Comment by nerdsniper
13 hours ago
I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness.
It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time.
My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews through thinking tokens. The competitive nature of it keeps me focused, and it’s rewarding when I win with a faster or better solution.
That's a great tip, but I know some people hate that because there is some cognitive load if they rely more on visuals and have to think more about which way to turn or face when they first start the route, or have to make turns on unfamiliar routes.
I also wanted to mention that just spending some time looking at the maps and comparing differences in each services' suggested routes can be helpful for developing direction awareness of a place. I think this is analogous to not locking yourself into a particular LLM.
Lastly, I know that some apps might have an option to give you only alerts (traffic, weather, hazards) during your usual commute so that you're not relying on turn-by-turn instructions. I think this is interesting because I had heard that many years ago, Microsoft was making something called "Microsoft Soundscape" to help visually impaired users develop directional awareness.
That's the entire point of it though, to make you more aware of where you are and which way you should go.
Extra cognitive load while driving isn't the smartest idea probably.
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This is explained in more detail in the book "Human Being: reclaim 12 vital skills we’re losing to technology", which I think I found on HN a few months ago.
The first chapter goes into human navigation and it gives this exact suggestion, locking the North up, as a way to regain some of the lost navigational skills.
I actually noticed this as a kid. One of the early GTA games north locked minimaps, and I knew the city well. Later ones did not, and I was always more confused.
I've pretty much always had GPS nav locked to North-Up because of this experience.
I try using north-up for that reason, but it loses the smart-zooming feature you get with the POV camera, like zooming in when you need to perform an action, and zooming back out when you're on the highway.
I was shocked into using it when I realized that when using the POV GPS cam, I couldn't even tell you which quadrant of the city I just navigated to.
I wish the north-up UX were more polished.
Unpolished north-up mode is a feature, the stakeholders want addicted users.
I haven't tried this technique yet, sounds interesting.
Living in a city where phone-snatching thieves are widely reported on built my habit of memorising the next couple steps quickly (e.g. 2nd street on the left, then right by the station), then looking out for them without the map. North-Up helps anyways because you don't have to separately figure out which erratic direction the magnetic compass has picked this time (maybe it's to do with the magnetic stuff I EDC.)
Yeah, I'm a North-Up cult member too, after seeing a behind the scenes video of Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear suggesting it, claiming "never get lost again".