Taking Flight Without a Smart Phone | Hacker News Reader

Taking Flight Without a Smart Phone

devtails.xyz

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Peak HN: "I use my phone too much" -> "Life is inconvenient without my phone" -> "I must design my own phone from scratch"

If he put an app on it, written in Rust, to monitor your gut bacteria, that would be peak HN.

Only of it can connect to your gut via bluetooth.

And post to web3 via ActivityPub, so you can fetch the RSS feed on some emacs orgmode convolution.

Your gut bacterial status is critical information for your org-roam/Zettelkasten workflow. Oh, you don't capture in detail, and perform analytics on, data about every aspect of your life? What are you, a barbarian?

Pretty sure there's some apps that's designed to reduce social media usage. One turned everything grey and removed notification symbols

Attempting to fix an electronics addiction with an app is also pretty HN.

My Android developer options has Colorspace, Red, Green, Blue, Grayscale. Last one puts everything as grayscale.

As a curiosity, I took some screenshots, and did some video calls, shot some photos. Everything on my phone was grayscale, but each of them on other devices, phones showed all normal colors.

Samsung phones have this built in. I really don't see the point of turning everything to grey?? But I'm of the age where I saved up for my own B/W TV with my newspaper job :)

> I periodically check my phone for the next 5-10 minutes. The driver arrives right on time. I would have had no issue just waiting there.

You had no issue this time. If the driver cancelled you'd still be standing outside and you'd miss your flight. Unlike public transportation, there isn't another arriving in 30 minutes.

This happened much less frequently in the past as it would ruin the taxi company’s reputation. With Uber we can get mad at the driver rather than the company and immediately order another car. So I feel that the convenience has also brought with it inconvenience.

>This happened much less frequently in the past as it would ruin the taxi company’s reputation.

Are you sure about that? I remember taxis being notoriously unreliable before Uber was around.

It seems like that's a major reason Uber took off - passengers could actually see the car was coming, rather than placing a call and just praying the driver didn't pull a no-show.

Anyways, I don't think either of us have anything beyond anecdotal evidence so it's hard to say.

I think basisword is British (as am I). I think Uber came about because taxis in the US sucked. Over here we never had the same problems with no-shows or overcharging (I'm speaking in general, of course this varied a lot).

Uber hasn't done nearly so well in the UK as in the US. Outside of London, you can't find an Uber anywhere and the same local taxi firms from before Uber are still competing, largely based on their local reputation. (Plus now they all have whitelabel apps which have all Uber's features)

> This happened much less frequently in the past as it would ruin the taxi company’s reputation.

Where do you live?

Where I live, this kind of thing happened so frequently that the reputation of the entire taxi industry was ruined; people simply had no alternative. Now that they do - I have not witnessed or heard anyone talking about calling a traditional cab at all in the years since Uber came along. I wonder what the actual market figures look like.

When I need to get a ride someplace, I find myself calling a cab more than uber/lyft these days. The taxis are significantly cheaper than the alternative and are required to take credit cards. A side benefit is that the airport has a fixed price to the city, while rideshare services will often cost double or even triple with demand pricing.

This was not true in any major city, especially on a Friday/Saturday night. No shows were the norm, best bet on even moderately busy nights was to start walking and hope to flag a passing cab.

From a cab driver perspective it makes sense, why travel somewhere empty for a pickup when you can grab a fare on the street?

Maybe it depends on the area? I definitely had taxis not show up before.

I cannot fly early flights anymore. Public transit takes 90 minutes at this time and uber trips are liable to cancel on me if its too early after pretending like they will be picking me up for 15 mins.

Why did those drivers take the fare in the first place? (Don't they usually like going to the airport for a return likely trip?)

They will grab my uber ride while they are looking for a more favorable trip with the lyft app or vis versa probably.

Ok, that might be happening. Though I guess they can't do that kind of thing too often, because Uber (and Lyft etc) cut you off pretty quickly, if you keep cancelling as a driver?

A very honest account by Adam that captures the anxiety of addiction, especially those moments of panic that cause us to fall back into smartphone dependency or use "just this last one time".

This article will resonate with everyone working to take back tech in their lives, but succumbing to the (false but emotionally very real) sense of isolation and disconnection from the so-called "expectations of society".

In Digital Vegan [1] I tried to re-word and make more accessible ideas from a book that I found life changing. It is called "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips [2]. It is written in quite dense, psychotherapeutic language that gives me pause to recommend it.

