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

at what point does the gap in tech knowledge really start breaking down society?
Hmmm. I'd say security patches. Remember Log4Shell from a couple years ago? CVE-2021-44228? That vulnerability put millions of devices at risk. Lots of people really need Log4J to work and not be a risk, and it's used by lots of systems that do different things. I imagine that includes many payment processors, too. Like, imagine if your stuff, literally overnight, is suddenly not PCI DSS (payment card industry data security standards) compliant and threat actors are able to do whatever they feel like because nobody has the knowledge to fix it. Nobody can pay you. You can't pay anyone. It's open season for fraud, theft, and the like. That money in your bank account? Worthless, because you can't do anything with it. Not to mention the general impact of not being able to pay for goods and services. They could just nuke your whole system if they felt like it and nobody could do anything about it because all they know is "use iMessage, go on TikTok, eat hot chip and lie." It'd be utter chaos.

The implications of not having security patches would be absolutely massive, and PCI stuff is just one example. That's where my money is. We absolutely need people who know how to fix that kind of stuff.
 
You mean they have to cut the machine apart into chunks to get it out of the building? That sounds like a horrifically difficult operation.
YES. It has been there so long that no one is going to remember how to take it apart. Those are built to last decades. Manuals get lost. It'll have to be torn apart and moved in chunks, because no forklift on earth is rated for that shit, and it's way too big to go out the door in one piece.
 
the whole saga over Bud Lite and the tranny, little articles about "young whore makes ZILLIONS from OnlyFans!", etc.
Oh yeah I see what you mean, "No such thing as bad publicity" and all that. I've read many companies purposely stirred the wokeshit pot because the bitchfest it would create would draw in more people than it drove away. And of course for every person complaining about porn there's 100 coomers looking for their next fix. Etc. etc.

Not so sure that's always the case though, Bud Lite and Target being the best examples of that. Seems the number of people who dropped Bud far outnumbered any consoomer support.
 
You mention the mere ability to use computer software as an example of tech fade, but what about all the skills needed to make all the tools to make computers?

In engineering, "tech fade" is *worse*. I could rant at length, but I need to get to work. And the hell of it is, I could be on the wrong end of the dichotomy myself, despite a lifetime of effort. So many things that I need to know, that I have no one to teach me, that "management"/professors at school/etc are entirely oblivious to. I've had to teach myself a lot of what I know. There is knowledge out there essential to the maintenance and creation of technological civilization. It doesn't live in books, and it doesn't live in documents (and as far as I can tell, powerpoint and "office environments" and the people it enables destroy that sort of knowledge more effectively than fire and invasion.) It lives in the heads of the people who did that work. If they don't pass it on, apprenticeship style, it disappears.

Feynman laughed at the cargo cultists. I hate karma.
 
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
Along with the problem of search getting worse YouTube removing downvotes from videos also doesn't help. Looking at the ratio used to be a quick way to tell if a repair/DIY video was good or gave bad/dangerous info on how to do something.

Tech Fade isn't just a computer problem either. Working on a carburetor is pretty simple but there really seems to a shortage of people who can work on them. Most lawnmower repair places seem to be owned by a pissed off old man who wanted to retire 10 years ago, can't staff enough mechanics to keep up with the backlog of work, and get constant complaints from customers about how long repairs take to do. I guess the there is an upside to this in that good deals can be found on equipment & vehicles with carbureted engines if you can fix them yourself.

For me learning how things work is usually a byproduct of needing to fix something so I can save money. Maybe the declining economy will motivate people to learn more about maintaining and repairing their stuff to save money, but I am not optimistic about this. I think most people would probably get creative with carrying more debt or just accept a downgrade in quality of life instead.
 
I enjoy youtube channels like 8-bit guy
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.
The 8-Bit Guy's videos are show-and-tell at best. But yeah, he's a colossal sperg and there are much better channels out there. My go-tos are Adrian's Digital Basement and Noel's Retro Lab. Adrian is very methodical in his approach, explains things clearly and is easy to watch, but his videos tend to run quite long. Noel's videos are shorter and snappier, and he includes diagrams of chips and circuits that are easy to follow.
Perifractic
That smug faggot gives me the shits, and his videos are more style than substance.
Big Clive
He's based, but he's more about electronics than computers. Between Big Clive and EEVblog's extensive back catalogs, you can learn a LOT about how to not only fix broken electronic stuff, but how to start making your own from scratch.

Back to the topic at hand, it hadn't really occurred to me that zoomers are the first generation to go backwards wrt their understanding of tech until I saw this thread. Whilst they started using tech way earlier than millennials or Gen Xers, I guess this doesn't translate into being more tech savvy. Probably because their first interactions with tech were way more passive than the first interactions that Xers or millennials had.

There's a difference between a kid being given their very own hand-me-down computer at 2 or 3 years old with something like Gcompris loaded on it vs having to type in BASIC programs from books to get the computer to do something useful, or spending 1.5 hours fart-arsing around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS trying to get a DOS game to run because the device drivers have to be loaded in a certain order to ensure that a game has just enough memory to start up; both these things being what a typical 9 or 10 year old in the '80s or '90s respectively would need to do. Even then, it was under parental supervision and/or parents set a time limit on it due to the computer either tying up the main TV (in the '80s) or mom/dad needing to use it for work they took home with them (in the '90s).

Alphas have it even worse. These days, parents just plonk an iPad in front of them as soon as they get home from the hospital.
The few competent zoomers I've met are like diamonds in the rough, and they are just average Joes, not even savants.
These ones need to be treated like gold, even though they're the least likely to expect this treatment.
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.
This is why those based zoomers mentioned above need to be encouraged by Boomer and older Gen X greybeards to learn shit like COBOL and RF comms. Many governments, large corporations, the military and other establishments have computer systems dating back to the '70s which are unlikely to be replaced any time soon because they just won't quit, hence COBOL. The barrier to entry is extremely high on account of the complete inability of pajeets or programmer socks to understand COBOL, meaning that any remaining COBOL coders can name their price due to so many mission-critical systems being dependent on COBOL programs to operate.

