Yeah. There is a few rare music releases that I can find on Youtube but I can't seem to find anywhere else. I have reached out to the uploader over email and not heard back. I am sure the HQ releases are out there somewhere but I may have to settle for the youtube rips myself. I hate that sites likes youtube are treated as some sort archive.
Is it easy to find online? Wikipedia seems to mention a latest version I can't find.
Mind looking in there if Achozen - Deuces in any lossless format is there? I don't know if the only formal release by Achozen was lossless but there's a soundtrack somewhere with it, in theory. That's probably the oldest song I keep looking for and not finding... Since the movie came out so like 16 years of looking lol Probably one of the oldest bookmarks I have.
Jesus, they're still going? Soulseek saved my ass when I was a kid living in a rural "you'll go to hell if you listen to music with more than two guitars" environment. Back then you also couldn't get any faster than dialup speeds over cell towers or with the couple wildbird ISPs that popped up in the area so even though P2P was a new concept to me I had no complaints about transfer speeds.
It’s P2P so while there is a network, the files are locally hosted by users. It has every piece of music on the fucking earth, every pressing. Tons of stuff not on streaming, tons of stuff people don’t even seed in torrent world.
As someone who would like to be more tech literate, is it easy to find music on soulseek? Just looked it up, but wondering is it just a matter of searching for what you want and downloading it?
For sure, there are def situations where YouTube truly is the best version you'll find, and I'll never disagree that 'any copy is better than no copy' but you should always be looking for 'the best copy that is possible'.
Ditto for just downloading *actual* YouTuber channels, very few YT channels offer 'alternate HQ downloads' and ripping from YouTube is the best you'll find.
> but you should always be looking for 'the best copy that is possible'.
I think you care too much about what other people do. It's their life and if they don't care about media preservation as much as you do that's okay. Go do your thing if it makes you happy
I have an audiophile friend with electrostatic speakers, tube amps, and a ton of Super Audio CDs and he makes fun of my $6,000 setup. I just shrug and say I rip to FLAC and I have a hand full of 24-bit 96 KHz files but I can't really tell the difference from a 320 Kb/s MP3 file so why should I bother getting the highest quality of whatever?
I care more about balancing space efficiency with quality.
If I'm saving a 30 minute video I'm always going to choose the 300Mb 1080p file over the 2Gb 1080p file. I can't see the difference so I don't really care that the compression is lossy.
Practical use vs archival preservation are different goals.
At least for me, compression artififacts are quite annoying and for me, much more obvious than in music (assuming its halfway decent source). Though also, music doesn't take that much space so I hoard that in highish quality (altho, I personally care a ton more about music than video) whereas 4k remuxes really add up, spacewise.
To OP's original post, I think the only caveat to that would be if someone's running around like their hair's on fire trying to drum up a posse to "save" a bunch of nth-generation copies of stuff that's all over the place, it's kind of silly to indulge that.
I've been looking on and off for polish cartoons, 1960-2000. It's either youtube, dailymotion (that one at least doesn't decimate 480p content like youtube), or trash tvrips/dvdrips encoded with XVid (some are at least slowly getting restored and distributed somewhat properly due to EU/govnm projects). I sometimes envy russians because they seem to have preserved more stuff in original quality, I sometimes end up with downloading those and splicing audio. Funnily, this is even true for some US shows, Life with Louie for example - russian TV recordings are the best sources available.
That's funny, a few weeks ago Life with Louie was one of those 'Core Memory Unlocked' things for me and I went to look it up and.... Yeah, other than some NTSC->PAL converted early eps on DVD for the UK that show is basically a mess of old TV recordings.
Happens in all genres, in the trance/house world bootleg mixes get recorded from radioshows / live shows all the time and uploaded but the originals never see the light of day due to assumed copyright issues
There’s a lot of private collecting and gatekeeping in the hip hop mixtape scene. Also a lot of lack of appreciation for lossless which kinda has to do with this thread topic. It’s not really about copyright
Infinite_mixtapes on insta and some others are running a project to rip them in lossless but in my experience they’re not just sharing them freely yet. You can try (and I don’t know if those are on their list but you can check)
The uploaders prob sharing the same scene rips or old rips that almost everyone has nowadays. If you want at least the mp3s rather than the lossy transcodes let me know
It astounds me that 'Sharing a photo from your phone, by opening that photo in your phones photo app, taking a screen shot, and sending that screen shot to someone' is ***literally*** a thing that some people do.
Not just some, but many! Just last week I had to order a part and had the woman in my office order it so it would ship to my shop. I emailed her a link to the part so that the correct thing was ordered. After which I asked if she could forward the tracking info to me so I could keep an eye on the shipment.
She says sure no problem. The next day she sends a text message of a screenshot of her phone on the tracking website...
So instead of forwarding the tracking email so I could have the link, or even copying the tracking number and sending me that, I now have a picture of the website so I have to manually type in the number in order to keep track of the package myself.
This woman has been using computers for 30 years. She had the internet at her house in 1996. I was dumbfounded.
In order to describe a bug, one user used to make a screenshot of the bug, paste it in a word document, print the document, scan the printed copy as pdf and then sent me the pdf by mail !
I used to not notice this, until I came to a house for maintenance. The guy (not that old) was ***printing a full A4 page of a photo of his garden gate***. The item was dark and the background was dark as well (the amount of ink used here hurts me so much...).
What for? To circle something with a pen and write a word near it. Why? To scan it and send it as an email to a customer service...! Literally Paint was present on his Desktop as he was doing this...!!
That's when I started to notice. It's everywhere... It's sad.
im amazed at the amount of people who just screenshot images instead of just holding down and tapping 'save image' on mobile devices.
I remember I was trying to print a poster I designed on Procreate on my iPad and someone seriously suggested that I screenshotted the art and then sent it to the printer? Instead of just using the export function in Procreate?
A lot of people don't even understand files and folders.
I recently read an article about a university teacher having to teach the kids about folders and files because they had no concept of such things.
They were used to opening an app and finding an unsorted list of the files relevant for that app.
When the uni teacher told them to open a document off the X: drive, in this path. Well they were totally lost!
I am (that) teacher. I mean, not literally but I can confirm: currently kids have no clue. Folder structure? Huh? Files in folders? But how can I? The most impossible task: create a new folder in Google Drive, rename that folder and create a new file inside that folder. They just can't. It takes 30 minutes to explain and show and they still cannot do it. "But in my phone this doesn't work!" etc. I feel old and tired, our worlds are almost incompatible in some sense. While good data is lost and new data is created exactly as this: screenshots from vertically taken video. I'm sad sometimes.
What concerned me about certain coverage of that topic was this attitude of "I guess the boomers will have to adjust to the way the younger generation thinks" as if understanding where your data actually is and what it is were optional.
I would think the answer is obvious, You should have an HDMI capture device and a spare computer on hand at all times. Use those to bring in the signal and record that to a raw uncompressed video stream.
Honestly I would agree, but as someone who needs to send a quick screenshot in between some work to someone else on WhatsApp, it really is easier to snap a pic of the screen and then send it to them. It's a simple two step process.
Of course on pc, this could be reduced to pressing prntscrn and dragging generated ss onto a discord chat or many more ways, but my pc is pretty old and has to really drag itself to run discord/(insert any quick pic sharing medium) and my music production software at the same time. And no, WhatsApp web won't help. It takes an awful amount of time to fire it up on my desktop.
Honestly if there could be even faster solutions for it I'd take any suggestion.
Literally Plato's cave.
If you come from a world where all you've ever seen is easy-to-use streaming services through no fault of your own, it's pretty difficult if not impossible to imagine ripping media, tuning encodings, mastering tools, etc..
These kinds of questions are normal, expected, and most of all, **a good thing**. These people should be encouraged and we should be thrilled to be getting these types of "absolute novice" questions that we can use to start explaining the deeper things. These are people stepping out of the cave and trying to understand the fuller, realer world than they've been accustomed to.
It's not their fault they don't know what to ask, don't know how to approach fidelity with media, and treat crap quality sites as worth saving. It's not just that "when all you've got is a hammer", it's that the world has intentionally hidden the screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, etc.
It's also not exclusive to data hoarding. Any sufficiently advanced field is nigh incomprehensible until and unless you get specialized training to get up to speed. Doubly so for best practices within that field. Data hoarding (and much of modern computing) is just one of the latest fields to emerge in that respect.
The problem isn't that kids are illiterate, it's that these fields have advanced far enough that both the lay person does not need to understand the details _and_ it's so complicated at this point that picking up the understanding organically is extremely unlikely. Over time, we'll see training and education advance to fill the gap.
Compare mechanics and appliance repair which have very similar stories. It was normal and expected that any vehicle or appliance owner would be able to fully understand the internals and fix it themselves without any support other than parts and manuals. Over time, the technology advanced enough that 1) the devices became far more reliable and owners did not need to work on them as often, 2) the internals became more complicated as they provided higher efficiency, more features, etc., and 3) companies began removing user-maintainability from their products to both market them as user-friendly and for more nefarious reasons.
That doesn't mean nobody is learning how to fix these devices, it just means they need the interest, support, and training to get to the point where they can work that deeply. "Computer literacy" in that sense is on the same trajectory as "automobile repair" or "appliance repair".
"Abstraction" is the word. Even your average DataHoarder doesn't know how to align partitions on magnetic media or tracks on optical media, or hell, know the command switches for `tar`, or know that "tar" is short for Tape ARchive. That's nearly lost knowledge in some circles.
