• invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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    408 months ago

    What I love about GPS is that it’s so pervasive that maps have basically vanished overnight. And in 1000 years there will be no physical evidence of it.

    The only thing future archaeologists would be able to tell is that one day, we stopped making maps, and suddenly we started listening to the stars.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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        78 months ago

        That’s even cooler, would be pretty spooky if modern historical records and knowledge got lost and then all that was left was a gap in written information and several hundred large man made objects that can be seen with basic optics or even the human eye under the right conditions.

          • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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            58 months ago

            It is wild that the longest living manmade structures have already been built. Satellites and space debris in stable orbits will be around for millions of years, way longer than anything could ever survive on earth

            • buckykat [none/use name]
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              48 months ago

              The oldest known human footprints are 117,000 years old. The footprints on the moon from the Apollo missions should easily outlast that.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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        188 months ago

        You’re right, they’ll just become deities because their motion is regular and visible.

        Then when they do de-orbit, a great schism will occur and the resulting wars will end in the re-industrialization of society and they’ll be replaced

    • REgon [they/them]
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      8 months ago

      The only thing future archaeologists would be able to tell is that one day, we stopped making maps, and suddenly we started listening to the stars.

      We got another candidate for the “beautiful sentence you’d think comes from a fancy book, but it’s actually just an internet comment” collection

  • Aradina [They/Them]
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    358 months ago

    Compiling a list of things Kurt Cobain died before they got invented.

    Bet he would have hated the sixaxis controller

  • EllenKelly [comrade/them]
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    208 months ago

    Helen Mirren unpacking her feelings of lusting over a twink 25 years her junior

    her father was a nobel whos family fled russia after the revolution

    kurt died in 1994 Helen, you git, the cia was at his house with their gpsses the night he died /s

    hete’s krist novasalic talking about using his laptop at kurts house to send emails

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Nirvana/comments/bvpgpx/comment/eprkbqs/?context=3

    just some scrambles notes i sent a friend when i saw this earlier in the week

  • mustGo [any]
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    218 months ago

    At least he still got to experience food getting mostly warmed up, but still having some very cold spots inside by a microwave oven.

  • REgon [they/them]
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    278 months ago

    No that makes sense. It’s crazy how much GPS has changed day to day life, and in such rapid speed and to such an extent we just don’t even think about it.

    • CarbonScored [any]
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      8 months ago

      This statement confuses me somewhat, is it a bit? The “crazy” difference in my life without GPS would be: I’d have spent some more hours of my life looking at maps to work out where I am. That’s what we did when I was a child and it really didn’t take long.

      That’s honestly it.

        • CarbonScored [any]
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          8 months ago

          Instantly knowing where you are on a map has fundamentally changed several aspects of our lives? I really disagree.

          I could well be the weirdo but it’s fundamentally changed no aspects of my life. I would love to know how it has others.

          • REgon [they/them]
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            8 months ago

            You are never lost in any place on the globe. You can always make your way home. Just the safety radiating from that. The way people suddenly feel/are more able to leave their local area is in itself a massive change in our lives. Finding way to any other place has now become nothing but a question of entering an address in a phone.

            That is unironically a superpower. The fact that saying “I always have up to date information about most of the world, I always know where I am, I am able to find my way to any place, anywhere, at any time. I always know of changes to routes and roadblocks. I am never lost” would be considered a trivial statement, is testament to just how integrated GPS is in our lives.

            Your maps are always up to date with all information you could ever need.
            This has severely facilitated individual navigation, removing one of the main advantages of public transport (in the perspective of the individual user. I wrote part of my bachelors thesis about this) making it so more people are perceiving the car as the most effective medium of transport.

            I cannot overstate how much of a simplification “I look less at maps” is. Actually think of the many times you are in a new place. Think of the times your friends have suddenly changed the address for your meet-up. Think of the value the knowledge “I always know where I am” has.

            This is what I mean when I say it has happened so fast and in such an all-encompassing way that we don’t even perceive it.

            “I look less at maps.” You don’t have accurate maps of every place you visit. Those maps are not up to date. Those maps will not contain the amount of information a GPS contains. If they do, then you have allocated a significant amount of resources towards the goal of always having up to date maps (and more than one type for each place) of every place, everywhere you might ever go.

            Navigating by way of map in unfamiliar environments isn’t just a quick look and you’re done. The very basic way you drive has changed. When was the last time you slowed down at every street looking at roadsigns? When was the last time you pulled over to re read the map? When did you last have to rely on local knowledge? Reducing this to “I look less at maps” is a massive trivialisation of an impressive reduction in the labour and resources required for individual wayfinding.

