The location for the meetup in Karlsruhe on 18.09.21 15:00 has been moved to the Fasanengarten, 49.014051,8.412563 , as the Schlossgarten is occupied by a festival.
Attention - The meetup in WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND has been postponed due to level 3 lockdown. It will now be held on Sunday 26th September, same time and place. I have sent emails out to those who RSVPd with emails, but there are a couple of people who have RSVPd without providing contact information, so I hope this message gets through to you in time. Other interested people, still a chance to come along!
Scott, could you update the entry for CALGARY? Due to a flight cancellation, I cannot host the Calgary meetup tomorrow. Please delay it by one week, to September 5.
For some reason, when I got this email, Gmail decided to *automatically* put the Winnipeg event on Saturday into my calendar, which was pretty annoying. I have never been to Winnipeg.
Probably just a hiccup with whatever system Gmail uses to do such things but thought I'd mention in case this happened to tons of other people, too, in which case you might want to figure out if something about your email caused it.
You probably get a fair amount of this, but let me pitch you on Birmingham as a stop on your EU tour.
*It has undergone a considerable amount of revitalisation in the last decade. Its current mix of the modern and the historical is a feast for the soul.
*It is a transport hub. If you plan to travel the UK by ground, you will almost certainly pass through / by Birmingham.
*There are a load of small fascinating museums based on Birmingham's industrial heritage. I would personally recommend the Back to Backs, the Museum of the Jewellery Quater, and the Coffin Works.
*It is a fantastically foody city. I guarantee if you go to any of the highly-rated restaurants in the city, you will have a great time (Although I would recommend an Indian, as that is something of a local speciality.
I noticed a few of these being at 4am and 5:30am on the spreadsheet and here - presumably a typo? Or do people in Mexico City really like waking up early?
Scott, if there was fundraising for new features for reciprocity.io would you share it? Feels like it's close to being great but needs a few features (ie being able to add a twitter account) . Tweetledee.xyz does this, but doesn't do Facebook or scrape Twitter lists so is a bit worse.
Is reciprocity.io still working? I remember seeing something about it years ago, and have occasionally thought about it and wanted to check it out, but forgot what it was called until you linked it here. I don't see much after I logged in, but maybe that's just because none of my FaceBook friends use it
The drop down help explaining that the site "is, uh, hosted on [their] laptop and will break if [they] ever turn [their] laptop off" isn't really encouraging, nor is the GitHub repository that appears not to have been touched in almost two years. But maybe it's working fine for the people who use it, and nobody wants to devote time to making changes.
Will attendees be required to be fully vaccinated against covid? Previously you suggested this as a possibility but there is no mention of it here. (You also stated that such a requirement would not be enforceable, but at least in the US or other countries with vaccination cards it is easily enforceable.) Clearly covid is important to people if essentially all of the meet ups have been moved outdoors, so it seems weird not to make this step (in countries where the vaccine is readily available, of course).
How the heck would you do this? Scott can't force 100+ individual organizers to enforce a common standard, can't verify they did, and where these meetups are in public places, there is no legal way to exclude a person from being there. Unless the municipality itself has and enforces such a rule for outdoor gatherings, there is nothing additional Scott can do besides make a suggestion.
I think this is the first or second-ever ACX/SSC meetup in Indonesia, so I don't know who will come... but please come at the time and place, me and at minimum two other ACX friends will be there!
Arborea Cafe is fully outdoor and is very, very wide FYI. It's located inside the Kementerian Kehutanan complex (open for public).
I'm a bit confused, Madrid isn't in the Meetup excel, is that a planned meetup still? I have no idea how I'd even host a meetup there, but would def go if there was one.
Nobody volunteered to organize a meetup there, but while I'm in Europe I want to go there anyway as a tourist, so I was planning to just go to a park and tell everyone where I was and see who showed up.
If you want to be the meetup organizer, fill in the form and I'll add you post facto.
