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Comment by deft | Hacker News Reader

This site makes absolutely no sense. Why is there no explanation to what I'm supposed to do and to what is happening? It says it's the "world" but I can barely navigate a small little neighbourhood. I thought I'd be able to explore the whole planet with drawings correlated to the location they're made in. Why does it tell me where people are drawing things from when it really means nothing?

When I finally got around to drawing something, it didn't work. I drew a relatively simple rectangular building and nothing happened. I realized it must be matching based off of things it already knows so I restarted and drew the simplest 3 line car I could. Still nothing. No error, no instructions. Just a trash can and a circular arrow.

This experiment is a failure.

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I think that, similarly to earlier projects like https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/, it's a way of obtaining tons of user generated data (scribbles), which are also relatively easy classified.

I don't know, took me a few moments to create a house boat. Experiment is a success?

You didn't create a house boat. Somebody modeled a house boat, gave it two parameters to slightly tweak it. An ML system was trained to classify scribbles as (among others) a house boat.

You scribbled something that the ML system classified as a house boat. None of the characteristics in your drawing moved over to the model. The only creative part (your scribble) was destroyed.

You could've just typed "house boat" and picked the model from a list. The result would be the same.

Hah, the UI told me I made a houseboat, thanks for raining on my parade.

You still get a trophy for participation.

And yet just doodling something raw and having something presentable come out is way more fun than choosing stuff from drop down menus. Everyone is wired differently and this may not work for you but may work for others.

Why even have a GUI why not a CLI which parses a config file that says "house boat".

> And yet just doodling something raw and having something presentable come out is way more fun than choosing stuff from drop down menus.

It's fun for thirty seconds, after which it is just tedious. If you actually want to "get stuff done", like building a toy city, you will want the menu that shows you what's actually available.

> Why even have a GUI why not a CLI which parses a config file that says "house boat".

Because that's obviously a bad interface as well. It's not like scribbly interfaces are the next step of evolution in human-computer-interaction. They're gimmicks. You're not going to go to Amazon.com and start scribbling something you want to buy. You'll type it in.

No one said this is the "future" of all interfaces. It was a demo and it may have a niche. You're extrapolating all on yourself.

Overall I agree with you. And I'm pretty disappointed with this experiment page. The previous ones were better for sure.

But to your Amazon example, doodles might be the new best way to find "that thing with the stick out the top and the bell looking thing at the bottom. I forget what it's called"

I'm glad Google is playing around with this. This one though just feels flat compared to the others.

> The result would be the same.

Not to Google.

You move around by dragging the picture from side to side. Not the most intuitive interface, to be sure.

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