            If you want a fun visualization of this: Beverly Hills Cop had the protagonist get some fancy sci-fi tech. That sci-fi tech was GPS.

            Even if it actually would be true that all it would mean to you really just is “less map” think of the world you exist in. Do you know how airplanes navigated before GPS or proto-GPS? Ships? I’ve done old school navigation and it is tiresome. You have to constantly recalibrate your compass. Mark your way. How do you know how fast you’re moving when you can’t reliably know where you are? The water moves your ship just as your engine does, but how do you know how much and in what direction accurately?
            Lord help you if you’re in shallow waters with sandbanks.

            90% of all cargo is transported on ships. The modern system of JIT-delivery would not be feasible without GPS.

            Same goes for trucks. Any transport of goods has been made significantly easier reducing in large part the time it takes, the level of uncertainty and the amount of labor involved.

            These things impact you.

            Warfare has been changed by GPS as well. The fact that all soldiers can accurately know where they are, where their destination is and what route would be best. At all times. And this information can easily and effectively be communicated up thru the chain of command.
            This is a drastic change of the world we live in.

            An entire experience of being in a place you do not know, no longer exists. You are (practically) never lost. I really cannot describe how big a deal it is that people are not lost as long as they have connection and power.

            Edit: Read the article linked by @[email protected] it details lots of stuff I didn’t cover. It’s got some fearmongering, but the GPS stuff is good.

            • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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              58 months ago

              This is actually becoming a significant problem in some contexts. I train people in some wilderness first aid skills and also train the Burning Man community mediators / first responder volunteers. We’re starting to get folks who volunteer for us, but are staggeringly bad at knowing how to navigate the world when GPS is unavailable or unreliable. Burning Man’s Black Rock City is laid out like a clock face, with radial streets named for times on the clock and other streets running perpendicular to those named after letters (so an address would be something like “5:45 and G street”). In the last few years, we’ve been increasingly seeing people who want to volunteer to help folks, but struggle to navigate this very, very basic city grid even with the benefit of a map. It’s not so much that they can’t use a paper map–that is a problem, but very few people have ever been any good at orienteering without training–but rather that they’re fundamentally just not used to the idea that you have to pay attention to where you are. GPS exists out there, but without specialized gear, it’s not precise enough to really locate you on the city grid, and since the city shifts location in the Black Rock Desert every year, it’s difficult to hard-code something like that with a specialized app or piece of tech. Map use is a trainable skill that we’re used to incorporating into the curriculum, but the idea that you have to actually look at street signs and dedicate a portion of your brain to remembering your location, trajectory, and relative position has turned out to be extremely difficult to impart to people who have never had to do it. We’ve had to turn away otherwise very good volunteers because “paying attention to your position in space” turns out to be a skill that’s very hard to train for in a limited time frame.

              • REgon [they/them]
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                58 months ago

                debate-me-debate-me

                Damn I spent all this time typing this out for you and turns out you’re just being a fecetious debatebro. Sad to have wasted my time.

                • CarbonScored [any]
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                  8 months ago

                  I’m really not, but aight, just assume bad faith I guess.

                  Either you’re being obstinate or we’re just talking across purposes. I’mma out 'cause this conversation now sucks :(

              • REgon [they/them]
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                68 months ago

                It’s funny when it’s a genuinely interesting article and it’s just shoehorned in like that

                • @[email protected]
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                  48 months ago

                  Yeah. I got to that part and laughed pretty hard. I will say I have no clue on the security of GPS though. 😆

                • Mostly dead reckoning i.e. knowing where you started, your acceleration, and the equations of motion. It’s actually still how most missiles work, AIUI few have the ability to receive time signals from a satellite while in motion.

            • CarbonScored [any]
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              8 months ago

              Yeah cool! This is a bunch of ways that GPS has meaningfully improved the way some things work. I totally agree with that.

    • @[email protected]
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      208 months ago

      One of my favourite things these days is to just jump in the car with my wife and just go for a drive in the countryside. I’ll avoid main roads wherever possible, and just pootle along country lanes looking for wildlife and interesting things. And the best part is that I literally can’t get lost, because at the point when I want to go home, I just hit the ‘Home’ icon on the screen in the car and it automatically calculates the quickest route for me.

      Sure, my grandparents could have done similar, but they’d have had to bust out the maps and figure out where they were and how to get home. All I do is press a button.

      It really is very cool.

  • Gorb [they/them]
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    558 months ago

    Its really sad Ea Nasir died before he could post to linkedin about b2b sales

  • Prehensile_cloaca
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    198 months ago

    Celebrities are not smart. There are exceptions, but most are simply paid to master the hallmarks of actual intelligence, without the requirement of the base substance.

    Children should be taught about parasocial relationships as a mandatory element of school- at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.