[soufron]

Technological short-sight at its best.

The GIS took decades to be developped and become functionnal.

The tools allowing to do a GIS lookup also took decades to be developped.

The tools allowing to encode the geodata within a picture file idem.

Not mentioning the development of the necessary hardware to take the pictures.

At the time the comics was being written, GIS lookup had been made easily available since what? 10 years?

And 10 years later, another layer is now easily available - also after decades of collective research and development.

It's not about "the difference between easy and hard challenges in software".

It's about the maturity of a software and its ecosystem, and understanding how even some small incremental changes can have an important impact.

[minkzilla]

The point of the comic that that from the outside no one knows how far along hard problems are, not that in and of themselves they are hard. Both the tasks in the comic rely on decades of foundational work in computing and even photography, the author is not saying all of that was easy up until GIS.

[soufron]

I totally agree. The comics is right - it's Munroe after all, but it's the analysis of the blog author that I am divergent with.

[minkzilla]

Ah that makes sense. I must admit I did not even read the analysis of the comic.