• DoctorNope@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Watching these corporate collaborators fall all over themselves to enact the profoundly stupid and short-sighted whims of a sodden, rotting corpse when they could just…not do that…has been one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

    The sad thing is, thanks to their capture of both parties, I have no conceit they’ll actually experience any consequences for it. We have handed power to some of the least-deserving ghouls the Wharton School of Business ever squeezed out.

    • John@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      Hi, I work in the map industry. We generally don’t get to decide what names to use for features. We apply what the local official name is (to simplify). That’s why if you’re in country A, feature X might be named something different than if you’re in country B. You can imagine this would (and has) caused many conflicts around the world if we didn’t display the local official name. (Switch your region via VPN and you can see this in action)

      If Google renamed it to Gulf of America, no Google didn’t, not really … They just inserted the new official name for that feature according to GNIS.

      • DoctorNope@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        The Google Maps change does only seems to be visible for people with US IPs. But I assume that Apple Maps, Mapquest, Mapbox, Bing (TIL Bing has a map feature), etc all use GNIS to label features too, right? None of them have changed the name yet. Seems unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream, and let Google drink their milkshake like this.

        According to this Wired article:

        In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”

        Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated. It’s now 23:40 EDT Sunday, and GNIS still says Lake Ontario…so yeah, I think this is on them. Dear Leader told them to jump, and they rushed to show him how high they could get.

        • John@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream

          It’s not like we all have one live server that ingests source changes and the customers will see it immediately. There is a massively delay, release schedules, etc.

          Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated

          But yea, you could be right on this specific point

          • DoctorNope@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            It’s not like we all have one live server that ingests source changes and the customers will see it immediately. There is a massively delay, release schedules, etc

            Good! Sounds like there’s plenty of time built in to the system for impact analysis, change management, QA, and the like, to avoid pushing unnecessary updates that end up pissing everyone off.

            • John@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              Who gets to determine if they’re unnecessary updates?

              EDIT/Update: ‘Lake America’ is currently under discussion from our Geopolitical Policy Board.

        • kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          i think that’s a bit of a rash reaction to changing the name of a lake locally