They actually do move… cities/towns/place names expand and contract, and incorporate and unincorporate all the time… it’s a huge pain in the ass for our system at work. Some place names are also 100% made up by the USPS and only used by them, and guess what, you still gotta support it. Even the professional paid databases don’t contain every possible place name people use.
And my comment was more about geocoding of exact addresses, not whole cities.
I just want an easy-to-use, offline geocoder (mainly address to latlon but reverse would be cool too) that doesn’t require terabytes of space, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and days to process. Handheld GPS units were doing this with only a few GB decades ago.
Why does this seemingly not exist as a FOSS project in $current_year?
I don’t consider that even a threat of LLMs, just humans being human.
Just like we don’t blame video games for violence.
Would be nice to not have to deal with terabyte+ PostGIS database shenanigans that take days to build and hundreds of GB of RAM. Looking forward to US coverage and easy updates (or local rebuilds). Will you be directly ingesting TIGER/Line shapefiles?
Thanks!
As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.
How do you know?
That is distinctly different from arithmetic but faster or writing but faster.
But not “problem-solving but faster”.
Wait until the printing press arrives, all the scribe monks will become jobless and no one will have experience anymore.
Wait until the cotton gin arrives, all the hand weavers will become jobless and no one will have experience anymore.
Wait until the computer arrives, people will become obsolete and no one will have experience anymore.
Wait until the steam engine, automobiles, planes, calculators, telephones, bla bla
“Slippery slope” arguments like these assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
History shows that when a “slope” appears, regulation steps in, technology evolves to solve the problem, or the culture shifts to reinterpret the tool.
In almost every case, the feared “bottom” of the slope was never reached because humans constantly built ramps or bridges along the way.
Thank you! This is huge and more people need to know about. Geocoding has been way too difficult for way too long.
Also, is there a guide or tools available for generating the .bin files ourselves?