Be kind to your elders

"before 1990" ffs. I was expecting "before 1960"

The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing "the end of history" with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I'm still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
- Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don't even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
  
  In fairness, most internet users would have been extremely against regulating social media until quite recently

My grandparents lived in houses before electricity and lived long enough that computers in their pocket could talk to them. Hopefully it is a few centuries before that much happens in 103 years

Is it really so hard to just stay somewhat connected to the world around you?
It's not like it was a rapid shift, this shit has been progressing for DECADES and some just refused to learn. I've talked to 30 yos who can't do anything beyond basic computer usage, and I've seen a 80 year old who was extremely with it and troubleshooting with me.
It's not an age problem, it's a lack of effort
- Exactly. I'm 61, and I first used a computer in 1980. My uncle was receptive, so as I helped him over the years, he became more and more proficient until now. He can do most of his troubleshooting on his own, and he's ten years older than I.

Okay, as someone born in 1988, I am not an elder (but also I will accept you being kind to me please, thank you 🫠)

elders
1990

Vhs? We used to be plopped into the local movie house to allow mom to go out on play. Videotape was something arcane used by the TV news crews

Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don't buy it. It's only brain-melting if you've spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
- The problem with cryptocurrencies is that you can explain it, without going to technical details, to a person with the intelligence of an average investment banker. (Which isn't much. Many animals make more profitable random investments when prompted.)
  Same with generative AI I guess.

Apparently I'm an elder.
The shifts in tech were easy.
It's the repeated economic punishment, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and political dive bomb this country has put us through that's been tough.
- I thought this was a Canadian site? You must be usaian
  
  I don't think you understand how Lemmy works then(not trying to be rude,just evaluating based on your comment and instance.)
  While yes, you are a member of a Canadian instance (Lemmy.ca), lemmy.ca federates with other instances, many in different parts of the world. Some are European, some from the US. Undoubtedly some in other countries also, since anyone can spin up an instance, but I don't know any examples to give you.
  The poster you replied to is from lemmy.world, one of the more generic instances is based in the US. Same as OP. The sh.itjust.works instance is also Canadian,but you should expert to see tons of people from all over, not just Canada and not just the US either.

I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
- Yeah.
  We can move on to "complicated" things like crypto after we've made sure people understand basic things like FUCKING FASCISM.
  Priorities.

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.
  Hell, 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.
  
  He’ll, I was looking to replace
  diff note: Why is autocorrect suddenly changing "hell" to "he'll" all over?
  
  I have been looking for just the right mouse for ages and the market for mouses (mice?) is terrible. I've been looking for a 5 button mouse that supports bluetooth (reliability) and I am actually so frustrated with what the options are. They are either massively over engineered, huge, expensive paper weights or cheap, super light, cheap junk I can crush with my weak feminine hands. I have ranged from top of the line hundred dollar gaming one to junky light weight 10 dollar ones and I am still looking. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
- Us millennials basically had the internet to ourselves for like 15 years.
  The only reason we’re still on it is chasing that high even though it’s gone
  
  What? I’ve been on it since the early 1990s ….

I grew up using the (actual paper) card catalog in the library to find books and yes I predate VHS. However, I even understand crypto, but I think my definition may vary slightly from younger folks "understanding".
Crypto has no intrinsic value like gold, and as fiat currency isn't even backed by any nationstate. This means any appreciation is based upon the "greater fool" model. Its not an investment. Its a series of Ponzi schemes so repeated that the term "rug pull" is right at home in the crypto world. I'm old enough to see other Ponzi schemes and know how they end up.
The only real value that I can see for crypto is bypassing of national monetary controls. As in, you can buy crypto in your home country with your home country's currency, then travel to another country with just your coins (as hex values on paper if you want to go that far) and exchange those coins for fiat currency in the other country. This isn't unique to crypto though. You could do the same with buying rare Pokemon cards and transporting them with a slightly higher risk of seizure at one nation's border. There might even be less volatility in Pokemon cards than many crypto currencies.
So many trends are variations on things we've already seen before. Bernie Madoff would have been right at home with cypto.

I remember being happy to watch whatever came on one of the four channels that your TV could pick up with a rabbit ear antenna.