If there's just one idea I'd love to get across it is within the subtitle "In Praise of the Unlived Life", which is not about Stoicism, abstinence as a virtue or any shallow "self-help" themes. It's deeper and darker, and about dealing with the loss that comes with being a real (true to yourself) person.

People talk about FOMO, a "fear of missing out". And of a fear of being "left behind". But if the person next to you has their head blown off by a bullet, or everyone else is swept away by a tsunami wave, being the one who "missed out" or was "left behind" feels like survivor guilt. It means dealing with a kind of grief about the life you so nearly had, or chose to walk away from. The fact that you got the better deal, even though you know that to be profoundly true, sometimes still doesn't feel like enough. Cult escapees feel this too.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13369538-missing-out

[2] https://digitalvegan.net

“Digital Vegan” is snappier than “Digital Selective Omnivore” for those us consciously trying to control our tech use, but I can’t find a positive term for people like my dad, who don’t directly use the Internet in a world that increasingly demands it. There needs to be a right to paper.

A very specific example: for international air travel, it needs to be acceptable to give an email address from the airline or airport to receive Covid results; alternatively, anyone charging for Covid testing must be required to offer a printout of results (or at least make it very clear when booking the test that results are only available via email).

A right to paper has privacy protections. If you have the right to receive and present required information on paper, you are not being required to carry and use a tracking device.

And I say all this as someone who has had and enthusiastically used smartphones for over a decade, and the Internet since the mid 90s.

Mandie, your dad, and millions of highly intelligent but independent thinkers around the world are represented in this insightful remark by Vint Cerf which I highlighted in a recent HN comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30975725

Digital Rights are, at their very foundation, the right to choose your own technologies, including the right to choose none of the above without prejudicial disadvantage.

> for international air travel, it needs to be acceptable to give an email address

I totally agree with the theme of your comment. However I feel compelled to point out that international air travel itself is not a right, but a privilege.

I empathise. You can get a quick win just by using a Focus mode. Just make sure that it hides notifications on the home screen, and I’ve set it to dim the home screen so that it’s visually different.

The habit of walking past your phone – which, needless to say should not just be in your pocket all day – and hitting the screen to see what’s come in is neatly broken. Because now you can’t see what’s come in, you have to stop, bend over, unlock it. Now that’s an actual thing that you have to do.

That’s enough to cause my brain to say, no, you don’t need to do that. And I’ve found the needless-check-of-notifications cycle breaks itself quite naturally.

This assumes you can just leave your phone somewhere. I’m working from home so it can just sit in a corner of the office. Bonus points if you hide it in a drawer.

Edit: also, this lets anyone messaging you know that you’re in a DND-like mode. When I see this, I think, okay cool, don’t expect an immediate response. All good.

I suspect that many people default to enabling way too many notifications by default. I have almost nothing turned in especially if I’m not in the app. Mostly just texts which I don’t use a lot, calls-rare, and calendar.

Totally! No notifications by default and then if some are necessary, copious use of Do Not Disturb-type features, and if you need to see things quickly, a smartwatch with the most limited notifications you can get away with. It's still just half the battle.

I confess that I was hoping to read the word "book" in this article.

I can relate. I spent some time using a simple feature phone. It was impressive how quickly and effectively I could slow down. I felt more present, read more, my thinking become clearer. But there were annoyances: my country is in a similar path as China's in terms of transfering payments and internet banking to smartphones; restaurants are more and more adopting QR codes to access the menu as a very inconvenient, unreadable menu in PDF; certain commercial and government services got very hard to get unless you're using a smartphone using their apps; among others. So I recurred to a midterm: quitted most of my social media and did some habit-changing exercises to interrupt my instincts of getting the phone and wasting too much time in it. It hasn't been as effective as my feature phone period, but it's been a good compromise.

Fyi, that is the town of Squamish, half way between Vancouver and Whistler. It is a legendary area for flying and probably the most popular rock climbing area in canada. But to call its airport small means this guy doesnt do much general aviation flying. It is at least paved. There are dozens of smaller strips dotted around BC.

https://squamish.ca/business-and-development/real-estate/air...

A funny thing about Squamish: even though it is right between Vancouver and Whistler, basically a highway town, if you draw a strait line between it and Alaska you will only cross two roads. Canada is vast. In BC that vastness starts the moment you step out of Vancouver.

But by airplane traffic Squamish is pretty small, any of the general aviation fields in the Vancouver area see a lot more traffic (boundary bay, Langley, Abbotsford, etc).