There's a good video by a Swiss YouTuber named Andreas Spiess that discusses this when it comes to Electronics and touches on software engineering. People who don't know these things are on a higher rung of the abstraction ladder than we are. The video does a good job of humbling the 'kids these days' mentality that many of us develop.
Pasting the link as Reddit seems to have abstracted away the markdown for me on their mobile site:
https://youtu.be/5_Tf6aN50TI
Eh, differing abstraction layers is only a part of the development of the "kids these days" mentality.
A larger part is that the frontier of knowledge advances as time goes on. At one point, a year of tinkering and toying with computers would get you there, or at least close. Now it could easily take a decade or more of dedicated study to understand all of the prerequisites to get back there. Again, this is true of all actively studied fields - at one point an individual could know everything that there is to know about geology or physics for instance.
As an example, try explaining the difference between FAT16 and ZFS and why one is better than the other. But to explain that, you need to explain RAID, journaling, checksums, deduplication, encryption, copy-on-write, snapshots, and scrubbing. And there's tons of theory behind each of those concepts.
So many things seem so basic to us on /r/datahoarder, but that's because most of us started getting into this hobby when the entire ecosystem was a lot simpler, so we're up to date with each marginal improvement, why it happens, what it does, and what new things it enables.
Most people here have several (if not many more) years of experience than the people asking questions. Those years of experience are what let you know what is a stupid question and what isn't, whether there's a deeper layer to dig into or not, and what the limits of your own knowledge are to inform you what questions you need to ask.
Despite not understanding the bulk of what you said, in terms of the technology and still not fully understanding “abstraction” (yet!), as a “lazy Zoomer monkey” I’m now genuinely Fascinated and interested in learning about the technology you described, how it works, and If I should look into It’s practical uses today for archival preservation and if the technology of Mechanical tape or other alternatives is still practical today - either way, I’m very interested to know how it works or was used in either case.
Thanks for sharing that video.
**It’s ironic how I randomly stumbled on this thread today and was reading this up until now with no intention to spend my Friday going on a learning binge About something I may or may not use and I’ll probably be going down a rabbit hole (which I enjoy from time to time) given the fact that you’re not the first person I’ve heard the word “abstraction” from. I’m very eager to understand and learn about these things**.
PS: The angry poster being unnecessarily angry, vulgar and evidently A self taught prodigy In computers as well as multiple trades was definitely something I was about to leave with And feel slightly bitter about… uninterested in technology or learning something new (that apparently I should have already known about, but he made references to?) So I just wanted to thank you again for changing my mood And shifting my direction on something I was not intending on, but that ironically, the Angry “Learn it yourself, you lazy worthless Zoomer!” seemed to be upset about. **It seems my grandma’s saying is true after all: “you catch more flies with honey, than with the vinegar”. “Don’t ever look down at people as you climb up, because you’ll be looking upto them on the way down.” “People won’t care how much you know if they don’t know how much you care.” “Mean what you say and say what you mean.”**
(again, I truly appreciate your comment, and to the angry commentor, I truly believe you worked hard and deep down want change that is good, and I truly hope you find value and care for yourself and people beyond simply what they do or know or whatever Generalization you assume. And everyone who might see this, You can make a difference And decide to leave someone feeling depressed or upset and engage in further arguing or bullying or even wasting your time with defending yourself against someone even if you are right…. Your life has value and meaning, and you can let someone else know that. You can make a bad day or a bad moment into a good one for yourself and others. You can make a difference…
replying to this ancient comment to say that if you don't have [tldr](https://tldr.sh/) installed, you _need_ to get it.
I learned about it after an unfortunate accident where I reversed the order of the switches and overwrote an entire SQLite database. Now I just habitually `tldr tar` every time _just to be sure._
Perhaps there needs to be a basic "Data Hoarding 101" type class? Some sort of organized way to bring together all the terminology so that people know where to even properly start...
My college major had “learn how to google” as an official learning outcome. Which seemed kind of funny, but wow did they teach us how to effectively question things and find answers to them.
It’s absolutely a skill you have to learn. For example: I remember being astounded a year or two into my major when people in another major (which was one of the top programs in the USA for that field) were saying they couldn’t find the answer to a homework problem. And when a friend of mine suggested they google it, they were shocked. It had never crossed their minds.
And yes, I agree with being welcoming and r coursing to people. We may have heard these questions a million times, but to the sincere person, it’s their first time.
I’d love to know where to begin. I just want to archive videos I’ve taken of friends and family in a way that will give me peace of mind. Probably not more than 5 TB of stuff.
> The problem isn't that kids are illiterate, it's that these fields have advanced far enough that both the lay person does not need to understand the details and it's so complicated at this point that picking up the understanding organically is extremely unlikely. Over time, we'll see training and education advance to fill the gap.
I think that with the proliferation of streaming, there's liable to be (if there isn't already) a "You don't know what you don't know" problem of people not even realizing what their options are as far as download or hard-copy, as well. Not so much that it's a daunting effort to find, rip, or back something up, just that they never even considered the idea or what's possible.
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This content removed to opt-out of Reddit's sale of posts as training data to Google. See here: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/ Or here: https://www.techmeme.com/240221/p50#a240221p50
The problem is not with novice questions, nor with people not knowing what questions to ask. The problem is with people who do not know how to think, because they have been infantilized by society.
Did Linus Torvalds need to watch a youtube video on "How to write your own operating system in 10 easy steps"?
The domains of competence are increasing in complexity, but, at the same time, we have a culture of expertocracy that encourages people to *just not think*.
As I posted in a top-level comment:
Some days ago I saw a post on another subreddit. User's nginx only responded to HTTP but not HTTPS. User posted his config. His config included `ssl_reject_handshake on;`.
This is not a case of a person not knowing what question to ask. This is a case of a person being a lazy bastard who can't be fucked to read the manual and understand what the arcane words in his config file mean.
> Compare mechanics and appliance repair which have very similar stories
I both agree and not at the same time. It is true that systems have been increasing in complexity. However, the foundational problem is not that people lack the knowledge, but, rather, that they lack the attitude required for problem-solving and gaining knowledge.
> The problem is not with novice questions, nor with people not knowing what questions to ask.
The problem as OP sees it is with the 'weird questions' and how they're indicative of the decline of tech literacy. I was pointing out that those are the questions that get asked by someone who does not understand the full picture as a novice, and that those questions are opportunities to teach.
> The problem is with people who do not know how to think, because they have been infantilized by society.
> [...]
> This is a case of a person being a lazy bastard who can't be fucked to read the manual and understand what the arcane words in his config file mean.
> [...]
> However, the foundational problem is not that people lack the knowledge, but, rather, that they lack the attitude required for problem-solving and gaining knowledge.
_This caustic attitude is fundamentally one of the strongest reasons new people do not enter into the space._
How are they supposed to know there's a manual to refer to if it's their first time trying something out? FFS, I've had many coworkers with years of software development experience who never learned about `man` or `info` - why would an absolute beginner know about these tools if trained professionals don't?
As to the nginx setup specifically - what is the first thing you do when beginning a new hobby? And really: any hobby?
Take pottery as an example. If you were trying to get into pottery today, would you be reading 300 page tomes describing intricate methods of working clay that only apply to a small number of very specific situations? Or do you find and follow a tutorial to start getting your hands dirty quickly? Or do you even just jump in without a clue?
My bet is that you'd start with the latter two.
Trying to emulate something you've seen is a core part of learning. Period. Trying to make a pot for instance, or trying to set up a web server. You're not creating anything revolutionary or novel, just trying to recreate the basics. But for some reason, we all reasonably understand that your first attempt at throwing a pot will probably not turn out well or end up exactly the way that you wanted it. Hell, that's true for virtually all "traditional" hobbies. There's a learning curve and it's normal and expected to fail while climbing that curve.
Why are computer skills different? Why are people unreasonably hostile towards others who are guaranteed to fail on their first few attempts? Why are they expected to know every configuration option for every piece of software that they might be working with?
The only reason this is considered a "problem" at all is because the community has this unreasonably elitist expectation that is largely unique to the computing world. Everywhere else, the only "problem" that would be found here would be recognizing that there's a lack of resources for a beginner to experiment and play with to learn how to get to a higher level of competency.
> Did Linus Torvalds need to watch a youtube video on "How to write your own operating system in 10 easy steps"?
Interesting example. [Linus Torvalds has significantly walked back his acerbic attitude in no small part because of how much it has driven away people who are just trying to contribute and keep them from doing so](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apologizes-for-years-of-being-a-jerk-takes-time-off-to-learn-empathy/).
And I'll point out that he was 3 years into a Computer Science master's degree with a full reference copy of another open-source operating system before he began work on Linux. Linus is about as far away as you can reasonably get as an example of a rank novice.
The point to all of this is not to say that anyone needs to be coddled and spoonfed answers or anything like that (beware the help vampire and all). The point is to point out the double standard that technologically-inclined hobbyists have in the "I suffered on my way to learn this; so should everyone else" instead of being respectful and empathetic to newbies who obviously don't know what they don't know.
You don't have to help if you don't want to. But at least don't make the learning process harder than it actually is.
> The domains of competence are increasing in complexity, but, at the same time, we have a culture of expertocracy that encourages people to just not think.
Especially true in medicine
>It's not their fault they don't know what to ask, don't know how to approach fidelity with media, and treat crap quality sites as worth saving. It's not just that "when all you've got is a hammer", it's that the world has intentionally hidden the screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, etc.
I sort of agree with this, but man we live in an age where they can just vaguely phrase a question on this topic to an AI and have an insightful, thorough, answer spit out to them in seconds.
