Removed means they were there before which means comparison to other maps means nothing. It's possible Apple never had them in the first place. It's completely unverifiable with the link or your links.
OSM is a foundational data layer for GIS. If you're building a mapping service, you're almost certainly using OSM augmented by satellite imagery and other sources to find population zones that OSM has not found yet.
If you look at the Apple Maps satellite layer, you see thousands of structures spread across the area.
It is a reasonable assumption that these population centers were labeled and Apple (or one of its data partners) has withdrawn the labels.
> If you look at the Apple Maps satellite layer, you see thousands of structures spread across the area.
and if stop fixating on South Lebanon and go to other places where israel is not invading and destroying villages, let's say Syria, you'll notice the exact same issue: https://imgur.com/8p1ANAZ
so your argument actually go against what you attempt to demonstrate.
now why is apple bad at maps in this area and possibly other areas elsewhere in the world is a different matter.
My family name comes from a Christian town in the mountains of Lebanon. I'm positive it was previously on Apple Maps (I've
shown it to people before), but now has no label. It still exists on other mapping services and if I search on DuckDuckGo, the top info summary includes an Apple Maps widget with the town. Clicking on it takes me to Apple Maps with the pin in the right place, without a label.
So it's clear that it was there and is no longer there. I'm not making a judgement as to why it's no longer there (the post on X makes an unsubstantiated claim that it's intentional). Could be a bug for all I know. I'm unwilling to make the leap that it's some malicious attempt without actual evidence. I can only verify that it no longer has a label.
I noticed a post on Reddit that claims Apple Maps only briefly had small towns listed. It's possible when I showed the town off in Apple Maps it could have been during that window. I looked through my texts and found when I recently shared the town a couple months ago it was on Google Maps because I was sharing a picture that was posted on Google Maps (my mom sent me an old photo of an overlook of the town and I sent a modern picture with the same vantage). To my knowledge Apple never had any local photos (just the town label; however briefly).
Since I don't look at the town often, I'm certainly willing to consider that they once had a data broker for the maps that they no longer have access to (or possibly trialed a data broker). Anyway, just thought I'd add as much context as possible, as it's definitely more nuanced than the social media posts imply.
Why do you say unverified? You can activate the hybrid satellite view and look around. There are many towns and cities showing up on satellite view without any label. That's easily verifiable.
What's not easily verifiable is (1) whether they were removed, in the sense that they were there before and now are not; (2) if so, when; and (3) if so, why.
The obvious interpretation—that they've been removed for political reasons connected to the current war—would require knowing all 3 of these, and we don't know those things yet.
I don't know if Southern Lebanon town names were removed or never there. In either case it seems quite odd that the southern part of Lebanon has been left so void of labelling.
Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?
and you can easily verify that this issue is not only in South Lebanon as it is also the case in Syria: https://imgur.com/8p1ANAZ and everywhere in Lebanon
so the verification process you suggest actually disproves the claim.
I believe OP is asking for a before/after of Apple Maps, because just seeing the map now isn't telling us whether Apple previously disclosed the villages and towns. I'm sure OP isn't thinking that the region is full of random roads out in the wilderness leading to nothing, which is the wrong conclusion the downvoters are probably leaping at.
You can very easily verify the claim by following the link. Other than three major cities, there are no agglomeration listed in Lebanon. Other countries have detailed maps.
Is anyone stopping you from doing that? Do you need my permission? If so, granted. I think you should spend whatever effort you want to verify claims if you believe that would be of value.
I agree with you that it isn't clear what's going on here. People are giving it an interpretation that feels obvious given the current context, and we don't yet know whether this interpretation is true.
Usually the obvious interpretation of an isolated internet factoid turns out not to be true.
1) It's terrible that this has happened. People who do this are evil.
2) It's atrocious that Sam makes it seem like any investigative reporting into him as a major public figure at the head of one of the 5 most important companies in the world is somehow responsible for it.
3) Sam is always playing the smol bean victim for sympathy points. To be clear, he is absolutely the victim of an atrocious crime. However, this post is not done for any reason other than to continue the exact same playbook he has for the last N years in order to manipulate public opinion to his favor. This post will do nothing to stop deranged, evail people but it may make people feel sympathy for him.
In fairness your calculation looks at the most expensive element of the DC but ignores all of the associated parts required to utilize the H100: CPU, memory, cooling, etc. No to say that that flips the calculation (I don't have the answer), but it does leave a lot of power out.
Let's be generous and pretend the rest of the hardware is free but double the energy budget of the H100 to account for all of it along with cooling. You're still at only $1k/yr; $10k over 10 years, or 25% of the TCO (ignoring all other costs).
"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.
Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.
It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.
“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.
That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.
Ran some of my internal benchmarks against this and I'm very unimpressed. I don't think this moves them into the OAI v Anthropic v Gemini conversation at all.
Major analytical errors in their response to multiple of my technical questions.
Playing with this some more and it's actively not good. Just basic mathematical errors riddling responses. Did some basic adversarial testing where its responses are analyzed by Gemini and Gemini is finding basic math errors across every relatively (relative to Opus, Gemini or GPT can handle) simple ask I make. Yikes.
I have the opposite experience: random HN/Reddit comments saying “this sucks” or “whoa this is a huge improvement” are the only benchmark that means anything. Standard benchmarks are all gamed and don’t capture the complexity of the real world.
I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.
EDIT: I'm at -2 for stating a fact.
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