Hello, I'm Crooked.
I recently saw a video on B-site that made me think "very wow":
/video/BV1y4421U72G/
The video had close to 400w of views, and near the end of the video, the UP owner set up a scoring interaction:
87,000 people participated, the average score is 10 points. This participation and average score, crooked master as a user in the B station mixed for many years, simply feel incredible.
This UP master is called "Map Detective", his video has a theme, netizens only give a picture, then he based on the picture to find the specific place where the picture was taken.
That's specifically what happened:
Then you go to his homepage and you'll see that he pitches videos all in this category.
The video I mentioned earlier is one of his most played videos:
It started when a netizen found the UP owner and sent him this plea for help:
And he sent a picture that looked like this:
An old photo, so old that it's been around for a long time and has seen a lot of changes. Don't you think it's a pipe dream to find out exactly where it was taken, just for this photo?
Note that I re-emphasize that it's not about finding where the picture was taken, it's about finding where the picture was taken.
It's a lot harder.
Even though the questioner gives a key clue: Sikeshu Township, Pingdingshan City, Henan Province.
But this "township" is still such a large area on the map:
How do I find it?
We need to find a "grip" first.
The "grip" that UP is looking for is the "shape of the mountain":
It's an old photo, but life rushes by in a few decades, and the shape of a mountain doesn't usually change drastically on this timescale of decades.
The "shape of the mountain" is particularly evident in the picture.
So, UP owners are using all sorts of approaches from that perspective, whether it's technology or social workers.
Narrowing it down a little bit and finally finding a point on the map based on the great triangulation method:
This point, which is about 50 meters away from the place where the wife of the person seeking help took the photo, can be said to be a precise location.
The netizen who asked for help bought a ticket to Henan on August 20, and with the information given by the UP owner, he took part of his wife's ashes and returned to his hometown.
I thanked the Lord of UP and said, "I think I have enough for this life.
Did you feel a twinge of strangeness when you read the story, while feeling deep emotion.
From the job seeker's description, it appears that he and his wife had a good relationship and, as a matter of common sense, should not have been unaware of where his wife's hometown was.
Then I found the answer in the comments section:
*, that makes sense.
In the past, the two sides of the Strait were not separated by such a shallow strait, and it was very inconvenient for * compatriots to travel to and from the Mainland, and communication was also difficult.
I have read a lot of stories about "family tracing on the Mainland" before, and in these stories, it is already very good to know the address of a "hometown".
Writing about * and the countryside, a text I learned as a child immediately popped into my head.
Nostalgia - Yu Guangzhong
When I was a child. Nostalgia is a little stamp. I was on this end. My mother was on the other end.
Growing up. Nostalgia is a narrow boat ticket. I'm at this end. The bride is at the other end.
Later. Nostalgia is a short side of a grave. I'm on the outside. Mother's on the inside.
And now. Nostalgia is a shallow strait. I'm at this end. The mainland is at the other end.
In the context of this story, "nostalgia" becomes more tangible and gives the video a special meaning.
In the comments section, I also found photos taken by local netizens following the places mentioned by the UP owner:
The shape of the mountain is, indeed, still the same.
When I saw this picture, I was first reminded of the 72-year-old Yang Shen, who, after experiencing great ups and downs in his life, faced the rolling waters of the river and wrote the famous line of the ages: "The green hills are still there, and the setting sun is red several times".
But in this story, "a pot of cloudy wine" is easily available, but there will be no more "happy meeting".
There are also a lot of friends brushing up on Xiang Ji Xuan Zhi in the pop-ups, including the comments section:
It's a text you learned in high school, and the last sentence is:
The court has a loquat tree, my wife died in the year of the hand-planted also, now has been pavilion as a cover.
When the time to learn do not feel any amazing place, now out of high school classroom, there have been twelve years, have seen more people, after more things, also began to gradually understand "now has been pavilion like cover carry" weight. Education does have a lag.
This quote, too, is particularly apt in this context.
