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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by rrr_oh_man on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:31AM (#50390614)
Is it really too much to ask to at least edit the slopscription?

  Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1. Imagery, road map and topographic map lie on real terrain, joined by thousands of open maps from the Library. Everything comes from freely available geodata, straight from its publishers, OpenStreetMap from the Kugelblitz tile server; you need no account.
  Everything loaded stays in the cache, and Kugelblitz instances in the same network share it with each other if you wish. Status windows tell how far the view has loaded, where you are looking and where its data comes from, and every source is listed with its license in “Sources and Licenses”. Kugelblitz speaks German and English and uses the units of your choice.
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by sofayam on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:06AM (#50390875)
Strange, nothing in those two paragraphs sounds particularly LLM-like to me. What am I missing?
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by eproxus on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:24AM (#50391009)
[delayed]
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by coldtea on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:46AM (#50391196)
"you fly over smoothly like a pilot" (so, with my view limited by the cockpit, and constrained to mandatory airways?)

"Everything comes from freely available geodata, straight from its publishers" (as opposed to using "freely available geodata" through mediators?)

"joined by thousands of open maps from the Library" (what Library? Of Congress?)

"Kugelblitz instances in the same network share it with each other if you wish" (yeah "if you wish" sure is how a human would phrase an optional setting)

"Kugelblitz speaks German and English and uses the units of your choice" (same)

and many more

It's slop writing.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by paulhilbert on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:08AM (#50391417)
No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German. Not everyone is a native speaker, you know?

In one of his recent podcasts he explained that he wanted to create a mixture of Google Earth and a libray. So "Library" is specifically meant as a name for the mixed data source aggregation.

To be clear: The entire software is vibecoded in a language Pritlove doesn't even have worked with prior to that. But when it comes to talking about his ideas Pritlove surely does not need a LLM. This guy basically started the German podcast scene and has been talking about software for at least 30 years.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by coldtea on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:55AM (#50391764)
>No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German

Germans are still LLM, just in human form.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by morsch on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:02AM (#50392402)
> as opposed to using "freely available geodata" through mediators?

I think that's the idea, yes. Usually the mediator is the publisher of the software who at least maintains a proxy, but often recombobulates the data in a way that makes for sense for their software. This is also doesn't leave the original publisher paying for the software user's traffic. Probably not much an issue for a first release.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by thejokeisonme on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:40PM (#50396452)
"; you need no account."

This single phrase is enough. Claude loves to write this way; no humans do.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by deanishe on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:36PM (#50409082)
> no humans do

Du brauchst kein Konto.

It's precisely what you'd say in German, which is what the author is.

You guys are holding a non-native speaker to an awfully high standard here.

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by nomnomno on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:09AM (#50391428)
That's so typically German/Austrian... Someone has built some great software, something that would have been unthinkable just a few month ago. And you guys are whining that the website could still use some cosmetic improvements... Release your own software and make it better. But if you just spout bullshit on LinkedIn, nothing's going to happen.
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by frnz on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:39AM (#50391643)
[delayed]
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by ilumanty on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:55AM (#50393060)
Nobody hates Germans more than Germans
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by a3w on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:58AM (#50393100)
He is working on this since before Google Earth. So 26+ years, longer than Duke Nukem Forever.
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by luoc on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:13AM (#50391454)
The author is heavily using AI and does not hide it. Quite the opposite, he embraces the technology and spoke quite a bit about it in one of his podcasts (German): https://freakshow.fm/fs313-der-tripelpunkt-der-metaebene?t=2...
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by unkeen on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:27AM (#50392672)
Doesn't make it better, does it.
Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by thejokeisonme on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:37PM (#50396406)
I also embrace it. Doesn't mean I chuck my slop at other people's faces.