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Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

As someone who moves frequently, GPS navigation is life-changing. You can snap into the local opportunities with incredible speed and virtually no stress. My wife needed to reroute while driving. Neither of us had ever been to the new destination before. I just shared the new destination to her car's nav system. She never took her hands off the wheel, and we could all plan our arrival to within a minute from 30 miles out.

I know land nav, celestial navigation, LORAN, at one point I knew the math for GPS. yada yada. As a practical matter, GPS is magic. It's the reduction of stress in new places that is such a game changer.

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“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”

― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

Nice play. I’ll raise you a Postman…

(W)e have been rather slow in recognizing that in solving the information problem, we created a new problem never experienced before: information glut, incoherence, and meaninglessness. … Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information, without even a broom to help us get rid of it. The tie between information and human purpose has been severed. … it comes indiscriminately, whether asked for or not, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume, at high speeds, disconnected from meaning and import. It comes unquestioned and uncombined, and we do not have, as (poet Edna St. Vincent) Millay said, a loom to weave it all into fabric.

- Neil Postman, Science and the Story that We Need, 1997

postman is incredible. Recently finished reading "Amusing ourselves to death"

In the Hayden War Cycle / On Silver Wings series by Evan Currie humanity is looked at with some concern for being heavy "tool users" who augment themselves. I don't think that in this case they specifically had GPS in mind, but rather the reliance on cybernetic implants, powered exoskeletons, and other more advanced technology.

One of the advantages of aliens in Sci-Fi is that they can provide such an outside perspective of humanity. I wish it was utilized more and to greater effect. It's rather interesting. Sadly most Sci-Fi either is so out there that humanity seems to dull in comparison and you'd not waste a thought reflecting on it, or it lacks peaceful interactions and alien perspectives.

What does defeat look like in this context? It honestly doesn't seem so bad.

One should note that there may be significant negative impact on local communities when GPS systems re-route drivers off major routes onto local/minor roads when there are accidents or delays on the major route.

If people have to really use them all the time, then the street network is badly designed because it has too many single points of failure. Also, locals and regular commuters likely already know about these alternative routes.

Edit: I used to live in a small city where traffic used to grind to a halt on rainy days or if there were delays or construction works at certain locations.

Or when some city planners neuter a main thoroughfare by redesigning it to "current best practices" making the minor roads relatively more competitive.

its great until its not

ive done my share of mediocre landnav in the army,and used to be OK in it (for a 2nd lt)

now i cant navigate in field for the life of me ,and have to look up every damned for in the road on a relatively simple trail

can't say im gonna do the effort of switching back to maps,but dang do i feel stupid sometimes

I use maps in the car and memory on foot. It seems a good compromise that preserves local awareness without being a Luddite.

If you care about a route, you can have the GPS calculate a path and you memorize the closest part of it. Once you’re out of the memorized part you either continuously look at the GPS or stop and memorize the next bit, and so on.

I personally find it more secure and also more engaging towards the path I’m taking.

Also Google Maps often spouts partly weird routes for no reason, and checking+correcting them mentally helps a lot.

I’ve been able to discover new routes in my area using navigation after a decade.

Case in point: 9 times out of 10 Google Maps will navigate me out of my neighbourhood via a backstreet that crosses a main road.

The suggestion saves a minute or two because you are able to avoid two sets of lights. This route doesn’t seem obvious, because intuition dictates waiting to cross a main road at an uncontrolled intersection will take longer. Miraculously, it doesn’t.

>Miraculously, it doesn’t.

It might if you are driving a slow commercial truck.

Or if you are one of those "timid to the point of hazardous" drivers.

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