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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.

I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.

Nah, this "older folk" loves my cameras and it's an excellent enhancement

I wish I had a camera in my Jeep. As I get older it gets harder to just turn around, and new cars have pretty bad sight lines. I think this is just using the tools available to you.

> new cars have pretty bad sight lines

This is really a big part of the reason for them. Newer cars are all aerodynamically contoured and this results in a high rear deck and a shallow angle on the rear window. It's much harder to see behind the car.

I still turn my head and also use the wing mirrors to reverse. It's habit and I find it easier than looking at a screen.

What is this based off of? Most young people (who have a car) have an old car, without backup cameras.

Backup cameras were mandated in the US in 2018 and were already getting to be pretty popular on even midrange trim vehicles by that time. Every six year old car has a backup camera, and a large percentage of 7–10-year-old cars do as well.

I cannot reverse my car without looking at the camera but that's because cars these days are so high off the ground, the rear windows are so tiny, and the pillars are so huge that I can't see much turning around.

Someone about four feet tall can easily walk past the rear of my car and aside from the half second of them in the side mirrors (which I can't see if I'm looking backwards anyways) there's no way I'd be able to see them looking backwards. But the ultra-wide angle camera mounted low on the gate I'd see them easily.

Plus, with the position of the camera at the end of the vehicle and its FOV, there are angles I wouldn't possibly be able to see with a car parked on either side of me. Coupled with radar sensors able to detect cross traffic before its even possibly visible in that situation the sensors greatly enhance by ability to see the situation than if I was entirely relying on turning around.

I do turn around while reversing, but more of just a double check of the overall scene. Same with double checking side mirrors while reversing. But a large amount of what I'm looking at is the screen.

Exactly. I was learning to drive in an ancient Fiat from 60s, it was like sitting in the aquarium, every direction was super visible. Next I had Daewoo Lanos which had reduced visibility in comparison, but still good. Now in the big modern sedan I wouldn't see anything when turning head, and mirrors have dead zones. Camera is a second best car upgrade I had in past decades, after automatic gearbox.

I'm old. I like the camera. It gives a better view for many things.

I wouldn't call those the same. My wife's car has a camera and mine doesn't. Since having children, I prefer backing up in her car because I'm so much more aware of the blind spots I have without it. We also live somewhere with lots more kids now, which adds to it. I can back up my own (camera-less) car, obviously, but it made me realize that I can't back it up without a bit of "cross my fingers and hope no kid darts into a blind spot from a blind spot."

For 13 years I drove stick and for 18 years I drove without a backup camera. Nowadays I don't turn around and look back. Automatic and camera are so much better.

Why would you want to? Camera is better in every way.

Seems vaguely worrying but maybe I'm just becoming fuddy-dudded or something. I've never used a car with a backup camera (did have a rear dashcam in one though) so maybe I just don't know. But the fields of view I see in images of backup cam displays aren't confidence-inspiring for me. It seems like the kind of thing that might be useful if you routinely forget to check for random toddlers/pets/bicycles having picnics directly behind your vehicle before you pull out of the driveway in the morning. Or if maybe you have a significant problem with young children, who you had so far completely failed to take notice of, dashing with uncanny timing from weird "blind areas" as you back out of a parking space, etc.

I would blame my (pretty small) commercial driving experience. But no, not really. Before I ever took a Smith System course, I would have had trouble understanding this. I'm regularly concerned, to say the least, at the complacency/obliviousness I've seen. I don't get how someone could be comfortable with not having active situational awareness of these things.

And that's the only way I can imagine it being a realistic concern that children or other drivers will suddenly and unexpectedly appear in their path. Which is the only serious kind of thing I can imagine those camera FOVs helping with. Which they shouldn't have to, because people should be cognizant that backing is one of the more risky parts of driving in terms of likelihood of any kind of collision during it, so they should be on guard -- not merely as they are backing up, but the whole way to the car. Any children in the area should be easily noticed -- unless they are lying in wait on purpose for some reason -- and positive knowledge of their locations should be actively maintained until backing is done. Nearby cars parked but still running, or with people getting in or out of them, etc., should also be fairly trivially observed and noted. If positive awareness has been broken, then so has confirmation of a clear path, and in that case it's completely reasonable to go as far as getting back out of the car and walking a few steps and taking a couple of seconds to evaluate who is within "reach" and what they could conceivably do to screw up your day in the time it takes you to get out of the parking space. It seems like it isn't that much of a reach to do some simple due diligence that should, in a ideal world, make the backup camera a solution in search of a problem.

I don't know if you're a network person or what (in 30-second hindsight, networking knowledge may not be necessary to understand the "metaphor") but often it feels as if I'm on Collision Avoidance and everyone ("everyone") else is using Collision Detection.

Define "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.

People who can't guide themselves without relying entirely on the app.

