Should this be a map or 500 maps?
escapethealgorithm.substack.com
escapethealgorithm.substack.com
for what it’s worth i do agree with the one or two comments here that say that the line “modularity is inversely correlated with expressiveness” is a bit reductive. i did have a long section of caveats but removed them because i felt like they confused the matter more. ironically i’m butting up against the expressive limits of the english language, its own modular technology :p
html of course is another shared protocol that is so flexible that it does allow for immense expressiveness even while it makes certain core decisions that limit (arguably helpfully) certain forms of expression
squarespace would be the ur example to me of a frankenstein product whose exceptional modularity makes expressiveness a battle with the machine
which is all to say, i welcome more thoughts on this dynamic!
for those asking to see all 500 maps, i wish i could too! unfortunately as far as i can tell they haven’t been digitized. if you find them please (please please) let me know. happy to upload the higher res versions of the maps i do have later.
I don’t think it’s reductive, just incomplete. It’s missing a third dimension of “complexity.” You can increase expressiveness, but only by adding complexity. But even then, you’re just fractalizing into 500 more maps; the complexity is comprised of layers of modularity, each with its own degree of expressiveness.
For example, you could mimic HTML by giving each map maker some standard components for expressing and classifying buildings and their relationships (“church,” “road,” etc). And sure, now you’ve increased expressiveness. But you’ve also added a new layer of modularity. So you’re right back at where you started. The maxim holds.
Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
But in general I assume you're right about the actual quality and it was hinted in the text. And when you take a look at the maps provided as examples, some of them are not accessible[1]. And for news articles, it really depends for me. Most of the time, I want the essence. But sometimes, especially with articles that are not actually news but a deeper analysis of a situation (e.g. ukraine war, palestine), I've read articles where on mobile it helped that they put extra effort in making the media work for the information by interleaving graphics, scrolling text, and so forth.[2] But as always this is also a matter of taste.
[1] e.g.: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... [2] I haven't bookmarked those texts and I am not sure if it is actual useful to pick one random example for this discussion so I just save my time searching for this one example I only vaguely remember.
Interestingly, with the fact that the article is digital, surely we can leverage so many more different and interesting ways to present the information, but I feel like most prefer to just read the text.
I think it's because everyone reads a paper article in a different way. If you ask people how they read a magazine, you'll get as many responses as respondents. Some read back to front (I do that for some reason), some read articles from top to bottom, some scan through and look at the pictures and captions, then pulled quotes, then the main text. Some even read the paragraphs out of order and assembles it all afterwards.
Everyone consumes a body of text in a different way, and an article that jacks your scroll and does "fancy" stuff with the way you can access the content makes assumptions about how the reader prefers to consume the content, and this assumption is often very wrong for me personally.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/...
who is this supposed creativity for? If the majority of people just want to scan headlines efficiently and read/parse.. isn't that a good thing for most people?
Pragmatically speaking, the creativity is not needed for news articles/headlines. We need better reporting / journalism in online news, not more creative frills..
Newspapers also. Same handful of column layouts, typefaces, styling.
It's not about user metrics. It's that what's important is the content of the text itself, alongside whatever photographs and illustrations are necessary and informative.
Websites are no different from the long tradition of books and newspapers in this regard.
There are plenty of spaces for artistic, aesthetic creativity on the internet. No shortage whatsoever. More art than there's ever been before.
There's no need in also trying to shoehorn it into nonfiction articles everywhere.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.
1. A more creative website by definition will take more attention to engage with than a less creative website.
2. Many users just "want the info" with minimal attention spend.
Hence the sites that take less attention to deliver the info will win - the less creative ones...
Maybe?!?
For any survey question, asking the participant “why did you choose that answer?” could reveal interesting information. Maybe they interpreted the question in a surprising way?
I have 7+ mapping apps that I use regularly. Usually I am using several at once and having to swap back and forth to figure out the information I need.
I really wish we had an interoperability protocol that allowed me to combine the data sets locked in each app. I would love to use only one map.
I think there is a strong argument that such a standardized protocol would allow people to currate and combine these datasets in their own way. While in one sense, it would mean there was just "one" map, but in another, there would be a plethora of maps, each tailored to an individual or purpose.
There already are some established ones, e.g., https://www.ogc.org/standard/wfs/
It's widely used in the GIS field, but unfortunately not adopted by the most popular consumer apps.
