I love those qr codes at restaurants. No need to interact with waiters. Just browse and order at my leisure.
I wish there was some universal app or website template for restaurants with functionality just like Wetherspoons! selecting a table number then ordering everything directly from there. no social interaction with the staff required… it is heavenly.
All the qr I’ve used are just web url. I just scan them with my brave browser app. No need for a separate app install. In fact I think that’s what people mostly gripe about, needing to install another app just to make an order.
I’m SzPD and not from the states. Had to go through Houston last year on a connection flight, when I first saw those tablets in the airport I thought it would’ve been the bees knees. Thing is, those things are so overloaded with useless shit (like ads) I just wanted to talk to a waiter. So many clicks to get to the main courses on offer, and there wasn’t any available space for notes, in case a costumer had a specific need (allergies for example). Plus, signal was so damn slow it took a while for it to load the dishes’ pictures.
No contact ordering has potential but it needs UX designers on top of the whole thing in order to make it more convenient and faster than just telling the waiter what you want.
I can see how it can get annoying if that’s the case for you, or in America in general. Maybe that’s how shitty the experience is in the US that people really love to complain about it. Seriously, every single time a thread about how deeply smartphones are embedded into society comes up, someone will gripe about qr code incessantly. Be it on reddit, fb, and now here.
I’m from Malaysia and eateries here are very good at it. None of those ads, no pesky additional install, really good ticketing system, and easy payment process at the counter with ewallet (also qr code) once you’re done. All I bring is my phone and car keys. Data and coverage here is very good and cheap on all carriers, so photos and menus loading time is never an issue.
I don’t need to call on that single waiter in the restaurant to make an order or to see the menu. I just sit my ass down and scan. The order goes straight to the kitchen and they only need to send my food to the table.
In my corner of the world we’re not there yet, a handful of places have adopted online menus but even those are a hassle. Most places just upload their physical menus as a pdf and call it a day, the others ignore basic principles of design and make the site overcomplicated.
If it were to be implemented in some new restaurant, I hope it gets implemented as you describe it, sounds like a dream.
Personally, I hate it. they’re only ever in places with terrible cell reception and no Wi-Fi.
Or the Wi-Fi is so damn throttled because they’re being overwhelmed by everyone trying to look at their menu at the same time.
Up until long-covid and being over-worked kicked me out of a job and onto my ass for a few months, I was a caseworker for adults with severe mental illness for years.
Helping people get a government phone was a necessity if we were working on transitioning them out of their residential care facility into more independent living.
It was such a frustrating struggle for the Clients without phones… Reminders, telephonic appointments, me being able to reach them was so much more difficult if they didn’t have a phone. Even being in RCFs, the resident line was always busy or misplaced, and staff at those facilities are not always the most stellar employees…
When covid hit and everything went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible for my team and myself to reach our Clients without cellphones…
Cellphones have become so ingrained in society and are essential for access to not only normal community resources, but also essential for adequate coordination and access to one’s treatment team and resources.
It’s getting harder and harder to function in society without a cellphone. That trend will only continue. I don’t think it’s necessarily/inherently a bad thing; it’s the evolution of our society. But it certainly is a terrible thing if you do not have one…
As a society we place huge importance on reading and writing literacy yet forget that digital literacy is just as important. Having a cell phone is, like it or not, a pretty big part of being literate in this digital world. We don’t see people acting proud of themselves for not being able to read (at least I hope not), and cell phones should be no different.
“I don’t even have a smart phone” is the new “I don’t even own a TV.”
Right? It’s a basic expectation that you have a phone number for everything. Work, doctor, etc. But we still treat it like having a phone is a luxury, for entertainment and convenience. Buy it yourself and figure it out yourself!
Hell, even restaurants are more and more replacing menus with QR codes
For all the trouble it causes, the benefits I’ve seen for people experiencing disability that smart phones and Internet has is amazing. I think we do need to be treating Internet access as something people just need to live in a modern society, like water or electricity. We are probably at the point where a basic smartphone or laptop shouldn’t be considered a luxury.
As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you’d need still exist. You’d just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions… But you could do it.
