- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
Search sucks for some time now. I’d say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
Google Maps, their traffic data has no rivals, unlike gmail which has plenty of good competition. It’s the one thing I couldn’t easily replace yet.
I prefer OSM since I can use the maps offline. Google maps is useless out in the middle of nowhere without any cell service.
Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they’ve just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it’ll let you select boundaries to download.
Its only car routes though, useless for footpaths and public transport
Edit: I may be stupid
It has all the path data
Source: I just tested it
It’s not only car routes
I tried OSM and it completely failed. Downloaded the offline region, loaded it up at home fine. Went to the location and the offline map wouldn’t load. Had a connection and tried to load an online map, nothing. Ended up right back using Google maps. I support the concept of OSM, it just doesn’t work.
Strange, it’s been very very reliable for many years, for me. Did you use OsmAnd?
No, I used solely on my phone. It worked fine at home and looked promising. When I went out 2 days later it wouldn’t load anything, was on cell only with excellent 5g data. Tried for about an hour and it just wouldn’t load a map.
Uh, but…OsmAnd is a phone app. So you’re saying you used the website on your phone’s browser, then? I’m not sure if that has an offline function, though I never used it myself. Does it say it has that function? Otherwise I think you will have to install an app, first.
Maybe you downloaded the offline map files, but had nothing to open them with. Apps use their own versions of the map files, by the way, those files you download from the website are for other use-cases.
ProtonMail is like the best if you can get if you’re a small user that regularly cleans their inbox and keeps things that matter.
I never use more than a handful of MBs, so I find 15GB of storage that GMail offers me a bit much. It’s been this way for me for years so ProtonMail does it.
This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add “AI” to it to look good and hip again. Only if the “AI” results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it’s not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it’s bad, they’ll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Nah. It’s not going to be “AI.” It’s going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by “Sponsored” results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that’s probably no longer relevant.
It’s going to find 1 billion more results that all are equally as irrelevant as the 8 billion results that was initially pulled up per search.
