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Comment by evrimoztamur | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That's the actual data it contains houses and structures

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...

Wouldn’t you just end IP with holes in your map?

Point clouds usually are not equidistant or arranged on a regular grid. You are right that filtering Lidar data to only get the terrain does create gaps in the cloud. The conversion of the point cloud to a surface does deal with holes though (that's the whole goal), and it doesn't matter if some are larger than others. There are different methods to do so, for example delaunay tetrahedrization [1], or ball-pivoting [2]. You do get flat areas though, but that's often a good compromise to make.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_triangles

It would be cool if they embellished on the buildings and towns a bit: realign them on the grid so that they actually look good, embrace the medium. Maybe even tweak some of the narrow valleys to be more aligned.

I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.

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.

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?

About 0.0000000001% of the daily global production.

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