It's not "brain melting". Even watching the internet go from "this is super neat, and way cool" (For nerds) to "Well, it's ALL going through enshittification now" wasn't "brain melting", it's just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
He'll, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn't find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
Nobody is expected to understand crypto. Same with the stock market and generally the economy. If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
Now people wait in line for Pokemon cards. 🤔
Goddamn I'm not that elder! But also true
I understand crypto... and it is utter shit.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies. Crypto is worse than that.
You know why vhs quality degraded with every generation of copy? It wasn't an accident or a technical problem, it was deliberate.
They want to discourge people from copying their tapes, so there was a mechanism in the VCR to actually cause some drop in quality when you taped something.
This is why TV tapings of a movie would never be as good as buying/renting the same movie from a store. Even if you used a virgin tape.
MST3K was great, and anime is good.
1990 time for Guru
i remember standing in line for dvds. we were hacking regionlocked discs before nft was just a scammer's wet dream. we were moulded by early modern technology.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
Who is expecting them to understand cryptography?
A yes the RS encryption, public key, private key ...
I vaguely remember
- Fuck you
- Who the fuck do you think you are?
- crypto is a fucking scam
Crypto isn't a scam. It's a fantastic way to protect yourself online and HTTPS has been a game changer. Crypto currency is a scam though.
So people who 35years old are elder now.
Get back in the lounger grandpa
I can't. I have to work to afford food and shelter until I die.
I'm 37, I'm not old!
Yes.
Fuck, I'm considered an ELDER now?
By someone old enough to not just be a dad, but identify so much that it's their username. Fuck this kid. I'm not old. Just getting fat, bald, slow, dumb.. oh wait.. maybe they're into something 🥹 😭
Dispense your wisdom, o my elder. I'm just a nineties boy, what do I know of the world before ?
I was born i 85. Not much more wisdom I can give I'm afraid. I am a tech early adopter and a coder so I understand crypto it's just too volatile a market for me to care about. Wish I had invested in Bitcoin when someone asked me if I wanted to in 2012 though. Mostly my driving force for new tech adoption was my gaming habit. I had a colecovision, NES, Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, and all the systems from the next gen onward once I had job money.
Your elders refers to people older than you, not necessarily elderly people
Fr. I just turned 40. Give me my senior discount card.
Yeha I turn 40 at the end of the year. Over the hill buddies.
I remember when you had to fill out a contract and leave a deposit to rent a VCR. You also had to make an appointment because the video store only had 2 or 3 machines. The whole neighborhood would come over and everyone would watch together.
The shift was 9/11 happening and everything that happened after.
For the US maybe. For my area it was the Russians finally going home and now they want to come back
Before 1990?… fuck you.. I have kids born before 1990… elder my ass … I probably understand crypto better than you do…
I’m not bitter. Not at all.
...Dad? Haha I'm about to hit 40 and shitcoins are my brainy boomer dad's hobby.
Ok. Before you get mad. Do you think you are a normal representative of your age group?
If you walk into a room of people you don't know but who are all likely born within +/-5yrs of you, would you expect to be able to talk about crypto with any sophistication and at least half would be able to follow?
If not, then the generalization is true even if it doesn't apply to you specifically.
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There's so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from "big player" censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance "bros" started coming in and badabing badabang now it's another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow "crypto" evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. "Trump!" "Gaza!" "AI!" "Climate!". Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we're left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
No, no one is forgetting they're built on cryptography. It just doesn't matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn't have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don't care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a "for the people" project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. "The people" did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn't and still don't have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It's still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it's really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.Bitcoin wasn't taken over by finance people, they're the reason it didn't taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
It's really not proving much of anything. These new "concepts" and "paradigms" are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that's been done before even if there's a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who're you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?
I keep saying that humanity's toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they've been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That's not new. The environment he's doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic,, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We've had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain's ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people's heads with it.
I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.
Worth it!
I am immeasurably grateful that the entirety of my youth is not on record.
Right? AFAIK there's about 5 pictures of me between the ages of 8 and 25. A couple of those are driver's licenses.
I seriously wonder how much brain damage I avoided by squeaking in my teenage years before the invention of smart phones.
Honestly I understand better now why old people complained about computers so much. We don't even know what we lost.
SMH. Dear boy. We elders were taking it to the streets in the 60’s and 70’s—in huge numbers. We organized without social media, were willing to face danger and arrest, and got shit done. We were using DOS before you were probably even born (do you know what that is?). While many of us are, in fact, fading, there are legions of us with knowledge and experience you will never understand until YOU are an elder.
