Hacker News Reader

Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

The example of not being able to navigate roads with a paper map points in the direction of what concerns me. Even if I have been diligent about maintaining my map-reading skills, other people's devaluation of those same skills affects me; it's MUCH more difficult even to find a mostly-updated paper map anymore. Or if for some reason GPS were to stop working for a whole town while I'm visiting it from out of town, nobody can tell me how to get somewhere that might sell a paper map, even if I'm still proficient in reading them and navigating from them.

Even if I work diligently to maintain my own skills, if the milieu changes enough, my skills lose effectiveness even if I haven't lost the skills.

That's what concerns me, that it's not up to me whether the skills I've already practiced can continue to get me the results I used to rely on them for.

View on HN

I like this comment because you can frame a lot of other responses here using this GPS analogy. People saying LLMs help me think or help me learn (better my skill) or help me validate my ideas, etc. is like saying I use the GPS to improve my map reading skills, but the outcome would still be as you described.

edit: typo

By the way, reading maps is easy. Reading a map and memorising all the landmarks and turns so you can then drive without looking at the map is the hard bit. IMO.

The hardest part is often finding where you actually are on the map.

That’s when I would get out of my car and ask someone.

>if for some reason GPS were to stop working for a whole town while I'm visiting it from out of town

I get that it's just an example, but how do you figure that could happen?

Warfare is one possibility. This might seem like a very unlikely scenario depending on where you live, but in a modern Blitzkrieg situation the government wouldn't be asking citizens to shut the lights off at night but instead interfering with GPS signals to make navigation difficult for enemy aircraft.

We know this is possible because in the last 1.5 years this has happened numerous times - people would wake up in Tel Aviv and open Google Maps and find that their GPS thinks they're in Beirut or somewhere in the desert in Jordan or in middle of the Mediterranean Sea or wherever.

You can imagine that this causes all kinds of chaos, from issues ordering a taxi in taxi apps to food delivery and just general traffic jams. The modern world is not built for lack of GPS.

I imagine this or something like it is a daily reality in Ukraine, with all the GPS jamming for missile defense.

I'm not actually assuming it only happens for one town. I'd assume it would be broader than that. I don't really think it matters much how it happens, though, does it?

Even if all that happened were a widespread cellular outage, it's unlikely I'd have that region downloaded such that I could still search for whatever address I needed. Locals very well might, even accidentally in their caches, which might let us generate directions to somewhere I could get a map...though it would make it harder to look up the phone number to verify whether such a place sells maps.

It's not necessarily completely unsolvable. It's just a lot harder than it would be if other people still cared about map navigation as much as I did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com