Category: Life

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Back in December 2024, Niantic posted about a large geospacial model they were building using data from Pokémon Go.

That led to a lot of online talk, with takes ranging from:

  • Well yeah, that’s what we figured they were doing with the “Scan a Pokéstop to build better AR models” feature.
    to
  • Watch out! Niantic is building a global AR model using every image that passes in front of your phone’s camera!

I was in the “of course that’s what it’s for” camp. When the game rolled out the Pokéstop scanning feature a few years earlier, it seemed obvious that it was training 3D machine vision, like how all the “pick the squares with bicycles” CAPTCHAs are obviously training for self-driving cars. I figured there was a good chance someone would use it for some harmful purpose or another, probably surveillance, so I skipped those tasks.

Anyway, after a week or so, Niantic updated the article to clarify* that it was using the deliberate Pokéstop scans in public places for Pokémon Playground, not any of the other AR features like taking a photo of your buddy in the kitchen.

This made sense, because if they were using that data, it would have eventually gotten better at placing a Pokémon in my kitchen. (The floor’s a grid. You’d think that would help, but noooo….)

Drones (And not just Beedrils or Combees)

Those scans are back in the news, because as DroneXL reports, that geospatial model is being used for camera-based drone navigation.

Including military drones.

Because of course everything has to be weaponized. Allegedly even Pixar’s RenderMan.

Admittedly, GPS itself started as a military technology long before it became civilian infrastructure. Military and civilian tech really do just have a revolving door between them, don’t they?

Training Data

Among other sources, DroneXL cites a Dutch-language article at Trouw, who asked the defense contractor (Vantor) directly whether it uses Pokémon Go data: Vantor initially said no, but later walked back any guarantee. Niantic Spatial, however, has stated that the Pokéstop scans were used to train an “early version” of their model. That means the data (or weights produced from it) is still in there, just blended so much by training process that it can’t be identified anymore.

Kind of like you probably couldn’t confirm my old blog posts are in the training data for an LLM by looking at the LLM weights, but you can find pages from hyperborea.org in Common Crawl data, and assume any model trained on Common Crawl still has it in there somewhere.

Maybe scans made since Scopely (US-based, Saudi owned) bought Niantic’s gaming division last year haven’t gone into the map built by Niantic Spatial (still independent), so Vantor technically isn’t using current player data. Or maybe Niantic Games continued passing scans along to Niantic Spatial for a while, under the separate TOS, and Vantor’s spokesperson just hadn’t made the connection.

Quietly Dropped

Curiously, the Pokéstop scanning task I’d left in my list for years just disappeared a few days ago.

At first I deleted the tasks as I got them, but every time I scanned an eligible stop it would add a new one if I didn’t have one in my list. So after a while I just left one there and ignored it like an ad banner.

It turns out Pokémon Go discontinued the features on June 2, just three days before the Trouw article was published. (New tasks stopped appearing that day, and it took a few days for old tasks to disappear.)

Coincidence? Maybe. But the timing’s certainly suspicious.

Notes

* Before Niantic published their update, I e-mailed them asking for clarification. It took them over a month, but they did eventually reply:

Hi Trainer, we appreciate your patience. Thanks for your questions about AR Mode and our Privacy Policy. I’ve shared some additional information below:

For Pokémon GO, only AR scans from the PokéStop Scanning feature will contribute to the development of the Large Geospatial Model. As noted in the PokéStop Scanning Help Article (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/2519-scanning-a-pokestop/): information gathered during PokéStop Scanning allows Niantic to generate accurate, dynamic 3-D maps of real-world objects and their relative locations, and help devices understand the surroundings in AR real-time. As noted in the Editor’s note to the blog post, merely playing the game does not train an AI model.

When using AR or AR+ mode, we do not store your photos on our servers. For PokéStop Scanning, once a PokéStop scan is voluntarily uploaded, the video recording and associated camera data is retained on our servers in accordance with our data retention policies. For more information please see our Privacy Policy (https://nianticlabs.com/privacy).

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The last time I went to Las Vegas was almost 20 years ago, after the last of the big themed resorts were finished and the city was moving onto more generic (but still glitzy) casinos and hotels. (We still have a pair of shot glasses from “Paris.”)

It’s bigger now.

