41–50 of 293 posts
So they'll default to showing directions for biking, walking, and transit?
Any additional micro-optimizations are going to be fractional.
So I see features like this and I feel bad that it's Google doing it: the ultimate goal of the technology is not to make the world any better, but to get more eyeballs and exfiltrate more personal data so their advertising monopoly can continue to snowball.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this factor in battery manufacturing / vehicle body manufacturing / varying gas efficiencies / etc.? The question is borne of the understanding that electric vehicles merely frontload your carbon footprint, rather than eliminating it.
I got around that by making my ebike out of recycled UPS batteries, and a bicycle I already owned. That way, the only source of carbon was making the additional drivetrain components.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you have an accident and require lots of carbon intensive medical treatment, and your ebike is trashed. Disclaimer: I ride and love ebikes.
Yeah because walking is accident-free and cars are so much cheaper and carbon-friendlier to repair than bicycles.
It's also the cheapest route to drive, as it's optimizing for lower fuel consumption: With insights from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, we’re building a new routing model that optimizes for lower fuel consumption based on factors like road incline and traffic congestion. Provided that the few extra minutes aren't critical to one's wallet, it's a cost savings. For me those extra minutes…
Apple Maps sometimes features alternate routes that are "simpler" or with "fewer turns", which I think is a very nice feature. I'd rather not cut through small side streets just to save 1-2 minutes.
Google greenwashing what is clearly a demonstration of its power to redirect flows of people at a whim. I wonder what other purposes such redirections could be used for?
Other purposes? It's easy! You can make people avoid businesses that didn't paid to you and make them drive close to fastfood that wanted advertising. Or you can drive people around some political protests...
I recognize that they have been caught with their pants down with things like altering search results [1], but making broad speculative claims like this about the real world without any substantiation whatsoever is unfair and alarmist.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...
Eco-friendly stuff aside, this post makes me feel kind of nauseous. Things like indoor AR directions or having the weather integrated into a maps app are obvious applications of existing technology, but hardly anyone but Google has the resources to make these things happen at scale with nice UX. So I see features like this and I feel bad that it's Google doing it: the ultimate goal of the technology is not to make th…
They're treating climate change like it is an existential crisis for them as well. Let them.
More traffic in areas not normally use to it, councils changing road design to deal with the new amount of traffic.. etc
It's also the cheapest route to drive, as it's optimizing for lower fuel consumption: With insights from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, we’re building a new routing model that optimizes for lower fuel consumption based on factors like road incline and traffic congestion. Provided that the few extra minutes aren't critical to one's wallet, it's a cost savings. For me those extra minutes…