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  • Yeah, the scary part of this is that as much as I absolutely would never go near this shit with a ten foot pole when it's clearly still woefully inadequate and over hyped.... They very frequently drive withing ten feet of me because for some reason it's legal to put this shit on roads with unwilling participants.

  • Source?

    I've read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

    There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using...

    There's also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn't been able to keep up.

    I don't see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there's nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

    So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion until there's actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. "Someone said they are" is not going to convince me. Especially if you can't even point to that someone saying that thing.

  • Yeah, I don't think people understand quite how astronomical an undertaking it is to replace this shit. People like to quote things like AWS, but AWS is a) expensive and b) general purpose. As such, it might be able to solve the problem, but not nearly as efficiently. It would cost you proportionally WAY MORE than Google is paying to keep YT alive, so that gives you an extra giant hurdle on top of the other complexity.

    Web hosting with low latency is hard. Huge data storage is hard. Transcodinf is hard. Constant uptime is hard. Search is hard. Recommendations are hard. Making it profitable is hard. Starting an ad service that isn't googles is hard. Convincing content creators to move there is hard. Convincing consumers to look there is hard. Sure, any of these problems have remotely comparable analogs. But you have to solve all of them simultaneously to get anywhere near competing with YouTube. And since Google owns the whole "stack", it's much cheaper for them then it'll be for you.

    Kick probably makes a decent comparison here. But they're A) solving a subset of the problem B) fighting against a company that has extremely clear problems (arguably much worse than YouTube) C) is in a tech savvy-er demographic D) is funded by mega-casinos with tons of money and a vested interest in the product E) fighting in a market with less inertia so viewers and creators can move easier F) fighting twitch instead if YT which is smaller and younger.

    And they're still not really all that much competition.

  • There's been multiple posts pointing to some possibly "wait for ads to finish loading" type code. It's quite possible that it's just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.

    But that doesn't make a cool headline so instead the "it's Google being evil" story is the popular one.

  • I know very well what it is, but just screaming "investigator bias" doesn't mean anything. By the "scientific method", you must submit evidence and prove it.

    But you don't. Because you don't have any. So there's no reason to take your claims worth anything other than the ramblings of someone who's just angry at the findings.

    I really don't care about the findings or whether they're true. It has no bearing on me. But you're acting like a buffoon.

  • Yes. Your entirely baseless claims, with literally no backing at all, without providing any substance or source for you claims, are very convincing here. You "see" and "smell" all sorts of "signs" but for some reason can't name them.

    You'd be literally laughed out of any reasonable credible discussion with this take. Hence why you're also being downvoted to hell for it.

    You're just complaining because you don't like it or something. If you had any reasonable evidence, you would have pointed to it. Instead you're pointing to some boogeyman to try to defend your stance. You're clearly the one who's butthurt here.

  • It's cold and has really shitty "inter item" contrast. I don't get how they think this is an improvement.

    Sure, it screenshots better. It makes a "nicer" picture in isolation.

    Problem is, maps is a tool not a piece of art. I don't care how "good" it looks. I care how effective it is at being a tool. If you can make it look better while still functioning, sure, no gripes here.

    But the road contrast with the background has been severely increased. Problem is, roads are a step to getting somewhere. I'm not looking for roads. I'm looking for POIs. And when navigating, I'm looking for which road to take. Giving every road contrast against the background means everything else has less contrast against the roads.

    I find it much harder to sift through seas of pins. But more importantly, the navigation "path" highlight has such little contrast to roads it's even harder to discern where I'm supposed to be going at a glance. Previously there was a high contrast blue line against literally everything else so I could look away from the road and in a split second know which way it wants me to head.

    Now I have to try to pick the deeper slightly contrasted line out of a sea of lines which are all in high contrast against the background. And they're all even tinted blue. This removes two of your brains subconscious cues for picking these things out and it makes it significantly harder to discern without really paying more attention to the map. Which is literally not how navigation should work. Navigation is meant to be glanceable.

    Honestly, this pushes me more to look for alternatives. But every other competing product is a joke and Google Maps still has the biggest feature set by miles so it's pretty futile.

  • In my experience the contrast for navigation is worse. Unless I'm getting some separate A/B test or something, I don't see how you could argue it's better.

    The background is essentially the same brightness as before, but roads are MUCH MUCH darker. And the nav is slightly darker. The route has less contrast with the roads around it and I've had a really hard time deciphering this on a dashboard/in sunlight. I really hope I'm just in some shitty A/B test or something.

  • Jokes on him. Why the fuck would I tip a server 25 fucking percent. Nor am I tipping someone to pour me a coffee while getting paid a normal fucking wage. And I'm definitely not tipping someone who shows up days later to solve my problems and already robs me of a huge chunk of my salary.

    Tipping in this country is fucking out of control.

  • Yeah, that's a good way of looking at this.... I didn't understand the Microsoft move at all. Why would an "open" non profit want to build business relationships with tech monoliths. It seemed antithetical, but I honestly had assumed that was more of a board/share holder decision... Sounds like that probably wasn't the case.

  • I find that the opposite. There's more contrast on everything. Previously, contrast of the path to follow made if clear where to go. Now that doesn't have as much contrast from the rest so it's harder to glance and see where to go. All of the roads stand out. But I don't care about all of the roads. I care about the ONE road I'm trying to follow and that doesn't stand our from the rest. That's all I'm trying to "pick out" while driving and now that is harder.

    It feels like "overly" busy because literally every item on the screen is trying to pop out from the background. That's just noise and over attention grabbing. I don't care about the 7 streets I'm passing popping out and grabbing attention. I barely even need to know they're there, so the low contrast made sense.

