From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia.

I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question.

I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.

So in reality everyone just uses Post Office Boxes for mail, who often just call you and say mail's arrived and charge 400 tugrug.

That said, no-one I know has even heard about what3words, aside from those who read the initial press release. And I'm from Mongolia.

One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!

> So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

> Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

    English   French
    -------   ------
       mile = embouchure
      crazy = adjuger
      shade = saladier

"plomba.rewelacja.oczy" => "exclaim.mainland.engages"

"plomba.rewelacja.fasada" => "dare.lawn.sleepy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM3foOLQwS4

Thanks for the info.

  * Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them.
  * Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address
    In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!)
    (maybe even for different kinds of data-packets)
  * Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT
    you first have to authenticate as a legal entity
    (person or registered organization / business)
    that authentication data is hard coded on to the envelope.

I rarely get any important physical mail these days. But I still run into issues over address problems (ironically, more now that I am back in housing than I ever did while homeless: https://writepay.blogspot.com/2019/02/mailing-address-drama....).

My life is mostly online. I was a military wife for a lot of years and moved around a lot. Lots of people have very physically mobile lives these days.

Yet, we haven't adapted our systems to this reality. We want to tie everyone to a physical address for a long list of things, as if we are plants who can't move from this one location or something.

I don't know what the answer is, but, wow, I sure wish we would come up with better answers than acting like this is still the 1950s and everyone will work for the same company and live in the same house for decades and we can each be found in some particular location all the time.

Just register with an email, things are autoscanned and sent to you with a PGP key you provide.

What you will get is a web application you get to sign into to actually get your mail, and you will receive a notification mail in your regular email inbox stating that you have received mail (but not from whom, or what the subject is, because that is privacy sensitive information), so that you know that you should go and get it yourself via the web application.

This is what every digital 'inbox' that isn't email has done thus far. This is in fact exactly what the Dutch government has done with their digital inbox which is intended to replace physical letters from services like the revenue service and municipalities. Thankfully that monstrosity is optional (for now).

But maybe I should get one again at some point. Maybe that would help with some of mail/address issues.

Upvotes will privately bookmark things you like. Favorites are public.

I use them occasionally to actually have some hope of finding something again. But if you don't want people to know, then don't use "favorite."

If you can extrapolate positioning deltas from the coordinates themselves, then you don't need to hit the API as much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve

With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing.

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

It explains how to easily search for "points no more than X km from Y" in a DB query without having to actually calculate distances.

I think the advantage of lat/lon boils down to the fact that everyone knows 79.999 is close to 80.000, even though they look quite different as raw text.

A tiny change in your coordinate will mean a tiny change in your physical position, but a tiny change in your physical position will almost always mean a quite large (and basically not predictable without doing an involved calculation) change in your coordinate.

In the purely mathematical sense, this means something like "continuous except at points with at least one rational coordinate".

In the programming sense, where everything must be approximated and you're mapping a 2-d lattice to a 1-d lattice, then it's a bit tricky to formulate, but something like: if you take the maximum distance in 1-d space between a 2-d point and its eight "neighbors", then the probability of this distance being > N should be O(1/sqrt(N)). Concretely,

P(point has an adjacent point whose Hilbert coordinate disagrees past the highest n bits) == P(d > 4^n) < 4*(1/2)^n

Here is the plot: https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc...

Notice the Log y axis. I don't you think you could consider this even roughly continuous. This is only even bounded because I only took points within the 256x256 grid, if I let it run over say a 1000x1000 grid the hilbert distances wouldn't plot well even on a log plot.

The second plot I took any random point within euclidian distance 8 from a random first point, and didn't restrict it to stay in the same 256x256 grid. 10k points total. Even at distance 1, you get hilbert distances like:

4469269309980865699858008332735282042493121940197464459241187147907254676691182325600624766055634475896677286062162016951251294270648856648811216335320387

I'm confused about the second plot; what order is the curve? It seems weird that there are no points between 10^12 and 10^156.

The difference would be more pronounced on a non-log scale, except the huge numbers at the top of the range would squish the graph down so you couldn't see what was going on.

The first graph isn't just not continuous, it's not even 1-1. (I'm ignoring the fact that is also discrete so that any formal sense of 'continuity' can't exist. Even if you tried to make it continuous by filling in the gaps it would be impossible.)

And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about.

It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three words, but the mistake will be readily obvious if you know the general location.

I shared your scepticism until I tried the app. The auto-complete is really slick and it just works. For sending coordinates through a human/speech interface it is just going to be more reliable. For ever other problem use another solution.

Same thing is true for words, there are words in my native portuguese that are dificult to tell from each other even in person, imagine by phone. If some one misunderstands a word and it's valid on a combination?

For example (in portuguese), Paca.Tatu.Cotia (Paca.Armadilo.Agouti in english) can be misheard as Maca.Tatu.Quati (Stretcher.Armadilo.Coati in english). What if both combinations are valid, but thousands of km away ?

I understand the difficulty with speech, but that is true of any verbal communication.

This already presupposes that the parties involved in the communication are using smartphones, so why not send the coordinates over SMS, email or any other available messaging system?

I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP.

So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name.

Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs? There is a free tier that are an open-source list of names for the entire globe, but companies could pay to have names like "free.tacos.here" point to their locations.

No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not.

IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic.

Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have suggested replacing alphanumeric onion names with something like W3W.

(www.)?[random-words].com

It's just anecdotal, I know. But I find it hard to imagine that most people don't understand URL hierarchies. I mean, people who use computers commonly organize files in folders.

But maybe that's becoming a lost art, as most new users just have mobile devices.

You've also (inadvertently) pointed out that there's redundancy in written numbers.

Equivalent redundancy with W3W would require remembering spellings rather than a simple rule.

That is the darkest most evil sentiment to any product manager. It basically says a person cannot form an independent opinion and looks to their neighbor to derive credibility. If enough people think that way new ideas never enter the market. This is the opposite of merit.

I mean, if I buy a hammer, I couldn't care less whether anyone else uses it. Its utility is entirely decoupled from the amount of users. In this case, you're not buying into a hammer, because utility is dependent on the number of users. If "//cat.dog.goose" means nothing to anyone around me, I can't use it to communicate a location to anyone around me.

Maybe it shouldn't just be taken as "the darkest most evil sentiment" but as the general reaction consumers will have to products or services where utility is a function of adoption. With any luck, some few people will insist on using it and kickstart more widespread adoption, but that's just it: luck.

Although it's not a limitation of the coordinate system, so improving GPS accuracy to mm level resolution will make GPS coordinates obvious

Oh yea house aren't that small but the vertical distance between the floors and individual apartment in the building is.

>Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

It's literally a con job designed to create a middleman where one isn't needed. It's the modern libertarian dream.

There is nothing libertarian about conning people or "creating a middleman where one isn't needed." If you believe that, you have been badly misinformed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912

SMS tends to be more reliable than a data connection in areas with a poor connection (remote, or interference).

This is doable right now - having some sort of data-to-emergencyservices gateway does not exist.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...

Also, in many cases a phone is not able to use (or has limited use) of data during a phone call. An sms would be able to go through concurrently. Imagine being on a 911 call. They ask you to click the W3W button (built in? Next to other on-call buttons?) and read out the response.

Not a w3w shill - but I think there's a use case for the emergency system that uses sms and it is usable right now and doesn't require any system wide upgrades. The only potential upgrade would be at the OS level just to simplify (button addition).

The ideal would be having the DB of W3w words locally so that it doesn't need the SMS gateway. Or having a completely open system...

Finland has done it, see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.digia.suomi...