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Personally I try to turn GPS off as much as possible but I also frequently consult it even for routes that I know well. And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there. Last weekend I was frustrated that Google was unaware of a road reroute but that is leaps and bounds ahead of the days of paper maps. Yeah, there's a lot of garbage on the Internet but it's also remarkably easy to find high-quality information.

The change over even 10 years ago is also really dramatic for how I use public transit, since I not only know where I am but where the vehicles I'm planning on getting into are so I can reroute that way. It's only in the past 5 years or so that the data has gotten reliable enough that I trust it to use in that way.

I agree that GPS and maps/directions are a magnificent improvement.

I remember what it was like to get lost, and be lost for hours, late at night nothing open, no one but unsavory characters out.

I remember how hard long trips could be even with maps or trip-tiks from AAA (which were awesome)

GPS enables all sort logistics, it allows transport companies to ensure trucks are driven safely, to know when and where goods in transit are there is an entire world of productivity improvement right there.

It'll also route you around major delays if it can. This saved me a three hour tailback only weeks ago (arriving at work after lunch would have been...irritating) and literally last week I didn't bother to set it on the way home and ended up in 30 minutes of standing traffic that it would have told me to avoid (there's an alternate route that's 10 minutes slower, but once you're in the wrong road you're committed and can't go back).

But you need to be aware of the downsides of becoming inadvertently over-reliant on GPS [1]

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

No offense, but that’s not really a downside of GPS, people make bad decisions all the time tech or no tech.

> Personally I try to turn GPS off as much as possible but I also frequently consult it even for routes that I know well.

I'm not saying it's not useful. I'm just saying it's not as big of an advance as it's being made out to be.

> And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there.

I've above clarified, but my "garbage" comment was not referring to maps, but other kinds of material you'd fine online. Maps are actually one of the few types of online references that tends to have very little garbage.

I went on a trip across Europe without checking any maps in advance and without any maps in my car. Multiple times. I never visited those countries before and arrived at precise locations, on time, without any kind of error.

For me that’s incredible and very reliable. Thousand of kilometers to arrive in a place I’ve never been before without memorizing the road in advance is innovation. My dad never could’ve done that at my age.

Reading this comment and most of the thread, what is missing is the human part of the experience. GPS directions are terrific, indeed, but you are choosing (by not "checking any maps in advance") to completely pass up the opportunity to explore, to wander, to discover.

You went all the way to Europe and didn't even look at a map? You could have been 100 yards from some amazing place and never even known it. Your dad never would have done that.

Technology has generally eliminated the worst scenarios -- getting totally lost or stranded -- but also generally eliminated the best -- discovering something new, an unexpected detour. I can also speak from experience and say that I barely remember the trips in which every detail was planned and executed exactly according to plan. The times when I was lost, or had no place to sleep, often turned out to be the best and most memorable trips of my life. Actually being forced to interact with other human beings has its upsides.

On the contrary, it’s been way easier to change course and visit things along the way because I didn’t have to worry about losing the memorized road. In the GPS there is POI as well which help not to miss amazing spots along the way … I mean how easier could it be when I change the itinerary because I’m seeing a Castel in the horizon and not worry about having to wonder how to get back on tracks …

A GPS makes it even easier to discover the world

I have an entire category "Nice to visit" in my Google maps, it has a distinct marking and I do visit those places when I am around. There are thousands of amazing places in Europe and it would be a full time job to visit them every time you have an opportunity. You just can't visit them all while on the trip, because you will never get to the destination.

Yes, because you've consulted a map (google maps) and created your list. My comment was not addressing situations like yours. The original poster specifically said "without checking any maps in advance and without any maps in my car."

Not only gps, but just being able to find nearby hotels and check vacancy and prices. When I was a kid, we would pull in at multiple hotels and someone would have to go in and ask for prices and if they had vacancy. My mom would usually go and ask for the price because my dad felt like they gave her better prices. In fact, a few times they did - as he sent her in after he asked.

So not only convenience and leveling the information playing field, but pricing fairness. I'm sure quite a few minorities would have some testimonials about the benefits of getting quoted the same price as everyone else.

> ...we would pull in at multiple hotels and someone would have to go in and ask for prices and if they had vacancy.

Did they say they had only room left and 3 people were looking at it right now, despite it being obvious the hotel was only half occupied?

Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent. Also, there were travel agents (a rare breed these days) who could assist with booking flights, hotels, and sightseeing. There seems to be advantages and disadvantages to each era.

However, I largely consider technology advances to be rather unimpressive, especially services and apps built on the internet. Access to information has definitely been improved though, but this is one of the few major improvements and now with more information being siloed behind corporate mega-sites we may be regressing back to the libraries for free access again.

> Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent.

On family trips in the 90s, I'm pretty sure my dad almost never paid the asking price for our rooms. If you were coming in from about the mid-evening on, without a reservation, but they still had some rooms unlikely to be filled, and there were any other hotels with vacancies around, they'd gladly knock off a few dollars if you asked, since the alternative was likely having $0 of income for that room, that night.

