Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors

https://strata.highloop.co/

by cloocher • 16 days ago

9 31 16 days ago

strata.highloop.co

planewave2• 16 days ago

Is it just me, or does it seem extremely dangerous to market: “Strata doesn't just show the data. It makes the call.”

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.

jere• 16 days ago

It's perfectly safe, I assure you.

cyphar• 16 days ago

"You're right to push back on that. Let me take a step back and reconsider the requirements for an application that people might entrust with their lives."

trillic• 16 days ago

Should I climb this mountain? Analyze the data. Make no mistakes.

cloocher• 15 days ago

Fair point, and you caught a real contradiction. "It makes the call" was wrong — it also contradicted our own safety page. We've changed it: Strata surfaces the risks and links the source forecasts, you make the call. It's a briefing, not a verdict. Appreciate the push.

ungreased06752• 16 days ago

Absolutely the wrong application for an LLM.

How do we know it’s providing correct data?

add-sub-mul-div• 16 days ago

Worrying about "correctness" is such pre-LLM thinking. What's important now is generating content that doesn't require effort or labor cost.

daft_pink• 16 days ago

Make sure you have a very good LLC that can’t be pierced.

rafram• 16 days ago

Well, for the creators’ sakes, I hope the ToS that Claude wrote [1] holds up in court!

[1] https://strata.highloop.co/terms

foxfired• 16 days ago

Note that there is Strata (strata.com), the 3d software company, which I immediately thought it was about. It was the first 3d software I used some 30 years ago.

jcoder• 16 days ago

“Strata doesn’t just show the data. It makes the call.”

Scroll scroll scroll…

“Strata informs your decisions — it doesn't make them for you.”

I hope you don’t kill someone.

carabiner• 16 days ago

Read the headline - sounds like a therapy / anti-suicide advocacy app?

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?

lukeasch21• 16 days ago

Unfortunately I think you've given far more thought into the concept than OP has

metacritic122• 16 days ago

Possibly because OP might have one-shot vibe-coded this app with a single sentence as an LLM wrapper.

buildsjets2• 16 days ago

Incoming trademark infringement lawsuit from Strava in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

weakfish• 16 days ago

This is gonna kill someone.

alfalfasprout• 16 days ago

This is going to kill someone... you can't just make these calls for people. And it's DEFINITELY not a replacement for snowpack tests, etc. at the location you're going to visit.

jobs_throwaway• 16 days ago

Classic HN responses ITT. Very Reddit-like in its absolute knee-knocking fear at any kind of liability/rule-breaking

devmor• 16 days ago

Yeah, let’s not let a little thing like safety get in the way of disrupting the “staying alive” paradigm.

Barbing• 16 days ago

Yeah, the app "tells you...whether today is a go", which is completely responsible and I'm not sure how HN could be able to miss it!

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.

planewave2• 16 days ago

I’m not so sure mocking is really that on point, a tool used to understand avalanche safety should be safe. The product copy highlights safety and the value of providing a recommendation instead of having to collate and synthesize different data yourself.

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?

snypher• 16 days ago

Any real avalanche threat analysis is done boots on ground, this app isn't adding any additional information.

rtkwe2• 16 days ago

I think this is taking the data those guys gather, some other data, and distilling it to a threat rating? That's at least what I get from the big above the fold blurb.

ungreased06752• 16 days ago

But there is no underlying algorithm crunching the data. It’s Claude simulating the output of such an algorithm.

jstrong• 16 days ago

hoping this is a joke

metacritic122• 16 days ago

Flagging for clickbait title. It's deliberately obfuscating to intrigue users into clicking.

A better plain title would be

Strata: An LLM App that Tells You If Your Hiking Route Today is Likely Safe.

buildsjets2• 16 days ago

To be perfected, this app needs a feature that uses AI to identify the difference between edible and poisonous plants and fungi.

defrost• 16 days ago

Wouldn't touch it with a forty foot pole.

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.

uargos• 16 days ago

Risk assessment is entirely part of mountaineering, and other risk-encompassing outdoor activities. Decision boundary to go or not go is never a sharp line, and it's always relative to your capacities, your knowledge, and ability to continually assess the risks while practicing.

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.

Auzy• 15 days ago

More AI hiking crap that will probably kill someone

So tired of this crap flooding the hiking community. Hiking communities are being bombarded by crap apps at the moment (particularly trip planning apps)

Do not trust this data.

Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors

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