAYs-52QVys) while it wouldn’t be “global”, the US did have a terrestrial alternative location system until 2010 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C). With today’s technology, enhanced LORAN would have been more accurate if funded as a backup to GPS
m463 2y ago
Also another window... The National Park Service was started August 25, 1916 (only 108 years ago) :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
josefx 2y ago
> Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. And you think we spend any less time trying to identify food animals that lay tasty eggs?
- rnewme 2y ago
  Yes.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  Once we discovered a handful of sustainable ones that can be farmed? Significantly. Identifying the 100th egg laying bird after you have your egg laying factory is much less interesting.
- krisoft 2y ago
  Demonstratably less energy was spent on automating that task, yes. Just look into the history of the School of Sagres, the longitude rewards, the Nautical Almanach published by the Royal Observatory, the LORAN project, the Transit project, and the NavStar system. These were all huge governmental undertakings with serious financial backing sustained over centuries. The power and might of empires were at stake. Can you name anything similar to the bird identification problem?
  - wasmitnetzen 2y ago
    Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years identifying birds, before there were even empires.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      And humans spent even more effort to navigate themselves. As they were getting to the birds, as they were observing the birds and as they were getting back from the birds. Everyone who is not blindly thumbling or being pushed by winds or water does some sort of navigation. Even if just relative to their surroundings. I would argue that observing birds by eyes does not really help you teach a slab of silicone to distinguish birds. But if you feel that it does, then surelly all the walking, riding, sailing around humans did should also be counted to the navigation task.
mewpmewp2 2y ago
That is kind of the point. It seems like navigational thing would be much more complicated to the layman, yet anyone can do it in few hours now. While a thing that is seemingly more simple, would take years because it isn't easily solved and served as an API. Although it is now.
- jessekv 2y ago
  Hmm I can see it from that angle... the comic works if we presume Cueball on the left has never seen or used a GPS-powered app. GPS was not really novel in 2014, so for me it's a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, Randall Munroe would be the last person to take GPS for granted, so this is probably a correct interpretation.
  - acdha 2y ago
    GPS wasn’t novel but GIS was less common and especially so for the open source side of things. I think that conversation makes sense if you read the first part not as “get the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken” but as “determine whether those coordinates fall within a polygon in the NPS set” where it’s not very hard but does require a little bit of work if you don’t already have an existing GIS setup.
  - cortesoft 2y ago
    Many people also don't know that photos encode the geo-location where they were taken, which is a big part of that part being feasible.
rtpg 2y ago
I don’t think the point is about GPS, it’s about GIS. So it’s not the navigation problem, it’s a “is this point in this polygon” problem. Which is… a bit easier
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
moritonal 2y ago
I always saw it commenting on the difference between what non-techies perceive as hard. Multiple times in my career a single off the cuff requirement in a meeting changed the estimate of a project by several months.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > a single off the cuff requirement in a meeting Same. And not always in a meeting. I've had detailed client specs that pick apart the minutiae of their intended inputs, interactive responses, and multi-user workflows, when somewhere hidden between the cracks is the single phrase “robust MI is required” with absolutely zero detail about what such reporting they are going to need/want. Sometimes this is because they don't entirely know up-front, but they expected us to know how to cost the thing that they didn't understand enough to fully describe to us yet! And it can be an uphill struggle getting through to them that not at least knowing vague requirements could cause us to not keep to time/cost estimates (or result in inefficient solutions) because efficiently getting out what they finally end up asking for might require a bit of rearchitecting of storage structures, changing work already done. This is why I'm not truly scared of AI taking my job just yet⁰. The promise is that it'll produce what the want if they can describe it properly, and that if is doing a lot of legwork. ---- [0] That might change over the next few years, we'll see how long the trough of disillusionment is with this iteration of the hype cycle… Hopefully I can hold out until some natural enough retirement age!*
  - RegW 2y ago
    Not always anywhere. Sometimes there is just an assumption that you will know that they want it.
cubefox 2y ago
> I'll add that if you think training models takes a lot of energy, try launching fleets of rockets to maintain an artificial satellite constellation. It's not the training what makes it difficult! It's the necessary research to invent machine learning algorithms which can be used to train a model to recognize birds. For multiple decades, this was way harder than maintaining a satellite constellation.
zulban 2y ago
I'd love to see a source but I'm pretty sure the energy, time, and money that has gone into compute infrastructure is far greater than our space programs.
the_af 2y ago
> This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. The point of the original xkcd was that the hard seems easy and the easy seems hard, especially to laypeople. It wasn't particularly about computer vision or LLMs. The exact problem is not the main portion of the observation.
tzs 2y ago
> This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. Even the navigation problem still offers some challenges that most apps fail to address. Consider the store locator function common on retail business websites and apps. They usually just compute the straight line distance from you to the stores and show the stores within some particular range, sorted by distance. That's probably fine most of the time, but consider a place like Seattle and its surrounding areas. Suppose you are in Kingston, which is on the west side of Puget Sound about 5 miles away from the east side, which is the side Seattle is on. The Walgreens store locator shows 10 stores when searching for stores near Kinston, and 9 of them are on the Seattle side of Puget Sound. Crossing the Sound there is a 30 minute ferry ride that costs around $20 each way if you are bringing your car. The one it shows on the west side of the Sound is on Bainbridge Island and that is probably not the one someone in Kinston would go to. They would go to the one in Silverdale. It's actually closer to Kinston than the one on Bainbridge by road distance, but slightly farther away straight line. The one in Silverdale is on their list, as are three in Bremerton and one in Port Orchard, which are all closer in terms of time and travel expenses to Kingston than are any of the ones on the Seattle side, but you only see those on the map if you hit the "load more" button. Once brings in Silverdale and a couple in Bremerton, and twice brings in the rest. Similar for businesses whose site has an option to find items in stock locally. They often report an item is locally available, but it turns out to only be in stores across the Sound.
- schoen 2y ago
  Another example: a relative of mine was on a trip last year and was almost in walking distance of a place I thought he might like to see. But it was on the other side of a border with tight controls and long lines, so it wouldn't have been convenient to visit at all. Actually, I guess there are quite a lot of places like that. I've been to both the Brazilian and the Argentine sides of Iguazu Falls, and they're both great, but one is not officially allowed to cross between them inside the parks, so no infrastructure has been built to facilitate that, even though it's literally just across a river. Or, I've heard it's quite inconvenient to get between Kinshasa and Brazaville, the two largest cities in their area, both national capital cities that face each other across a river just about two kilometers apart. There is a ferry but it's not quick and easy.
hmottestad 2y ago
When I was a student we got a task where we had to spell check some text. This was super easy because we could fit the entire dictionary in memory. Hadn’t always been that easy. Once upon a time someone was paging in and out their dictionary from a floppy disk. Not to forget about the compression they had to implement from scratch.
- schoen 2y ago
  So many times in Python when doing something related to a word game or puzzle I've written something like d = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split()) There's a lot of luxurious convenience hiding there!
cortesoft 2y ago
Your observation doesn't contradict the point of the comic. It isn't about which tasks are difficult in totality, it is talking about which tasks are difficult with our current technology. The idea is that non-software developers don't know which tasks current technology can solve trivially and which tasks can't be. Yes, the distribution of those tasks into the two buckets changes over time, but it is still not easily knowable by lay-people. Everything we do today would be extremely difficult to re-create from scratch, but that doesn't mean it is hard to do - because we DON'T have to re-create it from scratch.

