Tech Fade - Old tech is simply... Forgotten. People rely on corporate services to substitute.

[ToroidalBoat]

What are the implications? And how could we stop it?

The world could get worse, and there could be nothing to stop it.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

This isn't exclusive to tech this shit has been happening all over.

 

[Never Scored]

Which brings me to my final point. Even as someone who is considered tech literate, I don't know how to code in assembly. I've had no real reason to. As a solo indie game dev, I have other priorities when it comes to a project. I need things to work. Maybe I'm part of the "tech fade"? But that raises a question of how far do you go with this stuff? Are you tech illiterate if you don't code your own OS? Do I need to use linux console command to do move files around? Where's the line here?

Personally after working with both boomers and zoomers who are totally tech illiterate, I would put the line at does not know how to avoid or uninstall unintentionally installed 3rd party windows app that nags them to buy a product. Your mind would be blown how often I get handed a computer that is running slow and the user requests a new one when there are a half dozen or so programs like "Winzip Driver Updater" running in the background eating RAM and CPU resources that the user doesn't recall installing. Generally most people I would consider tech illiterate have a bunch of that shit on their PC and they don't know how it got there or how to get rid of it because they have no idea what the fuck they're doing. Like, I would expect that from a guy like my dad who is a 64-year-old blue collar worker who probably has not read a book in 45 years, but I'm talking about people with university degrees here.

I used to put the line at knows how to reinstall Windows if something goes really wrong, but that threshold was too high because that is apparently 99% of the general population.

 

[Smar Mijou]

I don't know of it's necessarily generational decline, or more of a symptom of the overall simplification of computers and cellphones nowadays. Either way, I agree that we're definitely on the downward slide of a bell curve in computer literacy worldwide. Everything is, for better or worse, wrapped up in slick GUI and one click installers. Programs are now "apps", and everything is more or less meant to work with one of a few dominant OS systems. Apple or Microsoft for computers, and Apple or Android for phones. Phones especially are basically used as modern day Dumb Terminals with an internet connection, ironically while the technology and capabilities of them get better every year. The bad part of that is that everything has became so easy, that anything out of the ordinary causes people's brains to lock up, and they become helpless. I've seen people who should know better get completely lost trying to boot up from DOS on an old 386 based PC for CNC machines, and I wonder how modern kids would react to loading from disk or cassette, Commodore style.

Then there's "lost tech". Most "lost tech" isn't really lost. It's just not profitable to make. I keep seeing YouTube videos in my recommended list saying that CRTs are "lost tech". In this age where you can print-on-demand almost anything, it still surprises me there is no equivariant service for old tech. The comments on the MATI thread tell me it's possible, just prohibitively expensive to do so. I'll take their word for it.

Some people might throw accusations of *autism*, but that's exactly why I enjoy youtube channels like 8-bit guy, Perifractic, Big Clive, etc. They delve deep into the origins of modern gaming, electonics, and computing, and while the tech is old and outdated for the most part, the fundamental skills are still necessary in today's world. Just as with many trade skills, legacy computer systems that are still in use are going to need to be maintained into the future, and the world would be fucked if those skills were lost.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Some people might throw accusations of *autism*, but that's exactly why I enjoy youtube channels like 8-bit guy, Perifractic, Big Clive, etc. They delve deep into the origins of modern gaming, electonics, and computing, and while the tech is old and outdated for the most part, the fundamental skills are still necessary in today's world. Just as with many trade skills, legacy computer systems that are still in use are going to need to be maintained into the future, and the world would be fucked if those skills were lost.

You'd be surprised the amount of old equipment still in use in the trades. Ever try to get rid of a 100 ton shear? It's only going out of that room with oxy fuel torches. So theyll keep them in service, long after the instruction manual has been lost. It'll only be gotten rid of when it breaks beyond repair. A lot of the knowledge to use these old machines is passed down word of mouth from the old operators anymore. It's scary how much of a tread we're on

 

[ToroidalBoat]

This isn't exclusive to tech this shit has been happening all over.

If there's some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe in the future, this world could become medieval after.

And it likely wouldn't be like in the typical isekai either. It would likely be a craphole of endless disease, starvation, and war.