I personally don't know of anyone that flies fixed wing there, only helicopter operations in the whistler Squamish area.

It is not the smartphones. It is the user.

I am using my phone to control my entire house: Cameras, door alarms, motion detectors, laundry machines, dishwasher, smart door bell, sprinkler system, smart lights, thermostat, smart plugs for fans and other utilities, garage door, solar panel, backyard garden controllers as well as their logging system.

This is only for the house, I also check my finances (banking, stocks, credit), all client communications (slack, skype, whatsapp, ringcentral, keepass). My health applications for smart stuff like garmin watch and garmin heart rate, bicycle sensors, weight scale, for work: office apps including microsoft and google. My dog greatly benefits from the apps I use including ordering his food with two taps, his schedules for vet visits with direct vet contact thru the app, training schedules, etc. I can listen to music in my car the way I want thanks to Spotify, or listen to great podcast like this american life directly thru their app. I can identify songs with shazam. The list can go forever.

Just no social. I tried not using it for a day after these random people posts; it just made things inconvenient and I missed my schedules. I feel like I am maximizing my tool.

Users who are "scrolling" all day can also abuse drugs, alcohol, coffee, or other things. It is the character. Don't blame the tool.

What a horrible comment; totally without compassion or empathy; totally self-congratulating.

What do you propose people who find themselves unhappily addicted to smartphones do? Just feel bad about their lack of "character" and wish they were you?

That someone disagrees with where the root of the problem lies does not mean they are lacking compassion nor empathy.

> What do you propose people who find themselves unhappily addicted to smartphones do? Just feel bad about their lack of "character" and wish they were you?

How do you fix a problem by mistaking its cause? Luck?

Personally I'd suggest they uninstall their top apps by interruption. Aggressively turn off notifications.

I agree addiction is hard.

What is horrible about it? Just because some people cannot control themselves, should we support banning smartphones?

They're not saying that everyone should get rid of their phone and that we should throw them all on a big bonfire. They're just saying that as a matter of personal choice they decided to not get a smartphone, as it fit better with their personality. And now they've discovered that it's actually expected you almost need to have this tool that they found is bad for them.

Would you push a glass of champagne on someone you knew was a recovering alcoholic for a toast and mock them for not taking it, or would you make sure that champagne flutes with orange juice were right beside the booze?

Imagine smartphone as a knife. You can cut throat's of puppies and people, or make world class food and become the best chef in the world. I know so many people who do not have any issues with smartphones. Yet I know people that abuse alcohol and other substances.

Smartphone OSes are clearly designed for abuse though.

The whole UI is practically built around full screen modal apps where the user scrolls through content. Installing community made software and maintaining things yourself is artificially made extremely difficult.

I could go on, but there is a legitimate problem with mobile OSes that previous PDA OSes didn't have.

This is exactly why I have stayed clear of them. For the last ~15 years I have used SHR, then Maemo and now PureOS, and it feels like the device is there for me, not the other way around.

A half-measure I've considered is dropping my iPhone in favor of (only) a cellular Apple Watch. This would allow me to call Uber, check my email, and do most of the other things expected by modern society, but harder to loose hours to the device.

If you're smart about what you permit on it, it works well. I only have messages, phone calls (rare events anymore), informational things (weather, maps, and such), some audiobooks and music, and tracking things (for sports and athletics). When I leave the phone behind, I'm still reachable but find myself much more engaged with wherever I am than when I have the phone. Even better if you leave the headphones behind (which I don't always during exercises and such, but do the rest of the time).

Unfortunately Uber recently dropped support for their Apple Watch app.

it's hard to imagine such as small screen consuming more than a few minutes of my life at most.

As someone who's spent twenty hours over the last two weeks playing a Funkey S, I wouldn't bet on that.

Okay, well, sure, I suppose humanity can find a way to be distracted by anything. But I think it would be a lot easier to ignore. Even the Nokia in the article is capable of playing Snake.

Tamagotchi called and laughs

The user should operate the phone, not the other way around.

I have all notifications turned off except incoming voice calls and SMS messages. Anything that comes in via Whatsapp / Signal / email I will see when I happen to open those applications. I don't have many apps and I don't allow notifications from them. So I can take a look at Google Maps if I need to, or add something in my todo list, and not be bombarded with messages and events.

I do browse news while in public transit, for example, but I'd be reading something anyway. What matters is that I choose to open and use my phone whenever it's convenient/sensible for me and not the other way around.

