Decades spent building tools to freely copy and fork each other’s code, only to arrive at a future where people pay tokens to do the same thing with added noise. Progress.
hahahaa•Aug 10, 2026
Well you can still freely copy free software.
olek1983•Aug 10, 2026
Almost every idea is copyable. Digital ideas are even easier to copy.
The icons for the different shapes don’t really make a lot of sense. It’s not really obvious how some of them work and many are quite unlike the actual pattern (which you have to scroll down to see on mobile).
Also Cahill–Keyes M, which I’ve never heard of or seen before, is described as “the classic M”. That’s not really helpful.
monegator•Aug 10, 2026
neat idea. hate the vibecoded website. Not even changing the default colors.
Max-q•Aug 10, 2026
Icosahedron is the classic? I have never ever seen an icosahedron globe in my life, neither real or digital. What in the world happened in the brain or artificial neural network when that title was picked for an icosahedron “globe”?
Symbiote•Aug 10, 2026
I've seen them in many novelty gift or travel shops in Europe.
My personal favorite is Authagraph, when folded they make a really neat looking shape. I bought one years ago at a paper store and it’s still standing.
This is pretty great! To the creator(s) if they’re around in here: if you’ve ever dreamed of a smooth, unified transition between the product’s actual scan .svg and the 3D simulation[1], I have some old code[2] for simulating origami paper folding in three.js that could handle this elegantly. It works by drawing faces based on rotating springs at each edge, anchored at two points each and executed in a (hierarchical) procedure.
The repo’s in a messy state of primarily-artificial cleanup atm (fml tbh, btw) but it should be trivial to pull out the parts you’d need for a one-off & one-step sim like this.
Apologies if obvious lol — it’s getting harder and harder these days to judge that
[1] obviously get why you’re not loading 3D on pageload, so worth pointing out that the same might be possible here with a clever .svg<->.ts swap.
Good on you for creating something fun, but vibing something up and then trying to charge for it, when anyone else could produce the same product for less, is poor taste.
srean•Aug 10, 2026
Why is it poor taste? He is not preventing anyone. Neither is he evergreening patents.
Many things that are on the market can be made and sold by someone else for less.
If you want you can put up a GPL version.
zkmon•Aug 10, 2026
Do people still buy .. globes?
srean•Aug 10, 2026
I see them on sale, so probably they do. However, regardless of whether they do or do not, if they have kids they should. Globes communicate so much better than maps.
In fact even better is to build one.
mkurz•Aug 10, 2026
Now that we have foldable phones, is there a (round) digital globe (like the classic ones) which I can control with an app and for example show me the current world map with "live" weather and all flights from flight radar? If such a globe would exist I would buy one even for a couple of thousand dollars. Just to have all kinds of "live" maps directly in front of me on my desk.
ShinyLeftPad•Aug 10, 2026
> No pins yet — your globe works fine without them, but a “you are here” makes it a gift.
12 Comments
Here's the antidote: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free
Also Cahill–Keyes M, which I’ve never heard of or seen before, is described as “the classic M”. That’s not really helpful.
https://www.rimemo.com/e/wap/show.php?classid=5&id=29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
https://narukawa-lab.jp/archives/authagraph-map/
The repo’s in a messy state of primarily-artificial cleanup atm (fml tbh, btw) but it should be trivial to pull out the parts you’d need for a one-off & one-step sim like this.
Apologies if obvious lol — it’s getting harder and harder these days to judge that
[1] obviously get why you’re not loading 3D on pageload, so worth pointing out that the same might be possible here with a clever .svg<->.ts swap.
[2]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/apps/origami
Many things that are on the market can be made and sold by someone else for less.
If you want you can put up a GPL version.
In fact even better is to build one.
(in exasperation) How does that make it a gift?