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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2614 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 23, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been seeing some of this geoguessr guys (georainbolt) videos for a while now, but this one just seems too absurd to believe.

https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1667908968163987457?s=20

From a 0.1 second flash of a location he is able to tell where it is in the world? Is anyone suspicious of this at all, I know this is his thing and he streams it, but it seems genuinely impossible. I feel like it's more likely that he's doing some kind of trickery with the software (ie prerecording the puzzles and memorizing the pattern beforehand) than he can guess where he is in the world with this kind of consistency. Though his whole twitter page is sending people locations of their old family photos which seems so many levels of fakery...maybe a combination of both? or maybe the human brain is just that good...or maybe GeoGuessr has other clues or tricks (only certain cities in some countries)...This does seem crazy impressive if legit.

It's probably real, but luck. He just does this constantly, right? If he does this for an hour a day every day for two years, and each round takes a minute, that's 40k rounds, and one in 40k seems like enough room for luck if he's already a bit accurate. And if he was this accurate with any consistency, he wouldn't have acted so shocked about it!

And you can get a lot of detail from a .1 second flash of an image. Some internet video memes flash various images by at ten per second, and if you pay attention you can get a lot of detail. Various studies find that even with <100ms people can still identify things. And that'd only improve if you practiced a lot, so I could see him narrowing it down to a general region from that, and then getting lucky.

no clear tells

I think if you're smart and you look at a hundred different (location, image) pairs, you'd pick up on a lot of associations between "how things look" and the location. Types of plants, style of buildings/roads, etc. If you've only seen a few hundred pairs signage style might be your only option.

I was about to edit in something about chicken sexing lol.

I don't think the system 1/system 2 or conscious/unconscious distinction is meaningful tbh, both are the same kind of learning and knowledge mechanically (and smart people are better at 'both').

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