| > It would be unimaginable to have the urge to look something up, It's not popular because this is very reductive and dismissive of the problem almost to the point of dishonesty. Many modern functions need an application and there is little or no alternative. Some examples: QR codes - lots of restaurants don't have a physical menu and need a QR code scan. This behavior extends well beyond restaurants as well. Keys - Lots of cars support lock/unlock and put a ton of features behind an app. While not strictly necessary, it's incredibly convenient if you're in the inevitable (and sometimes very expensive/difficult to remediate) situation everyone eventually faces when you lose your keys, or lock them in the car. Some garages and apartment complexes only support getting in by app, and I've seen this in hotels as well. Banking - doing many things at banks nowadays requires confirming you are you via push notification to your phone. Lots of MFA is app-based as well. I could not do my job without a phone. Navigation - I don't always carry a garmin or thomas guide around with me when I'm walking around an unfamiliar city, and it would be pretty ridiculous of me to do so. Probably could come up with a lot of other things. Without a phone it's not really possible to function in much of the modern world. There is more to the app ecosystem than tiktok, maybe that's the miss here. |
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| ▲ | juris 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > QR codes:
haha 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. > keys + mfa:
this one is a tricky one for me. thinking to go to web-only mfa fwiw and go full RMS with just a laptop and a hotspot. does he even use a hotspot? haha > 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, doom scrolling + time wasted, enshittified content, and people having near constant access to you at all times (remember when it was rude to call past 8p?) that i think it's time to just leave your phone at home...like in ye olde days with your landline (you should keep a phone and gps on and at least pretend that you're a normie) and i'm an app developer 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 mentioned the mudi v2 and sim swapping with https://github.com/srlabs/blue-merle | |
| ▲ | gniv 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > > 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. | |
| ▲ | zikduruqe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32545974 | |
| ▲ | PyWoody 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Paper maps before that. If you were in AAA you could get a "trip map" that was a complete route with turn by turn directions and a spiral bound, printed map that you paged through as you traveled, but paper maps worked well. Not as convenient as a phone but not terrible either. | | |
| ▲ | PyWoody 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The AAA maps are pretty great. I keep one of their spiral bound maps of my region in my trunk just in case. |
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| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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". | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | JohnMakin 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | everdrive 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I appreciate the response, and I would argue that in at least some cases “well, if you cant do that, it’s just dumb anyway.” is totally valid. With regard to the job, and the banking, I agree. I need to have OTP on my phone and I haven't tried to bank in person for a while. We have two young kids, and once things calm down I'm going to see if we can swap to a local credit union. The decision will be predicated on whether I can do everything in person. With regard to the phone, I think the softer version of my argument would be that you can install the bare minimum number of apps, and otherwise just set the phone on a table and not carry it around with you. If you're worried about government tracking, power your phone off when you drive to work. Your work itself (and all your logins) will reveal your location, so it's not really as if powering your phone back on once you get to work is much of a detriment. The same is true for banking. Even if you must use the smartphone, just leave the phone off / or in airplane mode and then just do the banking at your desk at home. In fairness to you, I'm pretty sure I failed a job interview once because I asked if I needed a smartphone for the job. I think my point would be that with the way things are going, it's becoming more and more important to figure out how to avoid as much of the smartphone as possible. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > The decision will be predicated on whether I can do everything in person. I don't want to do everything in person. It's frankly amazing that I can deposit a check on my phone, from my home, and don't have to go to a bank branch to deposit it anymore. For close to 20 years now, my primary banking has been through banks that don't have a physical presence at all, let alone in my city. And I don't mind it that way at all; in fact I like it, because these banks focus harder on making things more convenient for me. Your attitude here seems to be that if other people's preferred method for doing something doesn't conform to your preferred method, then the other people must be wrong somehow. That's not a reasonable way to be looking at this. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My credit union still offers walk-in or drive-thru in-person service for everything. |
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| Just one more example here, which I think is a big one for some people - chat apps. Without Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal, I can't really use my phone as telecommunications tool with friends and colleagues, because everyone is on them. The group chats are where a lot of discussion happens, so I can't just switch to SMS/calls. |