Well, I just volunteered (Google form) to host in Madrid on Sat, September 25th. I set that date because a few members of the EA/rationality community in Madrid had already settled on that date and said that would work for most of us. I'm open to moving the date to accommodate more people (and Scott himself).
Is there any update on this? Madrid is still as TBD, who can we contact to be more sure? I think Retiro has been proposed several times but am not certain 25th is the date
Ah right. If I have enough advance warning meeting in a park would be fine, but, again, I have no idea how do you organize something like this. As in, I suppose you rent a 'big room' for an 'afternoon', but have no idea who you call for this or how much it'd cost: suppose I could ask around. Would rather have someone else organize unless me doing it helps people go.
I suspect a Madrid meetup would be few enough people it could fit in a decently sized restaurant that isn't too covid cautious by late September, so is that an option too?
PS: Thanks, even though I fear a real decline in quality since I got a 'real job'
reply because no edit option: I know see there are a bazillion meetups in parks, so if organizing it amounts of taking notes and making nametags/a big sign, I suppose I could do it. how many people have shown interest in Madrid?
If Scott is fine with me setting up location as 'TBD' (I have time to ask about best park in that is easily accesible with public transport and easily identifiable entry so we find each other) I guess I can try and fill the form today/tomorrow
El Retiro Park is a convenient location, I'd suggest that as our first option. I would attend. I can bring refreshments for several people in case it's still hot. There should be plenty of shade and quiet in that park.
It's not clear to me in what dates exactly Scott plans to be in Madrid... do we have a clear date yet?
Hey! I volunteered to host the meetup last year but I've been so busy these weeks that totally forgot about it. I don't know if you filled the form already, but if you want any help or coordination you can email me at pvillalobos at domain, where domain=protonmail.com
We also have a slack workspace for rationality / EA in spanish if you prefer that
Hi. I was in a similar situation: saw the Madrid stop in the itinerary, couldn't find it in the spreadsheet, asked Mingyuan about it. I'm happy to help co-organise this. What's the best way to get in touch, Twitter? I'm @dcabo there.
I don't have the capacity to be an organizer this year but was hoping/expecting someone would do it for Kuala Lumpur and I'd stop by. I'll volunteer next year.
Excited to see so many meetups in the Netherlands.
The w3w links are hilarious. I feel sorry for the organizers who chose a great meetup location only to discover the name was so sad as "nobody joined friend" or so scary as "tigers-wasp union"
Well, but tigers.wasps.union is in Norway, tiger.wasp.union is in Indiana, and tiger.wasp.unions is in Sweden. The big problem with W3W, though, is not the usability (which they seem to have improved somewhat) but the intellectual-property implications: you can't meet up with someone who gives you a W3W address without the intermediation of a monopolist third party who keeps their algorithm secret.
I was really disappointed to see their system in use here, and I regard it as a hostile act.
For College Station, I specifically avoided the location "slug-cough-heaved" or something - "musical-airship-discovery" (or whatever it is) was much better, and in the same patio.
Wow, you'll be visiting Berlin, I'm thrilled to hear that. If there are any questions concerning your travel or stay, or holiday in Germany or whatever, please feel free to let me know. Also via mail or any other forum that you find convenient.
Hey yo Scott- I’m the dork running the Harbor City meetup on the 28th. I’m not sure if it’s my screw up, your screw up, or my phone autocorrecting when I didn’t tell it to when I did the thing, but the email is Eric[dot]L[dot]Fore[at]gmail[dot]. Not “fire”.
The post is correct; in general the spreadsheet is ground truth. The discrepancy comes because the events were created via import about 12 hours ago, and the Tel Aviv organizers decided to change the date of their event in the interim.
Note that w3w is promoting proprietary, closed system. Why not use regular coordinates or even plus codes? For once Google is promoting not something that is a closed garden.
Oh, I didn't know about Plus codes. Some chance I would have recommended we use those had we known about them. Though I do like the friendliness of the w3w system, but was also somewhat unhappy that it's proprietary (but also like, I don't know, seems good for people to make money off of a good idea).