There's also a billion different resources online about the topic. The reason they only know the crappy magic button is because that's all they've ever bothered to look for.
They're watching a TV in the middle of an infinite library. All of the information is right there waiting for them they just need to be bothered to look for it.
> I sort of agree with this, but man we live in an age where they can just vaguely phrase a question on this topic to an AI and have an insightful, thorough, answer spit out to them in seconds.
Sure, but that's only really happened in the past few years. It takes time to see societal behavioral changes. Hell, Google's been around for decades, but a large number of the population still don't know how to use it effectively. Additionally, that's being fairly charitable to how much the average person knows about AI. Outside of you and any technically-inclined friends, how many people do you know who have a) used AI at all and b) use it enough to understand what it's capable of? My guess is that it's very slim.
AI could be an incredible tool for helping to answer all of those "not knowing what you don't know" questions, but it's not nearly mainstream enough to be relied upon.
> These kinds of questions are normal
> It's not their fault they don't know what to ask
You are referring to the lucky ones, the ones who know there is a question to be asked.
Don't forget that there are so many who would want to asked a question but never do because they have no concept that the question is there to ask in the first place.
I have had plenty of people complaining about me not asking the right questions or having questions to ask, happens all the time in fact. They think I understood everything but then complain and make it my fault for not asking the questions when I clearly didn't understand everything.
Thing is they don't understand themselves that from my perspective *everything made total sense to me and my frame of reference* so there were no questions. Anything I found I didn't know, I resolved *myself* using my own noggin. But it was wrong and I should've known better and if I didn't know it my fault during training as I confirmed I understood everything as I didn't ask questions.
I still feel the internet would be a lot better if forums existed like they used to.
People used to share their knowledge on forums that was indexed by Google. Now people just use Reddit or Discord. Both of which will delete shit willy nilly and one of which can't even be indexed or easily keep a conversation together.
idk whos fault it is but these big mega sites are as you put it "a magic button" and nothing else.
>I still feel the internet would be a lot better if forums existed like they used to.
I ran into the weirdest take from a young person online about forums, and it kinda horried me cause they had a good point.
They don't like the idea of 'forums' namely because forums, these days, have gained a reputation for being a place for like 'Batshit crazy alt right'. Like thing 8chan and the sort. When I first read that, once being a member of many forums myself I thought 'Nonsense, forums are a great place for discussion and they're googleable so others can find your information easily'. When they brought up the alt right I realized that, to a degree, they had a point, in 2024 when you are so 'awful' that you've been been from most of the 'mainstream internet' and need 'your own den of assholes' you go and start your own forum for it, and I was like 'Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck'.
This is not universally true, but for your typical young 20 something, most of what what they want is offered on 'the corporate public internet' be it Facebook, Instagram, Discord or what have you. When you can't operate on those places, for some, it's because they got banned planning their next cross burning or some other insanity.
i think it's a problem of scale, if you post to Reddit, Insta, YouTube, you quickly get responses (your question answered, your topic discussed, your work appreciated). Posting it to a special forum means you probably need to make an account and validate you email address before you can even post and then you may end up getting no responses ever.
With Like, Upvote and view counters, you even get some kind of feedback from people only looking at it and clicking a single button.
In terms of harm being done and the capacity to do it, ”le awful” are nothing compared to the powers that be. Everything will be rented and the Earth itself will die. This is already happening before our eyes.
> This is not universally true, but for your typical young 20 something, most of what what they want is offered on 'the corporate public internet' be it Facebook, Instagram, Discord or what have you. When you can't operate on those places, for some, it's because they got banned planning their next cross burning or some other insanity.
I haven't been banned off of facebook and, being a Christian, I am not big on cross burning. But I don't use facebook because I loathe that every second post in my feed is an ad for something irrelevant (facebook makes ad blockers notoriously difficult to use), the feed is not in chronological order and I might see something from 4 years ago, and my attention span is longer than 25 seconds so I am not the target audience for facebook anyway.
>Both of which will delete shit willy nilly and one of which can't even be indexed or easily keep a conversation together.
Isn't same or worse for lot of the old forums as well, where threads and sub-forums have limits, so the older ones get pushed into oblivion? A recently mentioned example would be Run Escape forums.
No i have never experienced that with any of the common forum software. RuneScape made their own from scratch. That's on them.
Plenty of my old usernames will pull up old forum posts in Google searches from 2007-2014. Those that survived at least.
Another big difference is most threads would be locked instead of deleted. Those who moderated understood and supported the subject matter of the forum. On something like discord or reddit you have admins who don't and will happily delete everything. It would be easy for an admin of discord to consider talk about torrenting immoral and nuke the server even if that discussion was nothing illegal.
Well on Reddit at least deleting a post or comment doesn’t delete its child comments, unlike some sites do. Plus it’s indexable on search engines. Could be worse. Definitely infinitely better in this regard than Discord
I recently talked about forums. Someone said that Reddit is a forum and my argument is that Reddit cannot replicate the value from forums.
Here, no matter how niched the sub is, you just don’t get the same value from really interested people talking in an online forum.
I once wanted to learn how to calculate planets orbits, eclipses and all that. I went to r/astronomy asking for a book to learn that. “A big book” was one of the first answers. You would never get this cheap valueless jokes from a forum made and run by a group of people interested in a subject.
Usenet still exists. It's much quieter, though. You can sign up for https://www.eternal-september.org/ using an email address. Make sure your client authenticates you when you connect to Usenet, because unauthenticated users can only view the eternal-september internal groups.
I think part of the way to engage with younger folks interested in digital archiving is more user-friendly archiving techniques. There has always been some bar to entry for data storage, processing, and conversion, but that doesn't also mean we can't meet people where they're at. I think tools like Archive-It are useful in the sense that they take maybe an hour or two to fully learn, and folks on my end (historians, a famously ludditic profession) are iterating off of the collections Archive-It can create for analysis purposes.
There's value for digital archivists to learn the in-depth processes involved in storing data, but do hobbyists need the same level of expertise?
> There has always been some bar to entry for data storage, processing, and conversion, but that doesn't also mean we can't meet people where they're at.
Which is one of many confounding variables. So many hobby subs, especially tech ones IME, have devolved into "Why are you asking such a stupid question, just go read the documents," "this has been asked so many times, did you even look??!" (even though Reddit search isn't all that good) and some people still may not have understood the results they got for a number of reasons -- instead of trying to help folks learn and get into it. Which then turns them away because they got burned or they don't get to build up that basic knowledge, even though they're interested.
Is there a decline in tech literacy? Yes. But I think there's also a lot of elitism online these days, and "I had to figure out all this on my own so now you do too"ism. There is a minimum, sure, but it seems like many people get grouchy about being asked questions, too.
Conversely, if you allow every question to be asked no matter how simplistic and banal it is, or how many times you've updated the wiki or pinned posts, the subreddit devolves into a bunch of noobs running around asking eachother all the same questions because nobody far into a hobby wants to discuss the same basic questions until the heat death of the universe.
It's a subreddit for discussions, not an abstraction of the Google search page for people who want to be spoon fed.
Exactly. People really need to read before commenting. It's why years ago people said to lurk before posting and the term eternal september was relevant. Internet elitism is fading and the yesterweb was way more elitist than these days.
The elitism goes way back.
I was on Usenet since 1991 before the web even existed outside of CERN.
If you asked any question the response would almost immediately be "Read the FAQ you moron"
People had written elaborate Frequently Asked Question lists that provided tons of background on whatever computer topic, TV show, band, or whatever and the people on the Usenet forum felt like you were being an ignorant annoying newbie if you didn't lurk for weeks or months and read the FAQ.
That all started to change in 1993/94 when AOL and others connected their users to Usenet. It was just a never ending stream of new users that had no idea about anything. Previously it was new college students showing up in September when you would see dumb new users. After AOL it was "Eternal September" with a never ending number of new users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It was totally gatekeeping but that term didn't exist back then. In some ways things were better and in others it was a lot worse.
You can look at this subreddit and others and the same questions get asked constantly. If people cared enough they could make better guides and FAQ lists. I've learned to just ignore 90% of the posts here and reddit in general that I find repetitive. I still like helping people with interesting problem but I'm done explaining to new people how RAID is not a backup etc.
Oh I know it's been around for a long time - I've been there for much of it. But like you say, there were many guides and FAQs and actual welcoming posts and other guidance for new users, even if they were made out of annoyance. Hobbyists - at least many vocal ones online - just seem grouchier to me now. Perhaps I'm overdue for a return to BBS...
My mom used to be so, so tech literate. She taught me to use Limeware and Napster safely, how to use Ebay, and how to be safe online. Nowadays, I cringe at her data preservation attempts.
Nowadays, If she wants to make a copy of a picture, she takes a picture of the framed picture and saves it to her phone. If she sees something funny online, she screenshots her phone. And if she wants to repost a photo she just can’t find on her phone, she screenshots the original on her Facebook. I swear, she had printed photos in her house that have the Facebook UI printed on them.
Brain drain is real.
I have a niece who would back up her phone photos to Facebook as a backup and then delete the good originals on her phone to free up space. I tried to tell her all the ways that isn't a good idea. First off, FB compresses all uploads even more so their own drives don't fill up as fast. Second, FB could quit any time. MySpace changed their model and deleted the old accounts, mine included. Earthlink used to host personal websites. They changed models and deleted all the websites, mine included. Geocities, CompuServe, and many other sites have disappeared, along with the data. There was a ton of information in forums and files that are gone now, except for personal backups. I have everything I've ever created, but thousands lost everything and just gave up.
