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Show HN: I discovered roads in the US across > 1000 themes

13 points · 11 comments · 91awebsi

  1. totallygeeky · · focus · HN ↗
    The framing is a bit deceptive, saying that these roads are "named after" these things, despite the clarification in the about that they may have no relation. This whole thing is a bit busted, the about on each "chapter" only sort of describes what a category entails. Obscure shares the same about as famous.

    This feels like a project that was done without much care for the details, considering how many themes are pure nonsense. No acknowledgement of AI in how this was done but it sure smells of it.

    1. RickHull · · focus · HN ↗
      Agreed. I chose Robot Names, and it gave me a Mars Orbital Mission for Mom Lane, and Cygnus was a Deke Slayton reference. It seemed more about space and satellites than robots with personalities. And the thumbnail number (over 9000!) did not match the clicked result. And the segmented sections were hard to follow and navigate.
      1. duskwuff · · focus · HN ↗
        For another example: one "theme" listed is "Walking Dead episodes". The streets which come up are ones with names like "Faith" or "Family", which happen to also be names of episodes of that show. There is clearly no actual connection here.
    2. 91awebsi · · focus · HN ↗
      ouch, and also thank you for calling out the busted.

      An LLM titles each theme, but otherwise this is all derived by checking wikidata entities that are 'most read' (according to qrank), then choosing from a set of sparql queries I put together (members of group X, places within Y, etc), for what produces the most results, and then string/substring/bm25 matching across all the streets in the country.

      I think the trash smell is too generously allowing an association both in my sparql queries (what to search for), and whats considered a match :/

      I wonder too if explaining how a street matched (following the wikidata graph) would make the nonsensical less offending.

      1. netsharc · · focus · HN ↗
        Busted?

        You really think people wouldn't notice the slop? Did you even look at the results before hitting "submit"?

        Streets named after famous people, "Don John", it thinks it's named after Donald (John) Trump.

        "David Robert Court", oh "David Robert" is the first 2 names of David Beckham.

        Please... I'm going to flag this submission because of your lying and stupidity. "I discovered"? Go fuckkkk offfff. (Sorry for breaking HN rules, but this is fucking obnoxious)

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