What I've noticed traveling more recently is that there seem to be fewer vacancies if you try that "just show up and find a room" thing (which used to almost always work out fine, except at extremely popular places on very busy travel weeks), like the whole industry's running with way less slack (i.e. more efficiently). But also room prices have gone batshit crazy, even more so than general inflation, so the savings from that efficiency doesn't seem to be reaching customers.

You can always come to the less technologically advanced country and haggle all you want. I'm in one of those countries right now, and believe me, it's a lot worse when you actually need to do that every time you try to use any service.

After moving there I've started to appreciate a decent, frictionless, fixed price service a lot more.

I find some of these platforms to be far from frictionless. Try doing a basic sort based on price in AirBnb; it does not include the fees in the sorted price making it difficult to find the best deal. Many sites have false reviews that are manipulated to increase their ratings and push an undesirable hotel into a “deal” that hides the actually hotel for instance. Priceline, for example, is no longer the deal that it used to be and many of the actual hotel sites have better prices or match the ones on Priceline.

I mean, yes, there's a lot to improve because of bad actors and review manipulations. But for example, you can find a taxi through Uber relatively easy instead of wasting half an hour finding a driver who will a) get you where you want and b) take what's advertised through Uber instead of 4x-5x of that price.

> And some of those other things are debatable. For instance: I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything

That’s a fine personal choice to make if you value building up geographic knowledge for its own sake, but I don’t really get your point. You could say the same thing about giving up your dishwasher because you value hand washing dishes for its own sake.

I drove from California to Panama 3 years ago. In Central America Google navigation was not only useless, but sometimes dangerous so we turned it off. We were only asking locals for directions. After a few days we did not experience any inconvenience.

> Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.

I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right?

You know electric cars aren't a new invention, right? First ones came about in the 1880s, and they were quite common in the early 20th century.

Sure, not common in 1950, but the user experience difference between an ICE car and electric is, to a 1950s or 1910s person, basically noise. The ICE car is noisy, electric not. The acceleration, ride comfort, features - all are similar enough to be interchangeable to someone far removed from this time.

> The acceleration, ride comfort, features

This is not true at all. Ride comfort and features is massively improved in todays cars compared to 1950. Or to 1980. That goes for both the driver and passenger.

Depends on what you want in a car and what you mean by ride comfort. Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example. Also, many newer cars are unrepairable without special equipment and some don’t even provide service manuals to owners. Good luck getting your Tesla fixed quickly while traveling in remote locations versus a traditional car. Good luck finding a new battery for it if China supply lines are hampered by a pandemic or some other issue. Electric cars aren’t a panacea.

Bottom line is that cars have been available to get us from point A to point B at high speeds for over 100 years and that is why we buy them.

> Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example.

Active (electromagnetic) suspension systems are a huge improvement over the 1970-80 land yachts that couldn't corner to save their lives.

Better yet, you can adapt your suspension system to ride however you want.

Perhaps. But the old Cadillac is/was much cheaper and who needs to race around corners in a land yacht. Those fancy new adjustable suspensions are notorious for failing and cost as much as the car to replace. Know someone that just sold their 5 year old car with one of these systems that failed due to the $5000 to repair out of warranty. Cadillac would be new shocks/struts on all four wheels and out the door for less than $1000 and these components rarely fail within 15 years.

Get a sports car for fast corners.

Basically, if we ignore all improvements in comfort, speed and safety, there are no improvements in comfort, speed and safety.

Except you'd become a write-off yourself after getting into a car accident in a Cadillac/Lincoln. Especially if you didn't buy the safety belt option :)

Battery chemistry and renewable energy have advanced significantly. I appreciate and share your overly broad cynicism, but the technological advances of the past couple of centuries have been the exception rather than the norm of stagnation throughout human history. I think it's okay to acknowledge and celebrate advancements we've made in many fields recently.

In the context of the question being posted electric cars don’t move the needle for productivity. I spent three glorious days with a Tesla performance M3 in Texas recently. The driving experience is, for me, unparalleled. But it was definitely not more productive by any metric I’d use.

Never going to the gas station?

The fact that the per-mile cost is much lower? Isn't that pretty much the definition of productivity?

Potential downsides entirely ruin the concept. Think of having to find charging spot every week, potential waiting for days if not weeks for one to open up. The continuous degradation of range. The charge time on longer trips, with the potential of having to wait the mentioned days or weeks on each charging session.

I own an electric car, and I know many, many others that own them as well. Everything you've written is ludicrous - I can assure you nobody is waiting days or weeks to charge. If anything the situation is much better than gas cars as 99% of the time I just charge at home.

That wasn’t my experience at all. I spent substantially more time and cognitive energy keeping it topped off than i ever have an ICE vehicle. I’m sure if I lived in the area I could have installed a charger of sufficient capacity to start off every morning at 80% but i needed to hit a supercharger for 20+ minutes per day to do that.

> Never going to the gas station?

Not a big deal. And on long trips with an electric car, don't you have to plan around relatively extended stops at (currently) relatively rare charging stations?