I feel like its an advantage to know the analog way to do things in addition to the current norms. For example, navigating by paper map and direction of the sun, like some kind of land pirate.
I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.
What?
You know what a normal database is.
The Blockchain is a distributed database instead of a centralized one where normally people can verify that each other part of the database is correct.
Generally anything a distributed database can do, a centralized database in good hands can do better. Except for crimes. It's more difficult to get away with crimes when they can be shut down in one place.
Also it's harder to undo Blockchain/crypto stuff. They sell this as a benefit while the primary use is scams and rug pulls.
"The government can't get your money back." Yeah, gonna be hard to get back thr money you were scammed out of with a court order, isn't it.
They also try to sell it as anonymous, but it's very much not. Everything is on the record, so if they link you to an address (and they generally can), they can see every transaction you've ever made. There used to be services to obfuscate this, but the government has well and truly broken through those. They can find you of they want to.
Crypto is a an MLM for guys. You can make money, if you're lucky enough to be the scammer and not the scammee.
the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong
but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html
No, that's basically it.
The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn't backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can't trust the other computers that you're talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can't suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.
It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it's worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it's supposed to replace.
So it's just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that's supposedly worth something because...of reasons?
Fiat currency is just as silly. As is all money, really.
"I trade numbers for food. The numbers are accessible via a magnetic strip on some plastic in my pocket." or "I trade paper for clothing but the number of papers isn't as important as the number printed ON the papers." Both of these realities are absurd. :)
As a store of value representing labor rendered: neither of those are terrible systems and most people don't understand either of them anyway. Fiat seems "normal" because we grew up with it. That said: I'm no apologist. Popular crypto currencies offer little novelty for the layperson, no true improvement on the concept of currency generally, and cost orders of magnitude more to maintain their required infrastructure. I fail to see the appeal.
There are some projects which focus on the practical utility of decentralized currency (I remember thinking Nano (wikipedia.com) was cool back in the day) but they don't get the same kind of attention as meme coins because they can't be abused as easily. I've heard stories of these kinds of tools facilitating commerce in places where the local currency collapsed. Neat as that may be it isn't revolutionary... Still more convenient than bartering via cigarette though.
It's decentralized, so how do you prevent people from making up bullshit lies that didn't happen about where the money is? You do it by incorporating a difficult math problem. Then to incentivize people to actually work on that instead of just using the money, people who solve it get a reward.
I am not pro crypto, just explaining.
See, this guy gets it
I don't think there is one legal use case that can only be solved by a blockchain and not cheaper and faster with a classic database.
Except money laundering, crapto is fantastic for that.
I am sure scamming people out of their money with crypto is legal in a few jurisdictions.
Yall seem to young to to understand crypto. Its original intent was to combat the crazy bad economic stuff from 2007. It’s not inherently a scam as a category. 2007s banking collapse was really scary when it happened if you were paying attention. It made 9/11 seem like NBD. Unfortunately not much has changed and you’ll probably get to see something similar again.
Huh. I've never heard that being the reason, especially when crypto was supposedly made outside US but the 2007 crisis was centered around US.
The original reason is in the name.
Yes. Absolutely. But I see where the appeal comes from. A few years ago I bought some Bitcoin for 50 Euro. A year later it doubled in value. That was nice. And that was moderate compared to when I first got Bitcoin and it was as cheap as dirt and suddenly it's worth 70k. With the world in the grips of the billionaire class people get desperate for even a chance at moderate wealth. It's a sad symptom of the fucked up world we're living in.
Just a big lottery you'll never really win https://youtu.be/4DUkS98yw5Y
Then you don't understand crypto.
The only crypto that makes kinda sense is the idea of a stablecoin (essentially a layer around a stable currency/reserve), but so far there's not really a good implementation of one.
All the big crypto coins are just more volatile stocks with shittier tax implications (assuming you don't try to skirt the law with it)
FUCK YOU! I understand crypto and STILL have a VHS tape I never returned. pfft. arrogant youth. now where do i push to send this to reddit?
Crypto is an EMP away from being worthless
I'm against crypto but this logic seems same as money is one fire away from being worthless.
Which is true. We just give worth to things to make it easy for transactions.
Also, modern money is also susceptible to an emp, arguably more so than crypto.
Listen here you little shit: you think you’re superior because you rebranded Ponzi schemes with AI merde?
I was born in 1983 and I’m old enough to remember having only 5 tv channels, vcr’s, and you couldn’t get on the internet if your mom was in the phone.
