Yet another Hacker News

Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

231 points theanonymousone 3 hours ago 95 comments

mehwoot 3 hours ago | parent

I guess the map is the territory

brainwad 2 hours ago | parent

If you are only interested in 1m scale, maybe. Even the open satellite imagery goes to 20x that resolution, though, and of course there are small features that can't be resolved even at 5cm resolution, like survey marks. And even at the 1m scale, they've done a bad job transforming the source data to Minecraft, there's tons of errors if you look and most of detailed features (like road centrelines) are faked.

4ggr0 3 hours ago | parent

almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.

koziserek 2 hours ago | parent

I assure you will be better served with SweetHome3d

BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!

4ggr0 2 hours ago | parent

sh3d seems like an actual CAD-like tool to actually plan your furniture. what i find fun about this minecraft map is to make my actual home my base in the game, try to make it looo like my home and then just play minecraft while exploring the surroundings i know already.

then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.

then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)

ShadowOfThePit 3 hours ago | parent

Funky stuff, nice use of government data.

It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.

Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?

wmanley 2 hours ago | parent

> Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.

amiga386 2 hours ago | parent

Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...

barrkel 1 hour ago | parent

No, you download it then get an invoice in the mail with the bill, 30 days to pay.

evrimoztamur 3 hours ago | parent

It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.

herbst 3 hours ago | parent

That's the actual data it contains houses and structures

Lukas_Skywalker 13 minutes ago | parent

The Lidar point cloud has a classification attribute that lets you filter the data. You can take the class=2 points to get the ground [1].

[1]: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/de/hoehenmodell-swisssurface3...

shoobiedoo 2 hours ago | parent

I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.

Rapzid 2 hours ago | parent

I never got being bothered too much by this.

Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..

The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.

lotsofpulp 1 hour ago | parent

Is it in a different category than the electricity (or broadly speaking, any increase in entropy) flushed down the toilet making reality TV shows, or nonsense Tik Tok videos, or a mission to overthrow a government that doesn't bend the knee, or giving a 95 year old dialysis, or eating foods transported from far away?

qbane 2 hours ago | parent

Missing context: in Minecraft.

stabbles 2 hours ago | parent

See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.

comrade1234 2 hours ago | parent

They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.

abricq 2 hours ago | parent

Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !

Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!

amiga386 2 hours ago | parent

Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:

https://minecraftdanmark.dk/

https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/

> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.

> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.

> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.

> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.

stavros 2 hours ago | parent

It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.

well_ackshually 2 hours ago | parent

Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.

This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.

stavros 2 hours ago | parent

Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".

convict 1 hour ago | parent

The LLM puffery referring to the website and the texts on it, i guess

hypfer 1 hour ago | parent

I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey.

The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.

No one did this.

And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.

So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.

cadamsdotcom 53 minutes ago | parent

Doing something and charging money for it is how a lot of things that cost money got started.

stymaar 1 hour ago | parent

Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.

INTPenis 2 hours ago | parent

I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.

Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?

pluc 1 hour ago | parent

That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.

spicyusername 1 hour ago | parent

Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.

    I don't get it

Because it looks cool to see the real world in blocks. And if it looks cool, it is cool, as they say.

YeahThisIsMe 1 hour ago | parent

You're actually allowed to play video games the way you want to.

INTPenis 55 minutes ago | parent

"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"

You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.

FrustratedMonky 20 minutes ago | parent

Think you are missing a couple decades of Minecraft automation. Its been done since the beginning. This is just cool example of taking it to extreme.

skrebbel 1 hour ago | parent

The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.

epihelix 1 hour ago | parent

To be fair, Denmark is very flat and could probably be represented by a single block :)

Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?

ecto 51 minutes ago | parent

How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?

The world changing - no need to be rude about it.

jagged-chisel 41 minutes ago | parent

“Puffery” is about the article, not the work

thisismyanon2 13 minutes ago | parent

The Second American Revolution will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.

https://x.com/Heritage/status/1808581655122047025

netsharc 2 hours ago | parent

This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.

Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".

"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.

How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!

What an exercise in convolution...

rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent

> "Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

A mountain irl is, for instance 783 meters tall (sea level). A block in minecraft is always 1x1x1meters (according to the game engine def). Thus you make a mountain 783 blocks tall. You can also easily raise the sky limit if it becomes a problem.

ricardobeat 2 hours ago | parent

The point is that this kind of prose is typical of LLMs. It’s like describing a driving game with “each car has four wheels and a suspension just like the real one”.

lopis 1 hour ago | parent

LLMs still struggle with deciding what parts of a document or concept are more important. So documentation often trashes wildly around specificity, like "In this driving game the car moves forward and the glove compartment can be used to save the game". I think it's a big part of why reading unredacted and unedited LLM slop feel so much more tiring than reading human-written text.

knollimar 1 hour ago | parent

The exactly for something with a scale and rounding hurts to read

karel-3d 1 hour ago | parent

Oh it's Minecraft! I didn't realize what is this about for the longest time. I thought it's their own game named "blocks".

masswerk 12 minutes ago | parent

A model of Switzerland in 1×1×1m resolution. Are they trying to say that reality also comes in this granularity? Meaning, LLMs are telling us, the Planck constant h = 1m?

