551–560 of 705 posts
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If you're not using an adblocker in this day and age in 2023, you're doing it wrong.
Mobile doesn't have ad blocking, at least on iOS. Which is why I pay for Youtube premium.
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Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.
What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window. The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name. Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.
I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.
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I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down. I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app. As user,…
It's annoying, but if you are serious about taking public transit, you really do need to use the apps for whatever city you are in to get accurate information in my experience. Yes, Google Maps will tell you when a bus or metro is coming, but they often get it wrong, claiming that buses that run only on weekdays run on Saturday and so on.
I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.
The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are. Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?
> Finally, Google Maps seems more intent today on showing bars, restaurants, ads, and work-from-home businesses than useful map-related features. Sometimes it doesn’t even show the most basic information anymore, including street names. I suspect they arrived at this through a series of A-B tests, since the more useful navigational information they display, the easier it is for the user to "learn" a city, and be able…
And based on the article, they might be using user frustration as a indicator of success:
> A workaround I’ve stumbled upon whenever this happens is to select a business pin on the next street over. When Google Maps centers on that, it for some reason will label the street I’m standing on.
Yeah, maps is not as minimal as it used to be and maybe it will die as it is due to inexistent business model but my clutter of personal pins - at the moment - is competing with ads, so unless I zoom in I barely see any ads.
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It takes serious funding to make an excellent mapping app that contains worldwide business info, and a whole hell of a lot of paid review staff. A non-profit/charity can't really tackle this well. And since having a good mapping app is so important to the use of a smartphone generally, it makes sense for the two major smartphone OS vendors to each have a platform-standard mapping app.
I'm pretty sure you could use AI these days, to replicate the accuracy of Google Anything. And there isn't a paid review staff, people who filter maybe, but Google doesn't review anything.
Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).
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GeForce experience tracks every single window you have open, sending the title and window information, along with every single spot that you click on your screen to Nvidia, tied to your now mandatory account. That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since. Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.
I believe it, but do you have a source? I have a few friends I'd like to inform of this.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/privacy-policy/
How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes!
The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, CanardPC, but this is referenced quite a bit.
I was additionally wrong the GeForce Experience matters. This is currently untrue. After the original article was released of how much spying Nvidia does, the telemetry package was moved to the driver rather than GeForce experience.
Long story short: if you have an Nvidia video card and have not actively disabled nvtmmon then Nvidia is tracking every window you open, how long it’s open, which windows have focus and for how long, window locations titles etc, along with clicks (but not keyboard strokes) etc. *It is not only tracking games. It tracks everything. It does this with just the driver*. If you have GeForce experience, then that information is tied to your sensitive personal information. If you do not opt out, they sell that to advertisers. If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.
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If organic maps did traffic, reviews and opening hours I'd never touch google maps again. Literally everything else is worse.
I'm surprised it doesn't do opening hours, as that information is readily available in the OSM tags (though maybe a bit sparsely compared to Google Maps). As for the rest; yeah I'd love to see a serious effort to get an OMS-based map up to feature parity with Google Maps. Place photos, contacts integration, and the timeline would be big ones for me.
Google has some sort of system that auto-calls shops, I think, and asks them to verify that their hours are correct.
It's still pretty crap and I'm sure OSM could beat google maps at that game too but it doesn't seem to be a focus.
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If you're not using an adblocker in this day and age in 2023, you're doing it wrong.
Mobile doesn't have ad blocking, at least on iOS. Which is why I pay for Youtube premium.