Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors | Hacker News Reader

Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors

strata.highloop.co

9 pointscloocher31 comments

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“Strata doesn’t just show the data. It makes the call.”

Scroll scroll scroll…

“Strata informs your decisions — it doesn't make them for you.”

I hope you don’t kill someone.

Read the headline - sounds like a therapy / anti-suicide advocacy app?

Clicked the link - ok looks like it's for ski touring, because it mentions avalanche stuff?

Checked the route catalog - wait, there's barely any ski tours here and it's a bunch of random hikes from around the country. Why is avalanche risk highlighted when 99% of hikers are probably gonna stay home if there's a big snowstorm? Is this by chance your personal hiking history? Why these hikes in particular?

Are avalanches the only way someone can die outdoors? What about snake bites, heat exhaustion, drowning etc.?

I am not sure what the app actually does vs gaia, alltrails, nwac app. The site only has one screenshot. What does this app add?

Unfortunately I think you've given far more thought into the concept than OP has

Possibly because OP might have one-shot vibe-coded this app with a single sentence as an LLM wrapper.

Absolutely the wrong application for an LLM.

How do we know it’s providing correct data?

Worrying about "correctness" is such pre-LLM thinking. What's important now is generating content that doesn't require effort or labor cost.

Well, for the creators’ sakes, I hope the ToS that Claude wrote [1] holds up in court!

[1]: https://strata.highloop.co/terms

Risk assessment is entirely part of mountaineering, and other risk-encompassing outdoor activities. Decision boundary to go or not go is never a sharp line, and it's always relative to your capacities, your knowledge, and ability to continually assess the risks while practicing.

It is simple to craft the story around an accident in retrospect, but on the field the story is never that simple. If you read accidents reports (like AAC), you will probably never see accidents coming straight from one bad decision, at the beginning of the day, on one particular aspect. It is usual though to see failure about acknowledging changing conditions, multi-factor risks, or even failure to acknowledge high risk/low difficulty transitions by experienced people.

It's also why it is called engagement. Some people are willing to put their life on the line to achieve a moonshot project. But they usually know the risk they are taking.

Llms never took a difficult on field decision, never had to turn gut feeling into calls. If you were experienced enough in both machine learning and mountaineering, you would know a lot of this decision taking is pre-verbal, and is probably very lightly represented in training sets, if at all.

Note that there is Strata (strata.com), the 3d software company, which I immediately thought it was about. It was the first 3d software I used some 30 years ago.

This is gonna kill someone.

Any real avalanche threat analysis is done boots on ground, this app isn't adding any additional information.

I think this is taking the data those guys gather, some other data, and distilling it to a threat rating? That's at least what I get from the big above the fold blurb.

But there is no underlying algorithm crunching the data. It’s Claude simulating the output of such an algorithm.

Chinese room problem and all that, if Claude can perform the mimicry of synthesis sufficiently and reliably how much does it matter that it isn't "really" doing the work.

I'm dubious of it's ability to do that mimicry reliably that but the prompt is taking in/including the information from all those sources to nominally distill them for the user.

This is going to kill someone... you can't just make these calls for people. And it's DEFINITELY not a replacement for snowpack tests, etc. at the location you're going to visit.

Incoming trademark infringement lawsuit from Strava in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Make sure you have a very good LLC that can’t be pierced.

To be perfected, this app needs a feature that uses AI to identify the difference between edible and poisonous plants and fungi.

Is it just me, or does it seem extremely dangerous to market: “Strata doesn't just show the data. It makes the call.”

The page states it’s powered by Claude with nothing I could see that relates to its performance, metrics, processes, testing, etc. for something expected to be used in a safety application.

It's perfectly safe, I assure you.

"You're right to push back on that. Let me take a step back and reconsider the requirements for an application that people might entrust with their lives."

Should I climb this mountain? Analyze the data. Make no mistakes.

Fair point, and you caught a real contradiction. "It makes the call" was wrong — it also contradicted our own safety page. We've changed it: Strata surfaces the risks and links the source forecasts, you make the call. It's a briefing, not a verdict. Appreciate the push.

Wouldn't touch it with a forty foot pole.

I've literally "risked my life outdoors" for more than six decades in most climates at many altitudes and depths and this isn't something I'd pack.

Flagging for clickbait title. It's deliberately obfuscating to intrigue users into clicking.

A better plain title would be

Strata: An LLM App that Tells You If Your Hiking Route Today is Likely Safe.

More AI hiking crap that will probably kill someone

So tired of this crap flooding the hiking community. Hiking communities are being bombarded by crap apps at the moment (particularly trip planning apps)

Do not trust this data.

hoping this is a joke

Classic HN responses ITT. Very Reddit-like in its absolute knee-knocking fear at any kind of liability/rule-breaking

Yeah, let’s not let a little thing like safety get in the way of disrupting the “staying alive” paradigm.

Yeah, the app "tells you...whether today is a go", which is completely responsible and I'm not sure how HN could be able to miss it!

Jokes aside, couple changes come to mind:

- pitch more carefully as "may indicate when danger may be elevated"

- in app, on calm days insist "while prelim scan found nothing anomalous, click these links to find the original forecasts"

As of today, with this tech for this use case, the warnings should be the lede. Otherwise you're even more likely to have a "'Full' Self Driving" situation where we're lured into a false sense of safety.

I’m not so sure mocking is really that on point, a tool used to understand avalanche safety should be safe. The product copy highlights safety and the value of providing a recommendation instead of having to collate and synthesize different data yourself.

Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.

If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.

Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?

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