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stronglikedan

The word "requirements" is doing a lot of work there. I've never met a QR code where scanning it was required of me.

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Anecdotal, but I've encountered a number of places where it's more or less required.

- Restaurants: Menu is QR only. In one case, ordering food was QR only.

- Queueing up at my local Costco optical department requires scanning a QR code.

- Various other check-ins for various other government agencies and businesses.

- Urgent care check-in paperwork requiring QR code. No paper, and typing the loooong URL in manually is horrific.

Have you tried saying “my phone is broken”? I doubt it’s as stringent as you think.

I have never had an issue and I don’t carry a smartphone. Usually they just hand you a paper menu or a tablet depending on what you’re doing.

Often there technically are other options but this is still like saying you don't need to participate in society and can move to a cabin in the woods.

What’s the problem? Are you saying that people who live in cabins are doing something wrong?

I used to live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It has its downsides, but there were plenty of positives as well.

You can't see a difference between will and constrain? Force-feeding for example is torture, despite how much one may like eating.

Are you saying that you’re forced to use a smartphone? Because I don’t use one. It does make some things harder, but I don’t know what people are expecting. A law to ban smartphones? There’s not enough people who want that.

I do think we need rules that require businesses to accept cash, and to have alternative flows that don’t require smartphones for ordinary transactions (like buying food) or financial management. I also think we need to break up the duopoly and ensure that FOSS based devices can gain a foothold.

Unless more people go without smartphones, voluntarily, the friction in daily life is only going to increase for those of us who don’t use them. That means accepting a little bit of inconvenience from time to time, but you make up for it in other ways.

No, I'm saying that going to live in a cabin in the woods if you want to is great, not so much if you do it for running out of options. Not a hard concept to grasp. Whether smartphones are optional or not depends on a lot of factors.

I guess I don’t see what this adds to the conversation. What position exactly are you taking here? What should be done based on what you just said? I can’t tell if you’re making a real argument or if it’s an empty complaint about the status quo.

I didn't have my phone physically on me at the time. They did not have paper menus at all. They kind of rattled off a selection of items from memory. I ordered something.

I've seen restaurants that required a QR code to get a menu. I simply walked out. Lots of other places to eat exist with more reasonable practices.

Forcing people to scan a QR code to see a price is a great way to use the data from their device to serve them a different price than the last person who scanned that code was asked to pay.

Anyone else who wants you to scan a QR code as part of a check in process can be told you don't have a phone or that it doesn't work. It's their job to figure that out.

> Restaurants: Menu is QR only. In one case, ordering food was QR only.

Or worse, a physical menu but they want to pay you with your mobile wallet using a QR code. Even if there are alternatives presented when you complain, that still turns you into an outcast.

So you'd leave the restaurant if it has a QR menu?

Do you mean leave if they don't have an alternative?

I'm not religiously opposed to QR-code linked menus myself, but it just so happens that the last restaurant I ate at, the QR menu was broken and I was forced to ask for a paper menu anyway.

Now if a restaurant puts a lot of care and curation into a web based menu (and posibly ordering system!), and lovingly craft a complementary QR code to point to it, then why not?

A lot of the time the caring is the important part.

This happened in an airport restaurant. I asked the server to get me the cheeseburger with fries.

Yes, I have left restaurants because they only offered a QR code menu, and I plan to continue to do that in the future.

I certainly would, unless it was something I was doing for someone else's sake (like a birthday dinner for someone). Why would I do business with a restaurant that can't be bothered to provide a good experience for customers?

Yea, ditto if they only take orders via tablets. Vote with your wallet.

I personally do not use QR codes. I suppose there could come a time where I could benefit from scanning one but I still have access to restaurants where you can order manually from humans and they cook the food themselves also.

If they wouldn't find another to help me? Absolutely. I can't imagine I couldn't just ask the server a question like "what's cheap and good?" or "I'll take the soup of the day."

If they can't be bothered to bring a printed menu when asked, yes.

Restaurants have thin enough margins already. They aren't turning away a customer for not bringing a phone. There's one tiny burger place just around the corner from me that's delivery/pickup only, not even a QR code, but they have a sign outside saying 10€ combos and they're 15€ on the website... I just asked them. They have very good halloumi burgers and perfectly cooked fries. They were happy to accept my cash, too.

yes

Depending on what type of computer (if not smartphone) you have at hand, you can probably use a search engine to find the same menu. Or ask somebody at your table. Or ask the server. Or point at somebody else's food and say you want what they're having. Or eschew the menu entirely and ask to be surprised. Chef's choice can be fun.

Or leave yeah, I think that's valid. TFA is predicated on the notion of pretty-much-lying to people by telling them you don't have a smartphone even if you do. Leaving a restaurant if you can't find a menu seems like it'd be on similar ideological footing.

The idea is you shouldn't have to have any sort of computer on your person to participate in public life. If a proper eat-in restaurant can't maintain a paper menu then it's an indication of the level of service that's sure to follow.

Perhaps that's the grandparent commenter's idea but I don't think it's the point the article is making:

> So, seriously, I do really like the smartphone idea. It’s just that I don’t have any browser or "social" app on it. And I don’t want anything else than what I have.

> I wish I could say it is all I have, that I’m a true minimalist.

He defines true minimalism as having an _ideologically conformant_ computer, not no computer at all.

a bit off topic but the construction of the phrase: some word + "doing a lot of work" sounds so much like a claudism

Well, yeah, people have been using that phrase for years, if not decades. I'm not sure if you were aware, but they actually trained Claude on human text, so it naturally sounds like the human text it trained off of.

the word “decades” is doing a lot of work here. Knowing that Claude is trained on human text is really the load bearing point. I can’t unsee this argument.

Jokes aside, of course it’s trained on human text. The issue is that it has a specific tone which leads to formulaic sentence construction that is tiring. But the plus is that it’s easy to spot if you want to avoid AI generated text.

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