> seems good for people to make money off of a good idea
In this case it is deliberately designed to lock everyone into monopoly on way how location is specified. Achievement in adverse lawyering, monopolization and the worst kind of monopoly.
In this case I am fine with people not making money on their idea.
Their plan is to have monopoly on specifying locations and extract rent from that. What they invented is not very interesting, easy to replicate and potential lock in would be very, very problematic.
what3words is fairly simple from a software point of view, and is really more about attempting establish a standard for location look-ups. It will only succeed through the network effect of persuading many people to adopt and share locations. If it does succeed, then it also succeeds in "locking in" users into the system which they have exclusive monopoly over.
The algorithm is patented in several countries, preventing anyone from implementing a compatible algorithm or developing anything like it as a competing standard. Notably the patent is not restricted to schemes which use three words, so a hypothetical "what4words" would potentially also violate the patent.
Hand-in-hand with this patent, the wordlist necessary for encoding/decoding what3words locations is copyrighted, and is stored in an encrypted form in the what3words mobile apps (so decrypting the wordlist would likely trigger "anti-circumvention" laws such as DMCA §1201).
The algorithm is deliberately designed to make adjacent addressing blocks use all different words, forcing the users to consult the service and specify all 3 words for every address.
The names are localisable, but due to the differences in the word lists and the geocoding table, those 3 word addresses are untranslatable across locales.
Thanks. I guess I was trying (and failing) to come up with technical mechanisms that could prevent reverse-engineering of their software (while still allowing people to use it), and the answer is that they're using legal mechanisms instead.
It seems to me that the interesting part of their algorithm could be viewed as a trivial application of the more general idea of "using words as if they were digits in some high-base numbering system". I wonder if one could find some prior art of that more-general idea and use it to invalidate the patents. I can't think of any great example of that general idea offhand, but it seems to me like the sort of thing that's probably been done before.
xkcd's famous "correct horse battery staple" thing is *almost* this. It doesn't *rely* on treating the words like digits, but the entropy calculation sort of implicitly assumes that that would be the easiest way for an attacker to guess passwords of this form.
It's definitely bullshit and no one should use it. Luckily, the Dallas organizers also just named the park they're meeting in, and that can easily be looked up (I already know where it is since I've been there many times anyway, but others can look it up).
Mapping numerical coordinates to human-readable sets of words is just DNS, with the obvious caveat that DNS allows you to choose your own words as the coordinate owner, ensuring uniqueness by hosting registries at pre-allocated root words that can't be reused.
An actually novel and useful algorithm for dimensionality reduction of spherical coordinates is the S2 library (https://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy.html), which is open and didn't try to patent their algorithm (note that in spite of releasing this under an Apache license, Google nonetheless manages to make a lot of money). For 3m x 3m squares, you're at about level 21, which they say requires 26 trillion cells. Take the cube root and you could use do what w3w is doing with a lookup table and about 30,000 words.
> An actually novel and useful algorithm for dimensionality reduction of spherical coordinates is the S2 library
At a glance, it looks basically just like HEALPix in the NEST ordering, just extended to higher resolutions
(not that there's anything wrong with this, I just wanted to point out that pixelizing a sphere is not rocket sci...[*remembers who maintains HEALPix*]ehm... we need a better idiom for "all that complicated" than that)
Request that if you do this again, you notify organizers in advance if/when you plan to stop by (or at least give more explicit warning that it might happen). It's pretty frustrating for organizers to plan a meetup and then have it unilaterally moved later.
We were originally planning a meetup on the 19th - would you (or anyone else) be up for that? We might still do that one too, if there's enough interest
The location for the meetup in Karlsruhe on 18.09.21 15:00 has been moved to the Fasanengarten, 49.014051,8.412563 , as the Schlossgarten is occupied by a festival.
49.01445° N, 8.41252° E
(Exact location very close to the previous coords)
Attention - The meetup in WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND has been postponed due to level 3 lockdown. It will now be held on Sunday 26th September, same time and place. I have sent emails out to those who RSVPd with emails, but there are a couple of people who have RSVPd without providing contact information, so I hope this message gets through to you in time. Other interested people, still a chance to come along!
