Talking about supercomputers in your pocket… am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand? Or ask for anything that can be easily solved by just using the device they’re already holding? In the past I used to send “Let Me Google That For You” links, but I think I need a “Just use your smartphone!” T-shit or something. :P
Edit: while I find the situation funny, I want to clarify that I never mock people, or be rude to them. I try to go out of my way to help them, since you never know why they don’t do the obvious thing.
For people whose childhood didn’t have an internet, it makes sense. Many are more comfortable getting information the way they used to. Even though I grew up in the 80s, I prefer to avoid having to interact with people when possible, so being able to use the internet for information was a godsend.
I mean I agree, but also can see the advantage of asking someone who seems like a local if you’re confused about the transit system or if you took a wrong turn and just want to get some place without further hassle.
That’s absolutely true. One person asked me for directions once with Google Maps open and pointing where they had to go. Clearly this person was unable to understand the app.
It should be noted that while chat services that many use require low bandwidth, sometimes on throttled speed it’s not enough to even make a basic Google search.
It is likely that the person you are talking to already used up their high speed mobile internet and now is running on throttled. Searching something up can take a minute or two in that state. Opening up a website or navigation becomes straight up impossible.
I totally understand that. As I said, I never know the reason, so I don’t judge. It’s just that the situation is funny, in the “we have the tools, but still can’t solve the problem” kind of way. :D
My parents and grandparents will routinely give me directions to the restaurant we’re all going to. In the past I tried to stop them as I can never remember them anyway and certainly don’t use the same landmarks. Now I just nod my head and pretend like I got it all on the first try and then just use Google maps like a sane person.
am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand
Depends on the context.
If I’m hanging out with friends, in a city or area I’m relatively familiar with, and somebody suggests going to a restaurant or something I don’t know, I might just casually ask “Where is it? How are we getting there?” or something like that. Because there’s a good chance I don’t need to pull out my phone, open an app, type something in, make sure it’s the right location (being buried beneath the ad results), and following the steps the whole time, when a simple “just head to where the BDSM dungeon is, it like 2 doors down”
Yes and most opinions shouldn’t matter anyway. The problems start when opinions start suggesting that opponents should be hurt or killed because they are hated.
When I was a kid and they were parroting that dumb shit, I already had a calculator wristwatch. In fact, I probably bought that calculator watch specifically because my teachers kept saying that. Even back then it was well within the budget of a 6th grade punk who shoveled a couple of driveways or mowed a lawn or two.
I get being annoyed by the excuse when your kid, but it’s bizarre seeing adults still harping on this decades later.
You couldn’t use a calculator in math class for the same reason you couldn’t use a segway in gym class. Because there’s a lot more going on in a math class than just teaching you how to enter the correct answer.
Like… presumably most people here took some college of some kind, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp that education is a complex and multifaceted thing. It was never just about getting every answer right.
What’s monumentally moronic is that a tiny subset of teachers still try to use this line, here and now, in AD 2023. It was still quite highly moronic in the years of my school career, which was happening just on the cusp of the computing revolution – which everyone at the time with at least one functioning brain cell could see looming in all its inevitability just about 6" over the horizon.
Outside of basic arithmetic this canard doesn’t really hold water. Understanding how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide arbitrary numbers without a calculator is, of course, essential. But once that’s understood, it’s really unnecessary to have to stop to figure out by hand whatever the fuck, say, 23 divided by 4081.75 is when it’s just one component of some greater problem. In that context, using a calculator is not a “cheat,” even though some educators to this very day cling to the belief that it is. If you are doing algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. it’s really pointless not to use a calculator for the tedious small stuff, because if you don’t have an understanding of the mechanics of the problem you’re not going to accomplish jack squat… calculator or not.
(Yes, nowadays there are fancy graphing calculators and computer software that can do algebra, trig, etc. for you. You could probably even ask ChatGPT and have a nonzero chance of it getting it right. But back in my day we did not have them, because they were not commonplace, not very capable, and still extremely expensive. And computer software be damned, it was not quite viable yet on a middle or highschooler’s budget to carry a traditional computer with you.)
