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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

There is something deeply sublime about peering into the places other people live, so remote from my own place, lives probably so different from mine. I ruminate on "other lives" I could have had instead — all those other people I could have called friends, neighbors....

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There's a word for this feeling! From Wiktionary:

    sonder (uncountable noun)

        The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.

Appears term was invented in the book “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” in 2012 to create new words for emotional expressions, concepts, etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676647

If this intrigues you, please check out the work of artist Jon Rafman, who uses Google Earth as his medium:

https://9-eyes.com/

I had no idea what that meant, even though it makes perfect sense.

This is absolutely amazing. Far better than I was expecting.

I wonder the legality of this. Google owns those images, they have copyright. You can see the symbol when you zoom in on Google earth. Is he significantly modifying the images?

According to Google's guidelines https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB_ALL/permissions/geoguideli...

I interept it as "for non-commercial usage, give attribution to us and you're fine". I don't think Jon has given enough attribution though since some of the images do not have google watermark/copyright symbol (cropped?)

That was very interesting, right until it turned dark. Warning, somewhat graphic/NSFW

https://9-eyes.com/post/628925033219309568

If you enjoyed that feeling I suggest you look at http://astronaut.io which shows a few seconds of random Youtube videos with few views. Previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

Interesting, though doesn't support Https for some reason.

You might like insecam.org as well. Similar principle in the end, but sort of live. And morally a bit harder because it's essentially spying. But for the curious..

You captured it so well for me. I sat on the porch for a good 15 minutes.

I screenshot a few because I didn't want to lose that moment of sublimeness.

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