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by robotastronaut 1864 days ago
Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.
3 comments

I’m also working in the field and the Friar thing that came to mind was https://ihatecoordinatesystems.com haha
I hate them too. It's the worst to have to reproject an image or GeoJSON and overlay it onto a map. Very satisfying one you've managed to do it, but it's a pain nonetheless, at least if you don't work in the geospatial field and rarely use tools like GDAL.
I don't know if I would call it nitpicky for this example :P Thanks for correcting me, I've edited the comment.
An interesting tidbit is that our world is not a sphere, but a spheroid. This makes 3d -> 2d transformations very local.