We were only in town for one night last month, to catch a concert by a band that we’d missed when their tour stopped in LA. So we didn’t see much down on the ground, just the views from the taxis that went out to the freeway and back to avoid the traffic along Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s a sprawl of glass and steel now, and the main street was jammed solid.

I think my family drove through Las Vegas, sightseeing along the Strip, on one of our road trips back in the 80s or early 90s. Possibly the one where we stopped for a picnic at Valley of Fire. I wouldn’t try it today. (The picnic, sure, but not driving along the whole Strip. That way lies madness. And possibly road rage.)

There is one exception to the generic skyscrapers of the last couple of decades: The Hard Rock Hotel has taken over the former Mirage and is building a giant guitar-shaped tower in front. I took this photo from across the street, out in front of the Venetian. I hope they put the elevators on the outside where the strings would be.

Night scene in Las Vegas. At the left, replicas of all the major landmarks of Venice are crammed into a small area. Off to the right, a tower is under construction in the shape of an upright guitar.

The Venetian Theater is beautiful inside, but either the acoustics are terrible or the sound designer for this show had no idea what they were doing. Or just didn’t care about those of us up in the (comparatively) cheap seats.

A six-level, no-frills building in two tones of beige (with a few blue-and-yellow highlights). About the only thing that stands out is a diagonal at one end that makes it look sort of like a Jawa sand crawler from Star Wars, if a sand crawler had more windows. An overhang shades a plain sliding-door entrance, and you can see two rows of parking spaces in front of it. We stayed waaaay off the Strip near the airport (though as it turns out, not as far as South Point) at a plain hotel (Tru by Hilton). No casino, not even a slot machine in the lobby. I was surprised, since the first time we stayed in town even the Holiday Inn (long since demolished) had a casino level. I guess they’ve found there’s a market for travelers who don’t want bells and clinking coins and flashing lights keeping them awake all night. (That’s what the air conditioner was for. Judging by the noise, it had been running continuously since the hotel opened a decade ago. Earplugs helped, even if the ones we picked up looked disturbingly like candy corn.)

High Desert

The desert between Barstow and Vegas, on the other hand, seems emptier. There are only two rest stops, one of which is currently closed for…well, the sign said remodeling, but I suspect they razed everything to the ground and started from scratch. Every so often you’ll pass an abandoned building covered in graffiti, slowly falling apart.

Primm looks OK at first glance as you drive past it, but then you notice how empty the parking lots are, and some of the signs that have fallen into disrepair. Reportedly the mall is down to a single store, and the last hotel/casino was set to shut down until it got a last-minute reprieve in the form of a partnership with Terrible’s. Today.

Even Baker is a shell of its former self (not that it was much to begin with). The giant thermometer is still there (for now), and the Mad Greek restaurant. Alien Fresh Jerky has actually expanded (though we didn’t stop there this time, for various reasons). There’s a new food court attached to a gas station at one end of town, and a Tesla supercharger at the other. The Bun Boy is long gone, along with all three motels. Empty lots and a few vacant buildings dot the frontage road.

Towers of Power

There’s a solar farm just on the California side of the border, visible from the freeway and from Primm. It has one field of photovoltaic panels and three thermal towers, the kind where a bunch of mirrors surrounding the tower track the sun and focus sunlight on a boiler to drive steam turbines and generate electricity.

White lines converge through the air from the ground to the top of a narrow tower in the desert. The top of the tower is overexposed white, even though the rest of the image is exposed properly.

Those things are bright! Seriously! Light beams from the mirrors converge visibly, and the tower reflects so much sunlight (despite using a bunch of thermal energy) it looks like an ultra-bright beacon. Photos can’t do it justice because, print or video display, they can’t shine enough light directly at your eyes to get the point across. This photo by Aioannides at Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA) is better than anything we could get by pointing a camera out the car window from the freeway, and it still looks flat.

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Between Google trying to bury its search under an “AI” chat and me moving most most of my website over to a new domain, I’ve been checking to see how well-indexed the old and new pages are at various search engines.

“Marineland of the Pacific” seemed to be a good phrase to test. Marginalia Search still has the old location for my Remembering Marineland (or not) post, but that search also turned up a page with scans of a Marineland ad flyer from 1962.