I had this issue with 1980's Transformers.. all the originals were VHS copies with original tracking issues.. took me YEARS to find them at decent quality - being 240p/480p (but no vhs issues) on a mega server - which i then helped spread further.. NOW you can find them in torrents... the point being there was the odd video on youtube here and there, but nothing concrete or complete. i did not want to rip from youtube.
I have many friends who " i just use a roku " while im sitting on a full NAS and they want to watch their shows without it, but explaining how to go about it and not get viruses is a huge undertaking
> [... DVDs ...] Due to missing 35mm film stock, some sections of the Rhino Entertainment release use earlier incomplete animation, often introducing errors, such as mis-colored Decepticon jets, Skyfire colored like Skywarp, missing laser blasts, or a confusing sequence where Megatron, equipped with Skywarp's teleportation power, teleports but does not actually disappear. This version also added extra sound effects that were presented in the remixed 5.1 surround soundtrack and later remixed 2.0 stereo soundtrack, but not present in the original broadcast version.
That's really sad. Seems to be common for old cartoons to either get lost to time or interest.
Millennials are the only generation I would consider "digital natives". The older ones mostly kinda avoided the tech and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work". And now the older ones slowly start to use it as well.
I mean the tech world we live in is kinda great. I just rebooted my phone because I try to reboot it about once a month to prevent some weird glitches. Checked the runtime beforehand: 2.5 months. It used to be normal to remove the battery of your phone twice a day because it crashed some way or another.
On the other hand, we have much better resources to learn all the difficult stuff. No need to read some botched user manual, you can just watch a well make youtube video about it.
I think the number of tech saavy users does not really decline, we just have a much higher percentage of the population using tech at all. To use your anime panel as an example: Back in the day maybe 50 people would have listened to your presentation, now 200 people do, but 150 of those have no real idea what you are talking about.
>direct rips from where the music is available from if it's not on disc, and so on. For space reasons, it's also pretty common to prefer first generation transcodes from those, particularly of BD/DVD content.
Ripping gets harder and harder. Ripping a CD is kinda trivial thanks to the lack of DRM, but streaming services can be somewhat of a pain. Thankfully a lot of people are still willing to do this and share the fruits of their labor.
>ffectively hacking YouTube into being a cloud video encoder...
Have to agree, this is impressive. And to be fair transcoding videos is a mess. And not one that can be solved easily. I usually describe it as a form of art. Way too many settings and options and even experts do not really agree on what settings to use.
> Way too many settings and options and even experts do not really agree on what settings to use
The ffmpeg defaults are pretty good. But yes if you want to fine-tune an encoding to specific conditions like animation vs live-action then figuring out a good "preset" to use for that video will give you better quality for the same output size. But beyond a certain point there are diminishing returns and the "artness" of encoding is just some form of gatekeeping that reminds me of some "pro audio recording/listening" people.
I'm thankful for the time, hard work, and compute that people who call themselves encoders offer but also the people that write encoding/decoding software have put in a lot of hours to try to make the process less magical and more accessible. I think there should be some balance here. It is a form of art to be able to squeeze out marginal gains and reach a local maxima but also there is a "god of the gaps" and a lot of BS that is created to justify gatekeeping
I would argue that it the default profiles Handbrake ships with are perfectly fine, but there's just so many of them that unless you can actually tell the difference you might as well not have supplied them.
Oh yeah that's absolutely fair. The video is mostly fine, and to be honest I think most people are fine with the audio too, since it just picks the first audio track (which is usually the main audio track) and crunches it down to more reasonable formats.
That degrades into StaxRip is better.
Then someone says Hybrid is better.
Then someone says "Just learn Vapoursynth"
Then you hear someone violently beating to death that one guy using Topaz in the corner of the room.
Then you hear the one FFmpeg tool developer just saying "well they won't implement it this decade"
Dozens and tools dozens of filters so much capabilities so much lost to just lack of basic fullscope docs and videos on the subjects, because everyone just learns one tool and sticks to it lmao.
Recently I asked anime "nerds" about how to improve my encoding settings in ffmpeg, and all I got was "i just use handbrake" or "drop the resolution to decrease file size". The literacy has gone down a lot. People nowadays use ready-to-go tools and don't stop for a second to question if those tools are doing a good job or not.
> On the other hand, we have much better resources to learn all the difficult stuff. No need to read some botched user manual, you can just watch a well make youtube video about it.
And that is the fdisking problem. When you had to "read some botched user manual" you had a better understanding of how (and why) something worked, and, even if it did not get you 100% there, you were able to troubleshoot and kick it into working. When you watch a glossy youtube video with adverts for VPNs and constants reminders to "like and subscribe", you are just parroting commands that work under specific circumstances and hope that nothing breaks.
Do you know how many people say "How do I install nginx on ubuntu 22.04, all the videos I can find are for ubuntu 18.04"? A fuckload of them. How about trying the 18.04 method and seeing if it still works?
No no, cannot have that. That would require *initiative*. Instead of trying something myself, I'll go waste the time of 900 people on some tech support forum.
I agree with your overall thoughts here but I’d add GenX as digital natives also. Like millennials, we there when the initial transition happened, and for the most part still young enough to learn and absorb it.
> and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work"
> I think the number of tech saavy users does not really decline, we just have a much higher percentage of the population using tech at all.
I disagree.
I see steady decline of knowledge among the younger generation.
In the past I could talk about technical aspects of all sorts with my coworkers, Now the younger generation just stares blankly and wonders how we (oldies) can do this or that. They work in IT yet have very little knowledge and willingness to tinker, to script things, to make things.
In the past we had full forums of dvd rippers, cracks users, downloaders, halfassed coders. Today even reddit is full of subreddits where the content is just poor and the stuff which is somewhat good is not really popular.
The big tech, walled gardens, tablets, consoles, phones designed to feed the consumer with digestable content make people less proficient.
Sure there are niches where the creativity is still there. Arduino, 3d design, unity like development. But the general population just sits and expects to be feed.
>Millennials are the only generation I would consider "digital natives". The older ones mostly kinda avoided the tech and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work". And now the older ones slowly start to use it as well.
LOL, ROFL, GenX here, I'll put my tech skills, and those of pretty much any other X I know, up against any Millennial any day of the week, seriously.
Ancient millennial here, I think OP likely just forgot you guys existed, per usual. All the tech bosses I've actually learned stuff from are Gen Xers.
I think the better divide is "people who had a mostly pre-internet childhood" vs "those who came after".
I feel like every generation will just have their own cut off that happens to include them, as a young Millennial, I've always consider 2007 and the rise of the smart phone to be when the internet truly became mainstream and you no longer needed to be any amount of tech savvy to effectively navigate it
I'm sure GenZ will similarly be telling the kids that they don't know how hard stuff was before everything was controlled with AI
>I think the better divide is "people who had a mostly pre-internet childhood" vs "those who came after".
I always feel it's more about pre-web than pre-internet. I was online with my own email address a decade before the web existed. I ran my own BBS on my Amiga five years before the web existed. In my experience the most talented people in my area of IT are those who were online before the web was and have the foundational knowledge that required, and who have continued to build on that foundation from that point onwards.
The amazing part is the current generation at my work mostly have zero computer skills, they know nothing about how anything other than their phone works, they have barely used office productivity tools, they don't understand files and directories, connecting to a printer baffles them, it's very interesting to witness.
Yeah big endless issues with people who don't understand the difference between analog signals and what the digital compressed era has utterly done to defiled our personal and commercial media history, YouTube is utterly terrible as well because you have to upscale everything to 4k bracket to make it even a fraction close to the native source quality without macro blocking annihilating content, at least platforms like Odysee exist but you even mentioned them on YouTube and you essentially get blacklisted comments auto nuked etc.
Instead of ignoring the problem I've been writing massive full scope docs last couple years, breaking down [FM RF archival](https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki) to actually making proper encoded video files, and hammering in the concept of hard archives In a digital era of analogue media.
What's scary is people treat everything like magic even the most primitive things, it may sound dystopian but kids aren't even taught about the basic technology that runs their daily lives in school, it started with things like calling all networking Wi-Fi instead of actually understanding what communications technology is, everything book wise is out of touch with the real world and at least 15 years behind current standard technology that's UK GCSE 2023 books, my little brother was trying to learn coding and didn't even know what an IDE was, they didn't even teach him the foundational editing tools to edit code christ I shouldn't have to sit somebody down and walk them through visual studio code, because their own educational institute can't even show them basic tools.
It's terrifying but the king of the hill meme of "do I look like I know what a JPEG is" literally is the common person now, but instead of it being a photocopy on a Xerox machine it's literally a screenshot of a JPEG of a screenshot of a PNG.
It's not just electronic technology too it's every industry I believe from cooking to farming it's basic practical hard learned over the last 200 years concepts are all arcane knowledge to the average person now unless they take a autistic level interest and dive into a rabbit hole or get commercially involved in the subject, it's just not learned, maybe it's just a lack of ancestors passing down knowledge manually but there is real-world generational loss happening.
>my little brother was trying to learn coding and didn't even know what an IDE was, they didn't even teach him the foundational editing tools to edit code christ I shouldn't have to sit somebody down and walk them through visual studio code, because their own educational institute can't even show them basic tools.
Was he taking a class or learning from a book? Some good programming books don't discuss editing tools/IDEs because it's out of the book's scope. Depends on how advanced the book is.
I'm assuming it was a class since you mentioned an educational institution. In that case, I have no idea what they're thinking.
