That explains well my confusion stemming from mathematics. This might be compounded by language differences.
Planet is a very interesting example! In planetary context I relate "sphere" to biosphere or atmosphere, a thin (compared to the planet radius) layer where life/air is present. Such sphere roughly corresponds to the planet surface - closer to the mathematical definition of a sphere.
That definition is generic - as in math books (or Wikipedia).
The article lacks a definition (and implicit one is not the math one), but your explanation resolves that to be a "volume enclosed by a sphere" rather than a literal sphere. Thanks, I did not understand it that way!
Sphere is a collection of points that are at the same distance from the center in 3D space. It contains surface only and does not include interior, just like a circle is holow.
Circle != disc (in 2D), sphere != ball (in 3D)
The article and summary mix both shapes.
These image "AI watermarks" are already here and many people do not even notice them, taking AI images as real
It seems that the text-based ones are more subtle indeed, however with a known algorithm it may be possible for a human to incorporate them in their written text for false positives.
The paper in Nature covers to some extent spoofing and other limitations of this watermarking approach (stealing, scrubbing, paraphrasing).
It was not a mess previously, but with the change in traffic line thickness (mentioned in another reply) this would be a mess in the new UI. A trade-off the designers made...
I see your point about forcing people away from smaller roads. it is reasonable. The local roads I meant are two-lane roads that are major communication paths in my area, far from being quiet residential roads - those appear only at 20m scale.
Probably forcing all roads to a uniform system does not work. Right now highways, express roads and country roads all look the same gray, obfuscating the real network.
This reminded me about another change that Google did a few years ago. Previously only real green areas (forests, parks) were marked in green, so the map was useful for eye navigation - you could see that you will be driving through a large forest and plan a stop, or avoid if driving at night etc.
Since then everything is shown as green. Fields, grass, empty areas, everything that is not really "green" from the map point of view has now made green a useless colour. There are even parts of urban areas without trees marked green, and real green areas (full of trees) that are gray.
Ahh, I see now what you explained about making the traffic lines bolder! Thank you for showing that at least there is some other logic.
My goal was not outsmarting the navigation, but getting an at-glance view of the traffic situation in a known environment. I typically have two resonable paths to destinatinons within a ~10km radius. Previously I could see all of that on a single screen, so if there was anything suspicious (crash, unusual traffic configuration) it was easy to choose one path over the other. This is, sadly, no longer possible.
Letting Google know my source&destination every time was an overkill.
I agree that to a large extent (and for majority of people) the navigation replaces human routing decisions and that most of the time it just doesn't make sense to try outrun it - especially as the use of Googla Maps is so widerspread it has pretty good/dense data and traffic models.
I saw very few situations where I happened to (occasionally) outsmart the navigation, most of the time it helped:
1) optimistic left turns - it will sometimes insist on making a "shortcut" where you end up trying to turn left (no traffic lights, long wait) and more time is lost then via a slightly longer path with a right turn at the end = easy merge. This still happens but can be avoided once you notice the pattern (or specific place).
2) it sometimes tries to go around a "traffic jam", which exists only on lanes going forward - if I turn left or right instead, there is a dedicated empty lane leading to a faster shortcut. This was quite surprising, as I would have thought navigation is taking individual lanes into account. I did not check this recently.
3) contrary to what you wrote about predictive navigation - around rush hour it consistently suggested me the fastest-at-the-moment path, NOT taking into account dynamic situation. I was commuting daily (~45min one way) and navigation sent me right into the heart of the largest traffic jam that appeared before I arrive at it, which also required an optimistic lef-turn (point 1). This increased travel time by ~15min. The other path was 5min slower at the start of the trip, but it was consistent and the travel time did not increase (unless an accident happened). I still see this behaviour.
4) it sometimes leads me through local roads that it considers to be driveable at a standard speed limit (based on ETA), rather than at most half-speed due to road condition/crossroads/lights/speed bumps. This behaviour surprised me quite a few times in an unknown area - apparently Google did not account for real traffic speed on these roads. This sounds similar to the recent quirk sending people through a Nevada desert trail.
Thank you for taking time to provide me with a checkpoint.
For me the change in "show traffic" zoom level happened at the same time as the colour switch, first in desktop browsers (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, doesn't matter) then in the phone native application&browser about two weeks later. This seems too correlated and widespread (I checked with colleagues who have different computers) to suggest scaling issues, but I will read more on that. Computer is at 100% scale, phone's screen zoom is neutral (middle position).
I looked at various European cities, the results seem to be consistent:
At 20km "scale" the traffic is only shown on highways/express ways.
10/5/2km adds other major roads (two lanes per direction).
1km/500m (~18km across monitor) adds more roads (two lanes or major single-lane).
Only at 200m/100m (~1km across phone screen) the local roads (including two lane!) have traffic information displayed.
The lack of village names is limited to the car's built-in Android system, it could be a problem with car manufacturer implementation. This was also crosschecked with other people, they all have the same display (no names) shown, but never noticed it as they just follow the navigation hints.
The terrible colour scheme change also changed when traffic information is shown - now the same zoom level shows only the major roads (two-lane), one has to go down to 200m or 100m to see the same streets as were shown already on 1km scale previously.
This requires a lot of zooming/scrolling and prevents an effective use of the information, combining traffic infor with knowledge of local roads...
THIS seems to be the real goal - remove visual clues (no more a map) and force people to rely on directions (navigation only).
I've seen the same problem with in-car Google Maps for those unfortunate manufacturers who went Android route. These maps do not show city/village names and are useless as a map. The user is basically forced to tell Google the destination and rely on the directions.
In-car HERE maps look much better - they have a useful colour-coding, show traffic data (bi-directional!) in low zoom levels already, give you village names so you know where you are.
[Slashdot lame filters reflect sophistication of the programmers, or their decision-makers?]
..and USA agencies are able to access the data collected by USA companies. It's just national interests.
For the "rest of the world": this is a reduction from 8.4 l/100km to 5.9 l/100km
Fully agreed that this is a huge improvement over the traditional setup and should find a way to other vehicles - this technology is not particular to electric vehicles.
For example Audi's Matrix LED lights are good enough to project animated movies (low-res ofc).
You might think about the "shared bus" Ethernet from back when.
Nowadays Ethernet devices are connected mostly point-to-point and it is possible to make a link rx- or tx-only (unidirectional). Such mode can be used for network analyzers/IPS etc.
Try opening winamp.exe
Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to work.
