[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.