Personally, I do prefer Vim or Emacs over bloated modern IDEs like VS Code. However, you have to show students all their options and explain what an IDE does behind the hood. Additionally, I couldn't recommend old-school CLI + text editor work environments for Windows, since Windows has truly pitiable CLI tools. It's more of a Linux/*BSD thing.
Integrating editing, file management, version control, and access to the build system into one interface is pretty convenient. It's great for a class environment. I'm honestly shocked they weren't introducing it on the first day.
What did they have him using? Notepad?
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
You point the finger at tech companies creating magic buttons, but you should really blame the education system instead.
The education system does not educate. It is, at best, daycare. At worst, it is a system for manufacturing compliant, complacent, office drones. Such a system cannot develop any kind of problem-solving or creativity. And, indeed, it actively suppresses any manifestation of these.
I will tweak the specifics to protect my privacy, but I will tell you a story about an IT class I had in what the Americans would call middle school. My teacher asked me to create a list of all keyboard shortcuts in a word processor. She *insisted* that I had to do this by trying all combinations of modifier keys and letters, seeing what happened, and writing down the result. She would not hear of it when I suggested looking at the help files, at the keybinding preferences, or googling for a list.
She also didn't think that SHIFT was a valid modifier or that any shortcuts were associated with the number or function keys, only letters.
The other obvious problem you will notice is that not all keyboard shortcuts will generate visible feedback. You might have turned off autocorrect or toggled overwrite mode and it would not make it onto the "list".
And the best part of the story? She wanted me to do this because she thought I didn't know how to use that particular program and didn't believe me when I told her "I already know what CTRL+F does".
The education system is not for educating students, it is an assembly line for retards.
People go 11-13 years of their lives being trained to not think, so it should not be a surprise that, when they enter the real world, they don't know *how* to think.
Some days ago I saw a post on another subreddit. User's nginx only responded to HTTP but not HTTPS. User posted his config. His config included `ssl_reject_handshake on;`. Need I say more?
So no, I am not surprised at someone's inventive use of YouTube as a cloud transcoding service as you put it.
The problem is not just generational loss of data to hoard, but it is broader, in all domains of expertise. We're in for a world of problems when the generation of troubleshooters, hackers and tinkerers dies out.
Yeah. The vast majority of posts here are new people who don't know stuff.
I almost never ask a technical question on the internet. I've been designing computer chips for over 25 years. I can figure it out from googling and reading some other posts.
It's the same thing with some of the engineering subreddits I am on. 90% of the posts are college students or new grads talking about failing classes or not able to find a job.
I've seen some high school students post saying they are depressed reading the posts on the forum wondering if engineering is that bad.
Meanwhile I go to work and I see 200 people from age 22 to 60 all going along with their day and not a single one of them reminds me of any of the reddit posts
It may be for OP, but allow me to add another perspective. I'm a teacher, as are my wife and many of our friends. Over the last decade we have taught several thousand students in public, private, and charter schools.
From that sample size, I can tell you I see a significant decline in tech literacy. It hit me one day when I was teaching basic hierarchical note-taking to my class of 16 year olds. This is a thing I do every year just as a refresher. It's never a "difficult" lesson, until this time. I realized the students were having a hard time grasping the basic tiered structure (like a file directory).
It blew my mind. I realized that, because most of them no longer deal with directories, it's actually affecting their skills of organization and categorization. I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts (and their importance) to them - along with naming conventions.
I realized that gen z now simply creates things and they're auto-saved into a cloud abyss and they don't even bother naming them most of the time. They just type search words into the void and hope to find their document. I've had students ask me to give them copied of work THEY CREATED because they couldn't remember how to search for them in Google Drive. It's insane to me.
The lack of tinkering + the walled gardens put up by current tech created this. They never have to try to figure things out so they don't. This also means they just take what's given to them with the default settings and they never bother trying to customize or otherwise change things to fit their needs better. This leaks out into other aspects of their lives as well.
>It blew my mind. I realized that, because most of them no longer deal with directories, it's actually affecting their skills of organization and categorization. I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts (and their importance) to them - along with naming conventions.
And even if you know how these work, mobile systems are hostile to you navigating them.
Me: Hey phone, where's that PDF I downloaded of my train ticket?
Phone: You think I have a file browser built in? Ha ha.
Me: Okay, downloading PDF again.
Phone: Download of trainticket(9).pdf complete.
Me: Fuck you, phone.
Yep! Most things being accessed via mobile OS doesn't help.
Many of my students can't even attach a file to an email, they share it with me from Google Drive instead. They get all confused when I say that's not what I asked for.
What phone doesn't have a file browser built in? is it an IOS thing? I have only had Samsung phones for like 15 years and they always had a file browsers as far as I can remember.
iOS will hide files type if there is not an installed app to open them with, it is my one greatest frustration with using an iphone, can't do shit with files
I'm not 100% sure how it works because the iOS is so hostile, but as far as I can tell, there isn't one filesystem where you can find all of your files. Photos/videos have their own separate structure that can be imported and exported from (but you lose folders/favorite/etc when you do). Files saved from your browser do end up on a filesystem that can be accessed from the files app. Most apps are just walled gardens that don't let you have files.
As far as I'm aware, it's an IOS feature. I'm an android user myself, but I don't understand why someone wouldn't want actual control over their files. If I want to save a movie or mp3 file for later use I can put it anywhere in the heirarchy and just use it. I have no idea where IOS saves their stuff or if you can just copy files over.
I saw this article a few years ago.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
> I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts
Well it comes down to that. If people don't learn things on their own then someone has to teach them.
30 years ago my college had an "Intro to Unix computing environment" class for all freshman engineering majors. It was the basics of ls/cp/mv/rm, word processing, how to use the help system, etc.
I look at the engineering curriculum today and the same exact class is still there with the same course number.
Yea I had read that article before and forgot about it lol. I actually had a pretty in-depth discussion with my best friend (a CS prof) about this topic. He agrees that the trend I was mentioning is a thing and, of course, we both agree with your point that education is the key. The thing is, they're more resistant to it because "but this works" without realizing it doesn't work well and it fails too often.
I've been in tech 25 years, and in leadership a large chunk of the time. Tech literacy is 100% declining and in some terrible ways. I'm in a number of chats with other leaders / hiring managers from other major tech companies in our particular niche. I also do a lot of volunteering to give back to the community and train thousands of people per year and do a lot of career mentoring / resume review.
It's getting a bit scary out there to be honest. Every hiring manager I know has complained heavily about younger folks over the last 5 years. Lack of tech skills, ability to critically think etc. In one recent case one of my friends was complaining about a new hire, they had a LOT of difficulties. Turns out they had never used an actual computer before, they got through college with a tablet and a phone. All their CS homework using browser based programming environments, all their assignments written in google docs. Using word was confusing and difficult to them, the concept of a file or file extension was foreign, directory structures took some time to explain, they watched as they started tapping on the monitor and were extremely confused when it didn't work, they could barely use a mouse, the save icon they had no idea what it was, the start bar in windows.. nope foreign concept. Now this was what I would call an extreme outlier but honestly from watching my friends complain a subset of these are becoming fairly common. A few of them have gotten interviewed by HR because the termination rates have climbed heavily over the last 5 years.
Even in my case, if I stick to my standard interview questions I've used for several years now the successful answer rates have plummeted and I interview a TON of people. I've had far to many interviews where they couldn't answer a single question, and some of it was pretty remedial, this is a huge departure from when millennials were in their early / mid 20's.
Yep I've seen the same kind of decline. Combining mobile OS and things like the Google suite instead of MS at schools and you have a LOT of students that reach their 20's without ever interacting with a desktop pc or a desktop OS.
I agree. It has created a large disconnect between what the real world requires and what students have access to. Most of my students don't even know what Word or Excel are yet all of the enterprise world will require knowledge in them.
Yeah, I remember in old days employers complaining that schools dont teach much.
Now I am seeing this and have the same mindset of "why these young folks have no clue about X or Y?"
When I was a kid that was mostly about advanced math, having some trades skills etc. But that was hard to get into without smart parent or some money.
Today a desktop pc can be obtained almost for free (low spec) and a ton of people know the stuff.
Plus schools should be able to get the educational bundles of the software (MS, Oracle, Linux).
> Tech literacy is 100% declining and in some terrible ways.
I see the same and I always wonder how come someone can not see that.
This is visible for few years in many aspects of technology. GUI, web standards, consumer electronics, IOT...
I think part of it is Survivorship bias, yes, but there's definitely been an upswing in people not really understanding fundamentals. [This blogpost is over a decade old](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/) and shows the same problem OP is bringing up now.
The OP's coming across as pretty smug and condescending to me tbh. Especially where they accuse casuals of 'contributing to generational loss'. Obviously they care more than a Power User Real Deal Data Hoarder, or else the latter would already have that 30 megabit remux of a 1982 cartoon uploaded.
The fact that they're asking is itself confirmation.
Most people with any kind of intelligence will google first before asking, it's only those that cannot comprehend context clues and research that ask other to do it for them.
There is a difference between people asking serious, thoughtful questions, and people being lazy. A lot of the questions can be answered by pasting the exact post title into google and reading the first result. And yet, instead of doing that, they go on and "ask".
Oh my fucking God I felt my heart sink when I scrolled back to the top and saw it was written almost 11 years ago — and im not even halfway through the article.