roomey 2y ago

That's a really good point. It only makes sense if we ignore the "standing on the shoulders of giants bit".

aiaiaiaiaiai 2y ago
"Self made millionaire" "Your parents made you; money had to be invented"

scarface_74 2y ago

I was just listening to a Planet Money podcast about GPS (https://overcast.fm/+AAYs-52QVys https://overcast.fm/+AAYs-52QVys) while it wouldn’t be “global”, the US did have a terrestrial alternative location system until 2010 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C). With today’s technology, enhanced LORAN would have been more accurate if funded as a backup to GPS

m463 2y ago

Also another window... The National Park Service was started August 25, 1916 (only 108 years ago) :)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

josefx 2y ago

> Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. And you think we spend any less time trying to identify food animals that lay tasty eggs?

rnewme 2y ago
Yes.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
Once we discovered a handful of sustainable ones that can be farmed? Significantly. Identifying the 100th egg laying bird after you have your egg laying factory is much less interesting.
krisoft 2y ago
Demonstratably less energy was spent on automating that task, yes. Just look into the history of the School of Sagres, the longitude rewards, the Nautical Almanach published by the Royal Observatory, the LORAN project, the Transit project, and the NavStar system. These were all huge governmental undertakings with serious financial backing sustained over centuries. The power and might of empires were at stake. Can you name anything similar to the bird identification problem?
- wasmitnetzen 2y ago
  Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years identifying birds, before there were even empires.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    And humans spent even more effort to navigate themselves. As they were getting to the birds, as they were observing the birds and as they were getting back from the birds. Everyone who is not blindly thumbling or being pushed by winds or water does some sort of navigation. Even if just relative to their surroundings. I would argue that observing birds by eyes does not really help you teach a slab of silicone to distinguish birds. But if you feel that it does, then surelly all the walking, riding, sailing around humans did should also be counted to the navigation task.

mewpmewp2 2y ago

That is kind of the point. It seems like navigational thing would be much more complicated to the layman, yet anyone can do it in few hours now. While a thing that is seemingly more simple, would take years because it isn't easily solved and served as an API. Although it is now.

jessekv 2y ago
Hmm I can see it from that angle... the comic works if we presume Cueball on the left has never seen or used a GPS-powered app. GPS was not really novel in 2014, so for me it's a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, Randall Munroe would be the last person to take GPS for granted, so this is probably a correct interpretation.
- acdha 2y ago
  GPS wasn’t novel but GIS was less common and especially so for the open source side of things. I think that conversation makes sense if you read the first part not as “get the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken” but as “determine whether those coordinates fall within a polygon in the NPS set” where it’s not very hard but does require a little bit of work if you don’t already have an existing GIS setup.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  Many people also don't know that photos encode the geo-location where they were taken, which is a big part of that part being feasible.