What’s interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
I’m having to work on a safety plan for a trade school. There is no good way of establishing communication across campus in the event of a disaster outside of A) Walkie Talkies or B) Cellphones. And honestly I can’t entrust faculty and staff to grab a walkie talkie in such an event. What I can trust is that they’ll have their cellphone on them.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
You’ve bought into paranoia. In the US, most areas are far safer than they were in previous generations. Crime rates are largely down from their highs in the 70’s and 80’s. And even the 90’s wasn’t a safe time, by comparison. Even in the 90’s, the whole “stranger danger” crap was so overblown that it probably did far more harm than good. The problem today is that news, both traditional and online are a 24x7 feed of “doom, DOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” which give a horribly skewed perspective on how bad things really are. For my own kids, they disappear with the neighbors’ kids for hours at a time, and we’ll call them in when it gets dark. This usually involves either yelling from the front porch (I really wish I could whistle like my mother did. I could hear that whistle a mile off); or, calling around to the various houses until we find them. They don’t have cell phones yet, and probably won’t for a few more years, as they just don’t need them. Also, I don’t want to worry about an expensive electronic device ending up left somewhere or smashed.
Oh no, I agree with you entirely. That’s my point, I know it’s safer than ever and yet I still want that connection. You can call that paranoia, I call it an overabundance of caution for the soul that means most to me. How my parents did it without that connection during a time that wasn’t safe by comparison is amazing to me.
I’m not worried about my child’s safety in terms of other people. I’m worried because I know all the dumb, outright dangerous shit I did as a child and that they are as predisposed as I am.
A bit of things are harder to do now, without smartphone or especially without computers. I have no idea how this is going in the US, but here (France) there’s been a big push for “all online” stuff, including mandatory administrative tasks. Less digital alternative are still mostly available, but the trend of being able to handle thing without computers is clearly dying. And yes, this means an increasing number of people is lost and can’t do stuff we expect them to do; it seems not enough people care.
And, even outside of that, having a bank account these days can require having a smartphone, more specifically an iOS or Android; the “bank app” being used as an authenticator and required for anything from logging-in on their website to performing money transfers.
We still can operate offline, mostly, but there’s a huge push toward changing that. And I’m not sure there’s a way to make that without leaving a lot of people behind.
Yes we are probably at the tail end of the time where you can still pay with cash, go to the bank branch, handle things at government offices, etc.
Yeah but maybe a bit of our problem is people don’t get bored anymore. The feeling of boredom is an important one and we stuff it down with dopamine doping and doom scrolling. When I was a child, if I got bored I went outside, or I saw if my friend could play, or I got a toy out. Once smart phones came along suddenly being bored was just an invitation for Reddit— Lemmy— to fill in the void.
I’m glad that Lemmy is not as addictive as Reddit was. I want to be bored a bit sometimes. Boredom makes me do chores instead of ignore them. Or play with my kid more. Or go hiking.
I don’t imagine 80s kids would have said they had boring childhoods, just because they weren’t completely soaked up with phones demanding their attention 24/7.
This. It destroys real life community and severs local bonds between people. It makes one ungrounded.
My childhood wasn’t boring, but I was bored an awful lot. And I agree, boredom can be a great motivator. But I can’t say that I miss being bored.
I think nobody would really say their childhood was boring. But if you were to take a kid from the 80s and a kid today and compare their daily lives, regardless of what interests they have, the 80s kid would find their own life pale in comparison. You’ve got video games, movies, social media, news, books, and music on the entertainment front. There’s so many paths to express one’s creativity, whether in art, music, engineering, film. And of course nothing is really stopping you from doing anything you could do 30 years ago and doing it today.
I’m trying to not spend too much of my time online and I’m going kinda successful on that. But I can’t say the same about living without smartphone. I need it to study through PDFs and reading EPUB books. I’m 31 years old, so I picked a tiny part of the “pre terminally online era” during my childhood. However, I’ve became a sort of internet addict in my teens. I should be avoided it, but it’s a bit to late. Can’t fix the past, but I can fix my future.
I strongly believe we will evolve around the technology we created.
What made sapiens evolution unique was our ability to communicate. We are exponentially increasing that ability.
I’ll tell ya, it’s getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.
Horses and iron chariots are evil capitalist ploy. Embrace walking bare foot.
fire-breathing dragons, they are!
True, but look at it the opposite way - modern life is just getting easier and easier because of mobile phones. Think of all the things that they make easier and replace. When we finally get digital licenses later this year I can officially leave my wallet behind. The only time I’ll need it is when I go to the gym as unfortunately they don’t have their NFC cards available via phone.
