12 ms·
Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away
- 1317 10mo agocontext?
- Daneel_ 10mo agoSeems like the author of the linked post has a lost airtag located in the abyss.
- numbsafari 10mo agoIt’s sitting next to Apple’s values.
- JanNash 10mo ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 10mo agoThe distance is more than the circumference of the Earth. If you wrapped a rope around the planet at the equator, the length would be around 25k miles.
- reliabilityguy 10mo agoSure. However, if the road around the planet goes to Everest and back, the total length of travel will exceed the circumference of the planet.
- lxgr 10mo agoSome roads aren’t perfectly straight (not that this seems like it could explain what happened in this particular case).
- Etheryte 10mo agoThat's fair, but even the commonly cited longest route [0] you could theoretically walk without intentional detours, Cape Town, South Africa to Magadan, Russia, is approximately 14k miles. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/a2mcjq/21212_km_from_cape_town_south_africa_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/a2mcjq/21212_km_fr...
- mapmeld 10mo agoI went back to their posts in November for this > One of my AirTags is inexplicably 1600 miles away in Texas. It's one of my floating ones that I throw into bags when traveling as needed. > Maybe it dropped out of my bag only to be found by someone who thought it'd be fun to confuse the owner. Or maybe it became e-waste to be dumped in another country.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- zkmon 10mo agoActual distance about 3.2k miles plus equator length of 25k miles plus what else?
- throwaway290 10mo agoAltitude
- websiteapi 10mo agoOh wow, a bug
- MiscIdeaMaker99 10mo agoExcept this one is not on the windshield.
- sva_ 10mo agoIn Apple Maps? Unpossible!
- MiscIdeaMaker99 10mo agoLooks like a bug that I hope someone will have a fun time fixing.
- nashashmi 10mo agoI think the developers didn’t account for lost AirTags many hundreds of miles away. And that long calculation was not the best.
- srean 10mo agoYou wouldn't imagine ... I have seen API calls you people wouldn’t believe. Requests hanging off the edge of the load balancer, Ethernet tubes glittering in the dark. Latency logs reporting some API calls that took longer than the age of the universe. Their means and percentiles burning on the shoulders of weekly reports. Plot points dying at the edge of y axis ... like tears in the rain.
- rebolek 10mo agoFixing bugs. At Apple. OK.
- hdgvhicv 10mo agoDirections suggest an average speed over 500 mph. Not bad for driving.
- tempodox 10mo agoIt’s the speed of a passenger flight, but I wouldn’t want to spend 57 hours aboard.
- pushedx 10mo agoIt is easily 29,905 road miles away. If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go to the moon and back.
- hyperpape 10mo agoBeing a little bit clever can lead you to make some pretty bad mistakes. Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.
- thfuran 10mo agoYou would have to take an implausible number of wrong turns to have a chance of making it anywhere near that long a drive. For an example of a shorter but still entirely unreasonable path: Head straight north all the way to the pole, continue south to the pole, continue north to the latitude of the destination, then head due east until arrival.
- jb1991 10mo agoI question your use of the word “easily”.
- handsclean 10mo ago
- lugao 10mo ago[flagged]
- lupire 10mo agoGoogle "Dan Piponi", then sit down and think about what you've done.
- lugao 10mo agoMy bad. My intention was not to come across as snarky or aggressive. Dan Piponi, in his post, called for scale questions in interviews, suggesting that whoever worked on the feature at Apple would not have been hired if they had been asked those types of questions. I found that position non-constructive and wanted to counter it by mentioning that fractals could hint at why the length was so large. It is hard to predict how others will read my comment beforehand, and I apologize for not meeting the friendliness bar here on Hacker News.
- thfuran 10mo agoAre you saying that you think Apple Maps is directing him to drive along a fractal instead of a road?
- rvnx 10mo agoNot many people know about it but the world is an illusion, it is believed to be based on PS1 triangles so you have to count the edges thrice. Prove me wrong.
- mjd 10mo agoThe path taken did not traverse the boundary of every atom along the way, or even every grain of sand. Even if it had, the airtag location service is not accurate enough to have detected that.
- lugao 10mo agoNot really, if you had every grain of sand in the way it would diverge to a much bigger value. The problem is that the roads have >1 dimension at that scale, apple maps is definitely adding up to many details along the way, it's not a straight line and it ends up being 10x the actual distance. No Biggie. The "fix" is to smooth those details as the straight line distance grows bigger.
- monerozcash 10mo agoWhile we're on the subject of maps-related bugs, I was recently borrowing a new Tesla Model Y and took it on a RORO ferry. After the crossing, the car’s GPS was convinced I was still at the port where I had departed from. I restarted it a couple of times, but nothing. I drove off using Waze on my phone instead of the car's navigation. The map on the car kept moving relative to the direction I was driving, so the navigation was showing me driving into the sea and eventually started complaining that it would be impossible to find a charger. Approximately 5 hours later, just as I was about to arrive, the car finally managed to figure out my correct location. Exciting trip, not a huge fan of Teslas, but their charger planning is really nice. It was very unpleasant to suddenly lose it. I just genuinely wonder how such a bug can actually occur, surely you'd update the GPS fix more often than every couple of hours. Hard to imagine the car just suddenly couldn't get a GPS fix for hours either. But if it did somehow totally lose the ability to use GPS, the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system given how well it was responding to my changes in direction. On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice. Certainly didn't affect the length of the trip nearly as much as I'd have expected, but it was certainly super annoying to try and figure out the optimal rate of travel on the Autobahn. Charging at Tesla's supercharges was vastly more expensive than I expected, the "fuel" costs weren't much lower than what you could easily reach with a diesel car.