Lots of comments about literal maps and then web design. This generalization of the idea quoted above made me think of something I believe about technological convergence (putting everything into phones and tablets). We’re losing the way custom made devices for different purposes were able to optimize for one purpose. I was thinking of the alarm-clock/radio (which itself is a converged device, it loses benefits of a wind up alarm clock and the benefits of a dedicated radio) vs just using your phone as an alarm clock and music/news player. For one thing, the alarm clock has the time always visible. For another, the radio is instantly available with a single click. And that’s just one of a hundred things that have been converged into the phone (starting with the actual telephone).
I’ve been working on learning to build my own small computers. Part of it is that each one could be for a unique purpose and designed accordingly. (Circuitry, buttons, etc.) Thinking about it like thus article, one could go further and not limit each application to being “a computer” at all.
Standardization, like almost anything, has costs and benefits and tradeoffs and so on.
So when you're pushing to standardize something - consider what it is you're gaining and what it is you're losing, and decide whether that's a tradeoff you're ok with.
I would highly mitigate this statement. It’s more like some forms of expressiveness are out of scope once you settle for a set of constraints, be it through modularity requirements in precise specifications sent to people that all passed the same qualifying formation, or vague query to a set of random people who don’t held in common much more than ability to match your query with some mind representation of their own.
There is nothing that was either created by humans out of ontological constraints, even when nothing close to a mere wishlist was present. No one can instantly turns all its inconsistent dreams into shared reality just by turning its attention to whatever desire flows through their mind. And even dreams and desires and constraints by physical ability of brain mixed with psycho-social constraints.
I'd show it to you, but I ignored the constraint of sticking to the visible frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.
For most people, the entire experience of using a map is constrained to this mediocre one-size-fits-all solution.
Personalisation in general is just gone too. Remember the crazy weird skins for Windows Media Player? Now you're lucky if you can pick the OS-wide highlight colour.
In the quest to build universal products, we ended up with a tech culture designed by committee. As software is eating the world, so does this culture.
A welcome change from this is OsmAnd, an insanely versatile and customizable map that can be adjusted to your exact needs.
This also goes for other design fields. As a (stupid) example: I can design all kinds of weird wonderful stairs in public places, that will give the place some charm. But the best one will be with a more boring ramp of with about 5degrees of incline, because that's the wheelchair-accessible one.
edit: Don't understand the Downvotes, the Version on F-Droid is a legitimate free version of the premium app version: https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.osmand.plus/
For cycling though, I’m a happy user of cycle.travel[1].
I do enjoy digital life, but you know what else rocks, apropos walking in new cities[0]?
Custom maps, printed.
Its fun to look at the little piles of maps I've made for myself over the years, from Frome to Rome, Berlin to Pristine ..
In fact, I think I prefer printed maps over digital, for personal adventure/navigation needs.
([0] Disclaimer: Got navionics and predict wind running on multiple tablets..)
There's something comforting about knowing how to get around when the power goes out. Since I enjoy roaming adventures requiring navigation, making little maps for myself is basically just how I roll .. got me where I needed to be.
I notice this makes me drive more relax, and especially with a baby it’s way easier to keep the baby asleep
i would rather drive an extra straight 0.25 miles down a major road than to zig-zag through tiny side streets while trying to carefully pay attention to unfamiliar street names and/or constant nav app directions.
i've had google maps instruct me to take four or five additional turns to save a couple hundred yards of driving.
I've found OsmAnd to give me much better results. But google maps traffic awareness is pretty handy...
No-selfies mode: route with least cellphone coverage.
Horsebox mode: route with fewest intersections and the most sportbikes.
This might be a computational cost thing. Modern routing algorithms preprocess the graph to find the optimal route orders of magnitude faster than you normally would without preprocessing. If you let each person customize the graph then such queries would be much more costly.
Then again, I'm sure there are lots of other complications already and that most users wouldn't want alternate routes, so maybe the marginal cost here is irrelevant?
And as an added bonus they’ll be unrelentingly optimizing your map application to the point where the UI will run at 144 Hz ;)
In any case, I'm not suggesting it's impossible, just costlier than people imagine when they ask for the feature.
I think you're seriously overestimating how many AAA games do any kind of fancy pathfinding beyond "just use A*".
Ask them a few questions in the interview to see what specific kind of problems they’ve been solving :)
https://www.cyclestreets.net/help/journey/routing/
at the most basic level it lets you choose between fastest and quietest routes, understands hills, cycle paths, etc.
There's many, many other choices https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing
contraction hierarchies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_hierarchies made cross-continent route planning practical and practically instant, eg in GraphHopper. A lot of the options listed there work offline.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I have seen many different users intentionally deviate from the suggested route because they know more than Google about what is best for them (or at least they think they do).
