TheTechnician27

Edit: Got up to an uncontroversial 66:0, so I'm undistinguishing so real comments can shine.

If this comment gets to or above +50 net upvotes, I'll pin this to the top of the community for a week. What an amazing, special specimen of LAMF. (Not farming upvotes; just trying to make sure I'm not BDFL'ing by unilaterally playing favorites. Was going to ask about this on the Reuters post, but it critically lacked Milo's reaction.)

2

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

Hi, OP. Per Rule 3, please retain the original article title in the title of your post. Commentary and elaboration should go in the body of the post.

Edit: Rad, thanks.

1

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

It reminds me of this conspiracy that was circulating a few months back that Apple Maps had "deleted" cities and places in Lebanon to culturally erase it for Israel's invasion.

In reality (which you could see by e.g. looking at Reddit posts from a few years ago), Apple Maps' coverage of Lebanon was absolute unusable dogshit the entire time. There were complaints about how it wasn't even usable for basic navigation in Beirut. The city of Tyre (which was misspelled "Tyr") was still there despite being one of the hardest-hit cities by Israel's invasion.

Which was, to be fair, staggeringly incompetent, but it was provably true. Apple Maps' coverage sucked so badly that, at a surface level, it looked like somebody took an erase tool to a competent map.

I think a lot of people don't realize how automated corporate maps applications are. Which can be a weakness for crowd-sourced data like OpenStreetMap when there aren't enough contributors, but that democratization is also a huge benefit that anyone can see and fix issues. The main parts of Google Maps that aren't automated are points of interest, and those are kept up-to-date thanks to the network effect where e.g. business owners see value in maintaining their information or users feel like they're helping out (read: doing free labor for a trillion-dollar corporation).

11

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

So fwiw, the change was made official and updated in GNIS the day it changed on Google Maps, which uses GNIS behind the scenes. That same day, USGS said the name had taken effect in GNIS but that it was waiting for its maps to visually update.

I think this is a product of Google's infrastructure being faster to automatically update with GNIS changes. The fact they didn't step in to override it already shows that they're willing to go along with this; I don't think the fact it changed before USGS adds any significance to that bootlicking.

That is, I don't assume Google manually intervened to make this happen faster.

Still, fuck Google Maps. I'm glad people are waking up to how this level of hegemony over maps gives corporations too much power.

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

Well in that case, it's cool to see Fairphone using /e/OS!

9

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

Sorry, I realize that question could be interpreted in two ways: I meant for Fairphone not to try to get Graphene working on their phone. I know Motorola is trying to do that right now, for example.

30

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

ELI5: Why use /e/OS over Graphene? This isn't a rhetorical rant; I'm genuinely curious.

Edit: See below. I misphrased this question.

2

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 1w ago

If you're using Organic, it's worth considering Organic's fork CoMaps, which was created by major contributors in response to these grievances.

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 2w ago

the fuck is this?

Proof positive that only a tiny minority of people on Lemmy bother checking a post past the headline when it comes to politics/news.

I've seen a link to BBC News before where 50 people upvoted it (zero downvotes except mine), except the entire time, it was an invalid URL and went to a 404. No comments except mine, which was calling this out and asking OP to fix the URL (they never did; comment was upvoted 1:0).

This post isn't relevant to this community at all, is posted by a 3-year-old account with essentially just this post, and breaks literally every listed rule of this comm.

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 2w ago

Yeah, and?

If you actually edit OSM, you know there's zero compelling reason to make an application that prefers official_name:en-us. Want to know how I know? Because instead of wasting my time making something up to be outraged at, I went and looked up how often this key shows up. It's six (it shows five, but it hasn't updated for Lake Ontario yet). In the entire world among billions of key uses, this one is used on six objects. This will not ever happen; it's complete nonsense.

Even if it were made (it will not be),

Nobody would use it. Literally what on Earth usefulness could it possibly have within the already niche ecosystem that is OpenStreetMap? My dude, my guy, if they were targeting bullshit names Trump made up with an EO, they could just soft fork an existing OSM application and then hardcode in "Gulf of America" and "Lake America".

And most importantly,

It doesn't matter. That's what the official_name key exists for – to distinguish it from the name people actually use. That's why it's a separate key to begin with.

You're complaining about OpenStreetMap being accurate, and in order to do that, you have to invent some fever dream application that nobody would ever create and nobody would ever use – and that even were they to create it, they could've accomplished it more easily by just hardcoding six values.

"When available". lol, lmao even

2

TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world 2w ago

it’s in the data

Correct, because that's what official_name means. The US government, one of two countries encircling it, officially calls it "Lake America". That's why it's official_name:en-US specifically, not official_name=. The name= key, the "primary name of the feature in the real world", remains and will remain "Lake Ontario".

It’s not the name that is likely to show when viewing the map

I'll correct you and say that there's no "likely" about it: it's not the name that will be shown when viewing the map. That's the name= key, which is "Lake Ontario".