Pirut 2 hours ago | parent

I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.

https://github.com/pirut/earth-platform

vidarh 2 hours ago | parent

Sounds worth posting your own ShowHN post for.

rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent

Please rewrite this in C++/Rust. Java at this point is a pure meme-tier language. I've dabbled with rewriting the JVM and actually properly optimizing but it's a complete waste of time when you can just generate optimal low-level code with inlined asm kernels where needed. You're genuinely leaving tons of performance/efficiency on the table. If you need a high performance minecraft engine there's TONS of rust rewrites on github, or you can generate your own.

Pirut 48 minutes ago | parent

Funnily enough, I have been dabbling at rebuilding this to work with this project: https://github.com/ludovic111/horizon

The only thing about rewriting it in rust is that no other mods will work with this and the thing that got me really excited about building this is using Create Aeronautics with it.

echoangle 2 hours ago | parent

How does this work? You need to somehow flatten the globe into a plane, right? Are you just using a regular map projection? It says that everything is real scale in the description and that can’t really be true at high latitudes, right?

Pirut 50 minutes ago | parent

I used Web Mercator to flatten the map, so its "1:1" scale, but obviously not perfect because it is on a flat plane.

robot_jesus 15 minutes ago | parent

Neat project! It's an understandable limitation you had to commit to, but I'm curious how you've found the distortion away from the equator with Mercator. Probably not really noticeable in any major way within the arctic/antarctic circles but obviously closer to poles it's going to get quite wonky.

busssard 1 hour ago | parent

this is amazing! Now we just need a shared server that is accessible by anyone and see where that goes.

A world for anyone. should have more than enough are. it would be interesting to see if wars and terretorial conflicts arise here as well

Pirut 47 minutes ago | parent

Thanks! It is optimized to work on servers so if anyone wants to host it they can.

Pirut 47 minutes ago | parent

Also, great username my last name is Bussard :O

efilife 2 hours ago | parent

holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?

splatter9859 2 hours ago | parent

Welcome to life in the 2020s. Enshittification knows no bounds and cannot be contained.

"Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Collective." -- Borg Collective, Star Trek TNG

imilev 2 hours ago | parent

This is cool af.

petterroea 2 hours ago | parent

Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money.

I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.

I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.

gb2d_hn 2 hours ago | parent

Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself. Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify. Why do we give anyone any money? Why don't we just do everything ourselves?

well_ackshually 2 hours ago | parent

>Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself.

Because growing fruits is hard.

>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.

Because playing music is hard.

This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent

> This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.

As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?

well_ackshually 30 minutes ago | parent

Because if you're a talentless hack, you could have least have the decency to not charge for open data (that Swiss taxpayers have already paid for). There is nothing original, creative, new to this project.

FrustratedMonky 14 minutes ago | parent

AI generated web sites don't magically appear out of the ether.

Just like someone had to grow the potato.

Someone had to 'use' the AI to 'do something'.

The AI just cut out some steps, -> Just Like the Plow did.

petterroea 2 hours ago | parent

That's not really how it works, because in all your examples there is a pretty reasonable amount of work being put in that you are paying for.

Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.

A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"

andybak 2 hours ago | parent

So do it. Everything AI assisted I've made has involved a ton of work. The only difference AI has made is that I've increased the level of my ambition and avoided a ton of things that were previously blockers.

erfgh 23 minutes ago | parent

I think whether it requires a lot of work is not the most important factor. The important factor is how easy it is to replace it. If it was made with AI I expect it to be easily copiable with AI. Therefore it doesn't make much sense to spend a lot, if any, money on it.

dewey 1 hour ago | parent

> Many AI projects are just a few prompts away

"Just a few prompts" is the new "can do that in a weekend". In reality it still takes a while to build everything, think about what features you want to have and how to prioritize them, how to build a good UX / UI, set up payment providers etc.

tiborsaas 2 hours ago | parent

Why do people go to restaurants and pay significantly more when they can just buy the ingredients and cook at home? Those damn chefs make my food in 15 minutes.

amiga386 1 hour ago | parent

Why do people go to real restaurants, with chefs who actually cook things, when they can cook at home? Possibly the quality of the food, atmosphere etc.

Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.

Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.

tiborsaas 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting division you make there, I go to both "real", higher end restaurants and "low grade" pub restaurants. For me, the the reason is the same, convenience, laziness and lack of my expertise and willingness to cook.

