Artificially Intelligent Enshittification is so much better than the pedestrian one we've been getting in the past decade or two!

Genuinely a shame maps was one of the last great hold outs :(. Now they can hallucinate a petrol station near me whilst I'm desperate for fuel from the previous hallucination that sent me the wrong way.

Real world situation I always run into: trying to find Spanish grocery stores. Spanish, not Mexican, not Peruvian, Spanish. Somehow, it seems to think that Spanish doesn't refer to "Spain". There's things you can't get in the US very easily unless you buy it at a grocery store that sells food from Spain.

In the US, traffic closures are transmitted to cars using old radio frequencies (for in-dash units without Internet access). As much as I hate Google, this may have been due to an incorrect report by your local traffic system and not Google itself.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to pull accurate road closures out of traffic data. And DOT feeds tend to suck for machine consumption.

Sadly, there are people who will blindly follow what their device tells them to do and not put any thought into it, not even asking themselves "does this make sense?" I know a woman who was driving to a place she'd been to many times but apparently had the GPS set to "shortest" instead of "fastest", and it directed her to get off a highway some 50 miles before she normally would. She didn't question it one bit. Arrived much later than normal. If her GPS told her to drive off a cliff, she'd point the car

The answer is standardized public data feeds. Maybe all the navigation companies can create a global standard format to save taxpayer money, but data feeds are going to become an important part of infrastructure somewhere in the future. It might make sense to have user-reported road hazards or issues be fed back to the public sources. Even dispatch local authorities to check on a situation if needed.

> IF traffic-running-normally THEN ignore announcements that a road is closed.

If all the Android phones leave the road, then Google won't have enough data to decide traffic is running

> IF traffic-running-normally THEN ignore announcements that a road is closed.

That wasn't a Google issue. That was working as designed. That was a government issue, road closures are announced via API. Once that is done the road is marked as closed regardless of whether there's traffic moving through there or not. You can even do it on your own private premises. The reason for this is to prevent large volumes of traffic from being sent through roadwork areas which may temporarily have traffic flowing as lanes are reconfigured. Blame the government of Hessen

> Google Maps can't read those signs but it should be able to notice that traffic has ceased to flow there.

Quite the opposite. When tr

I'm using openstreetmaps with one of the f-droid apps (osmand+, don't remember how I paid) that do navigation, works fine for me.

> Does anyone miss the good old days when cryptocurrency was the fraud the techbros wanted to foist on everyone, but there at least was no practical way to integrate it into your operating system, your mapping app, you email, etc, so they couldn't ruin everything by adding cryptocurrencies to them?

> Any how, how's the open source equivalents of Google Map doing? Are they practical yet?

Yeah, ain't it funny how the tech bros decided the next big scam should be too big to not fuck up literally everything when it collapses on itself? Because when this AI bubble pops, or corrects to something reasonably adjacent to its actual possible utility, it's gonna fuck up everything from operating systems to banking, and sweep out entire sectors of the economic system all at once. I love how we never learn lessons, even from recent history. Too big to fail is now a goal, rather than a danger.

Er... they DID integrate it into everything, which is why AV suites and browsers had to start blocking cryptominers so your computer wouldn't cook itself.

Remember when they expected you to pay for website access by giving CPU cycles to their cryptominers?

> Any how, how's the open source equivalents of Google Map doing? Are they practical yet?

comaps (A fork of organic maps) is my favorite for open source maps.

So, a common voice prompt might be:

"No. Stop. What the fuck? NO! Don't DO that! Oh my God. I think I have a paper map in the trunk..."

While you have been able to do "Hey Gemini" or "Hey Google" for quite some time, BUT its bolted on Android Auto, and Android Auto is several conflicting apps with the same name behaving like different versions of a trash fire.

This is just another update that is going to break across the 3-4 different versions of Android Auto, where they are not going to touch any of the core issues such as the app wrongly picking LOD and being too zoom trigger happy.

I also get wanting to be able to distribute something that

Exactly this. Also a petrol station that is 10 km ahead on my current motorway is much better than one 2 km away in a village, even if is technically closer and ahead. Especially if Iâ(TM)ve already missed the off ramp,

Gemini is even worse at jumping between languages when speaking in my experience, but I would guess the names aren't flagged with the language in the source data either.

Around me in the US, some random sections of highway jump from being named in English to being named in Spanish. There is no reasonable answer for why it would happen other than they aggregated a bunch of map data and didn't validate that it was all in the same language. There is not a significant Spanish speaking population in the area.