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Is there any evidence of such an elaborate scheme? Are voters looking on Google Maps to validate claims about the fires, in some kind of mass trend that produce

by brookst 5mo ago

Is there any evidence of such an elaborate scheme? Are voters looking on Google Maps to validate claims about the fires, in some kind of mass trend that produces evidence? Because it really sounds like a conspiracy theory draped over a pretty tangential fact. But I’d love to be wrong if there is evidence (“Google did something totally different but also bad” is not evidence).

trunkiedozer 5mo ago
[flagged]
- skobes 5mo ago
  The map tile backend is in the middle of a multi year effort to migrate from the Flippity Service to the Floopity Service. The FlippityFlooper was believed to have finished the necessary format conversions for all map tiles in the US and Canada but 5% of the data sources were missed due to a bug that was discovered after the creator of FlippityFlooper had been promoted and changed teams, so those Floopity tiles are filled in from an older source. A junior engineer vibe-coded a stopgap fallback called FloopityFlipper that redirects to legacy Flippity Service when Floopity staleness is detected, but that redirect broke three months later due to a change in an injected dependency's experiment configuration. A bug was auto-filed and marked P2 by an overworked product manager who slightly misunderstood the scope, but the FloopityFlipper engineer will probably have a look once they are back from paternity leave. I made all of that up but it's more plausible than conspiracy theories.
  - trunkiedozer 5mo ago
    [dead]