As someone who’s spent a lot more time hiking the Palos Verdes Peninsula than visiting an ocean theme park that closed when I was a child (not to mention way too much time updating OpenStreetMap), I was immediately drawn to the map…which strangely enough, shows Crenshaw Boulevard running over the hill, down through the Portuguese Bend landslide and connecting to Palos Verdes Drive South along the coast, just east of Wayfarer’s Chapel.

Simplified map of the Palos Verdes Peninsula showing Palos Verdes Drive around the peninsula, Marineland on one of the promonitories, major roads connecting to Los Angeles (Sepulveda, Hawthorne, Crenshaw, Western), and roads going *over* the hill including Hawthorne, Crest, and...wait, Crenshaw?

Wait, did Crenshaw actually connect sometime in the past? If so, how?

Today, Crenshaw runs up to the top of the hill and stops just past Crest Road, at Del Cerro Park. A dirt road continues past a locked gate, narrowing to a switchbacked path through the Portuguese Bend Nature Reserve. A landslide below it has been moving slowly for decades, preventing much in the way of construction on the land. Some people bought land and built houses on adjustable stilts so they could level the house every few months.

The first time I checked out the view from Del Cerro back in 2011, I took this photo of the area to the east, where Crenshaw appears on that map.

Looking out along a hillside sloping down to the ocean. Most of it is dry chaparral, with some clusters of darker trees, and a jumbled suburban neighborhood off in the distance as it levels out near the base. A dirt road snakes its way around the curves.

Over the last few years the land has been sliding faster, and a lot of the area has been closed for safety. Wayfarer’s Chapel has been dismantled to prevent it from flat out collapsing.

It’s no longer possible to connect Crenshaw to the coast.

But had it connected in the past, and been wiped out by the landslide? I went looking for the history, and found some articles that answered my question. I must have read this 2023 LA Times article when it was published, which means I’d forgotten a key detail about Crenshaw Boulevard’s relation to the landslide:

It caused it.

Crenshaw never connected to the coast. An extension was planned, and initial construction reactivated an ancient landslide in 1956, as crews moved enough dirt around to shift the underlying structure out of balance. At the time, the Portuguese Bend section hadn’t moved in roughly 4,800 years. In the 70 years since, it hasn’t really stopped.

If the map was drawn when the park was new, it would have been reasonable to assume that the road would be completed soon enough, and draw it in early. (“It’s finished on the map!”) But the scan shows a 1962 copyright date at the bottom. That’s six years into the landslide, more than enough time to realize the road was never going to be completed and paint over it for the latest printing. That makes me wonder why they hadn’t fixed it by then.

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A story’s been making the rounds about a software project that enforced a no-LLM-use policy by using prompt injection to delete itself. An “AI” agent-using coder filed a bug report (understandable), but filled it with a bunch of long-winded, clearly LLM-generated comments.

I looked at those comments. I can’t say I read them, because my eyes started glazing over a couple of paragraphs in. The contrast with the posts by the maintainer and other commenters is…stark.

Though I did notice the bit about how nobody reads the docs, which seems rather telling.

One of the problems with letting an “AI” write for you: If you aren’t reading it, and you assume the person at the other end is just going to summarize it anyway, there’s no motivation to make it readable. And no motivation to think about it and narrow down what’s important. And if you’re rewriting the prompt to focus on what matters most, consider that the prompt would get the idea across more effectively.

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We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great again sound eerily familiar.

There’s even a bit about a latinum-plated toilet seat — I mean waste extractor.

It certainly sounds more like what Musk, Trump and Hegseth have actually been saying and doing than any other kind of “making Star Trek real”. Unless Musk’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his genes is enough stronger than his racism that he plans to make sure Khan exists. (Eeeeew.)

Wait, maybe that’s why Khan is white in the Kelvin timeline.

Seriously, though, the Ferengi have always been an extreme caricature of American culture and capitalism taken to absurd lengths. They were even compared to “Yankee traders” in their first appearance on TNG. In 2016, Trump campaigned as an extreme characature of a conservative, the kind that viewers a decade earlier would have dismissed as unrealistic. And since he won, the GOP embraced that caricature and has remade itself into a political/business alliance that makes Quark look downright progressive by comparison.

After all, Quark once brought up the horrors of Earth’s history: slavery, devastating wars, etc. Ferengi never had government death squads rounding people up off the street for being undesirables. They would have just let someone new in town pay the requisite fee and let them go about their business like a civilized culture.

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In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

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