Sure, I still have the skills to get out a notepad and do a long-division-with-decimals calculation by hand, even in my adulthood when no one has asked me to in decades. But you know what? No one has asked me to in decades. So I’m not going to do that standing in the grocery aisle with a 12 pack of something in my hand, or standing over the milling machine contemplating where to drill the hole in the $1200 piece of material. In the former case I’m going to round off and make an accurate enough assessment for casual purposes, and in the latter case you bet your ass I’m going to get out my calculator or phone.
And yes, I had teachers in high school who absolutely did force us to calculate multivariable algebra or geometry equations without a calculator and screech “SHOW YOUR WORK” at us, which explicitly included all the long multiplication and division and shit, when in reality just simplifying the equation and then solving for X, Y, Z with a calculator would have been just as correct and infinitely less irritating. And no, they did not do this for any other reason than the ironclad belief that if students were not being forced to comply with arbitrary rules and tedium in complete contravention to logic, they were not “learning.” That was considered “cheating.” As it turns out, the point was not to inform. Rather, it was to have an arbitrary and illogical standard to use to berate and punish children. The only thing that was being taught was not to attempt apply logic or speak up, but to submit to authority unquestioningly… or else you get a zero and/or a browbeating/detention. It was bullshit then, it’s still bullshit now.
In the university physics classes I took, if the final answer was 47/69, then that was acceptable because the goal was to show you knew how to get there, and the actual value didn’t really matter.
Also, when the final value does matter, each time you round a number (which you often do when it’s a division you want a calculator for), you’re adding error to the final answer. So avoiding using a calculator as much as possible will increase the accuracy of the final answer when there’s many steps.
That said, they didn’t disallow calculators and didn’t want to see long division or multiplication steps.
My point was that even at university level where the maths are theoretically the hardest they’ve been up to that point, calculators aren’t something that are heavily leaned on.
I absolutely agree with you. I do still laugh at the meme, though. It’s not because I think my teachers were wrong for teaching basic arithmetic; it’s just that “because you won’t have a calculator in your pocket” turned out to be an ironically bad reason. 100% still glad to have learned it, though.
I remember being surprised I could afford a calculator watch. First time I learned about them as a kid, I assumed they were some unattainable, bleeding edge tech.
I haven’t played VR for a couple years, but I played hundreds of hours of it in the 2018-2020 time frame. It has a long way to go but it’s already amazing too.
Personally, I don’t really consider what we’ve got to be really VR yet. IMO that won’t come until we have interfaces that take direct nerve input and override our sensory inputs. And given how our economy runs, I don’t think I’ll trust any company that develops that, as much as I really want it.
Though I also wonder if our brains can handle switching between that and reality. After playing hours of Horizon VR, I noticed having the feeling a few times that my hands weren’t real because I got used to thinking that when I looked at my fake hands in the game.
Well, that tech really progressed fucking fast. We went from calculators being a huge industry of mechanical and electro-mechanical monsters to wristwatch calculators sold for 20 bucks in like a couple decades.
Go look at asianometry for some interesting videos on the matter
Ive legitimately bruised my dick this way. Had a giant black bruise across my shaft, pissing was HORRIBLE, and we had to take a month or two off from fun.
Yeah, I remember being told this in 2005. Granted phones then were just phones with the calculator program built in because its an easy thing to tack on that costs basically nothing to add. I had a cell phone by then that was basically my own home line (it was always just at home for friends to call me), but like even then adults were largely expected to have a phone of their own. A few years later the 1st iPhone came out.
Who's to say cows can't be milked in Zootopia?
If you can earn money by donating blood and organs (i.e. part of a kidney or liver), guys can earn money donating sperm, women donating eggs, then why couldn't a Zootopia cow (or other mammals for that matter) donate their milk?
So drinking a real-world cow’s milk is ok, but drinking a Zootopia cow’s milk would not be ok because… the Zootopia cow is presumably a full member of society who earns a living by consensually being milked?
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