"What If We Collapsed Like Rome?" - Fire of Learning

 

[Power Appreciator]

With me it's the opposite. My reaction to nutech grows viscerally into further repulsion with each iteration of soymedia. Part of it is that I work in digital marketing and I am deeply intimate with the fact that all nutech is designed for no other purpose but to force feed you promotional content. Using a smartphone the way zoomers do it is literally 24/7 zog sissy hypno. I think many people still don't recognize how dead the nuInternet really is. Even here on KF like 50% of all the news in A&H are just ads and people seem oblivious to it and debate these adds like its a piece of "information" that you should form an opinion on

After liberating myself from twitter I no longer use any social media, I'm currently buying an older laptop to use it for linux and to learn linux (so far I know maybe 3 linux commands at best), I'm also buying a raspberry pi to "flash" a "coreboot" to disable "IME" from that laptop which I have no idea how that works other than you plug some cables into your laptop to exorcise a talmudic demon from it. I'm also reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and can already do a hello world in Lisp. I was never good at math, but I will learn to Compute. I am doing it for no other reason but to spite the fucking liz dong gone type google goon clown troons

 

[NoReturn]

I think children that grew up between the mid 1990s to late 2000s were spoiled with the technology classes and shit like that. I really didn't think they helped that much in middle school between 2006 and 2008, but apparently I was fucking wrong. It's like living in a completely different world than the one you remember living in just yesterday.

Typing, too.
I know it's not really "tech", but zoomies and the alphas could benefit from spending some time with Mavis Beacon.

 

[Lord Xenu]

You'd be surprised the amount of old equipment still in use in the trades.

I worked in a machine shop about 15 years ago. It had several old (1930's) brake presses & shears that were converted to the first gen of CNC (manually punch in coordinates on a calculator style keypad, not even DOS) and were frozen there in time, because they still worked, and its not a pressing issue to upgrade them. Those were were sitting side-by-side with the latest and greatest in machining centers and lasers (programs accessed from LAN fileserver, machine runs windows OS).
There was an old blue collar guy who had been there since the manual days and saw every piece of equipment get its automation. The shop had been sold several times during his tenure, and the owners had to keep him around to put out fires. I'd imagine when he finally retired, they either shut the place down and sold off the gear, or they upgraded the old presses with new stuff that runs on windows (or whatever is the latest and greatest today).

 

[残念。]

Time to respond to the tech literacy thread with being a retard myself, don't know how to properly quote bits of long posts that the forum doesn't allow you to reply to.

Regarding CRT themselves, they were almost a lost tech in the 90s. By that time you had the dim heater tubes that lasted an eternity, so the old tube rebuilding getups of the 40s, 50s and 60s had no real reason to continue since it was much cheaper to buy your next china produced tv set. The hardware that drives them is usually not bad to repair, I think flybacks are the hardest thing to replace, because who the fuck produces those anymore. Maybe someday we'll be able to 3d print transformers, who knows. Even if someone wanted to manufacture your own CRTs now, you would just get shut down by the government for environmental concerns. Fuck, you can't even just go buy an incandescent bulb anymore.

Stay away from 8-bit guy's videos, he's a foaming at the mouth retard. There are much better retro tech channels out there.

 

[NoReturn]

Time to respond to the tech literacy thread with being a retard myself, don't know how to properly quote bits of long posts that the forum doesn't allow you to reply to.

Highlight and then click "Reply"

Or click "+Quote" to add it to a multi-quote.

And then to use those you click this button under the text-box at the bottom of each page:

 

[残念。]

Highlight and then click "Reply"
View attachment 5275872
Or click "+Quote" to add it to a multi-quote.
View attachment 5275876
And then to use those you click this button under the text-box at the bottom of each page:
View attachment 5275879

Oh, I didn't realize that could be done on mobile too, very nice.

 

[doomocract]

What fucks with me the most is the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that today's youth just aren't invested in to learning anything of value. I installed linux mint cuz I hated windows 8, this was with NO knowledge beforehand as to how linux (general) worked.

I think whats been killed is their curiosity, and that's sad.

 

[Frank(en) Castle]

What fucks with me the most is the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that today's youth just aren't invested in to learning anything of value. I installed linux mint cuz I hated windows 8, this was with NO knowledge beforehand as to how linux (general) worked.

I think whats been killed is their curiosity, and that's sad.

