> Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.

This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.

maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back

I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.

In vacations on Mediterranean islands it took us through barely usable "roads" in the middle of a forest trail, thankfully nothing bad came out of it.

Beats me how it was supposed to be a fuel saving road, other than doing that by virtue of destroying the car.

* * *

In the Canary Islands it took us down a utility road that was literally being used as a mountain mike trail. We were in an Opel Corso. Fortunately a beater, and my friend’s superior driving skill got us out, but just barely. We were resigned to abandoning the car… and Google had treated it just like a regular paved road.

Probably best to avoid the Connie Sue Highway and other roads of the Len Beadell desert network then.

TIL... for someone like me who's never been to Australia and doesn't know much about its geography, that's a pretty crazy story!

And it turns out Connie Sue is still out there, running desert tours except not now because of lingering Covid restrictions.

> Connie's work background started with 10 years of general nursing and midwifery, 14 years as a violinist in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and has studied Computer Systems Engineering at TAFE part-time.

Interesting people!

http://www.beadelltours.com.au/interest.html

Long before I wrote earth scale digital mapping software in 1990s (yes, before google Maps .. and even Keyhole) I was taught how to use a theodolite by Len Beadall (I was ~ 12 or so at the time and pretty keen).

If you're interested in the landscape those roads pass through, here's a 13 minute intro:

Good roads until 6:00 minutes in .. and then they take the David Carnegie Rd.

Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc

The net altitude change is the same for all routes between two points.

Even with a car with regenerative breaking, going up then down is less efficient than staying flat/just down

In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping

Just checked my maps app and I do not have this option, but have recently been dealing with Maps picking utterly non-sensical routes (random small streets rather than main roads).

It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.

The routing can be pretty silly. I'm not going to journey down some backroad for a projected 3% fuel saving.

Google Maps keeps thinking that road repair that lowers 4 lane highway to 2 lanes means that the road is closed.

While you are driving on the "closed" road Maps keeps insisting on turning back and suggesting silly alternate routes.

Had guests who trusted Google and took the Google alternate route losing 30 minutes in the process .

I've noticed the maps issue too. I like their reporting in terms of traffic but allowing it to decide where I drive is just a no go at this point.

Waze has been consistently better, especially for traffic rerouting. It's also way better at letting you know about road events, like accidents, than Google Maps. Maps is better to search stuff on a map, but for navigation, it is so barebones (and not even in a good minimalist way). I'm not sure how GMaps can still lag so far behind when Waze is also owned by Google.

They run them as separate teams and don’t necessarily collaborate. Marking Police traps had been on Waze for years and Google Maps just got it last year.

Which is still insane to me.

Waze isn't a separate team anymore - it got merged into Maps[0], which means that its probably going to join the Google Graveyard in the next cost-cutting round[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903016 [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

The Maps/Waze teams merge has been underway since 2022 Dec 9.

see https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/google-waze-maps-merge/i...

I don't know about the recent decline. Google has sometimes seemingly switched to an "I feel like going for a country drive" mode for years. Which is particularly annoying in areas where it snows and narrow country roads are often not in great shape even if the main streets are pretty well cleared.

A week or so ago I was freaked out when some Google app nudged me with a link to email that said I needed to return a defective heatsink/fan by a certain date to avoid being charged for it. I looked, and found the email saying they'd gotten it; I had already sent it. If it's going to look for things like that, it should look for evidence that it's already been taken care of.

Yesterday I searched "apache kafka" on my phone because I can never remember if it's apache.kafka.org or kafka.apache.org (it's the latter, the former is registered by an Italian developer), and I had to scroll past five or six "sponsored" results from managed Kafka vendors to get the actual result.

Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.

How do you even view the web especially on mobile without an ad blocker?

I have an ad blocker, but it's not aggressive enough to remove sponsored search results.

Which one do you have? 1Blocker for iOS removed an ad for Confluent when I did your same search before I disabled it.

Opera's built-in one.

Maps decline has been a real annoyance for me. I’ve dropped all of Google products: mail, years ago for Fastmail; search, I pay for Kagi; youtube, I pay netflix and spotify; docs, I use it at work but still looking for alternatives; voice, Skype does well. I’m almost off the Google bandwagon. I think if there is a good map system out-there, I’d finally have no dependency on the whole Google stack.