I'll be driving down from Westchester to the NYC meetup Sunday. If you would like a ride, let me know!
Sydney meetup the link is wrong, this is the link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2310802810
See you soon
Scott, could you update the entry for CALGARY? Due to a flight cancellation, I cannot host the Calgary meetup tomorrow. Please delay it by one week, to September 5.
Updated!
Very unhappy to learn that the NYC meet up is the first day of Rosh Hashona
The Seattle one is Yom Kippur (Kol Nidre) :(
For some reason, when I got this email, Gmail decided to *automatically* put the Winnipeg event on Saturday into my calendar, which was pretty annoying. I have never been to Winnipeg.
Probably just a hiccup with whatever system Gmail uses to do such things but thought I'd mention in case this happened to tons of other people, too, in which case you might want to figure out if something about your email caused it.
Same. Wish I could attend but Canada doesn't let people vaccinated with Sinovac (I am only half-joking)
Gmail did the exact same thing to me!
You probably get a fair amount of this, but let me pitch you on Birmingham as a stop on your EU tour.
*It has undergone a considerable amount of revitalisation in the last decade. Its current mix of the modern and the historical is a feast for the soul.
*It is a transport hub. If you plan to travel the UK by ground, you will almost certainly pass through / by Birmingham.
*There are a load of small fascinating museums based on Birmingham's industrial heritage. I would personally recommend the Back to Backs, the Museum of the Jewellery Quater, and the Coffin Works.
*It is a fantastically foody city. I guarantee if you go to any of the highly-rated restaurants in the city, you will have a great time (Although I would recommend an Indian, as that is something of a local speciality.
Yeah, Brum is actually quite nice nowadays
I noticed a few of these being at 4am and 5:30am on the spreadsheet and here - presumably a typo? Or do people in Mexico City really like waking up early?
Thank you for keeping this going despite all the Delta fearmongering. Will definitely attend the Seattle one.
Wow. That itinerary is awesome enough to make Mick Jagger jealous. Pretty damn impressive.
How is reciprocity.io supposed to work for friend finding, since it's limited to your FB friends?
I think it's more for friend consolidation. I'd recommend Twitter for friend *finding*
Scott, if there was fundraising for new features for reciprocity.io would you share it? Feels like it's close to being great but needs a few features (ie being able to add a twitter account) . Tweetledee.xyz does this, but doesn't do Facebook or scrape Twitter lists so is a bit worse.
I don't even know who runs it at this point.
Is reciprocity.io still working? I remember seeing something about it years ago, and have occasionally thought about it and wanted to check it out, but forgot what it was called until you linked it here. I don't see much after I logged in, but maybe that's just because none of my FaceBook friends use it
The drop down help explaining that the site "is, uh, hosted on [their] laptop and will break if [they] ever turn [their] laptop off" isn't really encouraging, nor is the GitHub repository that appears not to have been touched in almost two years. But maybe it's working fine for the people who use it, and nobody wants to devote time to making changes.
It went through a re-launch and some drama behind that, and all the data was reset :/
Will attendees be required to be fully vaccinated against covid? Previously you suggested this as a possibility but there is no mention of it here. (You also stated that such a requirement would not be enforceable, but at least in the US or other countries with vaccination cards it is easily enforceable.) Clearly covid is important to people if essentially all of the meet ups have been moved outdoors, so it seems weird not to make this step (in countries where the vaccine is readily available, of course).
I won't. The government refuses to vaccinate me because I'm an illegal alien, and there's no non-government vaccination system.
There's multiple resources online citing that the vaccination is free and available even for undocumented immigrants.
https://www.nilc.org/2021/04/12/immigrant-access-to-the-covid-19-vaccines/
97% of US ACX readers said they were fully vaccinated on the survey, so I didn't think it was necessary to get too draconian.
