Your parent commenter didn’t suggest asking for permission, they suggested not allowing it, period.

No, no they are not. The last thing I want from an encyclopaedia is information I can’t trust, inconsistent and contradictory depending on when and how I search.

Billionaire levels of out of touch, is the answer. You simply cannot relate to any normal human when you reach that level of greed.

> if he actually had some redeeming qualities besides just being rich.

“Besides”? Being rich isn’t a redeeming quality, I’d say. It’s not even a quality in general.

The shape of his head might be interesting to study, though. Not in a phrenology sense, just anthropological, I’d be curious to see his skull.

They don’t need to be “sure things”, only threats. Once you buy the threat, whether it continues to thrive or withers is largely immaterial, the threat is gone.

I don’t know much about Notch so I have no comment on them specifically, but “building the company and brand for years” can still count as “luck once”. Once you strike gold and make it big, you have a lot of leeway for mistakes, it becomes harder to fail. Case in point, Zuckerberg.

> earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens.

What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?

Well that's just it - in most of the submissions the coordinates weren't supplied at all, and when any location information was given it would come down to just a city name or a park name. They're trying to pipe these results into ArcGIS to inform park rangers where to reroute trails, public works departments where to survey before digging, and real estate developers which lots need proper relocation assistance before building on. They were depending on the average citizen to know how to fill out a technical field in this form and to do so accurately, and without and form validation. The whole project needed re-thinking.

Sounds like a combination of 'can it be geocoded?' and 'is their location precise enough?' There is some progress on resolving human-written locations in cities ( https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html ) but I imagine once you lose reference points, '100 feet into Golden Gate Park...' would be interpretable but not possible to fix to one point.

You're absolutely right. Highways are a little better since they have mile markers, but once you get into a nature preserve you're dealing with a whole bunch of "If you pass the pond with the cattails on your left, you've gone too far." Fishermen, it turned out, LOVED sending coordinates for stuff they saw so long as their fishing spot wasn't nearby.

Cool article btw!

> Anthropic can't win in this case.

Sure they can. The solution is pretty simple and in your own post. Choose either:

* Make the product good to the point code is no longer slop and shit.

* Stop hyping the quality when it isn’t there.

* Do a hybrid approach. Use their own product but actually have competent humans in the loop to make the code good.

This is not hard. Be honest and humble and that criticism goes away. It’s no one’s fault but Anthropic’s that they hype up their product to more than it can do and use it carelessly to build itself. It’s not a no-win scenario if you’re the one causing your own obviously avoidable problems.

> there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick

Which is very much a positive. Those two aren’t a boon to humanity, they very much made everything worse at a global scale. We need fewer people emulating them, not more.