Interactive map that rescales cities based on population density as you drag

[u/k7for9]

https://actualscale.com/

[u/Nwg416]

Well intended, but still vibe slop. Listen, these kinds of things are cool little projects to have for yourself and friends, but sharing it broadly exposes you to a lot of risk and financial cost that the LLM-generated code is not likely to protect against.

[u/superexpress_local → u/Nwg416]

What sort of risk does this expose OP to? My understanding is that if a website is just an app or displaying information then there isn't really anything to risk.

[u/collin-h → u/superexpress_local]

im not sure about this particular project - but if you have an "app" or a "site" that somehow uses AI to do inference on a user's request. Like a "tell me what kind of cat I would be" and users chat with a chatbot and it gives them their feline diagnosis... then you're paying for usage with the API... so a bot, or a malicious user, could come in and spam that feature and one day you wake up to a huge API usage bill you weren't prepared for.

[u/superexpress_local → u/collin-h]

That makes sense. This particular website looks like it was built with AI but the map tiles are loaded from OpenMapTiles and the computation is done in-browser, so unless something is weird in the code (not impossible by any means) OP is probably safe.

[u/VIPHeat → u/Nwg416]

Can you explain these risks?

[u/k7for9 → u/Nwg416]

lol. I will gladly delve into the technical details of how this website works if you have any specific questions or concerns. I originally started this project years ago, but it took a while to find suitable data sources (I made sure all data has permissive licenses and I credit everything) and to solve the technical issues with streaming population data for the whole world at 100m resolution. 

One of the coolest parts is that the whole backend lives in Cloudflare’s cache, so it’s extremely performant without a financial burden. 

Let me know if you have any questions!

[u/pie-oh → u/k7for9]

Looking through the HTML it's clearly vibe coded.

Claude absolutely loves to do huge comments like this:

<!-- The About page below is the site for anyone without JavaScript (and for crawlers that

   do not run it). With JavaScript the map takes over and App.tsx shows the same text
   behind Settings → Help → About, so it never gets in the way of the map. The inline
   style is allowed by the CSP (style-src 'unsafe-inline'). Its colors are the theme
   tokens from src/index.css (light, or dark when the device or Settings asks for it);
   the fallbacks are the light values, for a dev server with scripts off, where that
   stylesheet is not linked. -->

Getting Claude to tell you how it works, or even having any clue on it whatsoever still doesn't negate it being vibe slop.

Also, using Cloudflare cache isn't really that big of a deal. I'm confused why you're mentioning it.

[u/ThreeDMK → u/pie-oh]

Always enjoy seeing the differences between developers and non developers pushing code out for the world to see.

Someone clearly doesn’t properly build their apps before deploying them. I have been pushing code all year via Claude and other than me telling people it was generative they generally can’t tell the difference. ;)

[u/whodiswhodat → u/k7for9]

So you didn't create this in AI?

[u/bytesback → u/k7for9]

It’s a static dataset, so yeah, it makes sense to have it in cache. That’s just general software engineering. It’s vibe-coded. You didn’t do the math, you prompted.

I generally find these little useless projects neat, but don’t try and give credit to yourself because you picked up some buzzwords

[u/Wauwatl → u/Nwg416]

I haven't looked at the code since I'm on mobile, but there is no reason a static website like this should expose OP to any risk or cost. I think it's fun. And so long as the data used is legit, I've no concerns if he used AI to create it.

[u/ChanceEngineering858 → u/Nwg416]

And what beautiful masterwork creations are you creating by hand without any AI assistance? Care to share so we can critique?

Are you using compilers/interpreters or are you writing assembly by hand like Roller Coaster Tycoon?

[u/WideConstruction2]

The whole city resizing thing is a bit confusing. Seems like it's just an unnecessarily fancy heat map.

Honestly the included heat map is more interesting than the city thing.

[u/UpSNYer]

I won’t shit on this unnecessarily. I think it’s neat but it’s finicky as hell on mobile.

[u/mother-demeter → u/UpSNYer]

Yeah it’s totally broken on mobile.

[u/oshawaguy]

Put in Toronto, and it suggested “State Capitol - Ontario, Canada”

[u/collin-h]

im still confused about how it works....

Here's an example:

pick any city at all. Say Chicago... Now move it slightly to the west, out into the countryside where it's less dense... it gets HUGE, but now encompases what was originally chicago... which wouldn't make sense. the parts of the expanded footprint that fall ontop of original chicago should be 1:1.

Its basically taking the density of the exact spot where your mouse it, not accounting for the density of the area the footprint occupies visually.

[u/Correct-Moment-2458 → u/collin-h]

The About page says it counts people across the whole outline, not just at the cursor. The shape uses one scale throughout, so the bit overlapping Chicago doesn't stay 1:1. It grows until the total population inside the moved outline matches the original city's population. The heatmap helps show where those people are.

[u/Ill_Parfait9548]

like idea