I assume you are not suggesting that so long as it's possible to choose to be a hermit in the deep woods, then your technology use is all optional.
In any case, stone tools are technology. Making fire requires technology.
I'll set aside people who need technology to live (clothes are technology, but so is a CPAP machine).
I'll set aside how places are increasingly going cash free (cash is technology, and credit cards are more advanced technology, and phone payment requires even more technology).
Take my gym. Last year they switched to QR phone entry. The QR code changes every few seconds, so you can't print out the code and take it in. The handful of people without a smartphone, like me, got an exception to use an RFID card.
However, those who have a smartphone were not allowed to use an RFID card, even those complaining at the front desk, angry because they did not want to bring their phone with them to the gym.
It's true they are not forced to go to the gym, though note that most other gyms around here have also switched to smartphone entry, and I chose this gym specifically because they are the only one offering a specific style of group training that I want.
Or, take some of the examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137488 where people can't pay for parking because they need a smartphone app which requires not just iPhone/Android, but is only available from the local country's app store - rather difficult for foreign visitors.
It's true they are not forced to park there. They can find somewhere else and walk or take the bus.
Or, take the local college. They are a Microsoft shop. You need 2FA via smartphone app to log into their machines, access email, and the like. Signs and other info about upcoming events require a QR-code for info like time and place. People are not forced to use a smartphone, since they have a choice to not go to college, or find one of the decreasing number of schools which don't expect everyone to have a smartphone.
Or, a friend of mine lives in a city with no good mass transit options or bike options. Those who don't have a car use app-based taxi services. She knows a couple of people who choose to not have a smartphone, so they are limited to places they can walk.
In all cases there is still a choice, but it becomes increasingly Hobson's choice - and we've decided that living as a hermit, even metaphorically, is not what you mean by an alternative to not being forced, right?
I think this comment is a bit hyperbolic - it's really not so bad. Sure, we need to be mindful about accessibility in our rollout of useful technology. But I think the advantages that technologies, including the ones you listed above, bring into our lives far significantly outweigh whatever you are complaining about.
To your points specifically, I mostly see that you are complaining about technology you were previously used to (RFID cards, parking payment systems, public transit, school management systems, etc.) being replaced by more advanced technology (QR codes, 2FA, etc.). So, I don't see the problem as decoupling technology from lives but as enabling a smoother transition to more reliable and advanced technology.
The article makes other points about addiction, etc., and this is a problem that is not innate to technology but to human behavior that is exploited (knowingly or unknowingly) by profit-driven companies. Targeting the technology itself in this situation, again, is being lazy in my opinion.
Humans’ abilities to solve math problems is independent of language – if you can (or cannot) solve a problem stated in English, and if you understand, say French, you will (or will not) be able to solve the same problem presented to you in French. The blog shows that while GPT-4o can understand base64, its math reasoning does not generalize to base64.
Probably off topic: it's the second time I am reading about phase shifts today. The first time I read it was in context of interpretability of attention in transformer neural nets where they find phase shifts between positional and semantic learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03902
In my mind it is a geometric thing, that is, you find phases in things like oscillators that have the symmetry that the complex numbers do. (e.g. position and momentum for the oscillator rotate around the origin once in every cycle)
I'm also paying them with my user data. They use this data to generate insights and make more products that make them more money. It's very easy to overlook how much you are paying through your user behaviour.
Curious if there's anyone who's made a plan for this sort of a thing. I'm never able to plan even the rest of my week and follow through with it. What does a plan for your career look like and how do you get the discipline to stick to it?
It's not about discipline, it's about cultivating the ability to find your own north star of sorts, follow that, and ignore the noise.
In my example: I consulted in 2010-2012 doing Rails and hated it (despite having a great client). Decided I was not compatible with the webdev culture of shipping fast and breaking things, so I started self-studying compilers. Landed a job at an R&D firm in 2012 working on LLVM stuff, then have hung out in the research-y space ever since.
I'd always set that as my career endpoint, but lately I'm not as sure. I think my next step is working towards being able to work for myself creating products on the side, and working for others part time eventually. I realized I like working on other people's problems, but I have a lot of skill and vision in programming that I can use in other ways, such as product design. The idea of learning how to be more independent is very exciting to me, including learning about marketing, UI design, talking to users, etc.
After that? Who knows! Maybe I will teach part time, or write ebooks, or give trainings, or write games with friends. Computing is a big world and I feel very grateful to be able to move around in it as I get older.
Try not to consider career planning as being in the same category as task management. Instead, have a broad vision and keep a look out for opportunities that might bring you closer to that vision. Opportunities present themselves all the time; it's up to us to have the attention to notice them and the judgement to know when (not) to take them.
For me it was more about identifying the archetype I was after so I knew who to
emulate. It only lasted a year or two in most cases until I moved on to someone else.
You can’t, and I don’t think it is smart to try to, line up a progression like this because in the process both you and the environment will change.