In the last second of the video, there's another cut:
"We have known each other for eight years and have been married for two."
Adds a little more sadness to this tale of pure love.
Other videos
I also watched the other videos of "The Map Detective", and I watched a lot of them, both the ones that got a lot of airtime and the ones that got a lot of airtime.
The second most played this one: 'Find out where this is and I'll give you 50k.' Difficulty 3 Stars
A wave of social worker maneuvering, along with all sorts of "Ah, that works?" and a solid knowledge of geography, as well as enough patience to actually find the exact location in the questioner's picture, really blew me away.
And what's even more shocking to me is that, judging from the comments section, the questioner actually gave the map detective a brush-off:
In this day and age of "lip service", this questioner, oh no, this rich brother who is true to his word, makes people feel very comfortable.
The fourth most played video is this one:
We all know that this picture was taken on the Great Wall of Beijing, but the Great Wall is so long and there are so many "arrow windows" on it that the UP Mains have to sit at home and find out which "arrow window" this picture was taken from.
It's as hard as it sounds.
After a lot of operation, I finally found the "arrow window".
Good man, this wave of positioning is straight up error free.
There's also this video that helped Netflix get to the point of finding where his dad took pictures back in the day:
Then I went to take a "group photo" with my dad:
Awesome indeed, with a few tricks up his sleeve.
Finding Bugs
I keep thinking that if this dude is a programmer, he should be pretty awesome at finding bugs.
And guess what, when I watched one of the 4-star difficulty videos, it required some programming skills, and then he said he came from an IT background:
Then it makes more sense to me that while watching his videos, I've actually been brought into the bug-finding scene.
A picture that is a bug.
In the process of looking for pictures or looking for bugs, we all need some professional knowledge to support, looking for more, but also slowly have a unique belong to their own routines and methodology.
I watched a lot of his videos and realized that in his case, the so-called "routines and methodologies" could be solar panels, shapes of mountains, wind turbines, power line towers, street lights, sunlight, shadows, etc... All this strawman stuff.
And in our case as programmers, it's Demo, source code, logs, online material, and so on.
I think there are commonalities in all of this.
But I think the one thing that has the most commonality is: time.
You watch his videos and will mark tons of suspect spots on a map, go through tons of just words from the questioner looking for clues, go to relevant websites to find all sorts of data, and even learn to use some of the newer tools that can help you locate the bits, and then eliminating a little bit, narrowing it down, and finally finding the answer.
Although the video he presents is just a few minutes long, behind those minutes is a long and tedious process. There's even a lot of misdirection that leads to a detour in the process, which makes the process all the more abrasive for such an experience.
The so-called unique secrets, that is, from simple to difficult, a large number of practical exercises summarized after some methodology only.
Methodology is very important, but more than methodology, combined with my past process of finding bugs and writing articles, I think there is another important point: to be patient.
For example, I once wrote this:"Never pass a Request into an asynchronous thread! There's a pit!
I was more impressed with this article.
I went from seeing this phenomenon to writing this post. I kept tweaking the demo to make sure there were no interfering items in the demo, and then kept Debugging the program, hitting I don't know how many breakpoints, restarting the service at least a hundred times, and initiating at least a hundred requests. Then I went through some detours in the source code, and finally saw the root cause of the problem.
Comment Someone asked me if I had any experience in troubleshooting problems.
Map Detective, just the programmer to find bugs in the process, changed another more intuitive and interesting way to show out.
Finding the address in the picture, and finding the bug, in my opinion, are similar in many ways.
A picture may be hard to find where it was taken, and a bug may be hidden deep.
First, you have to have the sense of conviction that you can find it.
Then, you need to have a rich enough arsenal of tools for every situation, as well as proficiency in the tools and methodologies developed after many hands-on exercises.
Secondly, you have to be patient.
As you endure more and more, the richness of your arsenal will increase.
In the end, you'll be able to reach a point where I don't know what the exact cause is, but I know where there are clues and what the direction of the lineup is, and go in that direction and find out what's going on.