Normally, I just glance at what action I should take next (i.e. continue straight for 2km and then take a left turn at X) and then follow the road signs to do so. But I've noticed some Uber drivers and other people who keep their eyes almost permanently at the app for locating themselves, even when there's a clear GPS or network disconnection, like in an underground pass. This often results in wasted time when the app doesn’t catch up with reality, and the driver misses a turn.

I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map.

I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it.

And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“

That's unfathomable to me. I live in a 1kk metropolitan area and I can go basically anywhere without a navigation system, in fact I'll only pull the GPS if I'm going to some remote neighborhood.

P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.

GPS is super-convenient when you're in an unfamiliar area. I sometimes catch myself thinking how did we ever get along without it. But we did. You just looked at a map before you set off, noted street names and turns, and paid attention. You would do the same thing and manage pretty well if you had to.

Of course it's convenient. But I learned to drive before we had it, and learned to find my way around without it. Maps helped, but you can do a lot with logic and by understanding direction.

You don't ever walk in your city without gps? Wouldn't you know the streets after a while?

Lots of people don't live in walkable cities. There's no realistic way they'd get to where they're going by walking. They might walk their neighborhood and know that, but these days lots of people don't even bother walking around their neighborhood.

So they'll end up driving everywhere they go. Work, groceries, restaurants, etc. Always driving. Many won't go down paths that weren't previously suggested by their GPS. And often those destinations aren't designed to be walkable either. Massive parking lots separating the various storefronts. Corporate campuses completely surrounded by a sea of parking lots and garages. Nowhere to walk.

That said, there's still exploring possible in a car-centric place. I tend to take alternate paths to get places, purposefully "get lost" driving around, and explore places I've never been before. But that has costs and lots of people don't bother doing that.

I do, but only for things in my immediate area. Stuff like grocery shopping, haircuts, doctors appointments, etc. Those are all reachable on foot and I know how to get there, because I do it regularly. But the first few times I used gps to find it. Now I know the route.

But that doesn’t help me for anything beyond that radius and probably not even there, because those routes go through parks and other stuff, so the car routes would be different.

You are in for a fun adventure, if you have an afternoon to yourself and no particular destination. My grandmother always began our day trips that way, in her shiny Buick. Remember to stop to rest.

Find your way around an unfamiliar city or area without google maps or similar.

I don't really see that as a bad thing. Einstein famously didn't memorize phone numbers because you could look it up in book.

Quick external lookups are a huge productivity boost since you don't have to spend all the time memorizing something.

It's not a bad thing so long as GPS works forever, I also think driving is much more enjoyable when you don't need to be thinking about GPS, it's nice to just focus on where you're going.

I have an awesome sense of direction which I attribute to almost never using navigation apps unless I'm really worried about traffic, and even then, I can usually find a less crowded non-recommended router, because I know my way around.

This is true to a point. You can get huge performance gains using L1 cache rather than accessing network storage.

I like your analogy. I agree. This doesn't fit all cases, and it really depends on how often and how long it takes you to look something up.

Memorizing directions though? Nah. Takes a while to memorize and is quick to lookup and not used frequently.

Knowing basic syntax for a programming language? That needs to be in RAM.

A conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle:

> That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

> "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

> "To forget it!"

> "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..."

> "But the Solar System!" I protested.

> "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

It can be pretty hard to tell in advance which knowledge will eventually make a difference (or would have, if you had it).

This is a very inapropos quote, because A Study In Scarlet was the first Holmes story, and Conan Doyle later retconned this because it turns out to be very important for a detective of Holmes' sort to be able to draw on seemingly-useless knowledge in order to make serendipitous leaps of logic.

I maintain that it's relevant because it illustrates how unreliably people assess just what knowledge is likely to be useful. If anything, the fact that it was retconned reinforces that such assessments can be wrong.

For example, there's a notion in this thread relying on GPS makes you soft and that unless you learn how to navigate the way your forebears did you'll be unprepared or something. I find this proposition just as dubious as the notion that actively forgetting that the earth goes around the sun helps you solve murder mysteries.

It seems to me as though such assessments are often driven by self-interest and the desire to maximize the social utility of one's own knowledge and experience. Of course, those who believe that that "GPS makes you soft" is unquestionably true may find fault with my perspective.

I also just find that passage hilarious. It's simultaneously so misguided and yet so compellingly crafted, which is what makes for great satire whether intentional or not. My Dad read Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to me when I was a kid and that passage has always stuck with me. But perhaps this wasn't the right audience to share it with.

I wouldn't say it makes you "soft", but it makes you inexperienced at it, and people often freeze when they don't know how to do something.

Drive around the country and you'll notice that sometimes Google maps doesn't work because your phone doesn't have reception.

That’s a good description of my programming.

I use the documentation panel of the inspector in Xcode, all the time, and write my code to generate this documentation.

I’m too grizzled to care much about being sneered at by insecure folks. I am able to get the job done; quickly, and of extremely high quality.

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