Comment on "Hey Google, find the nearest Burger King" - "Sure, here is one on the other side of the globe!"
Dewe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hey were you in Florence near the Piazzale Michelangelo?
Comment on "Hey Google, find the nearest Burger King" - "Sure, here is one on the other side of the globe!"
Dewe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hey were you in Florence near the Piazzale Michelangelo?
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 10 months ago
WTF??? How did you extract that even if I censored it
isildun@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I’m not the person who found that, but this is similar to the game Geoguessr. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.
It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle by how your GPS works, it’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.
MMauro@feddit.it 10 months ago
Good explanation. Just a tiny detail: “via” in Italian literally means “street”, so not much info there.
isildun@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Oops. Good to know… I guess the main thing was simply that there was a BK in the right place relative to the 9792 km arc then.
Dewe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes a bit lucky but just draw the 9xxx km circle around the MY BK and then I saw the circle go straight through Florence (also Bologna was a likely candidate). Then find a BK within 2.6 km with a fairly long street name and draw a circle, it intersects with the other circle in two places. The obvious one was the parking near Piazzale M.
I can also get the GPS coordinates at all times from your phone so it was easy to verify I was right.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Can also make guesses as to where you’re from as well bc not too many languages spell it Malesia