Totally. Although since my previous comment, the official status page has been updated to mention issues with some non-Old components: "Native Mobile Apps" "Vote Processing" "Comment Processing" so I suppose the DownDetector spike is an unknown combination of people using Old and people using those other things. I assume New web/desktop reddit is able to operate when those functions are degraded by reading from stale cache / faraway regions / other fallbacks, while Old reddit is more directly coupled to those degraded functions.
Yep I specifically keep Google Maps around to find restaurants even though I far prefer the audible navigation from Apple Maps nowadays once I actually want to drive there.
i do the same. Plus Apple Maps handles audio and lock screen much better. Apple must be calling a private API to manage lock screen during driving. When I drive with Google Maps, the screen locks and blocks navigation
I've noticed that Apple Maps incorporated their own rating system some time ago (I want to say within the last one or two years); it's simple, just asking you to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on certain businesses, sometimes with a bit of granularity (e.g., rate the atmosphere, food, value, and service separately). There appears to be some threshold for how many ratings they have when they switch from displaying Yelp reviews to their own stuff, although it's not clear what the heuristic is.
Anyway, tl;dr: I think they're working on replacing Yelp.
Especially since there were apparently complaints that Yelp was doing pay-to-play with good reviews for a while, which diminishes the truthiness value of any reviews:
(Anecdotally, I also seem to be seeing this on Google Maps now! It seems like highly rated but local restaurants don't even show up on the map at all until I zoom in literally to the building -- perhaps because the owners don't pay for ads? Crazy if true... and Bing maps seem to not have all the restaurants or ratings, and you can't seem to filter based on rating either, which seems like a massive Bing fail. Maybe the review apps were always destined to crumble under a business model that encourages dishonesty on both sides..)
I was going to share this story but you beat me to it. They're still claiming this in tours ~2017.
The building was called the Foreign Languages Building until very recently and is now called the Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building.
Relevant info from the UIHistory site:
"Located on the site of the former Old Entomology Building, ground was broken on the Foreign Language Building (FLB) on December 18, 1968.
A popular myth is that the building's distinctive architecture was a result of its being designed to house a supercomputer on campus called Plato. The building was supposedly designed so that if it was bombed, the building's shell would fall outwards, protecting the supercomputer on the inside. It is also rumored that the building's interior layout was a result of trying to confuse Soviet spies and prevent them from stealing secrets from the supercomputer.
In reality, the building's architecture is not actually all that unique and was a popular style of the day. In fact, just a few blocks to the west, one may find the Speech and Hearing Sciences Building, which a 2-story clone of the building. Plato itself was real, but refered not to a secret government program, but rather to the first "modern" electronic learning system, the forbearer of course software like WebCT and Mallard. The mainframe computer that ran the Plato system was located in north campus, in a building which used to reside on the west side of the Bardeen Quad." [0]
Plato was in fact real... I used it many times! Looking back, it was pretty impressive technology for its day but was quickly becoming obsolete. I hated having to walk all the way to campus to get some physics units in that I missed.
I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war, I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I stopped getting Plato assignments!
Plato was an early interactive learning system, the supercomputer was called the Illiac-IV.
The building was called the "Center for Advanced Computation". I don't know if the computer was in that building, but I don't think they were exactly hiding it from the Soviets.
A version, or two, ago they've introduced their own rating system where you can thumb's up/down certain criteria (which elude me, right now. but, of the "ambiance", "food quality", "service", etc. variety). So, I imagine they're looking to ween off of Yelp for their rating's system.
National Auto Dealers Association (NADA). Once there was a large number of these independent dealers, they had the political sway to get it made into law.