How the heck would you do this? Scott can't force 100+ individual organizers to enforce a common standard, can't verify they did, and where these meetups are in public places, there is no legal way to exclude a person from being there. Unless the municipality itself has and enforces such a rule for outdoor gatherings, there is nothing additional Scott can do besides make a suggestion.
Hi! I'm the Indonesian (Jakarta) organizer.
I think this is the first or second-ever ACX/SSC meetup in Indonesia, so I don't know who will come... but please come at the time and place, me and at minimum two other ACX friends will be there!
Arborea Cafe is fully outdoor and is very, very wide FYI. It's located inside the Kementerian Kehutanan complex (open for public).
Hey! Moscow organizer here:
1. Could you change the coordinates to https://what3words.com/sectors.toffee.sweeten, the current one points to the wrong side of the building.
2. RSVP on LW shows the location for another meetup.
Fixed #1
Fixed #2.
I'm a bit confused, Madrid isn't in the Meetup excel, is that a planned meetup still? I have no idea how I'd even host a meetup there, but would def go if there was one.
Nobody volunteered to organize a meetup there, but while I'm in Europe I want to go there anyway as a tourist, so I was planning to just go to a park and tell everyone where I was and see who showed up.
If you want to be the meetup organizer, fill in the form and I'll add you post facto.
(PS: I love your Twitter)
Well, I just volunteered (Google form) to host in Madrid on Sat, September 25th. I set that date because a few members of the EA/rationality community in Madrid had already settled on that date and said that would work for most of us. I'm open to moving the date to accommodate more people (and Scott himself).
Is there any update on this? Madrid is still as TBD, who can we contact to be more sure? I think Retiro has been proposed several times but am not certain 25th is the date
This is my proposal:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gECjwasPyiHEDmLZh/madrid-spain-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021
Still TBC, and no response from Scott. But in one of his last updates, he mentioned this exact date and time, and thus I suspect he's aware of it.
I'm going to email Mingyuan, maybe she forgot to update the spreadsheet
Thanks!
Ah right. If I have enough advance warning meeting in a park would be fine, but, again, I have no idea how do you organize something like this. As in, I suppose you rent a 'big room' for an 'afternoon', but have no idea who you call for this or how much it'd cost: suppose I could ask around. Would rather have someone else organize unless me doing it helps people go.
I suspect a Madrid meetup would be few enough people it could fit in a decently sized restaurant that isn't too covid cautious by late September, so is that an option too?
PS: Thanks, even though I fear a real decline in quality since I got a 'real job'
reply because no edit option: I know see there are a bazillion meetups in parks, so if organizing it amounts of taking notes and making nametags/a big sign, I suppose I could do it. how many people have shown interest in Madrid?
Park meetup sounds great, I hope you volunteer as a host!
I can't since I don't live in Madrid (not yet), but I'll be there from mid September to early October, so I'd love to join in.
If Scott is fine with me setting up location as 'TBD' (I have time to ask about best park in that is easily accesible with public transport and easily identifiable entry so we find each other) I guess I can try and fill the form today/tomorrow
+1
El Retiro Park is a convenient location, I'd suggest that as our first option. I would attend. I can bring refreshments for several people in case it's still hot. There should be plenty of shade and quiet in that park.
It's not clear to me in what dates exactly Scott plans to be in Madrid... do we have a clear date yet?
Hey! I volunteered to host the meetup last year but I've been so busy these weeks that totally forgot about it. I don't know if you filled the form already, but if you want any help or coordination you can email me at pvillalobos at domain, where domain=protonmail.com
We also have a slack workspace for rationality / EA in spanish if you prefer that
Hi. I was in a similar situation: saw the Madrid stop in the itinerary, couldn't find it in the spreadsheet, asked Mingyuan about it. I'm happy to help co-organise this. What's the best way to get in touch, Twitter? I'm @dcabo there.
Same here
I don't have the capacity to be an organizer this year but was hoping/expecting someone would do it for Kuala Lumpur and I'd stop by. I'll volunteer next year.
