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“Strata informs your decisions — it doesn't make them for you.”
I hope you don’t kill someone.
It is simple to craft the story around an accident in retrospect, but on the field the story is never that simple. If you read accidents reports (like AAC), you will probably never see accidents coming straight from one bad decision, at the beginning of the day, on one particular aspect. It is usual though to see failure about acknowledging changing conditions, multi-factor risks, or even failure to acknowledge high risk/low difficulty transitions by experienced people.
It's also why it is called engagement. Some people are willing to put their life on the line to achieve a moonshot project. But they usually know the risk they are taking.
Llms never took a difficult on field decision, never had to turn gut feeling into calls. If you were experienced enough in both machine learning and mountaineering, you would know a lot of this decision taking is pre-verbal, and is probably very lightly represented in training sets, if at all.
How do we know it’s providing correct data?
I've literally "risked my life outdoors" for more than six decades in most climates at many altitudes and depths and this isn't something I'd pack.
The page states it’s powered by Claude with nothing I could see that relates to its performance, metrics, processes, testing, etc. for something expected to be used in a safety application.
Clicked the link - ok looks like it's for ski touring, because it mentions avalanche stuff?
Checked the route catalog - wait, there's barely any ski tours here and it's a bunch of random hikes from around the country. Why is avalanche risk highlighted when 99% of hikers are probably gonna stay home if there's a big snowstorm? Is this by chance your personal hiking history? Why these hikes in particular?
Are avalanches the only way someone can die outdoors? What about snake bites, heat exhaustion, drowning etc.?
I am not sure what the app actually does vs gaia, alltrails, nwac app. The site only has one screenshot. What does this app add?
A better plain title would be
Strata: An LLM App that Tells You If Your Hiking Route Today is Likely Safe.
Jokes aside, couple changes come to mind:
- pitch more carefully as "may indicate when danger may be elevated"
- in app, on calm days insist "while prelim scan found nothing anomalous, click these links to find the original forecasts"
As of today, with this tech for this use case, the warnings should be the lede. Otherwise you're even more likely to have a "'Full' Self Driving" situation where we're lured into a false sense of safety.
Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.
If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.
Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?