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Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

vaidik.bearblog.dev

221–230 of 395 posts

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#221

My phone screen was cracked, I had to leave it with the repair place for an hour or two. It was glorious. I leisurely strolled past shops, sat down to eat something without being distracted, and generally enjoyed being outside. I had to ask someone for the time. I resolved to go without phones more often, as it made me feel connected to me environment more, with less stress and reduced absentmindedness. Of course I n…

I'll provide counter example

I didn't use smartphone till very late 2021

now I enjoy going for 1-2h walks waaay more cuz I can just listen to music and disconnect myself from the people around and focus on thinking about various stuff

Sure sitting at train and thinking about your life instead of spamming on HN is likely a good thing, but sometimes it's just awkward - depends who you sit with

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country does not require you to carry an id at all times where outside your house? Most countries do and most don't even accept alternate id's like driver's license.

is it even enforced? my country "requires" it, but I never have my id with me unless I need it e.g going to gov office

I’ve heard tales in my state it is “required” but only ever seen people slapped with that charge when the cops weren’t quite able to pin the original charges they’d pulled them over for.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#223
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there literally no alternative? Round these parts you can pay in cash (with no change given). I've heard people complain they were forced to use the app when they just didn't have any cash. (I have to be aware of the alternatives because I don't have a smartphone. It's not been an insurmountable problem yet.)

No alternatives and here's the Councils announcement: https://www.richmond.gov.uk/services/parking/parking_machine... Some have extended to non-residential areas. One of the biggest parking apps says this: Q: "I have no network coverage and need to park?" A: "Move quickly to an area with better network coverage and complete your parking transaction with PayByPhone... Pay for your parking via other methods such as Pay…

Lol - “move quickly”

Tangentially - I’m always astonished at the lack of self-awareness of many municipal/utility service providers - they pretend like I’ve sought out their service and WANT to engage with them, when in fact I just want them to provide me the thing I need (or am obligated to do) with as little hassle as possible…

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#225
post #110

Why are they still called phones? I think the phone function is one of the lesser used ones. More appropriate would be Smartcamera, if you don't want to call it a computer

I think phones calls still serve as infrastructure of last resort. It’s main downside is also it’s benefit, the pressure for immediate interactive response and attention.

It’s preferred to call a restaurant to see if they have the wallet or card you lost. Your flight got canceled? Best call to get the quickest list of other flight options. Typing while driving is right out, but calling is not, even if a voice call is arguably still distracting.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#226

Personally I find modern technology to be very liberating. When I was a child, even going around my own city was a stressful thing. What if I get lost? What if I run out of money for the train? How do I know I got the bus in the right direction? (the darn things didn't announce stops at all). The first times I traveled involved printing a stack of papers including names, addresses, and maps. Getting to a hotel in a c…

Unless your day-to-day is so extraordinary that you don't have any kind of routine, it seems that you are using the exceptional cases to justify the rule?

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#228
post #72

I'm part of the new generation and I think the opposite. I am obsessed with my phone and the Internet. And I don't think it's bad. It's extremely stimulating in a way real life is orders of magnitude worse at. Point of reference, born around 2000. There's no going back for me. I want my phone at all times to have access to billions of possible thoughts, pictures, memes. It's literally a god like power.

Trust me, there are also plenty millennials, gen-x and boomers hooked on the internet and their phones as well. Plenty.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want. It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods. I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the…

Little nitpick: "the algorithm" does not even find the things "most people wants"; it finds the things some executive or other decided it was the most convenient to find taking into account the needs of the corporation only. Yes, there is theoretically some way to return, up to some degree, what people would find useful; but the decisions are not made by the people fiddling with the algorithms. Those people have thei…

Even a little research would show that Google is far more sophisticated than that in tuning its search engine.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#230
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want. It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods. I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the…

ironic. search engine optimization, rather than minimizing the entropy of search, maximized it..

It's not like the people at Google didn't know about Goodhart's Law. Somehow I don't think SEO was ever meant to improve search results.
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