Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale (blocks.manifold3d.ch)
351 points by theanonymousone 7 hours ago
amiga386 6 hours ago
Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:
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.
INTPenis 5 hours ago
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?
skrebbel 4 hours ago
The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.
mbesto an hour ago
pluc 4 hours ago
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.
tantalor 2 hours ago
spicyusername 4 hours ago
YeahThisIsMe 4 hours ago
INTPenis 4 hours ago
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago
emdash an hour ago
ecto 4 hours ago
How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
amiga386 an hour ago
If someone said that about a website I had an LLM shit out, that led with such inauthentic marketroid speak, I'd say "it's a fair cop, guv"
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
jagged-chisel 4 hours ago
“Puffery” is about the article, not the work
rossy an hour ago
I'll never have to worry about that.
Applejinx 2 hours ago
That would be weird and disheartening BECAUSE I'm not using LLMs to work instead of me and have ideas instead of me and implement them instead of me.
If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.
mpalmer 2 hours ago
Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.
osense 3 hours ago
Denmark? Ah, so it's a 2D dataset only?
sorry, I'll show myself out...
jbrnh 2 hours ago
Denmark has a larger area then Switzerland, but Switzerland has a larger surface then Denmark.
alasano 2 hours ago
xquce 2 hours ago
How dare you! We have The Sky Mountain! …
Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill.. and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is.. And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..
Okay it’s 2D…
stavros 6 hours ago
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.
stymaar 5 hours ago
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.
well_ackshually 5 hours ago
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.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago
stavros 5 hours ago
epihelix 4 hours ago
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?
petterroea 6 hours ago
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.
palata 2 hours ago
> they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself
Deal! Make a screen recording of you doing the same thing (well, instead of Switzerland let's say Austria, since Switzerland is already done) and I'll pay you 15 bucks.
throwaway2037 an hour ago
How do you feel about AI generated music? There is an artists who calls themself "Nick Hustles" that makes a lot of funny soul/funk tracks. You can listen on YouTube or Spotify. It feels like a different type of Weird Al Yankovic -- the humor is a bit more adult. Honestly, I'm fine with it, but I can I understand if you feel different.
Here is a good tune ("Minding My Goddamn Business"), and the lyrics really make me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhvUJi01ng
The New Yorker also wrote about him here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/that-new-h...
guitarlimeo an hour ago
Not GP but the value of AI music to me is $0. It had its one time novelty moments ("look what AI can do") and can fill the background as any $0 muzak before could. But as anyone, me included can generate songs like that infinite times makes it so common it's lame. There's no scarcity of AI songs, why should I be impressed with any that come up?
Plus it seems Suno still hasn't managed to figure the static noise creeping up as the song goes on (compare the sound of the hi-hats at the start vs. the end)
gb2d_hn 6 hours ago
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?
donohoe 2 hours ago
"Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify."
petterroea 5 hours ago
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 5 hours ago
dewey 4 hours ago
well_ackshually 5 hours ago
>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"
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago
rfgplk 5 hours ago
weego 4 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
> 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?
j1elo 3 hours ago
Go to the fundamentals. Assuming that this is low effort, if this is low value, it will die sooner than later. If this is high value, soon there would be incentive for someone to do a clone and charge $1 less to compete.
tiborsaas 5 hours ago
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.
samus 4 hours ago
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.
adrian_b 2 hours ago
amiga386 4 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
skybrian 2 hours ago
They spent the tokens so you don’t have to. This is clearly AI-generated but doesn’t look low-effort, even with heavy AI assistance.
But if you’re sure it’s easy, why not give it a try?
olmo23 5 hours ago
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?
lionkor 3 hours ago
It's incredibly sad that somehow knowing how to navigate websites made for complete idiots (domain registrars) is considered worth paying for. How many middle-men do you want to pay?
busssard 5 hours ago
i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service
netsharc 6 hours ago
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...
karel-3d 5 hours ago
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 3 hours ago
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?
rfgplk 6 hours ago
> "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 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
throwaway_7274 2 hours ago
knollimar 4 hours ago
The exactly for something with a scale and rounding hurts to read
abricq 6 hours ago
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!
evrimoztamur 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
That's the actual data it contains houses and structures
Lukas_Skywalker 3 hours ago
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...
NetMageSCW 11 minutes ago
shoobiedoo 6 hours ago
I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.
Rapzid 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
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?
Pirut 6 hours ago
I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.
vidarh 5 hours ago
Sounds worth posting your own ShowHN post for.
Pirut 2 hours ago
echoangle 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
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 3 hours ago
busssard 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
Thanks! It is optimized to work on servers so if anyone wants to host it they can.
Pirut 4 hours ago
Also, great username my last name is Bussard :O
stormbringer_ an hour ago
Hi,
This is my first post although I have been following Hacker News for years.