I can remember only having 3 TV channels, and they closed down sometime around midnight until the morning. You got the fuzzy black and white bits of CBR on the screen when they turned the signal off
When videos came out, only my richer friends had them and they were few and far between, we used to have an after school video club where we'd pay 10p to watch a film in the AV room (sat on a carpet of old piss stains)
The internet didn't exist, and I saw my first computer while at secondary school in the late 80's (I'm thinking BBC commodore or something, I can't really remember)
I feel so fucking old right now lol
I remember getting up early and trying to watch TV, there would just be a high pitched sound and a photo of a girl and a puppet I think. There was an urban myth that the girl was slowly moving but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't see it.
The TV was heavy and cube shaped, it hummed and had a picture that was grainy and flickered. It had an aerial and had to be tuned with a dial on the front, like a radio. The channels were tuned to buttons which clicked in, on the front of the TV.
We didn't have a VHS for ages either. We had a local video rental shop (not blockbuster) and we'd go rent a couple of films every week, which was an event which we'd get excited about.
Later I was the only one who could work out how to do the timed record function on the VHS player, so I was in demand as that was the only way to do 'catch up' for most things on TV. You would just miss whatever it was you wanted to watch and not be able to do anything about it. :o
Sometimes they did put on replays of programs, even regular ones, but people were crazy about 'their soaps' or whatever program they liked and planned their lives around being at home to watch them.
Reading this made my back and neck hurt lol.
As a kid we had four channels in the rural US. ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS had really good coverage and all shut down at midnight. Then a Fox station started up just close enough that I could pick it up clearly at night to watch Babylon 5!
It was happier times.
As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.
I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.
When I was a kid I always was amazed at things like my grandparents going from no electricity to microwave ovens and VCRs. I often wondered about huge cultural shifts and what that was like, going from preindustrial production to industrial or major shifts in religion that affected whole societies. Now I am experiencing it and it's very uneasy but exciting at the same time. Weirdness.
Some of it is rose-coloured glasses. Even my grandfather (born in the 1920s) once remarked to me whilst watching the news: "you know, this has always been happening; we just didn't used to talk about it", in response to some kind of crime/violence. It's also generally one of the goals of parents to let kids be kids and shelter them as best they can from some of the actual hardships and shit that is life, so a lot of us think back fondly on those times (at least who are lucky enough to have similar experiences; not everyone had adults in their lives that would or even could do that).
Spying has been around forever, but the creative jobs thing is apt. Instead, it was the threat of manual work getting taken over by robots, hating Japan because of their miracle economy basically made possible (at least at first) due to the US but then nearly overtaking the US, etc. that defined a lot of what I saw (which is humorous given that I have been living in Japan for the past decade).
I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.
OK, this one kind of hurt a bit. I can't be the only one with a functioning VCR in the room with them right now...
Nope.
The same room? Remember to take your meds
Y'all don't understand. We had to learn you don't have to rewind DVDs before returning them. It was stressful.
Why you gotta do me dirty like that?
My young kids: “Back in the 1900s”
😡
Also.. a significant number of millennials (81-87) were born closer to 1950 than today.
Oh god I'm sooooo ooooold 😭
Who do you think built Crypto? The millennials were the ones building everything in the last 10-20 years. Be sorry for the boomers. They built the infrastructure we stand on but tech has completely changed since they left the workforce.
And at least when the chase check glitch fad went around we recognized it immediately as a felony. Gen Z jumped right on that grenade.
And Gen X continues to disappear between the cracks. If it weren’t for movies made about us by Baby Boomers, nobody would even know we were here.
I thought about including Gen X but decided I wanted to continue the tradition. :)-
Boomers didn't build shit, they just pulled up ladders.
Don't confuse the politicians with the makers. They literally invented the entire backbone of the Internet.
Cryptocurrency or cryptography?
The former you don’t really need to understand fully to use, but the latter is vital and indeed brain-melting.
Cryptozoology
I'll give you five chupacabra for a mothman
It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.
Us elders be here designing the shit that does crypto.
It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.
I'm a xennial and I'd say I'm doing pretty good at keeping up, but I'm also a software dev so that probably skews things a bit.
Crap. I'm an elder now?
Oh. Yes. Yes you are. Look after your back. You only get one.
1971 here, I must be your great grampa.
Yeah, let’s see you write a new autoexec.bat file with whatever text editor came on a DOS3.2 floppy that’s infected the the Stoned virus after you stupidly deleted autoexec.bat from your 386 by going to the library and checking out some books.
Uh oh, your dad is going to beat your ass!
Umm the rest of us has to write it own autoexec.bat, not because we were idiots that deleted stuff or got viruses, but to change the keyboard language and a few other things to have enough memory to play Doom.
Don't forget config.sys! Who all here can get a Soundblaster working without disabling anything else? (IRQ 5 typically?)