I wasn't saying this never happens. I myself deviated from Google Maps just yesterday. But, like, this was probably the only one out of my last 10 queries. And I was trying to say this is a minority of the queries.
If you're the passenger on a road trip and doing the navigation you're unable to use maps to make plans for tonight or tomorrow.
Okay the driver could be nav, but now they also need to be the music, and everytime you the passenger wants to use it to look for petrol on route or change music you have to ask their code or hold it up to their face. Plus now you see all their notifications.
Even without being on a road trip, on a desktop i'd be making plans in multiple tabs before making a decision. On a phone it's a nightmare when it could be so easy.
Or use Maps in abBrowser.
Interestingly, when you have public transit navigation running, Maps is able to run "current trip" in background while you plan an alternate/additional trip.
At this point paper maps start looking more useful than digital ones.
Google Maps is not a map. It's a half-decent nav system slash ad delivery vector, that pretends to be a map, but sucks at it.
You can also have functionally unlimited maps on different browser tabs not just nav apps. https://nps.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Maps are meant to help orient yourself and communicate rich information about the area. They're used for planning. Google Maps has long been moving away from this case, focusing instead on just-in-time point-by-point nav and searchable PoI database. This is an entirely different product category to a map, and has opposite goals.
If you don't use it for directions, then that's entirely what it is.
Sure there are a few icons for sponsored businesses, but that's all. They're easy to ignore.
The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Looking up an address is instant rather than taking a couple of minutes on a paper atlas, and it's simple to pan and zoom the route you want to plan, without having to jump from page 30 to page 65 when you go north and try to re-locate the road you're trying to follow.
It's much more than a map, but it's crazy to say it isn't a map. Along with Apple Maps and OSM, they're basically the best maps ever made by humankind.
(And you can put down markers too, and then remove them later. Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible.)
Except when it cleverly hides the street names, PoIs and other important labels, as you zoom in. The way Google Maps does it is so absurd that it feels it's done on purpose.
A road atlas is a high-density map. Not the most convenient in paper form, and ripe for digitization, but not in the way Google Maps does it - information density is a feature on a map, when you're trying to orient yourself. It's only a problem when the app is optimized for navigating you to points you already know the address of.
> (And you can put down markers too, and then remove them later. Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible.)
Sorta, kinda. That's another feature Google is going out of their way to make impossible to use. You can't just put markers (multiple) in the middle of a search or normal scrolling, for example.
Erasing from paper maps is easy - buy laminated ones and use dry-erase markers (or permanent markers and have some alcohol handy).
It's usually fine. Sure sometimes I wish it showed more, but that's just a matter of degree. Again, still 1000x more useful than a paper atlas. If it doesn't show the street name, it does when I zoom out or in or pan a little.
> You can't just put markers (multiple) in the middle of a search or normal scrolling, for example.
During normal scrolling? Of course you can. Just click on any building, and tap "save" in the panel that appears. I just checked on desktop, and you can even do it in the middle of a search -- the panel that appears is in addition to your existing search panel. Do it as many times as you want.
> Erasing from paper maps is easy - buy laminated ones and use dry-erase markers
I've never seen a laminated road atlas, and back in the day I worked a job that required driving for hours a day to addresses I'd never been before so I was familiar with all the atlases sold at the gas station and the bookstore. You're talking about the metropolitan atlases that are 100+ pages? I can't even imagine how thick and heavy they'd be if each page was laminated. Maybe they exist.
I am amused when movies show military situations where commanders draw on huge and otherwise pristine rollout maps. Are they going to be discarded after this one engagement? If not, shouldn't there be scribbles from prior uses?
And so actually did discard 20 huge, otherwise pristine props, and had another 30 waiting because they didn't know how many takes would be needed.
Default + website (on multiple tap) are always available, but on long road trips I use Waze.
There’s also a bunch of really nice apps for things like subway maps, trails, etc.
Many people have serious issues even with how stripped down everything is, so IMO as a default app loaded on every device it’s a decent compromise.
In the Directions mode, you can insert a map pin for a point you want to pass.
It's frustrating to me that after all these years, I still end up using Google Maps mostly. I haven't really come across a general purpose mapping tool I can use for cycling directions and routing, both on desktop and on my phone, in cities and in the bush.
Google maps is good enough for find my way in a city, or getting to a destination by car. And when I get there, I whip out another app to pay the parking. If I forget where I parked, my car has an app with a map. To plan a longer trip with an electric car, ABRP is better. And when I'm just looking for a charge pole where my card will work, Plugsurfing. If I want to use car sharing, another app with another map.
