I suppose that's what I come back to.
My parents lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation, my grandparents fought in ww2. My gg parents lived through ww1. Most of everyone before them lived in relative poverty.
I'm not sure id take any of them over the current situation. Certainly there are massive problems looming that will cause lots of suffering, but humans do find joy and purpose at all times
Except facebook used to be like that, and somehow we did just fine. Shit myspace just gave you Tom when you signed up for a new account and nobody found that confusing either.
Standards have certainly changed, but it's really not that hard to follow a few people that look slightly interesting and grow your network based on who they post.
Imo old people are sometimes worse with this.
100% this. We were paranoid that facebook would melt our kid's brain, but in reality it's messing up our parents' generation.
My 9 yr old is conflicted because all his friends are on Messenger Kids and he wants to talk to them, but doesn't want to give facebook access to his data.
That's very true too. I like the way Matthew Crawford talks about the Attention Economy and how we're essentially selling our attention to websites in return for "free" content.
I also think there's a real difference between actively sourcing information and mindlessly consuming it. Going to Netflix to specifically watch Black Mirror or Orange is the New Black is substantively different from opening Netflix and letting the algorithm suck away a few hours of your evening. Youtube tutorials are amazing and I've used them for all kinds of home, work and personal projects but it's also very easy to watch a bunch and feel like you know how to do something. I expect watching a really satisfying video of someone hand-cutting a dovetail joint between two pieces of wood releases a good chunk of the dopamine of actually doing it yourself, but it's not the same... not at all.
I disagree, I have a 9 yr old son and he's all about how everything works. I think the problem is that it's too easy, for most of his questions it takes literally a minute to find a youtube video that explains nearly any concept. I certainly don't mean to belittle that but he'll have some question like "how can a cluster of satellites observe the entire planet" and he can have that question answered in seconds, and be force-fed ten more youtube videos on more of the same.
When I was his age (would have been 1989) that'd be a very difficult question for me to answer. Even though that problem had been solved for hundreds of years, I'd have probably needed to start with an encyclopedia and try to find enough about orbits to dig more. My dad knew a bit about space, maybe he'd have been able to point me in the right direction, but there was never an easy video to answer that.
There's an ability to access knowledge like there never has been before, the breadth and depth of knowledge on the internet is something we could only have dreamed of 30 years ago. The dream was that this equitable access to information would create a more informed and more inquisitive society, but somehow it's just made us lazy.
I'd like to see my kid realize there's not an easy youtube answer and actually go do more digging and synthesize an answer. I think he's well-placed to develop that skill but it's not something most people posess.
Yeah, especially when you imagine that they are accustomed to not having to seek out knowledge or even entertainment. When algorithms feed you everything and your attention becomes a commodity you don't need to develop the skill to actually find it, or the wherewithal to even imagine that you need to go out and find it.
I believe those of us who were online in the 1995-2010 era remember what it was like to have an internet full of possibilities that you could explore and discover, but that was the exception.
I think the Intel/nvidia combo works (with a lot of caveats) but the amd/nvidia one seems way less supported. Not a massive deal for me as I mostly use it as a desktop replacement machine, but it does suck to only get about 2.5 hrs of battery life on the rare occasions that i'm untethered.
A few apps like Photoshop and Fusion360 keep my running Windows. The graphics card situation is also a giant pain in the ass, my laptop has a Radeon and a RTX 3080 and I can't get any kind of prime offloading to work. I'd really like to use the radeon unless i'm running something intensive that needs 3d acceleration, but i think I'd likely have to reboot to switch between them.
That leaves me running the RTX chip the whole time so the laptop draws about 40W at idle, when running windows it's more like 10W because the nvidia chip is completely off.
Yeah, though some of that's genetics too. I'm a couple years younger than him and honestly think I look at least a couple of years younger than him. I eat fairly well, but definitely have occasional donuts and frequent pizza.
Plus even if you could get an exact number of USDA calories (which you probably could do with hyper-processed foods) there's no guarantee that your body would extract that exact number of usable calories because that's a function of your individual digestive system and how it responds to certain inputs.
Slackware was my first distro too, probably around 95 i think as I got a CDR copy from a friend in high school. It's certainly not been my daily driver for that whole period, but I think I've probably at least had a linux system operational for nearly 30 years.
I've been using Windows since maybe 92 and MacOS since 86. I think Solaris is the only other OS I've used a significant amount. There days I've got a Macbook Pro for work, Windows 10 for photo editing and Kubuntu Jammy for everything else.
I have that sense too, i feel like some of my earliest interactions blew me away and now i still use it for certain pieces of code, but it's not as strong as it first was.