Excited to see so many meetups in the Netherlands.
The w3w links are hilarious. I feel sorry for the organizers who chose a great meetup location only to discover the name was so sad as "nobody joined friend" or so scary as "tigers-wasp union"
Yep, I'm co-organising the Manc meetup, saw tigers-wasp-union was the link and thought "...do you know what, at least people will remember it"
Well, but tigers.wasps.union is in Norway, tiger.wasp.union is in Indiana, and tiger.wasp.unions is in Sweden. The big problem with W3W, though, is not the usability (which they seem to have improved somewhat) but the intellectual-property implications: you can't meet up with someone who gives you a W3W address without the intermediation of a monopolist third party who keeps their algorithm secret.
I was really disappointed to see their system in use here, and I regard it as a hostile act.
For College Station, I specifically avoided the location "slug-cough-heaved" or something - "musical-airship-discovery" (or whatever it is) was much better, and in the same patio.
Wow, you'll be visiting Berlin, I'm thrilled to hear that. If there are any questions concerning your travel or stay, or holiday in Germany or whatever, please feel free to let me know. Also via mail or any other forum that you find convenient.
Excited! :)
Given that last year's Berkeley event had 105 indicated by the excel doc, isn't the Berkeley location going to be incredibly packed?
What Habryka said, but also it's a pretty huge backyard.
We might move to a larger location, just need to confirm with the university whether we can.
the Lakewood one is walking distance so I think I'm out of excuses....
Hey yo Scott- I’m the dork running the Harbor City meetup on the 28th. I’m not sure if it’s my screw up, your screw up, or my phone autocorrecting when I didn’t tell it to when I did the thing, but the email is Eric[dot]L[dot]Fore[at]gmail[dot]. Not “fire”.
Ty
Alas, well that explains why I couldn't reach you! It sure says 'fire' in the form you filled out :P I'll go and fix that everywhere now :)
My phone and I compete about who can screw up more often. Phone is losing atm.
The Israeli RVSP seems to lead to a dufferent date than the one stated in the post (October instead of September). Which is the correct one?
The post is correct; in general the spreadsheet is ground truth. The discrepancy comes because the events were created via import about 12 hours ago, and the Tel Aviv organizers decided to change the date of their event in the interim.
Great. Thanks!
RSVP, the Tel Aviv one
Note that w3w is promoting proprietary, closed system. Why not use regular coordinates or even plus codes? For once Google is promoting not something that is a closed garden.
Personally I would recommend OSM, but it is not so good (for now) in USA. See say https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=52.51081&mlon=13.39865#map=18/52.51081/13.39865 (link like this can be generated by going to share on right - this icon with an arrow and selecting ""Include marker)
Yeah, I agree. It was really disappointing to see w3w URLs here; I regard it as a hostile act.
Oh, I didn't know about Plus codes. Some chance I would have recommended we use those had we known about them. Though I do like the friendliness of the w3w system, but was also somewhat unhappy that it's proprietary (but also like, I don't know, seems good for people to make money off of a good idea).
> seems good for people to make money off of a good idea
In this case it is deliberately designed to lock everyone into monopoly on way how location is specified. Achievement in adverse lawyering, monopolization and the worst kind of monopoly.
In this case I am fine with people not making money on their idea.
I know only a little about w3w. Could you explain in what sense it is proprietary / what risk this poses?
Their plan is to have monopoly on specifying locations and extract rent from that. What they invented is not very interesting, easy to replicate and potential lock in would be very, very problematic.
Following is quoted from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words
what3words is fairly simple from a software point of view, and is really more about attempting establish a standard for location look-ups. It will only succeed through the network effect of persuading many people to adopt and share locations. If it does succeed, then it also succeeds in "locking in" users into the system which they have exclusive monopoly over.
The algorithm is patented in several countries, preventing anyone from implementing a compatible algorithm or developing anything like it as a competing standard. Notably the patent is not restricted to schemes which use three words, so a hypothetical "what4words" would potentially also violate the patent.