  • I just strongly disagree with this. In light mode, roads are way more blaring. That makes them easier to see against the background. But makes it harder to see everything else. IE, if I drive to a 5 way intersection, it's extremely difficult to tell which road is highlighted as the path for me to take. Because everything stands out, the actual DIRECTIONS don't stand out from everything else.

    I dont care about seeing roads that aren't the ones I'm taking very well. While navigating, all I care about is where I'm going and maybe like counting how many cross roads or intersections till I turn. When I'm searching for things, I don't care about roads, I care about seeing balloons. And as EVERYTHING has more contrast, the results/selections don't stand out as much and it's harder to read.

    I do wonder if maybe this becomes a rural vs city sort of thing. Maybe that's not a big problem with rural driving and fewer roads? But harder when there's a bunch of roads in one place?

  • This shit is so much harder to read. I don't understand how this is getting approved. Even driving navigation feels like a torrential horde of vomit with all the high contrast streets sliding by.

    Sure, it might make for prettier screenshots, but it's actually functionally harder to read, as the important/highlighted elements just don't stand out as much when literally everything "stands out". I feel like this has been a continued trend from Google Maps and this might be the final straw for me... I've already noticed having a harder time distinguishing turns.

  • I couldn't agree more. Except maybe bits of the time line - it was barely beginning a decade ago - I'd say the past like 7 years have been bad though.

    I really hate the move away from this. I don't give a flying fuck whether the icons mismatch - I want to be able to find them quickly and that's objectively harder when they're all the same shape. Brains process shape/silhouette extremely quickly and subconsciously and its much easier to find "weird envelope with an M poking out" and "crinkled up map" than it is "dot on the GREEN squircle".

    I've been using custom launchers forever anyway, and I just use icon packs of the old style, but as that style gets older, it becomes harder and harder to match every app icon.

  • I never said anything about app icon color. But that is another kind of silly problem that it even exists. But being able to circumvent the problem by replacing the system doesn't mean the system is fine. It's just making the first party solution worse and worse.

    1. It's bland and boring. Why would you ever want all the apps on your phone to be the same color? I understand some amount of consistent theming and styling so you know what things are buttons, where to find certain settings, etc. But Material You pushes them all to use the same exact color theme. This makes it harder to distinguish between Messages, Chat, and every other messaging app that takes on the the Material You coloring. They're all text, in the same font and color, on blobs that are the same color, with buttons that are all the same icon sets..... Can I figure it out? Sure. But it all blends together. It's bland. And soulless. It's in a way "commoditizing" design and making everything samey. This is especially drastic after Material Pre-You was extremely heavy on color. Go look at all the old Material design stuff. Everything is vibrantly showing brand colors.
    2. It's dull. Holo was really dull. Material brought bright and saturated colors. Material You pushes back faded, low saturation, mushy, dull colors. Everything feels "dead", especially in contrast.
    3. Everything is the same squishy shapes. Android has a long history of things like app icons having distinct shapes and emphasis on outlines and sillouhettes. This is shoving back even harder on "everythijg is a circle or a squircle"
    4. Pixel has absolutely butchered features and customization options in order to make way for.... Pick a color?
    5. Everything is fat and chunky. Buttons and margins are obscenely large. It feels childish. Material was sleek and efficient. You seems to take space for sake of taking space. It's wasteful and dysfunctional. More stuff in the notification shade (like brightness) was pushed behind another swipe because they just don't have space with all the quick settings having gobbled more space despite showing fewer shortcuts. This is just one example, but these things are everywhere.
    6. Google does not take authoritarian control over app design of every app in their store. As such, devs take more time to update their apps. And so many apps just don't bother for a while. This means every change comes at the cost of fragmentation. And Material You is explicitly pushing for further unification. So it's inception is actively hurting its purpose. Case in point, skim through Googles own apps - they're in varying states of migrated, so Googles own first party apps aren't even consistent.

    I understand this design could be appealing on paper, especially if you look at it in a vacuum. Objectively, it's a pretty good design language. But Android's previous design language was measurably better. It was objectively more efficient. So the people who have been using it blatantly are shown all the shortcomings. If you buy a new device with it, there's no context and it seems decent. If you upgrade, tons of the things you use just disappear . Instantly. Which shows its problems much faster.

    Google has literally walked backwards here. In many ways. And it's half done, has problems, is bland, and blatantly less exciting and efficient than the thing it's replacing.

  • TL;DR: Intersectionality is a thing and forcing the separation of intertwined issues is counterproductive as well as unjust.

    Yeah, okay, enough of this pedantic bullshit. We're all aware. You're not dropping some grand unknown knowledge. You keep making sweeping arguments about some general scheme, instead of you know, the conversation at hand.

    Such bad strategy, in fact, that it was probably the biggest reason within the campaign's control that Bernie Sanders didn't become president in stead of Trump.

    Yeah. That's definitely it. There's definitely not a whole slew of other things here.

    You've clearly made the only real point you had here, and have gone off the deep end. This isn't really productive anymore. Nor has it been because of a staunch refusal to read what's going on.

  • That's what I'm trying to say: it IS about both

    I don't think your argument comes off that way, but i guess that's subjective.

    The original article outlines how they're pushing a bill to stop discriminatory pricing. That lower income areas and areas with fewer white people tend to have less tech / higher price. It then goes on with multiple quotes about race. And how people of color don't have the same access.

    The original comment says they don't think it's just race, that it's a larger class issue.

    You then start talking about how it IS race and is racist.

    We know. The original article posed that angle. The comment you responded to said it was a broader problem. Youre coming back around to the race thing again, which sounds a lot like you're saying the race thing is a bigger deal or something.

    Again, the article outlined both and hammered on race. The commentor says it's also a class issue. You then come back "disagreeing" which doesn't sound like you think it's both. Like I said, it sounds like you're trying to re-narrow the argument.