Kubernetes at What3words
medium.com
medium.com
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...
> The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.
> If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.
> You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!
Kinda curious why you would be using something like this?
What's silly about W3W is that their entire "proprietary algorithm" is going to be the same as all of these, except with /usr/share/dict/words instead of A-Z0-9 as the alphabet.
The only reason they need Kubernetes clusters on AWS is to keep their word list secret, every open-spec code can run offline.
Have they patented the idea of using english words to encode numbers? Because I've seen patterns of 2-3 english words used in the past to communicate things like keys and confirmation codes.
What do you mean by that?
But if you're taking, say a telemetry point from a truck moving across the city and trying to map it to an address, there's going to be some drift in that number. And you're going to use that coordinate to say "what's the nearest house to this" – but due to that potential drift, you might match with a different house.
This is not life or death stuff. But then it becomes harder to "cluster" points together to say "all these datapoint correspond to this house". Having a slightly larger grid system allows you to say "anything in this 100sq foot square will be associated with this house" which allows you to have some margin of error, while still being able to address individual addresses.
So then instead of -72.883322, 38.128312 being treated differently from -72.883320, 38.128317, they all cluster around one "square" which makes it easy to just group them.
But What3Words is trying to give each of those "squares" a unique english word identifier, whereas other coordinate systems probably just use alphanumeric codes. I didn't know their algorithm was proprietary. That's bullshit because there is no "algorithm" per se – it's just mapping numbers to word lists. That's it.
But that's marketing.
If you just want to snap your coordinates to a grid, check s2 or h3 or just make your own grid in your country's authorative coordinate system or even snap your coordinates to a lower precision.
W3W is really dumb.
I wouldn’t say that W3W is dumb. I like the idea as a global mnemonic device. But it is a hard sell.
Really irked that they bill themselves as a solution in the public safety (emergency response) space while objectively being detrimental in that domain.
There are better services out there.
I'm always amazed to find 10 Infra engineers and 15 backend engineers to maintain a very simple webApp for example.
There is certainly overhead (kubelet, master) over running your PHP app on bare metal or whatever, not to mention having to figure out what deployments, pods, services, kube-proxy, etc. are... but once you've done that, it's pretty easy. Especially if you use something like GCP, you don't pay for your master, and there is a web UI for doing everything that's simple. I would recommend it once you need to scale beyond 1 computer.