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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.

Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?

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The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.

If thats the case, the parent's critique was oddly stated and confusing. The phrase "to do it" implies the "LLM puffery" was required to accomplish the task, which clearly providing LLM generated praise isn't required in either setting to create a world in minecraft.

Denmark presented the world with their entire country as a Minecraft map, and they did it without inflicting an awful marketing website on us. This Swiss project couldn't resist the urge to produce such an eyesore of a website while providing the world with another 1:1 Minecraft map of a country.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this website, just some people hate slop.

Compare:

"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."

"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."

The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.

I don't feel there's that much of a difference. It certainly isn't "awful" to me.

Actually is wasn't useless, I don't know the scale Denmark or where the data came from. So the bottom example is slightly bigger but includes more relevant details.

Without the "detail" of "Minecraft" you don't even know what "the data" is.

> I don't know the scale Denmark

What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?

"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"

Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.

They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.

I'm not a fan of AI generated prose myself, but this was at least informative to me.

Yeah, like a lot of AI stuff it gets worse the more you look at it.. eg. "Block by block" the 2nd sentence fragment in this very important intro paragragh.. and, it doesnt mean anything. In fact its misleading, if it meant anything I would take it to mean that this was made by a human without tools placing one block at a time, which is clearly not true.

Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.

everyone spotted in the wild!

I am mind blown at how long it took me to read that this was Minecraft. I agree, the wording makes you mentally skip Minecraft somehow.

There's literally nothing wrong with the website, what are you on about.

Some people get a rise out of dissing LLM stuff.

Was thinking, the automation to produce the map was probably not an LLM

That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.

Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.

    I don't get it

Because it looks cool to see the real world in blocks. And if it looks cool, it is cool, as they say.

You're actually allowed to play video games the way you want to.

"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"

You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.

thank you for the wisdom INTPenis

Think you are missing a couple decades of Minecraft automation. Its been done since the beginning. This is just cool example of taking it to extreme.

People have been doing this for a LONG TIME

Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:

> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWAwWD47OE

The game generates the worlds using automation even when playing normally. Have you even played Minecraft?

Yeah, but normally the world-gen is automated and then the rest isn't. I get the comment. Minecraft isn't fun when you automate everything. People have been hosting WorldEdit-spammed servers since the beginning that were always lame. The real-life to ingame map conversions were novel at first but are old news now. One famous example was the UC Berkeley replica, which was done in creative mode manually in 2020. Tons of people joined that server and explored the entire campus. Then Stanford auto-gen'd their campus ingame from real-life spatial data, and it was boring, and nobody cared.

These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.

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