alt Hacker News>QR codes
Those restaurants are worthless
>Keys
Carrying your car key does not count as inconvenient
>Banking
Agreed, and this is a problem, but you can just do your banking at home without carrying around your smart phone. This is a case where the industry is forcing a choice on consumers. I'm considering joining a local credit union for this reason.
> Navigation
How did people manage this prior to 2007?
Replies
> How did people manage this prior to 2007?
MapQuest? It sucked.
Google Maps does allow you to download areas to your device that can be used offline, too.
> How did people manage this prior to 2007?
You just looked at a map. People used to be good at looking at maps, and remembering cardinal directions prior to GPS units. We have unfortunately lost that sense of natural direction.
This is goalpost shifting and ignored much of the point of my post. this same thinking can be applied recursively to “well, if you cant do that, it’s just dumb anyway.”
And you’re flat out wrong about banking, there are things and situations that require you physically entering one. And yes it is a situation where society is forcing the decision, that’s my entire point - I as an individual cannot apply the non remedy of “just do everything on your computer, ldo” because society has stripped that choice from me. unless the prescription you’re giving is to withdraw from society - which is only proving my point.
I’d also hardly describe my job as a minor inconvenience.
I see these types of arguments a lot on this site and I am very confused where they are coming from. It’s almost like the implication is you have no right to complain about the privacy nightmare if you participate in using things that are necessary to participate in society. You can have reasonable privacy and these tools at the same time, it’s not an impossibility.
> How did people manage this prior to 2007?
Paper maps. Or even (in the earlier 00s) looking up directions on MapQuest or whatever, and then printing those directions out. I don't want to keep printing out directions; what a huge waste of paper that would be. Paper maps are doable, but awkward to use, and can easily become out of date. You need to have addresses (or at least nearby landmarks or cross-streets) for everywhere you want to go, because paper maps have a very limited set of points-of-interest on them.
> Those restaurants are worthless
That's just, like, your opinion, man. Your criticisms seem to mostly amount to "people should just abandon the various conveniences and niceties that smartphones provide, because there are alternatives, even in cases where those alternatives are incredibly inconvenient".
Yes, it's idiotic that we're subjected to so much tracking when we carry our phones around. But the response shouldn't be "let's just become a luddite and not take advantage of modern technology". It should be "wow, this makes me fucking angry; we need to fix our laws so this sort of thing doesn't happen".
> QR codes: haha agreed. those QR codes coincide with mandatory post covid tip rate and inflated prices; whenever I tip it's 15-18% cash, and direct to waiter. i don't eat at places that invest in insta (food for the eyes) instead of real food.
> keys + mfa: this one is a tricky one for me. thinking to go do web-only mfa fwiw and go full RMS with just a laptop and a hotspot. does he even use a hotspot? haha. as far as SMS MFA goes... maybe tailscale out an adb session to your real cellphone at home. feels brittle, but so is sms mfa. edit: actually i'll just forward SMS to myself via e-mail; this is what your financial advisor does, since SMS is heavily regulated in fintech
> nav: yeah when smartphones first came out i just hated every design aspect about them (stupidly fragile screens at the time), but the most compelling reason to switch at the time was navigation. i don't mind printing mapquest again or just using a dedicated gps.
it's the value prop of having "all the world's knowledge at your fingertips" versus:
stupid obsoletion practices + lithium mining, corpogovernment surveillance + tracking, eroding mental health, porn, gacha games, cellphone thumb + turtle neck, doom scrolling + time wasted, enshittified content, the reverse flynn-effect, infuriating typing ux on both ios and android, and people having near constant access to you at all times (remember when it was rude to call past 8p?)
does this thing really make you happy?
that i think it's time to just leave your phone at home...like in ye olde days with your landline and i'm an app developer. (you should keep the phone and gps on and at least pretend that you're a normie).
anyone in construction really like their ruggedized SIP phone and can recommend a good voip system (ie they trust their voip provider) with e2e encryption that I can connect a wifi 6 mobile router to? someone a few months ago on hn mentioned the mudi v2 and sim swapping with https://github.com/srlabs/blue-merle
> > Navigation
> How did people manage this prior to 2007?
We had a map for each county. My wife would switch them when we crossed county boundaries and would give directions. We still got lost. It was romantic.