this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Possibly the dumbest statement I've heard this week.
It's not as dumb as you make it out. The issue isn't that GPS is really, really good at what it does; it's that it's also incredibly vulnerable to disruption and spoofing. And due to the particulars of how GPS works, we can't entirely fix that. We can do some things to ameliorate it, but a lot of those aren't suitable for smaller things that use GPS today.
The other thing is that GPS largely replaced a tremendous number of other navigation aides and techniques, including other radio-navigation systems like LORAN-C.
It's also just a generally bad idea to be too dependent on a single system. If GPS reception fails for one reason or another, it would be good idea to have a backup.
You're saying this in the world where SMS is considered good for 2FA, and PSTN identifier is considered as good as your citizen's ID, and people's lives depend on systems incorporating NodeJS and Kubernetes. Yeah, by the way, Docker everywhere, and all the POSIX standardization and source-compatibility to allow different systems adhering to standards ... have lost to Linux just becoming another main target.
But yes! It's a bad idea. Also it's typical now for these systems to start lying in warzones where their owners don't want one of the sides to have satellite navigation. They then give shift maps or whatever to the side they want to win.
Nah the idea is sound. As someone else said, GPS is incredibly fragile. Also very terrestrial...it doesn't work once you leave the atmosphere.
This will probably be another SpaceX grift, but there are alternative technologies that are more resilient to attack. From military/defense perspective (the original reason for GPS), that's pretty important.
No, not really. The GPS signal isn't designed to penetrate concrete, no. But that doesn't make it fragile.
Considering it was never meant to...that's really not that goddamn weird. It's a global positioning satellite system. So clearly for it to work you have to be on the fuckin' globe...
Having functional GPS in a tunnel would be very nice...as someone who drives through Boston and fucking hates tunnels.
But that's not what I meant by fragile. I meant it can be disrupted/jammed fairly trivially.
There's no reason why some sort of augmentation system couldn't improve the navigation situation with the big dig. Stick some low power beacons that provide GPS-like signal in the tunnel based on their predetermined location and we'll have GPS accounting for special relativity, general relativity and continental drift.
I fear for the world. You afraid that you're gonna make a wrong turn? Inside of a tunnel? A fuckin' tunnel my guy?
You have clearly never driven on 93 through Boston where the person you replied to said they are from (aka the Big Dig). It is basically an entire highway that is underneath the city. There are many on and off ramps, lanes suddenly become exit only, complex multi-lane exits that branch...it's intimidating. As somebody that has lived in the Boston area for 15 years now, I still mess things up.
Global Positioning System, I sleep
Universal Positioning System, real shit
There was an article today about how they just used GPS on the moon.
Fun fact: just this past week an experiment on a lunar lander confirmed that GPS signals can be detected from the surface of the moon. I don't know if those signals can give any kind of location precision, but it is an interesting finding.