this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Watching these corporate collaborators fall all over themselves to enact the profoundly stupid and short-sighted whims of a sodden, rotting corpse when they could just…not do that…has been one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
The sad thing is, thanks to their capture of both parties, I have no conceit they’ll actually experience any consequences for it. We have handed power to some of the least-deserving ghouls the Wharton School of Business ever squeezed out.
Hi, I work in the map industry. We generally don't get to decide what names to use for features. We apply what the local official name is (to simplify). That's why if you're in country A, feature X might be named something different than if you're in country B. You can imagine this would (and has) caused many conflicts around the world if we didn't display the local official name. (Switch your region via VPN and you can see this in action)
If Google renamed it to Gulf of America, no Google didn't, not really ... They just inserted the new official name for that feature according to GNIS.
The Google Maps change does only seems to be visible for people with US IPs. But I assume that Apple Maps, Mapquest, Mapbox, Bing (TIL Bing has a map feature), etc all use GNIS to label features too, right? None of them have changed the name yet. Seems unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream, and let Google drink their milkshake like this.
According to this Wired article:
Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated. It’s now 23:40 EDT Sunday, and GNIS still says Lake Ontario…so yeah, I think this is on them. Dear Leader told them to jump, and they rushed to show him how high they could get.