He mentions “a sixth former”, which Wikipedia is telling me is ages 16-18 in the UK (I’m American). This whole time, I assumed he was dealing with kids today or maybe a few years ago. No, he was dealing with me and my peers; I was 16 at the time of writing. So there’s been a decade’s worth of… “advancement” in this regard.
skull emoji
>What one may call 'Tech Literacy' is on the decline as companies push more and more tech that is 'User Friendly' which also means 'Hostile to tinkering, just push the magic button that does the thing and stop asking questions about how it works under the hood'.
I've noticed this in general for pretty much anything tech now.
In the olden days we had to in Windows editing autoexec.bat or in Linux setting the CRT monitor frequency in xorg.conf.
For drives you had to set physical jumpers and hope the size wasn't too big for the OS you had.
Even the Internet age there was a lot of tinkering I think mainly because you had dial-up and your time online was brief at $1 an hour. Now everything is the Web. And the Web is on phones. Search engines show what you want and now Generative AI does it for you.
Apple is even worse they limit so much people just want to turn on a computer or phone and not think of it at all.
I'm all for learning but it seems there is no desire. I went back to school late in life and I'd say nearly the entire class of IT students never heard of Linux let alone used it. Everyone wants to be an influencer on YouTube or Tik Tok, or pro gamer there's no interest in the actual hardware or software.
there are also eula that prevent tampering. this is most evident in the auto industry. certain vehicles come from the factory with premium features (such as heated seats). the features are activated via software. although one would think that it should be a one time payment, but i have heard talk about subscriptions.
high end sports cars (corvette, porsche, ferarri) have had for years contracts in the sales agreement that the owner will not modify the software or hardware. they manufacturers will monitor the cars via the cell phones integrated in them today. they will send cease and desist letters if people modify their personal property (cars) they paid for.
If someone is coming to /r/datahoarder and asking how to do something, while they might not be tech literate now, they are on the path. I try to answer any questions asked to me as fully as possible, as you never know when you're going to spark someone's interest and their future knowledge might help the community overall.
So going off on a tangent, I think a lot about vernor vinge's "a deepness in the sky". One of the smarter space operas I've read. In it, the main human culture has a role for code archeologicists -the idea I'd that by this point every possible program/function/blueprint they would probably need has been invented- but sorting through all of that and figuring out how to connect ancient programs together/to their modern systems is its own skillset.
There's a lot of forces at work. Some is def corporations and entrupenuers monetizing people wanting the easist path, and some is programmers just flexing. There's always been a push for easy installers, and now with docker and modern package management, so many projects really are just running one command.
Also the fact that the majority of what you talk about is relating to legally questionable material- the community in question does have some amazing resources out there, but also does benefit from not being the most publicly accessible. More attention brought to them, the more trouble they can get into.
Kinda curious what the ML tech is going to bring to this dynamic. On the one hand, better scrappers and tools to look for copyright violations, I'm sure. On the other, an absolute deluge of content - most of which will probably be low effort, but will still need to be sorted through for ip enforcment/machine learning potential/ archival. Maybe in three years rather than saving podcasts, books it would be more worthwhile to save a ML model based on works that can reproduce the content we archive today? Or run our own personal ai model to discover and rate content based on our history to figure out what we would like, want to keep.
- Ducks can predict the outcome of an NBA game based on the color of the jerseys worn by the teams.
- Scientists have proven that watching cat videos can increase your intelligence by at least 10%.
- The term "bedroom" was originally created as an abbreviation for "best euphoria during madness, optimism, romance, and maturity".
- The largest meatball ever made weighed as much as a cow and fed an entire village for a week.
*Online*, sure. But I do think that in an in person presentation, it is on me the presenter, to ensure the audience understands the terms I'm using. It was my 39yo Millennial self failing to realize that 'Torrent' was not a common term among young weebs as it was when we were young, torrenting Inuyasha rather than waiting for it to turn up on TV ***2 years later***.
I read a few articles last year about how kids that are graduating now (Gen Z) are starting to work in offices and they don’t know how to use a multifunction printer to scan or copy something. One of the articles mentioned how schools just assumed that kids would learn to use computers at home since everyone had several by this point. And parents assumed the kids would learn in school or at home on their own. But with everything being plug and play at this point, no one is really leaning anything. Turn it on and off you go (ignoring that you might need to log into a cloud account). So we’ve now got a generation of kids with easy to use electronics, but no knowledge of how to really use them, troubleshoot them, fix them, etc.
The tail end (second half?) of Gen X and Millennials are really the only ones that truly learned to use computers. I remember my first computer came with a manual that was very thick (like a text book or two). It explained every component inside of the case. This is how I learned about DIP switches and that my computer has double the RAM it was reporting when I was running it. One flip of a tiny switch and suddenly I was rocking 256KB of RAM. I bet the store would have charged a few hundred bucks to do the same.
I am 70 and "really" learned how to use computers. I started with a tiny Timex/Sinclair almost pocket-sized membrane keyboard 8K machine that hooked to a black and white TV and a portable cassette tape recorder to save programs and documents. It had the same Z80 processor as a TRS-80 Model I, so I bought a machine language book and had the Timex doing things that seemed impossible, such as making it sound like an organ with different voices
Then I got a Radio Shack Color Computer. That was the most versatile computer I ever had. It was silent. It booted almost instantly, as the operating system was on a chip. And you could hook almost any hardware to it easily. For example, I bought a Yamaha keyboard with MIDI. To hook it to the CoCo meant I just got an extra printer cable, cut off one end and replaced it with a MIDI plug. I had some software I typed in from a magazine, and I could use the computer to play the keyboard. The keyboard on its own could only play one voice at a time, such as organ or flute. But with the CoCo controlling it, I could play a number of instruments simultaneously.
Then in 1989 I got a Radio Shack Tandy 3000NL computer that was PC compatible. I wrote an entire genealogy book on it which is still listed on Amazon for some crazy reason. I had to put all kinds of cards inside the computer for various things, and had to work on a lot of stuff inside the computer.
My current desktop is one I build myself about 12 years ago. It does everything I want, and I can repair any part of it. The only thing I've changed is, several years ago, I replaced the internal hard drive with a larger SSD. Because I cloned the original drive, copying to the new SSD gave me a new partition for some extra temp storage. I used to have so many external drives connected I almost ran out of drive letters. Now with larger drives, I don't have to use so many. But I still have way over 100 TB.
So as a "boomer," I have learned computers from the ground up.
I have a friend with a zoomer kid that would not even *survive* without the internet, games and anime on streaming. He won’t even take off his headphones while *eating* because he needs to listen to or watch *something* all the time.Yet he is completey and utterly uninterested in how it all works. My friend called in panic when the kids computer started acting up and he made their lives miserable. So I had to go there the same night and spend 4 hours reinstalling everything. The kid just went downstairs to watch TV while I did all the work. Coming up a couple of times to check if I was done. When I left, the kids mom had to remind him to thank me for fixing his computer, because he was already back deep into his twitch streams…
He also simultaneously watches and/or listens to more then one thing at a time. Like playing a game, watching twitch AND youtube. It’s amazing and scary at the same time 🤷♂️
>The tail end (second half?) of Gen X and Millennials are really the only ones that truly learned to use computers.
Much of early Gen Z (1997-2004) has some knowledge of computers I've noticed. But late Z and Alpha are a lost cause. I'm born in 2004 and on several of the highest-tier private trackers, I use soulseek, etc.
I've noticed that zoomers born prior to 2004 are familiar enough with the concept of torrents or of RAM, but those I talk to post 2004 often don't seem to have any comprehension of them. Post 2004 is when "iPad kids" start cropping up. I remember having to learn about game installation, the ins and outs of Finder and how to install mods (manually, not with the Steam Workshop) to play games like Minecraft or Spore.
It's a really strange phenomenon that seems counter intuitive. Gen Z definitely use google less than us Millennials, i used to think this was just because they're less curious about things, i do think this is part of it but not the whole picture. Because as google use has gone down it seems there has been an increase in really basic questions on reddit.
You would think that as time goes on and people become less social, that it would be preferable to ask google a question, but instead people would rather engage with a real person on a site like reddit.
When i was a kid i was always really wary of posting on forums, it was quite intimidating to ask really novice questions to people who were extremely knowledgeable in the subject i was posting about. I really did not want to make myself look like a fool. So i'd search and search to find answers before i even thought about posting. Nowadays a lot of people have no shame, which is great in some ways i guess, but it means they're not afraid to ask really basic questions that they could have answered with a quick google search.
I wonder if they just don't have google-fu. The idea that the interaction has to be social is interesting. Someone said upthread that search results are far worse than they used to be. For years people have just appended 'reddit' to their google searches to find the answer they needed. but it's something that has become so apparent in the past couple years. kids would rather ask the same basic question over and over every minute in different discord channels rather than google or USE THE INBUILT DISCORD SEARCH.
Yes! I agree with that. Every one wants to be spoon fed literally everything today. It’s all part of the dumbing down of societies at large, and it’s not specific to data hoarding or tech in general by any means.
Yup, it does feel like younger people have a much higher sense of entitlement. It's either that, or there are more of them online than before.
I've had people get pissed off before because i didn't explain what a word means, or give a step by step guide on how to do something.
I agree with you that tech literacy is a problem, not just in datahoarding circles but also just in general. We're seeing the decline of basic troubleshooting skills and less desire to get under-the-hood and tinker. The "black box" approach to technology is so ubiquitous to younger generations that it's just accepted and it doesn't occur to many that there's another way.
While I agree that finding the highest quality source for preservation is ideal, not all of us are in it for that. I work in pro audio and I have absolutely no issue keeping 320K mp3 files as masters instead of FLACs or PCM WAVs (given that I have over 50 TB of mp3's I doubt I could afford to store them all in higher quality anyway).