Obviously I can judge a place based on the quality of service and food, but that's not the reason I've gone there in the first place.

samus 44 minutes ago | parent

Just tally up how long it takes to shop, cook at home, and clean up, and multiply it with the rate at $dayjob. I am pretty sure for most people on Hacker News the figure will be significantly higher than at a restaurant, and we would have to adopt a similar working style to bring the cost down, like buying and preparing in bulk, focusing on a few dishes, cooking for multiple people at once, etc.

I am not exactly a fan of this kind of comparison unless one can actually freely allocate one's time, but it is illustrative.

olmo23 2 hours ago | parent

I disagree. What might be "a few prompts in claude code" for you, could be a lot of work for someone else. Not everyone is comfortable setting up a domain name and hosting etc... and if you provide value, why not ask for something in return?

busssard 1 hour ago | parent

i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service

weego 52 minutes ago | parent

If your only measure of value is human labour just say that. Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance.

Obviously anyone can make anything once they've seen it implemented from someone else's idea. Maybe sometimes the idea is the value in itself, the action of taking it from zero to product is just a means to distribute the idea.

monsieurbanana 35 minutes ago | parent

> Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance

The human brain works with pattern recognition. Regardless of whether I think that llms are great or not, right now they're vastly used to produce slop (I know it doesn't have to be the case), and because of the aforementioned pattern recognition we are largely being trained to recognize ai-generated content as slop.

There's really only one logical outcome:

If you're trying to sell something to me and you have a vibe-coded website, it doesn't matter how great your product is, I'll never even get to see it because it's slop-by-default.

And you don't even have to bring up AI at all to see how that's a bad idea. AI is flooding everything, isn't it a basic marketing strategy to differentiate yourself from the rest?

Markoff 2 hours ago | parent

AIDR

dguest 2 hours ago | parent

How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?

lmpdev 2 hours ago | parent

Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map

I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate

0x_rs 2 hours ago | parent

This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.

barrkel 1 hour ago | parent

Would the time you spend getting a model subscription, giving it an environment to work in, and figuring out how to enable it to operate safely, be less than 15 francs of your time?

Minimum wage in Zurich city is 23.90 chf/hour. About 37 minutes of time, at most.

0x_rs 1 hour ago | parent

If someone wanted this, and lived outside of Switzerland (where it's sold exclusively, presumably to avoid digital sales headaches), or did not want to pay the equivalent of a monthly subscription for the conversion to Minecraft, that's what they'd do. This could've been a GitHub page with instructions to follow. The dataset does not impose any country restrictions unlike the product.

barrkel 6 minutes ago | parent

Note that it is also a mod, to support the data model.

FrustratedMonky 11 minutes ago | parent

trivial .

Can't tell if you are being sarcastic?

IshKebab 1 hour ago | parent

Do we really need to post projects like this? It's obviously of no practical or even entertainment use. In the past it would have been a somewhat notable achievement due to the effort required. Today it's obvious that you can easily do this so what's the point? Showing off how many tokens you can waste?

It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?

FireInsight 1 hour ago | parent

I find https://buildtheearth.net/ way more interesting than this & the other autogenerated projects mentioned here. It's actually thousands of people coming together to build the actual buildings everywhere on earth, not just terrain.

hotelsacher 1 hour ago | parent

This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.

barrkel 1 hour ago | parent

An ETH student's project apparently. Despite the naysayers, I think it's great someone had the impetus to get this done, and it has my son quite excited.

barrkel 10 minutes ago | parent

Also, it isn't just a map. It's also a mod to enable better rendering of the data at distance, with a couple of modes; faster flight; layered read mechanism; etc.

stefanka 1 hour ago | parent

Wow. How can I view this on the meta quest? Can I import this into Godot and run smoothly? Is the licensee permissive to use it in a game?

BSDobelix 40 minutes ago | parent

Wait is that not a 1 to 1 derived work from the official "swisstopo open geodata", taking 15.- is for sure not "fair use"

>>Obtaining and using the data and services is free-of-charge, subject to the provisions on fair use.

https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi#2.-Dat...

Am i wrong here?

probably_wrong 25 minutes ago | parent

Based on the earlier definition of "Fair use" I think it only means that the developer promises not to overload the geodata servers with too many requests and that the publishers reserve a right to rate-limit them if they don't behave.

FrustratedMonky 17 minutes ago | parent

Everyone is complaining that the web site was made by AI?

Why? It looks like a hundred other web sites. The text isn't different from any other generic sales copy that humans have been doing for ever.

People are so paranoid about AI slop, that they see it everywhere, even if it was just a human. You can't tell.

numlock86 13 minutes ago | parent

The one from Denmark (while not as cool looking, because ... you know, mountains and stuff) had much more appeal, though. Probably because it wasn't 1% blocks and 99% of Claudism rubbed against your face.

> B~ b~ but they would have used LLMs back then if they could, too.

"You're absolutely right."™ But they didn't/couldn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

alberth 12 minutes ago | parent

> ONE BLOCK = ONE METRE

Aren’t most high-resolution aerial imagery (Google Earth), 1 metre resolution.