I still remember the excitement of dialling into a BBS and seeing there are 10 new messages, then downloading them home and reading them via an offline reader. That excitement is gone if you see everything right away. I still try to create moments where I go through all my messages, and ration those moments so that my life won't be ruined because of notifications and I could actually enjoy the "you've got mail" moment when it happens.

It's frustrating how very, very large dumbphones are.

Dimensions on this device are 131mm x 53mm @ 13.7mm thick ... and that 13.7mm thick is almost comically thick. This is for a device that does a very small subset of what a smartphone does and does not benefit from screen real estate.

The tradeoff we should be making is smarts vs. size ... but in this case, you get the lack of a smartphone but also weirdly large and ... comically large in one dimension.

If you're wondering what should be possible in this product space, look at the MOTO F3 (FONE)[1] which is 16 years old and had dimensions of 114mm / 47mm / 9mm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

There are smaller dumbphones than the Nokia 6300. For example the Nokia 2720 Flip is smaller wile closed. The Punkt MP02 phone is also a bit smaller. There are also credit card sized dumb phones like the LightPhone (pricey), the Kyocera KY-01L (Japan exclusive) and the Talkase (defunct). But you are right this phones like the Nokias and the Punkts are a bit thicker by around 5-7 millimeter than the MOTO F3. Looking at the phones it seems to me than it's because of design choice. The Nokias have photo capabilities (not the MOTO) and the Punkt have a reinforced plastic body.

That QVGA camera probably needs a lot of room.

Joke, but also not a joke due to different market pressures on components like that vs. the high end ones.

I bought an iPad recently (4 months ago?) and moved all "content" apps to it from my iPhone, and blocked all news sites on my phone. It's not perfect, but it's been pretty helpful to train myself to use the "fun" device (which I don't have on me when out and about) for fun and to keep the phone as a communicator only

Ironically the OP can just use airplane mode and probably get the same benefits as if they built one from scratch.

The problem is the lack of discipline the author has in the first place will just lead them to turning off airplane mode "every once in a while" until they just leave it off and are back to start.

I used the Jelly 2 for 6 months https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-2

Highly recommend it for people who want to get a smartphone break. It's a "proper" android with maps, google pay and surprisingly all apps run on it. But the small size of the screen (and the keyboard) somehow does not emit dopamine when casual/mindless browsing and the urge to check things quickly disappears like if you don't have a smartphone in your pocket. Yet it's sufficient for all the apps and features if you need them occassionally.

I switched back to an iphone after moving to a city where i have to use a smartphone a lot more for uber, food, maps, payments and entertainment for long commutes.

> […] a city where i have to use a smartphone a lot more for uber, food, maps, payments and entertainment for long commutes.

That sounds dystopian. I can understand how a smartphone might be required if you are exclusively dependant on private ride sharing companies for transport, but the rest? Ordering food can be done on a normal computer, or just by calling or going out (buying food to cook yourself just requires going to a supermarket). Maps exist on paper, or on any computing device with a browser. Portable music players and paper books are still a thing for entertainment.

Does paying for services require a smartphone where you live?

Not really required but a lot more convenient, even more so if you don't speak the local language.

My dad, in his 70s, has never used a smartphone and barely used a computer. I act as his personal assistant, booking flight tickets and managing stuff that comes up along the way, but there’s an increasing assumption that the passenger has a smartphone. At some point, I’m worried that his credit card issuer or an airline is going to block a purchase because I’m using his credit card (with his full knowledge and permission!) in a different country - VPN would just look even sketchier.

I’m glad the author mentioned email-only Covid test results - that’s just another thing I’m going to have coordinate with printer-having family near him.

My dad really doesn’t want a smartphone, and having seen his peers engrossed with theirs like stereotypical teenagers when I visited his Sunday School class a few years ago, I’m not sorry.

One of the grocery stores near me is impossible to park at without a smart phone to link into their services for payment.

That’s the kind of nonsense I’m talking about. My dad wouldn’t even begin to understand why he couldn’t put his truck there.

> our current society makes it very difficult to live without a smart phone

I call baloney. It's not a matter of society, it's what kind of life style you prefer. I've never owned a mobile phone in my life, and I consider myself a happy part of society.

A phone is just a tiny computer. Everything these days are electronic, so getting by without it is annoying.

Although, I think you could disable all notifications and train yourself to not impulsively look.

There is a shockingly large group of us trying to figure this one out. See reddit.com/r/dumbphones community as an example.

did this person just completely *miss the point* of bioshock?

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