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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • feoh@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs Google Maps getting worse?
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    1 month ago

    Here’s some “high quality” (heh heh) anecdata for you: I navigated from my house in Somerville to a restaurant in the Seaport district of Boston last night, in the POURING rain using public transit and walking.

    Google maps literally was leading me around in circles downtown once I got off the train, so I switched to Apple Maps and it was straight shooting from there on in.

    I think GMaps is more susceptible to the tall buildings fouling the GPS. Not sure why?





  • Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?

    Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.



  • This. I’ve seen SO much hype and FUD and all the while there are thousands of developers grinding out code using these tools.

    Does code quality suffer? ONLY in my experience if they have belt wielding bean counters forcing them to ship well before it’s actually ready for prime time :)

    The tools aren’t perfect, and they most DEFINITELY aren’t a panacea. The industry is in a huge contraction phase right now so I think we have a while before we have to worry about AI induced layoffs, and if that happens the folks doing the laying off are being incredibly short sighted and likely to have a high impact date with a wall coming in the near future anyway.









  • A thing I wish more Linux enthusiasts were more up front about: And prepare for PAPER CUTS! Because they’re there. Most Linux folks ^1 probably do 5-6 things a day that new folks would find confusing or infuriating, just because they Get Used To It.

    A perfect example: My Linux desktop is a System76 Thelio-r2 running Manjaro KDE latest, which I LOVE. Every time I boot it up, if I want to use my BT speakers or headphones ^2 I have to go into the BT settings panel, wonder why it says “Bluetooth Disabled - Enable Bluetooth”, click the button, and move on with my day.

    Turns out this is because of a kernel bug in the latest kernel versions with Intel bluetooth hardware. The driver times out at system boot, and thus the system is disabled by default. By the time you’re fully booted, that time out never happens so if you just click Enable, you’re good to go.

    And these things are additive. They pile up and increase frustration for end users who aren’t savvy enough to know which forums to search on or what search terms to pump into their search engines.

    This does not mean you shouldn’t try Linux. Please do! It can be a life changer and a serious power up! But be aware that the path will have many small roadblocks that need to be traversed, so just set your expectations accordingly, explore and have fun!

    ^1: I use Windows, Linux and Mac as need dictates. Let “tool to task” be the whole of the law :)

    ^2: Perfect example: Many Linux users wouldn’t use Bluetooth speakers! They’d get wired ones or one of those RF thingies that has long time Linux driver support. But if you’re new, you don’t know that!


  • I think pretty much anyone would agree that pervasive public transit with pervasive coverage and short wait times would be pretty much ideal.

    I hate to be cynical but I can’t see us getting there any time soon in the US. Mainstream American culture is so delusional about the idea that we’re all RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS that the idea of touching people is utterly repugnant.

    I would love to dream of a world where this could happen, and maybe I should stop dreaming about self driving cars and start dreaming about this instead :)

    Meanwhile, public transit everywhere in the US besides Manhattan is utterly abysmal and even in cities like Boston where public transit is decent-ish most people who can drive do.

    Those who can’t either take a taxi/Lyft if they can afford it, and if they can’t afford it they suffer. It’s the American Way.