I have been building something similar except not for Minecraft but hiking maps on mobile (Android). This is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chessvorte...
I combine OpenStreetMap data for routes, satellite data from Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM GLO-30 for heights, resolution is around 10m/pixel for image and 30m for heights - those are the highest resolution datasets I can legally redistribute, although I am also including what I call hi-res maps building for some countries (USA, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Romania) which has image resolution at 1.5m/pixel instead of 10m.
I could have used higher resolution for hi-res maps, data is available at precision like 30-50cm/pixel but this being a mobile app I needed to consider storage for a map on mobile, at hi-res a 10x10 km squared area takes around 25MB.
The idea for this came from my own hiking trips, in many mountains there is not so good internet connection, so I can build an offline map beforehand and in terrain I can use this to see where I am in 3D - and just use the phone GPS for location, no data needed.
For building the map packages I have setup a linux server that combines all 3 data sources (OpenStreetMap, Sentinel-2, Copernicus GLO-30) so once an area is chosen it can build it in like 1-3 minutes. Since all OSM endpoints are giving lots of timeouts I setup a local OSM mirror with the data that I need - takes around 50GB of storage for the whole world data and I have a script that updates it weekly.
Coming back to the original post, seeing 1:1 ratio of Switzerland made my heart stop for a bit, then I realized it's 1m resolution. Switzerland was also my first choice for hi-res data, they provide good accurate image and height datasets. Pretty cool all this Minecraft voxel rendering, I intend to see how it would look in my own app.
0x_rs 5 hours ago
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 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
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 3 hours ago
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago
trivial .
Can't tell if you are being sarcastic?
0x_rs 3 hours ago
Why would I be sarcastic? Importing real-world data in whatever format it may be into Minecraft has been a thing for nearly as long as it has existed, either with custom tools, WorldPainter, or the dozen projects on github that do this. swisstopo gives you everything, and there's endless tutorials for what to do with it on YouTube also. You can point an agent at the problem and it will deal with it swiftly and effectively because all resources on this have been extensively worked on or documented. Lately, plenty projects have been working on this, arnismc.com has already been mentioned and seems to be the most ambitious one and freely available.
BSDobelix 4 hours ago
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 3 hours ago
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.
maelito 2 hours ago
Related, though less artistic. See this French LIDAR data visualisation of buildings : https://batiment3d.ign.fr, and this other visualisation that shows France in 3D, measurable (measure heights, distances) : https://julesrumeau.github.io/Scopus
ShadowOfThePit 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
> 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.
barrkel 4 hours ago
No, you download it then get an invoice in the mail with the bill, 30 days to pay.
amiga386 6 hours ago
Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
stabbles 6 hours ago
See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.
comrade1234 6 hours ago
They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.
qbane 6 hours ago
Missing context: in Minecraft.
lmpdev 5 hours ago
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
barrkel 4 hours ago
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 3 hours ago
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.
FireInsight 5 hours ago
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.
mehwoot 6 hours ago
I guess the map is the territory
brainwad 5 hours ago
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.
dguest 5 hours ago
How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?
stefanka 4 hours ago
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?
alberth 3 hours ago
> ONE BLOCK = ONE METRE
Aren’t most high-resolution aerial imagery (Google Earth), 1 metre resolution.
hotelsacher 5 hours ago
This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.
hybrasian an hour ago
I do have a minecraft account since the alpha version of minecraft.
But since microsoft took over i exlusively play without an account using polyMCs client. You can play any version/modpack you want, you just can't play on official servers.
imilev 6 hours ago
This is cool af.
4ggr0 6 hours ago
almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.
koziserek 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
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!)
xandrius 26 minutes ago
geekgod382 3 hours ago
Even if this is some vibe coded slop, it's still really cool. Where do people find such powerful LLMs?
xandrius 25 minutes ago
You're surrounded by "powerful" LLMs, just get a subscription or pay for tokens. Literally any recent LLM can do that.
mclau153 2 hours ago
Markoff 5 hours ago
AIDR
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago
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.
bspammer an hour ago
Just because you personally can't spot it, doesn't mean other people can't. There are a lot of very clear tells of AI writing, and this site is full of them.
NetMageSCW 6 minutes ago
You are delusional if you think there are clear tells.
IshKebab 5 hours ago
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?
xandrius 24 minutes ago
Wow, how can you survive on HN I wonder? Nothing fun or not-profit-oriented must be liked by the plebs. Cmon relax, it's a fun student project.
efilife 6 hours ago
holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?
splatter9859 5 hours ago
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
numlock86 3 hours ago
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)_/¯
pkilgore 3 hours ago
If you can't be assed to write even the marketing for a thing you want me to buy I'll never be assed to even try it.