If I want to go for a run or a hike, outdooractive has some routes. Komoot has some others. But if I want to find some rock climbing routes, I need 27crags. Meanwhile, my sports watch also has a map which can show me the route I just ran.
None of these are fundamentally different. All show a very similar map, just with other points of interest, other routes, other layers, other navigation algorithms.
But all of these apps have different UI, different features, and just behave slightly differently.
I wish I could just have a single map app, where I enable the layers I'm interested in.
I kind of like having separate apps for different activities. For sure, it's nice that they integrate eg. gas station search into Waze -- it's a car-related thing, and a likely option in the workflow of navigating a trip. I'll use a totally different app for route finding along mountain trails - here I'll be concerned about offline availability, topography data, terrain types, shelters, precise location and orientation, etc.
To OP's point, it would be nice to have a bike-centric app that responds to concerns cyclists have and others pay little attention to - eg, road surface quality, lane widths, grading, wind exposure, general safety rating etc. Google Maps does the token thing of indicating the total climb and descent for a planned route, but it doesn't give an option to optimize for that (eg, longer route with fewer climbs).
It's made for long touring rides, but it works perfectly for shorter rides within the city and its routing is produces routes that are faster, more pleasant, and overall much better than Google Maps.
To save everyone a click, here's a summary of that argument: you might want Google Maps to let you ask for the "nicest" rather than the "quickest" route; that would systematically tend to send you through the fancier higher-income parts of town, and in the case of walking directions the effect (which would happen across the entire world) would be to shift foot traffic, and hence e.g. custom for shops, from poorer parts of town to richer parts of town, and that would be bad.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I think this is a silly argument for many reasons; here are a few of them. For walking directions through commercial parts of a city, practically everyone is going to choose "quickest" rather than "nicest" and they probably aren't going to stop in the shops along the way; for driving directions, moving traffic from poorer to richer parts is probably a net social-justice improvement; most people asking for "nicer" routes are probably more interested in e.g. avoiding major roads outside cities.
(I do think it's reasonable to ask: what would be the consequences for the world if we offered this feature? and sometimes to conclude that it would make things worse. But I can't say I find it very easy to believe that companies like Google do in fact generally make their decisions on this basis, given what most of those decisions look like.)
But, bad argument or not, and genuinely representative of how Google makes decisions or not, it isn't an argument for not letting people make more specific choices like "avoid this particular road" or "prefer this road when possible", nor for not showing cycle routes and hiking trails, nor for letting you keep the screen on without showing directions. It doesn't have anything to do with any of the things the grandparent comment was complaining that Google Maps doesn't let you do.
I guess it's possible that Kasey in fact argues against all forms of user customization in Google Maps on the grounds that users might customize Maps in ways that are socially harmful. It's even possible that she does so and it makes a difference. But there's nothing in her tweets linked above to suggest that she does, and it doesn't seem plausible to me that considerations like hers have much to do with a broad lack of customizability in Google Maps.
Apple Maps tries a little - I can zoom out over the US and occasionally it tries to write ‘Appalachian Mountains’ along the length of the range, for example - but it pops in and out as you zoom and scroll and actually getting a view where the whole name is visible is difficult. Sometimes it labels the ‘Gulf of Maine’. Sometimes it labels it ‘Fox Islands Thouroughfare’.
Google maps as you zoom out just keeps showing the road networks with no hierarchy of importance (the interstate network doesn’t stand out from the dense grid at all) and at some level just labels states and countries. It has. Interest in labeling large scale geographical features at all.
Try picking out a good view on one of these maps that lets you trace the course of the Mississippi River and pick out the major cities along the route. It’s just not something you can accomplish with these maps.
That isn't the point. I just want to trace out all the different ways I can possibly go and measure them. I don't want the software to find a route for me at all. I can find it myself. I just want the software to record it and measure the distance, not the way "Map My Run" and what not do by recording where you actually go via GPS, but letting me do it on the map before running it. The stupidest thing is this would be so much computationally simpler than what they really do. They wouldn't need GPS or location services at all. They wouldn't need any feed of current route status. A paper map can do this with no computation at all. I'd just like to have it on my phone and not need a ruler and string to do the measurements.
For the inevitable peanut gallery, I'm aware of browser-based web apps that can do this and I use them. I'm also aware of Apple/Google's "choose waypoints" or whatever feature, which does not do what I want because it still finds routes itself between the waypoints.
For people with aphantasia: yes, there are actually people that can make/see pictures when eyes closed. Or even use their brain as CAD software.
As for us, sorry, can't do it.