Disposible QR codes
===================

Quick Response code [1] went mainstream years ago and like many things
that started as a tool for engineering, work, education or research;
It's now misused in public space by companies and normies.  People use
them to scam each other and marketing teams for their campaigns.  Yet
this is not what I dislike about the whole situation.


Good UX for software, bad for humans
------------------------------------

My issue with QR codes is that people will print or post them without
human readable information of what the code encoded.  In most cases
it's a simple integer number, URL or code.  A very short text that
could be read and remembered or retyped by human to any device or
written on piece of paper.  But not, unless you have a smartphone with
camera and proper software you can't get that information.  This is
bad UX.  My hope is to eventually see a practice of including encoded
information below QR code.  Like we do with barcodes [2].  OFC often
code holds information that is not readable or useful to human anyway.
But in majority of cases it is, and it's not like QR code is used as
security measure.


GitHub Arctic Vault
-------------------

	> For greater data density and integrity, most
	> data was stored QR-encoded, and compressed.

GitHub has this Arctic Vault project [3].  I fail to see why potential
ease of recovery and readability of stored data was sacrificed to save
on storage space.  I'm not buying the "integrity" argument.  I can
imagine that it's much easier to scan than printed font.  But printed
plain text on plastic [4] and hex dumps of binary would outlive books.
I'm probably missing something obvious with my ignorance here.  Still
adding extra layer of QR codes and compression to encoded information
that already requires extra knowledge of programming languages to
understand will most likely not help recover data in far future.
Changes in human spoken language itself makes things difficult when
interpreting old texts.


Disposible binary
-----------------

I guess I just dislike using a smartphone.  Information stored in QR
codes that is expected to be scaned with smartphone is not of any high
importance or value anyway.  Fells like disposible binary data.


[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode
[3] https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
[4] Text on transparent plastic was portrayed in movie "Fifth element"

EOF