[throwaway64643]

Was taught in college that if we get stuck, just move on forwards, things ahead can clear that up. And it works in this case for me. That part really doesn't matter much. At the end of the day, our brain is not a linear programming interpreter.

[marcellus23]

I stopped reading there because frankly, if there’s such a flaw in the article that early, I was worried about the accuracy of the rest of it.

The concept is just not explained at all. I spent too long making sure I didn’t miss some sentence somewhere explaining what was happening in that diagram. It felt like the article was wasting my time, and that maybe the author himself didn’t really understand what was happening.

[YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo]

You are assuming instead of knowing because you are talking about something you didn't read. LOL

[marcellus23]

No. I definitely did read that part of the article. I also went back and read the rest of the article this morning before I posted that comment, and he never goes on to explain that part. He just brushes past it and never clears it up.

[jameshart]

It’s not really relevant to how GPS works? It’s just scene setting an intuition for, crudely, how you might estimate your position relative to landmarks.

If your take is then ‘well, he didn’t rigorously define how he derived the error bounds on crude position estimation, therefore all this stuff building into the level of precision GPS is capable of rests on a flimsy foundation of lies’, perhaps you are not the target audience for this kind of didactic presentation.

[marcellus23]

> well, he didn’t rigorously define how he derived the error bounds on crude position estimation

or more correctly, he used an example and a diagram without every explaining how we should think about it. I think running into a nonsensical, unexplained diagram is a good heuristic for whether or not an article is worth reading — even if, in this case, it turns out the rest of the article is well-written.

[jameshart]

Sounds to me like you ran into a strong counterexample that suggests it’s a terrible heuristic.