rtpg 2y ago

I don’t think the point is about GPS, it’s about GIS. So it’s not the navigation problem, it’s a “is this point in this polygon” problem. Which is… a bit easier

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

moritonal 2y ago

I always saw it commenting on the difference between what non-techies perceive as hard. Multiple times in my career a single off the cuff requirement in a meeting changed the estimate of a project by several months.

dspillett 2y ago
> a single off the cuff requirement in a meeting Same. And not always in a meeting. I've had detailed client specs that pick apart the minutiae of their intended inputs, interactive responses, and multi-user workflows, when somewhere hidden between the cracks is the single phrase “robust MI is required” with absolutely zero detail about what such reporting they are going to need/want. Sometimes this is because they don't entirely know up-front, but they expected us to know how to cost the thing that they didn't understand enough to fully describe to us yet! And it can be an uphill struggle getting through to them that not at least knowing vague requirements could cause us to not keep to time/cost estimates (or result in inefficient solutions) because efficiently getting out what they finally end up asking for might require a bit of rearchitecting of storage structures, changing work already done. This is why I'm not truly scared of AI taking my job just yet⁰. The promise is that it'll produce what the want if they can describe it properly, and that if is doing a lot of legwork. ---- [0] That might change over the next few years, we'll see how long the trough of disillusionment is with this iteration of the hype cycle… Hopefully I can hold out until some natural enough retirement age!*
- RegW 2y ago
  Not always anywhere. Sometimes there is just an assumption that you will know that they want it.

cubefox 2y ago

> I'll add that if you think training models takes a lot of energy, try launching fleets of rockets to maintain an artificial satellite constellation. It's not the training what makes it difficult! It's the necessary research to invent machine learning algorithms which can be used to train a model to recognize birds. For multiple decades, this was way harder than maintaining a satellite constellation.

zulban 2y ago

I'd love to see a source but I'm pretty sure the energy, time, and money that has gone into compute infrastructure is far greater than our space programs.

the_af 2y ago

> This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. The point of the original xkcd was that the hard seems easy and the easy seems hard, especially to laypeople. It wasn't particularly about computer vision or LLMs. The exact problem is not the main portion of the observation.

tzs 2y ago

> This one always felt off to me. Humans spent millennia working out the navigation problem. Even the navigation problem still offers some challenges that most apps fail to address. Consider the store locator function common on retail business websites and apps. They usually just compute the straight line distance from you to the stores and show the stores within some particular range, sorted by distance. That's probably fine most of the time, but consider a place like Seattle and its surrounding areas. Suppose you are in Kingston, which is on the west side of Puget Sound about 5 miles away from the east side, which is the side Seattle is on. The Walgreens store locator shows 10 stores when searching for stores near Kinston, and 9 of them are on the Seattle side of Puget Sound. Crossing the Sound there is a 30 minute ferry ride that costs around $20 each way if you are bringing your car. The one it shows on the west side of the Sound is on Bainbridge Island and that is probably not the one someone in Kinston would go to. They would go to the one in Silverdale. It's actually closer to Kinston than the one on Bainbridge by road distance, but slightly farther away straight line. The one in Silverdale is on their list, as are three in Bremerton and one in Port Orchard, which are all closer in terms of time and travel expenses to Kingston than are any of the ones on the Seattle side, but you only see those on the map if you hit the "load more" button. Once brings in Silverdale and a couple in Bremerton, and twice brings in the rest. Similar for businesses whose site has an option to find items in stock locally. They often report an item is locally available, but it turns out to only be in stores across the Sound.

schoen 2y ago
Another example: a relative of mine was on a trip last year and was almost in walking distance of a place I thought he might like to see. But it was on the other side of a border with tight controls and long lines, so it wouldn't have been convenient to visit at all. Actually, I guess there are quite a lot of places like that. I've been to both the Brazilian and the Argentine sides of Iguazu Falls, and they're both great, but one is not officially allowed to cross between them inside the parks, so no infrastructure has been built to facilitate that, even though it's literally just across a river. Or, I've heard it's quite inconvenient to get between Kinshasa and Brazaville, the two largest cities in their area, both national capital cities that face each other across a river just about two kilometers apart. There is a ferry but it's not quick and easy.

hmottestad 2y ago

When I was a student we got a task where we had to spell check some text. This was super easy because we could fit the entire dictionary in memory. Hadn’t always been that easy. Once upon a time someone was paging in and out their dictionary from a floppy disk. Not to forget about the compression they had to implement from scratch.

schoen 2y ago
So many times in Python when doing something related to a word game or puzzle I've written something like d = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split()) There's a lot of luxurious convenience hiding there!

cortesoft 2y ago

Your observation doesn't contradict the point of the comic. It isn't about which tasks are difficult in totality, it is talking about which tasks are difficult with our current technology. The idea is that non-software developers don't know which tasks current technology can solve trivially and which tasks can't be. Yes, the distribution of those tasks into the two buckets changes over time, but it is still not easily knowable by lay-people. Everything we do today would be extremely difficult to re-create from scratch, but that doesn't mean it is hard to do - because we DON'T have to re-create it from scratch.