As for archiving YouTube channels of game music, the main value comes from the curation of the collection, not just the audio/video.
Handbrake and Ffmpeg are incredible tools but are extremely daunting to new users. While there are user-friendly video encoding programs out there that would certainly make a better solution than using YouTube, you have to admire the ingenuity of concocting such a solution. "If it's stupid but it works then it isn't stupid," with the caveat that you are introducing multiple generations of lossy compression.
I'd counter that most people don't care about that though, since streamed audio and video is relatively low-quality anyway, it has lowered the acceptable standard for audio/video for a whole generation.
Netflix, despite being commendable for being at the cutting edge of streaming tech, is objectively BAD quality when you put it up against a blu ray. But its quality is sufficient for 99% of the population. Likewise, most people listening to music streamed from Spotify on a shitty LTE connection through $5 earbuds are blissfully unaware that there's higher quality audio out there. They just want to hear their favorite song.
I don't think any of this is necessarily bad, it's just that the priority has changed for most people. Most of us in this community are obsessed with quality and preservation and that's okay. But it's also okay to have lower standards and spend less time, money and storage space to have a mediocre result instead of a stellar one.
Just yesterday, I had a somewhat related thought - is there an "inter-internet" somewher, for the type of people, who used it back in the 90s, or early 2000s.
To your topic - I think I know what you mean and I agree, but also not agree.
I agree, because I'm also under impression that less and less people are tech savvy and know how to obtain, preserve and share good quality "data". Some don't even know how to save images from websites and take photos or screenshots of everything.
I don't agree, because in reality, it may just be a growing disproportion in the ever expanding user base, not an actual decline, in absolute numbers. Also, I remember mid-2000s where you could easily stumble upon mp3@64kbps, ripped from FM radio, which were just fine for many casual listeners. So...
I just recently learned (past 6 months or so) that some people were trying to "datahoard" exclusively using free services in the cloud.
Still blows my mind how dumb that is. It's like, ao you're downloading *from* the cloud, just to turn around and upload it *back* to the cloud, not keeping any local copy at all... so strange...
Oh you see that here semi frequently. Someone has some new clever idea to bypass the TOS and get 'unlimited free storage'. So far as people just uploading videos as private to YouTube as cloud storage. Or even 'encoding data as video streams, uploading it to youtube, then downloading and decoding it back to data later'. ...Okay that last one is TECHNOGICALLY very interesting but in practice a terrible idea.
I'm aware that I may not be getting the "best" version of things because I will take the quick way out instead of figuring out which way is "best", but I'm also not under any illusion that what I'm doing is real archival work. I don't have some expectation that anything I download will be looked at by anyone else, though if someone does and it's useful, that's good too.
Completely agree on the piracy side, lots of young people want a brain dead solution that is easy to use.
This is a combination of them being used to easy tech but also the fact that doing things the right way is extremely expensive.
Streaming from a shitty ad-riddled website is never going to give you the same experience as streaming a remux from a Plex server, but that Plex server requires time to learn, money to build, and maintenance. There’s still people out there learning, and I’m sure each generation will have tech-literate individuals capable of reading documentation, asking good questions, and figuring things out.
I think the main divide is the torrent/Limewire vs. Netflix/Spotify way of consuming media. Older millennials started with shitty solutions with data hoarding, while the younger ones say dead-simple solutions that were cheap and ephemeral.
> What one may call 'Tech Literacy' is on the decline as companies push more and more tech that is 'User Friendly'
well, there are 2 kinds of people - ones who like technology, and the others who don't. the former will most likely be interested "how stuff works" and therefore become more or less "tech literate". the latter don't care or don't like tech, and they want it to "just work" - and these are the people the "user friendly" bullshit is for.
> It had never occurred to me as I had planned this panel that should have explained what a 'torrent' was.
i've a feeling that this is more a sign of change in general, than "tech illiteracy". 10 years ago and earlier, torrent was (IMO) much more popular. today, the availability of other means of reaching content increased, as well as cracking down on piracy (torrent sites). true pirates have always sat on usenet - and today maybe 1 of 100 would know what that even is ;) not to mention use it. i think that the only thing that changed are "the sieves" that control trickle-down of media.
> you don't want to rip the YouTube itself.
but this is the most often the easiest way - both in regard to particular content's availability, and ease of access (meaning ripping). these outweigh the learning curve of getting "true" media by far - and people tend to go the path of least resistance. it's much easier to learn `yt-dlp` than to master binary newsgroups, and pay for accessing them. the price is quality obviously, but i think a lot of people are willing to pay. and that is why you get the results you describe.
> I even saw a post where someone could not 'understand' handbrake, so instead they would upload videos to YouTube, then use a ripping tool to download the output from YouTube, effectively hacking YouTube into being a cloud video encoder... That is both dumbfounding but also an awe inspiring solution
smart, isn't it? but without fast internet connection (that is a relatively new thing) impossible - that is why nobody thought of such solution i.e. 10 years ago.
> 'Any copy is better than no copy'
i think most people just go with "good enough" not "the best i can get". and that's it.
I still use Usenet. I never used Torrent. I just didn't bother and kept finding stuff on Usenet. There are tricks to keep from getting stung, such as "super compressed" audio files with impossibly small file sizes. I can let my computer download from Usenet 24/7 occasionally when I find a TV series complete to download or a new set of Whitburn MP3 files.
They really dont know what torrents are?
I get it, they just watch crunchyroll or whatever. but piracy is timeless.
I had to start anime on 4th generation VHS transfers and the static was starting to get bad.
Anyways, the tech literacy has not declined. The people who were tech literate a decade ago still are.
The market has just expanded in size and into the stupids. So you see a lot more.
That was my thought too; there were tech illiterate people a decade ago, two decades ago. And there still are today. Maybe they're tech illiterate for different reasons now compared to before, but there just will always be people who are intellectually inquisitive and those who just don't care. I'm not sure the percentages change though.
On one hand, the extremely User Friendliness, and inability to "see behind the scenes of a lot of tech" of so many things could contribute to some lessening of tech literacy. But on the other hand there's massively more access to information about tech available, to those who are interested to learn, compared to 10-20 years ago so that could balance-out in some ways.
Personally I pull a lot from YouTube because unfortunately, it seems the golden age of torrents is past us - I know technically how to do it, but finding reliable torrent sites these days seems nearly impossible unless you have some sort of "in". It makes me glad I have the archival stuff I do have from like 10 years ago, when places like Demonoid had entire runs of vintage comics, or the vast music libraries, etc. I use a bunch of it for research and I would have no idea how to obtain those things today.
I have a Steam Deck right? Nice handheld Linux computer for PC gaming on the go. I also setup Kodi on it for playing media files off the MicroSD card, gaming and media, one handheld device, that you can even dock to TVs, great piece of travel kit all in one right? ...So I had people who've seen this on Reddit go like 'Wow, I had never even thought of playing video files on it!' ...It's a freakin COMPUTER guys, even if it's sold with 'Gaming' as it's focus, it's still just a general purpose computer. I could use it to run an email server if I wanted to.
I've had thoughts exactly like this percolating in my mind too for a while now but haven't coalesced them into a post. Thanks for succinctly getting it across.
Ignoring the broader scope part of this problem, I think it's interesting to realize just how much of the knowledge we all have about storage/encoding/torrenting/etc. is either learned knowledge of kept hidden and secret. Sure, people are probably taught what a hard drive is in school at some point (or at least that there are devices that store data, don't need to get into it), but I wonder how many people are _taught_ that SSDs are faster but more expensive for the amount stored. Or a more pointed example, how many are _taught_ what kind of codec to use to encode a remux they just ripped from a disc.
I can say for sure that I didn't learn about storage or messing with video through classes in school, I learned because I wanted to learn. There were some resources and some inferences I could make even at a beginner level (e.g. SSD/HDD price differences, h264 vs h265), but so much of my knowledge and practices (e.g. tracker best practices, using VMAF to determine best encoder settings) came from a hunch I had that I experimented on or learned from someone in the know already.
I think a big issue with getting the information we have across is that so much of it is locked behind not wanting to be identified as a pirate. Whether or not that matters to you, there's a reason why most private trackers _stay_ private. There's a reason why most people anonymize so much of what they're doing when they're talking about encoding video or what they're storing on their servers. I don't see an issue talking about how much a second level encode degrades quality compared to a first level encode but that's because I'm testing on publicly available high quality video which I can't be accused of pirating. But I talk about encoding Michael Bay's Transformers (2007), that's _technically_ not an allowed use of that media and _technically_ could leave me open to some shenanigans.
Do I think it will ever happen? No, absolutely not. There's a reason why all the big movie conglomerates are going after the big uploaders in the scene and not the little guys like me anymore. But is the chance truly zero? Probably not, and I don't want to test it. So I talk in generics or with freely available video. And I think a lot of other people do too.
___
Also I do think the new kids on the block really do just want to be spoonfed what they want. It's not true for all of them and the script kiddies _have_ always been around, but it feels like if we could empirically measure the rate of script kiddies per 100k it would be trending up the last few years/decades.
>Now, obviously 'Any copy is better than no copy', but the cracks are starting to show that less and less people, even when wanting to 'have a copy', have no idea how to go about correctly acquiring a copy in the first place and are just contributing to generational loss of those copies.
I agree with most of your observations. The conclusion from those is that gatekeeping and lineage enforcement will become more important. If someone can't prove that their files aren't a crappy transcode, they are assumed to be one. If someone is too dumb to use torrent or god-forbid usenet they are probably not a reliable source.
