The article would be better if the author replaced "smartphone" with "smartphone screen". A ton of activities are made better by smartphones - a walk or a run with podcast or music, a drive or a bike ride with navigation, etc. It's specifically the screen that takes 100% of your attention and prevents you from daydreaming.
To each their own, IMO. As the other commenter says, some folk might find that distracting.
When I go hiking/backpacking, I don't listen to music at all, as I enjoy the peacefulness of the forest and the break that my mind gets from the noise of life. I also typically default to paper maps after having done a lot of research via guidebooks, old and new, about where I'm heading. I'll reach for my phone if I really need it, but usually I don't, and I don't roll with a GPS track I downloaded from someone's past trip. I'm there to enjoy the environment around me, and that means hearing it, too.
Same for driving. Maybe I'll use Waze if it's somewhere I've never really been before, but typically I'll just look it up beforehand and find my way there on my own.
When it comes to those navigation choices, wrt both driving and hiking, it gives me a better understanding of the area, and a stronger sense of route options, and therefore a stronger sense of myself being able to find my own way, than if I were to rely on a screen (or Google Maps/Waze audio telling me where/when to turn and me following blindly).
I think cycling is a particularly good example of this. Using the phone on a mount for navigation can help you go more interesting places you're less familiar with, but you have to look at your surroundings to be vaguely safe. I don't cycle with music or anything, I don't think I'd feel safe doing that but I really enjoy a long cycle with the phone on a mount for directions.
A garmin or something would likely be better for this, but I don't particularly want to buy one and the phone does a fine job.
if you are listening to a podcast or music, your mind is following those rhythms and thoughts. Not clear this is better when running that listening to the rhythms of your own body; breath, heart, footfall, and the sounds of the world around you.
If you are driving using a GPS for navigating, how much of your mind are you using to track where you are, spotting landmarks, etc. This is a FUNDAMENTAL aspect of almost all motive forms of live, the circuitry is deep in the brain, and if you are not activating it, you don't even know what you are missing.
I frequently use RWGPS for planning my bike rides but don't pay for it (yet!). Curious - is all routing done by graphhopper or do you have some secret sauce on your end? Also graphhopper web has regular bike mode and "racing bike", they tend to come up with different routes, wondering if it's incorporated on your side somehow or if there is a way to influence RWGPS algorithm to be more "road cycling" vs casual cycling (I think that's what graphhopper means by "racing").
We have an update to our web and mobile route planners coming out in the next month that adds more specific bike profiles, including paved/unpaved preferences and cycling infrastructure preferences. Maybe an MTB profile as well.
We use graphhopper for everything, with customized profiles. We add data to the weekly planet PBF files from the OSM project for additional routing data not present in OSM.
Thanks, looking forward! I don't know where most of your users are, but coming up with a safe road bike route in US suburbia is not a trivial problem. Current RWGPS planner routinely wants to take me to very dangerous roads (for a road cyclist). I hope your update will make it better.
I don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI. After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?
My understanding is that in the US, earned wages (while employees were employed) are indeed employee claims. Not paying these is what YC guidance above says will lead to "very bad things."
After people are let go, severance and continuation of healthcare beyond some term mandated by law (maybe state, maybe federal, maybe varies by state, don't know) are not considered employee claims in this sense.
CEO and the board didn't follow the YC guidance mentioned above, and it's on them.
Good article. Bottom line is employees need to be aware what can happen and how future rounds of financing, among other things, could affect their equity comp. The more articles and blog posts about it, the better.
There is no one-size-fits-all recommendation though. Everybody is different, and everybody's situation is different. What works for me won't necessarily work for you.
Equity comp, especially in non-publicly-traded companies, indeed is closer to a lottery than a lot of people think, and articles like this are helpful because they are educating people about it.