Not really, no. Took a drive from Seattle to Oregon a bit ago (200 miles one way), never once have i planned around charging stations or even thought of them.

Took a quick look at the map of the superchargers exactly once before the trip, just to doubly make sure there are any at all on the way, and that was it. The car navigation system automatically added the needed one to the path and showed exactly the calculated amount of charge i should have left by the time i get to the charger and/or destination. There were at least 6 supercharger stations on the path to my destination (didnt even look at the regular chargers).

I didnt charge my car prior to the trip, it had about 40% charge before I headed out. A bit past halfway through to the destination, i stopped at a supercharger (that the car notified me about and added as a stop on the navigation as soon as i started the trip, because it calculated i won't have enough charge to make it to the destination). Charged the car to 90% in about 40 mins tops (was one of the older v2 145kW superchargers, the v3 ones that I've seen before are much faster), went to mcdonalds and stretched my legs in the meantime.

There was a tradeoff of stops vs charge time: i waited to 90% to avoid additional supercharger stops, but if i was ok with those, my stop time would have been even shorter, because the charge speed is faster the less charge you have, it is like a logarithmic curve. I.e., about 10 mins of wait for 100 miles of range on the lower end of the charge, but 40 mins if i want to reach the 90% (with the total range being about 330 miles total).

I went into a lot of detail to explain things here, but during that trip (around 400 miles total), at no point have i even thought of or planned for charging specifically, the navigation system handled it for me just fine with pretty much no detours. And i wasn't driving through dense city areas either. Once i got out of Seattle and nearby areas (about 30 mins into the trip), it was all rural areas through and through, but somehow they still had about 7 supercharger stations conveniently placed on the way.

It's very regional. There are 2 route variations for me to travel to a large city 300 miles away, with one of them having a clear disadvantage (a stop further from the highway by a meaningful amount).

Of course electric cars are a big improvement in many ways. But it’s not revolutionary in the same way as cars compared with horses. The usage pattern between ICE and electric cars are more or less he same, while a horse require care for significant time several times a day whether you use it or not. Not to talk about the space requirement, speed, range or power.

> Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.

Nope, sorry. An electric car is still just a car, not some revolutionary different thing. It gets you from A to be exactly the same, the only difference is you plug it in at night rather than visiting a gas station.

> I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right

Nope, sorry. A car is an order of magnitude faster, have far longer range, haul more than a horse and buggy.

>The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

I don't agree at all. Especially in the sciences, the collaboration across countries over the internet has been tremendous. The ability to instantly know what papers are being published in your field and use their results to further your own research can't be overstated. We rely on that to do our work at our company. But going back to tech, the ability to do open source projects _at all_ wouldn't have been possible before. The interconnected nature reduces 'local maximas' of knowledge, skill and expertise. I have learnt so many things from watching youtube DIY channels that I otherwise would never have in my own local community.

And so I ask - What makes your claim "probably true"?

Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

> Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

No it isn't. I moved to a new city and realized after a couple years that I still barely knew my way around. I then correctly diagnosed that the cause was the overuse of turn-by-turn directions. You're trying to frame it as some hipster cooler-than-thou thing, when it isn't.

The point is, a couple of anecdotes don’t prove the rule. You might not find GPS useful, but a lot of people find it immensely useful and revolutionary.

If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.

Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.

I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference

You really should go to some museum or google how cars in 1950 looked like, functioned and sounded.

> I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything

You are in minority there from pretty much all aspects. People are not ditching GPS. They are not looking into GPS constantly either, generally people don't go to places they don't know that often. And if you are refusing "weird shortcuts" then you are lessening your geographical knowledge even more - you are opting out for routes with easy to memorize milestones instead of learning how streets are really connected.

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

I was surprised the first time a Tesla went by because I had no idea a car could be that quiet.

> The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

IMO the Web has done a terrible job of realizing all the wonderful knowledge-spreading and educational purposes it was supposed to.

What it has done is make it so idle, trivial thoughts that would hardly have reached the level of consciousness before, become an itch until I find out the answer—because now I can find out the answer ("who was that one actor in that one show"). And it's great at answering those kinds of questions.

It's 2022 and in tons of fields you'll still run out of material on the Web as soon as you go past the barest surface of a topic, and have to go track down some books (which may have no digitized version, so I mean actual books). I have niche reference books from decades ago that are exactly the kind of thing that an online catalog-of-knowledge ought to be good at, but what's on the web is far less complete than them. That kind of thing.

All that, plus it's so crammed full of spammy shit that using it is like trying to track down a poorly-marked Little Free Library box on the Vegas strip.

Physical libraries with inter-library loan remain much more valuable overall—and university libraries, especially—which is kind of pathetic.

The most valuable sites on the Web are probably piracy websites like Library Genesis, and they still can't deliver everything you can get on dead trees. But they come the closest.

A Tesla is a fucking space ship compared to the cars people had in the 50s...

So is a Jag, or Ferrari, and a Lamborghini may well actually _be_ a spaceship. The method of propulsion isn't what would make them point and go "spaceship"