Could you make the dots smaller in the updated UI? I didn’t realize at first that you were using an actual map of Roman provinces.

My eyesight isn’t great and it would help if you used a political map rather than terrain. I’m not sure what’s out there for ancient Roman map tiles, though.

I’m not so much of an antiquity scholar AND I’m an American so my European geography isn’t perfect. It would be neat to be able to flip to a modern map, too, so I can see where things are in terms of modern landmarks.

You’re not getting a ton of comments so far, but FWIW these are the kinds of projects I come to HN for. I’ve been getting into opera lately and suddenly classical antiquity is very relevant to my interests. I’m going to keep this in my bookmarks, I’m finding the tangential historical stuff related to opera is drawing me in nearly as much as the music.

I’m also going to pass it on to an academic friend of mine who is working in an unrelated field but might find similar techniques useful.

Finally, when I first opened the map, I recognized the basic shape of the peak Roman Empire in the dots! I love when data does that kind of thing.

Thank you again for sharing this very cool project.

> It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity.

That’s the thing, though. The version I build for myself sheds all the features that get in my way. I don’t share them either because they’re only useful for me.

Perhaps in the future big tech projects will be delivered with a common “core” and the expectation that agents fill in the use-specific stuff.

Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.

Also, leadership at MSFT has talked quite a bit about their strategy with VS Code and it’s exactly what I was describing above (which is why I used it as an example). They give it away for free so that they can control the ecosystem.

(The score on my post above has been bouncing around all over the place, lol. The fun police are definitely out in full force. I’ll stop having fun when I’m dead, thank you.)

You’re also just confidently wrong about the model reading the code. It quotes file paths and line numbers and I open and read those files at those line numbers. For me, hallucinations are much more frequent when it references the docs rather than code because docs are more subjective than code.

This is a normal thing I’ve been doing since at least December.

I have to ask — do you actually use LLM coding tools? Your knowledge on this topic seems really out-of-date.

What? It’s actually insane that they haven’t yet.

I don’t like changing tools. What engineer does? I want to learn one tool and tune it to my exact preferences. Proprietary vendor tools are not portable and I avoid them.

Either Anthropic or OpenAI could drop the first-to-market open coding harness tomorrow and it would be as big as VSCode, it would be the standard platform everyone builds stuff on.

https://halluhard.com/

There will never be a time where there are zero hallucinations because of the non-determinist nature of LLMs, but eventually the frequency of hallucinations will be so low that it doesn’t matter. If the robot makes one mistake for every ten a human makes, that’s coming out ahead (depending on the nature of the mistake, of course).

Also I’m not making any value judgement about the technology and how it’s used and, frankly, I don’t really appreciate the assumption that I am. I’m fucking job hunting right now and it’s a hellscape thanks to LLMs.

I’m just being real about where the tech appears to be going based on its current trajectory and my experience in the industry. There seems to be a lot of cope going around that these things won’t ever be good enough to take our jobs. They will, and sooner than any of us are ready for. Leadership is fine with slop as long as it ships, the tech as it stands today doesn’t have to be much better to reach that standard.

I think it will even be solved soon, like, within the next 18 to 36 months. Hallucinations are the biggest problem consumers have with LLMs and a solution to that would be instantly worth billions of dollars. I’m sure every company in this space is desperately trying to figure it out before everyone else.

A non-deterministic system will always make mistakes, but we’ll hit a target where LLMs make fewer mistakes than humans and that will be good enough for almost all applications.

Disregarding wealth inequality is the most trope-ey American thing you could possibly do.

Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.