- roywiggins 10mo agoPossibly it was using WPS keyed to the ferry's WiFi and didn't consider the possibility that the ferry itself could move out of where it was registered (ie, the port)?
- monerozcash 10mo agoI drove away from the ferry and passed lots of WiFi APs on the way, presumably it should have figured out the new location pretty quick with WPS.
- kijin 10mo agoPerhaps the car is programmed to ignore all external signals for a while if it detects significant disagreement for a prolonged time, as might have happened if it had access to both WPS and GPS during the ferry ride. In such cases it would be safe to assume that something is being spoofed, and fall back to INS.
- amelius 10mo agoLoved the comment about the fractal shaped path.
- speedgoose 10mo ago48 137 km.
- rzzzt 10mo ago1.2 times the circumference of the Earth. Is space compressed between SF and Guatemala City somehow?
- derriz 10mo agoThe most annoying thing about iPhone Maps for me is the inaccuracy of the direction indicator. I've googled and it doesn't seem to be a universal complaint even though I've experienced this on multiple devices over the years even after following instructions to re-calibrate multiple times. Maybe I've just been unlucky. It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one direction when in fact you are facing another.
- mertd 10mo agoThat's a phone compass problem no? Perhaps the specific way you're holding the phone is confusing for the algorithm?
- holditright 10mo ago[dead]
- cenamus 10mo agoYou're holding it wrong part 2?
- morshu9001 10mo agoOn my past iPhones, the compass always got screwed up over time somehow. Sometimes recalibrating fixed it, but only for a minute.
- derriz 10mo agoYep - exactly what I’ve experienced. Calibrate the compass and at least it’s within a right angle of being correct. But the problem returns.
- joecool1029 10mo agoWas it serviced? In some models they used to have a non-ferrous screw put next to the compass, if a tech puts the wrong one in it will not calibrate.
- mmooss 10mo agoTangentially, why won't computerized maps - e.g., Apple Maps, Google, etc. - show a scale? Generally they'll show one as you pinch/zoom, but it disappears when you release your fingers. Sometimes I just want to eyeball distances, and not plug in addresses and request routes for everything. I know not everyone always wants it, but a scale is a fundamental feature of mapping! Scale almost defines mapping. Edit: One reason I ask is because I suspect some technical limitation.
- layer8 10mo agoIt’s purely a UI thing, the same (misguided) reason scrollbars disappear.
- rendaw 10mo agoI thought it'd be cool if the scale were shown by some channel, like coloring roads (pink at neighborhood scale, blue, green as you zoom out) so you could intuit the scale at a glance. With map simplification and symbolic markers (roads are the same thickness at multiple scales) it can be really hard to figure out distances. I was once going to a less populated area, based on my local intuition I thought the distance between two locations was a maybe 30m walk max if I missed the bus, but it turned out it was a 3h walk.
- pkolaczk 10mo agoI’ve had that bug a few times. I think it’s related to some roads being closed and/ or under reconstruction. I’ve seen this happen multiple times on the same route, and it always fixed itself after I passed the construction site.
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo agoContext is confusing because we arrive in the middle of a story arc, at a point where an unrelated tech snafu happens. The story arc is about a lost airtag that is living it's secret life in Mexico. The link is for a post where Apple decides the distance to it's location in Mexico is greater than the circumference of the Earth.
- LeoPanthera 10mo agoGPS has an altitude component so maybe it thinks either the AirTag or the tracking phone is really high up?
- moralestapia 10mo agoNah, the altitude component is less than a rounding error at the scales involved.
- ribosometronome 10mo agoIt's clearly in a vaguely geostationary orbit above Guatemala City.
- FireBeyond 10mo agoMaps has gone backwards on CarPlay, too. Hysteresis is completely broken - I stop at a traffic light and the map will jump back and forth between two resolutions, often once a second, which is extremely distracting. I also love that Find My says my partner was "last seen" at home "8,912 days ago". Apple just doesn't give as much of a shit any more.
- 9dev 10mo agoSidenote, I love spotting random binary numbers out on the wild
- ksherlock 10mo agoAs one of the commenters pointed out, altitude. A geostationary orbit is ~26,000 miles. Dollars to donuts, that's where it is.
- dmcq2 10mo agoIf you account for the satellite being further away because it would be above the point the distance works out okay - except that geostationary satellites go around the equator and that is a thousand miles away from that.
- pyrolistical 10mo agoMaybe they are running into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
- verteu 10mo agoIt's unlikely that would cause a 10x increase, especially since the directions are presumably aligned to roads of non-vanishing length.
- lugao 10mo agoI made a comment earlier that was rightly flagged for its tone, and I would like to restate the technical point more constructively. The post author, Dan Piponi, clearly knows about fractals, but his post raises the question of whether asking Fermi questions in interviews is actually effective. I am skeptical that such questions would have prevented this type of bug. I suspect the issue stems from small measurement imprecisions accruing over long distances, which is—in my view—tied to the fractal nature of roads traversing natural landscapes. However, as others have pointed out, it may also be tied to road closures: if closed segments are set to a higher length internally (to discourage routing), these values might be getting summed up blindly over longer distances. None of these issues would have been prevented by being good at estimating quantities alone. Apologies again for the unconstructive tone of my previous comment.
- Lucasoato 10mo agoA pure spirit is required to admit your own mistake. Don’t be let down by an error, never lose the opportunity to fix it. May this be of example to everyone to keep improving this already wonderful but not perfect community.
- DanPiponi 10mo agoHere's a Fermi-ish question: given the fractal nature of typical landscape, should a truck driver budget for 10 times as much time as would be predicted by using the known typical speed of the truck and the distance as the crow flies? (Aside: the nearest grocery store to my house is 1 mile away but the shortest route by car, as measured by the car odometer, is 10 miles.)