And then put that autoexec.bat on a bootable floppy disk you needed to research how to make yourself, fucking around with EMS and XMS settings to have enough memory to play.
Figuring out how to get games to play as a teenager is what launched my career in IT.
When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.
It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.
So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.
Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.
This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.
I like to re-read my favorite science fiction classics and giggle at the author's mistakes.
In "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" a self-aware computer struggles over creating a CGI face for him/herself. Also, iirc, the computer uses tape.
William Gibson has done essays about how much he got wrong in 'Neuromancer," but my personal favorite is the spaceship pilot who never heard of a computer virus.
My favorites are in Asimov. In the Foundation series, one product the traders sell is a nuclear powered ash tray. They employ advanced nuclear plasma manipulation to...quickly atomize cigarette butts.
Or the time there's this couple. They are traveling to another planet, and they get aboard their personal interstellar spaceship. The society is advanced enough, that that is just something you can own.
What happens as soon as they get onboard their personal FTL interstellar ship? The husband commands his wife to get dinner started.
To me, the storage isn't the impressive part; it's the logic, "thinking", fine motor control, etc.
For what it’s worth, the capacity of Commander data did very a little bit during the show, but I just chalked that up to a few upgrades.
Besides, I think it’s important to mention that data was not built for storage capacity. He only had as much storage capacity as he realistically would need during his lifetime. Until he could get an upgrade, I suppose.
JESUS HAYTCH CHRIST. I'm watching TNG with my daughter at the moment. Did you have to do me that dirty?
Still, given modern video compression algorithms it's a solid 93,000,000 hours of video recording at 1GB per hour at decent quality and surely that's only going to get better with time.
Approx 10,000 years
Nitpick, I do believe just like the storage for the actual computer in the ship (isolinear optical at first then more complex in TNG), positronic brain storage is not one to one comparable to what we use. Or rather, a bit may be the same (again, maybe not, I don't think it's binary) but how it's used is a lot different than our slow versions.
8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.
6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers
9/11 was high school for me, Columbine mass shooting was around the same time. I went from end of cold war get under your desk drills in early grade school to a few years with no drills aside from tornado, to ending high school with active shooter drills.
4th grade for me, so barely old enough to understand the significance, but definitely old enough to remember airports without TSA, and being able to go all the way to the gate with whomever was flying.
I had a girl in my classroom watch the second plane hit the tower and said out loud to the room, "wow, what a coincidence." We were so innocent... and she was so dumb.
The elders had to rewind the movies after watching
I still own a VCR and a vast collection of VHS tapes. I mean, I also pay for streaming services, but without the old 90s commercials for Disney World and previews for movies that were released in 1995, the movies just don’t hit the same.
Be Kind. Rewind.
If only the pace of technology was the only paradigm shift to have to worry about since the 80s/90s
This post makes my knees hurt
Wait… what happened to people born in 1989 that didn’t to those born in 1991???
hold up now.
I remember beta vs VHS debates, now get off my lawn!
Beta was superior
Funny story. Back in the 1960s porn shops invented loop booths. You'd pay a quarter and have five quiet minutes alone to watch an 8 mm porn movie. When the time came to switch over to video, the porn shops went with the cheaper option. The guys who made the tapes put them on VHS because the porn shops were the biggest market at the start. When guys went to buy dirty movies for home viewing they saw that most were only available on VHS.
That's how Sony lost billions.
My aunt was born before TV was broadcast
My mom had the first tv in our community when she was a kid cause her dad owned the general store. Before that they all gathered around the radio at the store. By they, I mean the entire community cause he was the only one with a radio as well.
I wish that wasn't painfully true.
Wasn't expecting that to be associated with 1990
The other day, someone in one of the gaming communities posted a comparison of the progress of video games from mid-90s to mid-aughts, and a more recent decade. It was clearly meant to be slightly exaggerated since the the recent screenshots were all the same one from fortnite, but the point still stands.
I wouldn't trade my 90s childhood for anything in the world.
Nah fuck em. They invented nuclear physics and they can't figure out a goddamned email? Skill issue.
When I was growing up the “big scam” was chain mail and televangelists.
Get off my lawn!
....why is he replying to himself?
Character limits and/or not being able to edit the tweet to add more thoughts once posted.
Honestly?
It’s you guys that are missing out. You literally miss the perspective we have. Social media is completely optional. What the politicians do doesn’t affect you. Ignorance is bliss.
What the politicians do doesn’t affect you
Uhhh
Well they did follow it up with “ignorance is bliss“ so…
Bet this guy doesn't understand crypto himself... (And I wouldn't expect him to either if not for this post)