I’ve heard the single most important purchase incredibly low income people can make is a phone, because without it they can’t apply to new jobs or network with people because all applications are done online these days
I’ve seen homeless people with smart phones. There’s definitely affordable ones out there
You can buy a Xiaomi phone that will last you for 4 years for less than $99, and there’s some “functional” phones for much less than that but they will be unusably slow for casual use and more like emergency devices. Then there’s the 2nd hand market…
Fortunately smart phone access is not that difficult
Then you have to work out a data plan. At least in the US, free wifi is t as ubiquitous as it is in Europe (at least in my experience).
Maybe not ubiquitous, but it’s in a lot of places like fast food restaurants and libraries where they are okay letting people spend long amounts of time loitering on their device.
Do you not have purchase-once prepaid cards? Internet access is expensive on them but they could work for emergencies when there’s no free wifi
Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
My family got a new KitchenAid stove and I wanted to set a stop time for the oven while we went for a walk. I am able to do this on my shitty oven at our apartment.
I had to connect the stove to wifi, download an app, make an account, and link the stove. All to set a timer. Even then of course there was an error linking them.
Usually I wouldn’t have done that but I was really looking forward to the walk. I was one of the first adopters of Hue lights and used to be excited for smart home stuff. But this is so stupid.
Wondering if it’s some sort of data collection thing and also there’s no way a kitchen appliance company focuses on security and making their wifi connected devices secure.
So dumb.
I never buy any appliances with WiFi or any IoT shit, I draw a hard line there. That shit is cancer.
I’m willing to buy smart appliances, but only if they are LAN only and connect to HomeAssistant. No data collection, no privacy policy, no outside access
It’s getting harder not to buy ones tbh
There’s always a way to get tickets without using an app.
It just takes LOTS OF MONEYYYYY
It is pretty ridiculous. They started doing the same thing with app ticket at Red Rocks in Colorado. So I have an ancient android phone I use for that shit now, doesn’t even have a sim card in it. Has the ticket app and I may put a grocery store app on it at some point, but otherwise it’s factory fresh. They can keep their grubby apps off my real phone.
The most ridiculous part are services insisting you install an app when everything their app does could be in a progressive web app. PWAs are less work to develop as they can run on any device with a browser. For fast food and clothing brands especially, I think PWAs are a no brainer. (Unless you want to track your customers coughTimHortonscough)
It’s your last point there. They want you to install an app because said apps can collect a lot more data points on a
foolconsumer than a web app.Decathlon you need a smartphone for their loyalty card. Only upside is you don’t have to get receipts for their 1 year return policy.
In my country (Czech Republic) you can tell them your email address that is tied to your account
It’s a good thing and a bad thing imo.
People now can keep and relive moments easier and faster than ever before, but it does suck how big companies now just use it to do anything and how ads are just thrown everywhere to make every possible penny they can.
Same goes with reading skills, which at some point weren’t needed in society I bet.
Interesting perspective but then I think of the data on this phone as an extension of my privacy/private life; literacy doesn’t track.
I guess privacy is getting more and more popular nowadays. Hopefully private smartphones will become easier to get
Yeah, phones such, literacy doesn’t. But phones could have better software and hardware, then it would be fine.
Except that skills aren’t at risk of being stolen, lost or stop working. Phones are tools, not skills.
The one thing that really makes me sad about common cellphone usage is the lack of face-to-face connection. It’s a trip because I went through middle and high-school without smart phones, everyone did. I miss those regular, everyday connections with people.
Those that haven’t gown up a significant amount of time without smartphones don’t think the difference is that severe, or that the connections we’ve replaced them with are the same or superior, but it just… isn’t.
Is it really the phones or is it just that connecting to people after high school gets harder?
Well, connecting gets harder in the sense that we’re no longer all forced together into the same space, but phones have added a severe second layer to that. It disconnects us from those physically around us in order to digitally connect us with people not physically present.
Prior to phones, eye contact was pretty frequent. More small talk between strangers happened. People were far more aware of those around them. That’s just not the case now.
Again, smartphones have brought a lot of good to our lives, but the physical connection to people around us has been paralyzed. It really is sad, and I’m sad that it’s not something I’ll ever experience again: a space that physically connected. I’m sad that younger generations will never experience it their whole lives.
This is it. They don’t warn you in high school, but after school your friends will be in colleges or jobs miles away. This is just the way it is and if anything, cellphones would theoretically allow people to stay connected.
