Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
>> Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Blast on mIRC isn't comparable to TikTok. It's direct comparison would be a discord or tg chat.
There are a lot of discord chats full with teens that spend their time talking about modifying software. It mostly a whimsical software like small games or desktop pets, not something of interest to most adults.
I, uh, might be biased, but I think not a lot of teens were at the mIRC chats at the time. Mostly teens bought magazines, watched TV and rented porn.
It seems to me like you are comparing outliers then to a baseline now. Baseline now is pretty good, drug addiction down, teen preggy down, less crime, etc
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).
Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
It’s true but things did change meaningfully. Before you could read forums discussions, mailing lists threads going for weeks or months on a topic. The content wasn’t optimized, it was between some people chatting/debating without the expectation of a larger audience. Same for blog. Not to say the quality was always great (blog comment sections were notoriously extremely low quality, I spent way too much time having the dumbest exchanges there) but you had some interesting things to search and look for. All current platforms (not HN) are full of cropped Twitter posts with cynical commentary that you consume in a few seconds or minutes (if you read the comment) before you scroll to the next one. Even if you go to smaller subreddit the discussions are dominated by whatever is the latest thing someone said on some other platform (still so much of Reddit is made of cropped twitter screenshots…), there is very limited actual engagement with the content. No interaction between whatever is posted (very likely out of context) and the original author. Virtually nobody ever interact with a discussion slightly older than a few hours.
Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?
I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest
The more political a page becomes the greater the temptation to abandon a neutral viewpoint (consciously or unconsciously) and to limit the number of people making edits.
When it comes to politics Feyman's line about "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" is times 10.
> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?
I think the thing that makes an OSS implementation more difficult than iOS/macOS is the friction involved.
Say you've got an android phone, windows PC, and a linux box, and you want to be able to quickly drop files from each one. unless we get some kind of cooperation across all three platforms at the OS level, you'd at minimum need to install some kind of client into each system - when the nicest feature of airdrop is that it's baked into all of Apple's OSs, in my opinion. even if it worked exactly the same way, but had to be installed, I think it would see less use - and there's no real way for a single OSS project to do that across multiple OS platforms, to my knowledge
The physical layer part really isn't complicated, and most Wi-Fi chipsets have supported something like it for over a decade now.
What's tricky is to specify and get everybody to implement the layers on top of it, including device discovery (frequently offloaded to Bluetooth for efficiency reasons), user identification (Apple runs a PKI for this) etc.
Pi or pi pico? At first glance it looks like that software is designed for double precision floats. That would certainly be some compute. The M0+ doesn't have hardware floating point let alone double precision. The M33 on the newer chip I think has hardware single precision float so a simple find-replace should let it go.
If it's not doing anything else and the sample rates aren't outrageous it might be doable but I'd have to dig into the code more to see how much work they're doing per sample.
People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.
Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.
There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.
reply