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.
- Same with the stock market and generally the economy.
  Okay, you can tap the breaks on that one. There's a book from 1949 called "The Intelligent Investor" that's been the benchmark for savvy stock market analysis for generations. Hardly the only one (although a lot of the newer stuff is just variations on the core themes). Understanding price-to-earnings, market share, debt-to-asset ratios, and marginal return gets you a long way towards consistent middle-of-the-road long term safe returns.
  Same with The Economy. Get a copy of Piketty's Capitalism in the 21st Century and you will have a firm grasp of macro-economic models and trends by the end of it. You'll get a core understanding of the difference between short-term investment returns and long term value creation. You'll get an idea for the broad reasoning behind different public policies and their impact on the broad growth and development trends seen over the last 500 years.
  There's no need to mystify markets or economic systems. In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment), a modern business analyst has a generally firm grasp of their industrial or market focus.
  Even crypto is something people can broadly understand as a modern iteration of a privatized experiment in currency manipulation. The thing about crypto is akin to understanding how a casino works. Analyzing the system doesn't mean you're going to be able to profit from it. Its like analyzing a grizzly bear with a plan to engage it in a boxing match. The best analysts will tell you "You're going to get horrible mauled if you interact with this thing, stay away."
  If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
  The scams aren't a product of (lack of) transparency so much as they are the result of misinformation and market manipulation.
  You've got a guy in a big wagon with a bullhorn selling "Better Than Aspirin!" for $10/pill right outside a pharmacy selling aspirin for $3/bottle in a bottom shelf at the back of the store. The moral of this isn't "Nobody will ever understand pharmaceuticals". It is that there's is a great deal of money in capturing people's attention and then lying to them.
  
  In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment)
  But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.
  We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.

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.
  
  MST3K was great, and anime is good.
  
  People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies.
  As a general rule, I prefer getting torrent links from friends in a Discord stream over huffing it over to a Blockbuster and hoping their single copy of "My Neighbor Totoro" isn't checked out. You can make the case for a better brighter tech future.
  Just don't put half your paycheck into "TotoroCoin" because its trending on pump.fun
  
  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.

Now people wait in line for Pokemon cards. 🤔

Goddamn I'm not that elder! But also true

Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.

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.

1990 time for Guru

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.
  
  Clearly I and the OP meant crypto to mean cryptocurrency.
  ENCRYPTION is great but it isn’t “crypto”

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 🥹 😭
- 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.
- 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

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.

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.
  
  Oh I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a hobby. I tend to believe it’s a method of market manipulation by a few big players and somehow used for money laundering (but that’s my own conspiracy theory 🤣). It’s WAY too volatile for me to “invest” in. I pretty much meant from the techy side like I understand how blockchain works. Like the difference between PoW,PoS,PoA,DPoS… and the math (cryptography,hashing, etc) behind the whole process. I mean I’ve used it before to buy things when I wanted more anonymity (well maybe more obfuscation but now but that’s not even really possible).
  And I really didn’t take offense at the whole original statement. I just thought the arbitrary “1990” cut off for elder was just comical. I mean someone born around 1990 is 35/36 and that’s an elder?? Really?? I might have put that number at closer to 1965-1970. There is no way, even when I was in my teens and 20s would I have called a 35 yo an “elder”. That’s just ludicrous.
  And I’m a computer nerd and have been since I was single digits. So I understand this kinda stuff way better than my kids.
- 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.
  
  Oh I wasn’t mad, it was meant as more an humorous thing more than anything. I should have added “Now get off my lawn!!”. And yeah a lot of people in my age group wouldn’t understand. I’m also surrounded by a bunch of nerds my age so my perception is a little skewed.
  But you might be surprised how many IT folks are in my age group. It was a good job to get into in the 1990s. So there are lots of techy mid to late 50s out there.
  
  You think half of any group of zoomers can talk with sophistication about Crypto?

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

I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
- Public ledger blockchain is genius technology, whether you can imagine a use-case you consider valid is not a condition for it to actually be an amazing construction.
- 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?
  
  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
  
  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.
  
  It's a speculative asset that fluctuates based on the whims of billionaire hedge funds and early crypto investors. There is zero value in owning it unless you got in early enough. And even then it's a situation of the last man holding the bag. Someone will end up losing their asses.
  
  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?
  
  "it's somehow worth money" is basically true of all fiat currencies. It's worth what the consensus agrees it is worth.
  (this comment should not be read as a defense of crypto)
  
  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)

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.

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.

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?

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
  
  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.
  
  Reading this made my back and neck hurt 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.

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 😭

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).

It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.
- Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 it's only been -8 years plenty of time to understand
  
  2008 it’s only been -8 years plenty of time to understand
  watch out in about 4 years, stock up on masks and alcohol.
  Drinking or cleaning alcohol
  Yes.

I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.

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

Crap. I'm an elder now?
- Oh. Yes. Yes you are. Look after your back. You only get one.
  
  You only get one.
  Speak for yourself 😏
  https://youtu.be/X53ZSxkQ3Ho
- 1971 here, I must be your great grampa.

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
  
  stands up with popcorn crunching SFX from knees

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.

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.

Y'all don't understand. We had to learn you don't have to rewind DVDs before returning them. It was stressful.

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.

Us elders be here designing the shit that does crypto.

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.

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.
- 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.
- To me, the storage isn't the impressive part; it's the logic, "thinking", fine motor control, etc.
- 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.
  
  I don't have a machine, but can't throw away some classics. Sometime in the future, someone will watch 'Videodrome' as God and nature intended.
  
  How are the VHS cassettes holding up? 30+ years I think is past the average lifespan, do they jam/tear/etc more than they used to?
- 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