This is a fair point and one I constantly bring up in relation to public schooling. From a young age children are taught to simply repeat what they are told and that's it. Otherwise they're wrong, and wrong is bad. That utterly kills curiosity, creative thinking, etc... From there it's a straight shot to learned helplessness, to tech fade/competency crisis.
But I won't derail this thread by sperging anymore about my hatred of public schooling.

 

[0WLLC]

What fucks with me the most is the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that today's youth just aren't invested in to learning anything of value. I installed linux mint cuz I hated windows 8, this was with NO knowledge beforehand as to how linux (general) worked.

I think whats been killed is their curiosity, and that's sad.

I'd say there is roughly a %80 - %20 split of willfully ignorant to anti-authority self-motivated zoomers. It is horrorifying to see how low the bar has been lowered. I hate how willfully ignorant the majority of them are. The few competent zoomers I've met are like diamonds in the rough, and they are just average Joes, not even savants.

 

[lemonsolebrother]

What fucks with me the most is the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that today's youth just aren't invested in to learning anything of value. I installed linux mint cuz I hated windows 8, this was with NO knowledge beforehand as to how linux (general) worked.

I think whats been killed is their curiosity, and that's sad.

This probably ties in with another thread on here about how search has gotten worse - there was a time when you could search on how to do something and not only get sites with useful answers but also go down a rabbit hole of things you didn’t even know you didn’t know whereas now the first page of search results are useless click bait, paywalled or ads for an unnecessary paid app/ service

 

[Slav Power]

Personally after working with both boomers and zoomers who are totally tech illiterate, I would put the line at does not know how to avoid or uninstall unintentionally installed 3rd party windows app that nags them to buy a product. Your mind would be blown how often I get handed a computer that is running slow and the user requests a new one when there are a half dozen or so programs like "Winzip Driver Updater" running in the background eating RAM and CPU resources that the user doesn't recall installing. Generally most people I would consider tech illiterate have a bunch of that shit on their PC and they don't know how it got there or how to get rid of it because they have no idea what the fuck they're doing. Like, I would expect that from a guy like my dad who is a 64-year-old blue collar worker who probably has not read a book in 45 years, but I'm talking about people with university degrees here.

I used to put the line at knows how to reinstall Windows if something goes really wrong, but that threshold was too high because that is apparently 99% of the general population.

Glinner clearly knew his shit eh.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I'd say there is roughly a %80 - %20 split of willfully ignorant to anti-authority self-motivated zoomers.

It's not just zoomers, but millennials and gen-x. I assume it might be true of boomers too.

there was a time when you could search on how to do something and not only get sites with useful answers but also go down a rabbit hole of things you didn’t even know you didn’t know whereas now the first page of search results are useless click bait, paywalled or ads for an unnecessary paid app/ service

And how the internet has gotten worse as a whole. Wikipedia is a great example. I've had zoomers tell me that Wikipedia was never good and was always shit, even though I remember huge rabbit holes people would go down reading article after article, or games where you race from a random page to Hitler or Jesus.

 

[Harbinger of the Demiurge]

%80 - %20 split of willfully ignorant to anti-authority self-motivated zoomers.

It's crazy to me how willing people are to give all their info away to any dipshit who asks for it on the Internet. I was always told to be careful with what you put online but those same people are the ones who are more than happy to give their address, phone number, credit card number, SSN, email, fingerprints, or even fucking retina scans to whoever asks for it. And they call ME crazy for having a healthy paranoria that maybe, juuuust maybe that information won't be used in the most ethical of manners. With their consent too, because I know they didn't read the terms of service.

games where you race from a random page to Hitler or Jesus.

Six Clicks to Hitler and Find Jesus in Five were so much fun.

 

[0WLLC]

It's crazy to me how willing people are to give all their info away to any dipshit who asks for it on the Internet.

It's particularly bad with Zoomers. I've noticed they will happily trade privacy to avoid any slight inconvenience. These stupid fuck-wits will be the reason America ends up with a Real ID and a Social Credit system. It's going to be wild to see how dystopian things get in the next 10 years. Even Boomers are *slightly* more hesitent to give out their personal information.

But to bring the thread back on topic, at what point does the gap in tech knowledge really start breaking down society? It seems like once we hit a certain point there will be enough demand to pass along the esoteric knowledge that it will be passed on. Even if it is for no other reason than because it will be immensely profitable to do so. The people in charge *need* these systems to work in order to keep the cattle in line, and will not allow the tech to fail, so they need a caste of tech savvy people to maintain the system.