I also put RF into this bucket because if there's a colossal SHTF moment and large swathes of the Internet are taken out, people will need to rely on radio communications for information. Most of the guys who do radio stuff are in their 50s or 60s, and I've never met an RF tech born after 1980.
 
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Tech Fade isn't just a computer problem either. Working on a carburetor is pretty simple but there really seems to a shortage of people who can work on them. Most lawnmower repair places seem to be owned by a pissed off old man who wanted to retire 10 years ago, can't staff enough mechanics to keep up with the backlog of work, and get constant complaints from customers about how long repairs take to do. I guess the there is an upside to this in that good deals can be found on equipment & vehicles with carbureted engines if you can fix them yourself.
My chainsaw is giving me grief. I looked at a fancy save-the-earth battery powered one... $500(with batteries, etc). A rebuild kit for the carb is $10, a new carb with probably identical Chinese parts from the rebuild kit is $20. I bought the new carb, fuck dealing with those tiny parts.
 
My chainsaw is giving me grief. I looked at a fancy save-the-earth battery powered one... $500(with batteries, etc). A rebuild kit for the carb is $10, a new carb with probably identical Chinese parts from the rebuild kit is $20. I bought the new carb, fuck dealing with those tiny parts.
My old Honda 4-stroke weed whacker is playing up at the moment and I'm 98% sure it's the carby. How have you found the Chinese carby on your chainsaw? I know it won't be identical (assuming your chainsaw is a 2-stroke), but it'd give me a rough idea as to whether to try rebuilding the carby or spend the $15 on a replacement.

That said, I'll probably rebuild the original one anyway as it's always handy to have a spare carby ready to go, especially with small engines.
 
My old Honda 4-stroke weed whacker is playing up at the moment and I'm 98% sure it's the carby. How have you found the Chinese carby on your chainsaw? I know it won't be identical (assuming your chainsaw is a 2-stroke), but it'd give me a rough idea as to whether to try rebuilding the carby or spend the $15 on a replacement.

That said, I'll probably rebuild the original one anyway as it's always handy to have a spare carby ready to go, especially with small engines.
Don't know yet. It's been a saga. It stopped working in some orientations a few months ago. I cleaned the carb and found some water(it seemed) then it worked for a while. Then it didn't. Noticed the fuel filter had broken off the hose in the gas tank. Ordered a new filter+hoses+some seals from a not-Amazon shop. After 3 weeks they cancelled the order. So I ordered the generic filter and hoses from Amazon, mostly I wanted one of the special seals after taking it apart so many times. Those arrived, I put it back together and.... nothing. Took the carb apart and it was dry but the fuel hose had fuel, so something got clogged. So I ordered a new carb. Can probably disassemble it and soak it in carb cleaner but I'm done with it for this weekend. Will try again once the carb arrives.
 
Back to the topic at hand, it hadn't really occurred to me that zoomers are the first generation to go backwards wrt their understanding of tech until I saw this thread. Whilst they started using tech way earlier than millennials or Gen Xers, I guess this doesn't translate into being more tech savvy. Probably because their first interactions with tech were way more passive than the first interactions that Xers or millennials had.
Ever since you were a small, easily impressionable child, all your authority figures probably told you that the tech geniuses at FAGMAN are going to propel your life into The Singularity any day now, hyping up whatever investor talk niggerbabble they heard on social media or TV. The one electronic device you always have available, the smartphone, is allergic to anything outside of the "use app, if not use web app" walled garden and really doesn't like modifications. Its gimped performance doesn't matter to you because, thanks to economies of scale, replacements are cheap and buying new things releases that dopamine. Why would this hypothetical zoomer ever want to learn how a computer works?

I also put RF into this bucket because if there's a colossal SHTF moment and large swathes of the Internet are taken out, people will need to rely on radio communications for information. Most of the guys who do radio stuff are in their 50s or 60s, and I've never met an RF tech born after 1980.
I don't think you'd need any clarification on how fucked you are at the point when undersea cables are being cut and satellites are (presumably) being blown up in orbit.
 
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"?
If there was a bug in your tooling software that could be fixed with a simple assembly change do you think you could muddle through? would you try?
 
Its weird that I don't work in the field of IT but I'm more technologically literate at computers than most people I know in real life and even the IT helpdesk at the corpo I work at.

You know its shocking when most people don't know how to setup their own internet modem when it's as simple as making sure your ISP internal internet account info is input into the isp modem that they give you.

People see you enabling a local account on a windows 11 fresh install as blackmagic now due to microsofts bullshit.

No longer do we need to burn USB sticks to install windows or any other linux distro with ventoy which lets you drag and drop disc images to use (outside of a few specific isos. Looking at you Steamdeck OS).

Yet people just chuck the device now because they can't figure out how to reinstall it.

It makes me wonder if the lack of technological literacy is the reason why we have sheep who drink the koolaid on why being able to self service your devices is dangerous.
Which allows bigtech to justify turning all their devices unrepairable garbage for the common layman that you must have specific activation tools to even complete a proper fix looking at you apple.
 
If there was a bug in your tooling software that could be fixed with a simple assembly change do you think you could muddle through? would you try?
I'd like to say yes, but the fact is I don't know. I wouldn't know if there was an assembly problem.

I do have an passing interest in making things for retro and fantasy hardware like C64 and Pico 8, but have never gone through with it. Even gameboy and Mega Drive games have tools that make handling basic tasks quicker and easier.
 
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