Hand-in-hand with this patent, the wordlist necessary for encoding/decoding what3words locations is copyrighted, and is stored in an encrypted form in the what3words mobile apps (so decrypting the wordlist would likely trigger "anti-circumvention" laws such as DMCA §1201).
The algorithm is deliberately designed to make adjacent addressing blocks use all different words, forcing the users to consult the service and specify all 3 words for every address.
The names are localisable, but due to the differences in the word lists and the geocoding table, those 3 word addresses are untranslatable across locales.
Thanks. I guess I was trying (and failing) to come up with technical mechanisms that could prevent reverse-engineering of their software (while still allowing people to use it), and the answer is that they're using legal mechanisms instead.
It seems to me that the interesting part of their algorithm could be viewed as a trivial application of the more general idea of "using words as if they were digits in some high-base numbering system". I wonder if one could find some prior art of that more-general idea and use it to invalidate the patents. I can't think of any great example of that general idea offhand, but it seems to me like the sort of thing that's probably been done before.
xkcd's famous "correct horse battery staple" thing is *almost* this. It doesn't *rely* on treating the words like digits, but the entropy calculation sort of implicitly assumes that that would be the easiest way for an attacker to guess passwords of this form.
The OSM wiki page has a link to a Stack Exchange post showing someone else published a video to YouTube demonstrating a method for doing this exactly 9 days before w3w filed for a patent on his idea: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in
It's definitely bullshit and no one should use it. Luckily, the Dallas organizers also just named the park they're meeting in, and that can easily be looked up (I already know where it is since I've been there many times anyway, but others can look it up).
Mapping numerical coordinates to human-readable sets of words is just DNS, with the obvious caveat that DNS allows you to choose your own words as the coordinate owner, ensuring uniqueness by hosting registries at pre-allocated root words that can't be reused.
An actually novel and useful algorithm for dimensionality reduction of spherical coordinates is the S2 library (https://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy.html), which is open and didn't try to patent their algorithm (note that in spite of releasing this under an Apache license, Google nonetheless manages to make a lot of money). For 3m x 3m squares, you're at about level 21, which they say requires 26 trillion cells. Take the cube root and you could use do what w3w is doing with a lookup table and about 30,000 words.
> An actually novel and useful algorithm for dimensionality reduction of spherical coordinates is the S2 library
At a glance, it looks basically just like HEALPix in the NEST ordering, just extended to higher resolutions
(not that there's anything wrong with this, I just wanted to point out that pixelizing a sphere is not rocket sci...[*remembers who maintains HEALPix*]ehm... we need a better idiom for "all that complicated" than that)
Diceware, the PGP biometric word lists, ...
> if one could find some prior art
That is only start. The real challenge is going through supercostly legal process.
Well. My understanding of our legal system is that anyone could always force you through a supercostly legal process, even without a patent.
Courts try pretty hard to avoid being used as a means of baseless harassment.
Well, I am from Poland (and not wealthy) so I have small risk from that part of the problem.
But initiating such process would ensure that I have such problem.
Request that if you do this again, you notify organizers in advance if/when you plan to stop by (or at least give more explicit warning that it might happen). It's pretty frustrating for organizers to plan a meetup and then have it unilaterally moved later.
Yeah. Might just be me, but rescheduling to a holiday weekend less than 2 weeks in advance is a pretty conclusive dealbreaker.
We were originally planning a meetup on the 19th - would you (or anyone else) be up for that? We might still do that one too, if there's enough interest
I would be! Won't be able to come on the 6th
Totally fair, sorry, this was my bad for not formalizing my trip plans until the last minute.
The RSVP link to Berkeley is to the Grass Valley one
Thanks, fixed.
The RSVP link for Champaign-Urbana leads to the RSVP for Honolulu, Hawaii. Here's the actual link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SWFfLvBy3mcocAJBh/champaign-urbana-il-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021
Corrected, thanks.
Please, no comment spam! Also I don’t want to use counterfeit money.