Smartphones turned everyone into chronic flakes though too. You can always bail at the last minute on flimsy plans you made when you were drunk because “you’re not feeling it”.
Both. It makes it easier to keep in touch technically, but whether or not they are responsive is a whole other story.
True, school is nice in that it forces you to hang out with your peers, and that isn’t really emulated later in life. But I don’t think that’s the point.
The point is that it’s just tougher to have non distracted conversations. Or even non distracted periods of time hanging out.
It just feels awkward when someone is sitting there texting with someone else in front of you. Or just looking something up on their phone “really quick”, and then is MIA from the conversation for five minutes.
I like them for being able to text and make calls. Otherwise I hate using them - a desktop computer is far easier for me.
Just give me the bloody neurolink already, I’m ready to ascend into the hivemind
Fuck society. Grr, I don’t like how much we’re expected to have phones. It’s not just the electronic though, but the number attached to it as well.
I’m phoneless as a stand against canadian telecom companies and wow I’m basically a second-class citizen. Almost any service becomes inaccessible.
Heavens forbid I care about my own privacy and get a vpn. Now I’m locked out of even MORE services that want to ID check me with my phone.
Just let me have what I seek 😭 there’s too many steps to these services now
auuuugh rant done ty.
If I can’t get a custom rom and use xprivacy and adblocking on my personal phone, I will instead carry a fucking ham radio for emergencies. I’m sick and tired of tech corporations but also society in general walking all over people, profiting from it and generally running things further into the ground at every chance they get.
Ahahaha ham radio future~ just you wait until everyone switches and it becomes profitable to have AI listening in. The oh-so-likely future. ;p
I can understand your need for privacy, even though I don’t go to similar lengths myself. That being said, I always prefer the way forward instead of shutting new technology out. I don’t have the answer to how that would translate to your situation specifically, but a privacy minded android or linux os with a prepaid sim card could go a long way.
It shouldn’t be a need.
I do agree. I’m behind in terms of privacy protection, but most of my energy is on escaping some life struggles at the moment. I’m fairly aware of where to find what I seek, but it’ll take a lot to collect all that information and implement it. Story of our lives though, eh? ;P
I’ve looked into prepaids, but it goes against my desire to support our telecoms. I looked into VOIPs as well, but most services block them because again, they need to identify YOU and I refuse to accept it, QoL be damned.
I’m currently thinking about shadowing off someone else’s identity. Solves a lot of my problems, but I’d like to figure alternatives and potential reprecussions before I go bumming off my friends.
You literally have what you seek. You want to be an island, and you are one.
No they don’t; they just said they’re taking a stand against the phone company.
The reasoning behind it is concern for their privacy though.
That’s incorrect, my appologies for the confusion.
My privacy concerns are a seperate issue that causes additional turmoil. Most services throw a ton of 2fa at you once they see the vpn, typically involving some means of identifying you with a phone number. Discord is the most common place I run into. That’s a lot of stuff I’m missing out on just with one service.
I’m standing against telecoms because they provide terrible service for rediculous prices. I’m especially aware of what they can offer as I used to work in Bell’s loyalty department (lasted a month LOL). By paying for shitty phone services, I’m accepting it. I’d rather search for an alternative.
I mean, who wouldn’t want internet access anywhere they want in their city?
It’s very interesting to see how primitive services such as government’s services requires citizens to have a phone. So eventually you can literally not be a citizen without a phone.
The life I experience is an invisible struggle, but it’s partially self-induced. I wonder how others are fairing, especially those who didn’t have the privilege of choice.
Then again, my city’s vocal majority want to wipe the board clean of homeless so maybe my empathy is misplaced.
I guess so but they are rather helpful still, so…
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
I know Apple is restrictive, like that other guy who commented who likes to apply customizations, but I love that apple products talk to each other seamlessly. I could have gone on through my tablet, except that I don’t pay for it to have its own wireless signal.
That’s actually how I found my phone. My neighbor let me tag on to her WiFi and I used the Find My Phone feature with my iPad. Saved me from a meltdown lol
Yup. Ive spend a lot of time with backups and screenshots of my apps/home screen in case I need to replace it, and I still get weird when I think about it. Years of settings and customization built up, no way I’d be able to get it back 100%.
Why don’t you just back things up through iCloud or Google Drive?
I do, but it doesn’t back up everything. Android just doesn’t have the backup that apple has unfortunately.
Aw, dang. That’s annoying