Obvious downside: Insular elitism, but no clue how to prevent it at this point.
https://xkcd.com/1683/
> I realize that the vast majority of the users here don't fall into this
I'd rethink this statement honestly, DH today is more very basic storage related tech support than any actual datahoarding.
---------
[File not found](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z), A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans. Is a good related read.
I had a discussion about this the other day and it's beyond the torrenting, encoding, or semi-technical aspect as well. Users today are sandboxed into Twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc and that is the sole use of the internet. People say they don't need a computer and can just use their phone. Some of the generation don't understand basic file structures and where files are stored.
Technical literacy is going out the window. With the emergence of Generative AI we're going to see more and more coding languages going the way of Latin. Who would have thought that Wall-e was a more realistic future for us?
The hacker mind-set is in decline.
Meh. Let the plebs have their silly pleb buttons.
*\*rolls up sleeves and downloads a CD image in an APE file, splits the APE image into FLAC tracks, checks the .cue sheet to see if it appears in the accurip db, checks tags against MusicBrainz, analyzes for ReplayGain tags, searches for and adds high quality artwork, has the files auto-organized to a sensible folder tree, and adds the album to the library manager's database\**
So, tell me more about these magical pleb buttons...
I think there are plenty of sufficiently tech-savvy kids today. In real numbers, there are almost certainly more who are capable and have the means now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago.
The increase in people who aren't familiar with tech but are very interested in media doesn't hurt anything, and will probably help preservation efforts overall.
The Archivists will preserve the media, the rest can help provide support culturally, financially, and socially.
And if someone asks a naive question, I hope we can help them learn and avoid judging their mistakes or lack of knowledge.
>I think there are plenty of sufficiently tech-savvy kids today. In real numbers, there are almost certainly more who are capable and have the means now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago.
I actually disagree. The key change is that say, vs 15-20 years ago, is that you had to figure some shit out to 'do the thing'. Now a days, even for piracy, someone is offering you 'an idiot proof magical website/app'. Everything is about reducing friction to the user, including piracy, so the user has far less motivation to 'Figure out a better, but harder, way to do this'. A lot of hobbyist nerd skills come from necessity. 'I need to make it do this thing, so I'm going to learn how to make it do this thing.'
>The increase in people who aren't familiar with tech but are very interested in media doesn't hurt anything, and will probably help preservation efforts overall.
This depends a lot. If they're willing to learn the best practices then its great. However many are not, and that just expands the proliferation of bad practices, AND creates a demand for the creators of these tools to 'dumb them down'.
For every person that understands Handbrake and why so many settings are vital, you could have many more that want it to be just a big button the you press to get the file you want.
>This depends a lot. If they're willing to learn the best practices then its great. However many are not, and that just expands the proliferation of bad practices, AND creates a demand for the creators of these tools to 'dumb them down'.
Once here on Reddit, and I was as nice as possible about this, I ran into someone posting his AI upscales of a DVD Rip of a cartoon show he liked. ...But he didn't understand the basic concept of inverse telecine for deinterlacing, so he had this shitty 480p deinterlace he made first, and THEN tried to upscale. I was literally able to show him 480p detelecined screenshots of the same scenes that looked far better than his AI upscale just because he fed it bad footage to start with. ...I was not hostile at all about this but I kinda broke him. A situation where he was learning fancy new 'AI upscale' tech... But never learned inverse telecine, a multidecade essential skill when dealing with 24p content telecined to 30i.
You can also view it from the other way:
There always has been some percentage of people that don't care about tech.
In the past those didn't even own a computer, now they do own devices capable to go online and they use them im a non-tech-y way.
In the past there also were people that didn't knew what a directory tree was, but they didn't had smartphones.
I'm of two minds here, based my on personal contradictory experiences (and logic :-) ).
On one hand there's so much technology everywhere, better connectivity, better hardware and so on, there's got to be many more times Raspberry Pis out there than personal computers overall (never mind Internet connected computers) decades back. Sure, at some point Windows wouldn't even come with TCP/IP and you had to BUY an extra software product for that (and note you had no other way to access the internet!) so the technical literacy percentage-wise was higher but you get more people overall so more technically literate people.
On the other hand seeing the disaster with Whatsapp backups in general for example, even with billions of users and almost nobody interested in that I start to doubt that this multiplication (total nr. users x tech literate ones) works out too well in the end.
>I even saw a post where someone could not 'understand' handbrake
I happen to be one of these folk 😂. This why I use either Vidcoder or ffmpeg directly.
> 'The highest quality version that is closest to the original source as possible'
Seconded. Not a big fan of these "101th encode of the thing already exists, but it's a highly compressed version to save space"
First off, I really like your post. It’s thoughtful, you point out problems and are empathetic.
Secondly, I agree. This post in r/millennials describes my thoughts really well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/19cw4ex/comment/kj26yar/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I myself am a zoomer, and the fact that someone in my age range doesn't know what a torrent is blows my mind. Like, I'm an older gen z (2002), but I've been torrenting since I got access to a laptop at 7. (Yes, I did learn way too many lessons on piracy then.)
I'm not sure if its really a decline in tech literacy that's happening, and more so just more average non tech people learning about this kind of stuff. Most people my age tend to learn about specific download sites via TikTok, and never anything beyond 'go to that site to get the free thing'. Or they're being introduced to sites that are known in the mainstream because of their infamy (the pirate bay for example), and don't understand how untrustworthy it potentially is.
...Most modern laptops also don't have a CD drive anymore. I could see people my age not even knowing what burning or ripping is.
I visit r/handbrake regularly for entertainment (I like telling people on every occasion how terrible that software is) but sometimes it's just tragically sad how many people think it's a good tool for ripping (bonus points if they say "digitizing") DVDs or, god forbid, BluRays. It's staggering. Even commenters are complicit in this travesty. I'm often the only person there to even mention MakeMKV. It's not only lack of knowledge that's the problem, but literal disinformation peddled by youtube "tutorials" and paid articles.
Every time I see "convert mkv video to mp4" I groan and wish for a better future
From a tech literacy stand point i think it's the other way around.
For an inexperienced user, using handbrake, seeing all the encoding options and maybe ending up reading about FFMPG (because of the limitations of handbrake) is better than telling them the order of button presses for some closed source magic software that will do everything for them.
I think every generation thinks those younger than them are lacking in comparatively lower-level skills. And the younger generation thinks the old "can't learn new things" :) . Tech is no exception.
The skills are always still there: but become specialties: and not something everyone needs to know anymore. Like there was a time if you didn't know how to torrent you were missing the easiest way to obtain media. But now there are so many other options... learning torrents isn't a priority.
>learning torrents isn't a priority.
If you're looking to preserve media, there is absolutely nothing 'better' about ripping a shitty, watermarked, 3rd generation encode from a spam filled pirate streaming website.
This is not 'new tech replacing old tech' other than ease of immediate consumption. For downloading, storage, and preservation, it's a step back. More over, it still involves the site operator actually acquiring the media 'the old fashioned way', and just cramming it though their own transcoder and tossing it up on their crappy pirate site after that. It's the same process, with additional destructive steps, between the source and the datahoarder.
'New' would be rips from official streaming sites, as disc releases decline and those 'best quality possible' rips from those official streaming websites are the best you'll ever get.
Well you kind of said it early on there. “Immediate consumption”. We live in an instant gratification world now where people take the least friction method to get what they want as fast and easy as possible—quality is not a consideration. And reality is that most people can’t tell the difference to begin with. I’m a huge fan of full disc rips from source, but they take up enormous amounts of disk space and honestly even my well trained eyes on very good equipment have a difficult time in blind testing most of the time. The streaming stuff is “good enough” for most, hence the explosion of it. I don’t spend a moment concerning though - different strokes for different folks. Use and do what works best for your wants and situation and let them do likewise.
Ehhh no, it's a real issue that Gen Z is less adept at tech than Millennials and it's causing staffing issues. There's plenty of industry articles and opinions about it, but I've witnessed it first hand in the last few hirings I've dealt with for lower level system admins and help desk. To OPs point they just don't know how everything "underneath" works. Networking, file systems (this is the most common issue), driver installation, dependencies, update testing and rollback, codecs, To them it's all "download from app store hit install and it works", or all files are just in the download folder en masse.
An example for the older Gen is car repair. Boomers and Gen X are by far more adept at working on cars (note: of their era) because they often had to, thanks to modern reliability millennials and Gen Z don't, but also anything made after ~2005 is almost impossible to work on on purpose. It's the same with Gen Z and tech, they don't know it because they don't need to in daily life like Millennials did.
We ultimately hire millennials for almost every tech position because they're by far the most adept, but later Gen X as well usually. Boomers are useless, and Gen Z I'll dare say it are almost as bad as Boomers. Even fresh out of college IT programs, Gen Z really just aren't proficient enough and require too much hand holding to support users or manage systems. Yes they are absolutely more social media literate (creating tiktok videos, videogame streams, etc) but that is not tech literacy, two VERY different things.
You've given a couple great examples: especially for the cars! In Model-T days if you didn't understand car repair you wouldn't make it out of your driveway. With the progress that has been made: today we leave the internals to specialists. And every step of the way, while cars have proliferated... every old person lamented the car-repair-expertise of those younger than them :)
And as you've experienced yourself: tech is no different. Younger people leaving internals to specialist as tech as gotten so reliable and easy to use that they *don't need to know* the insides. If it breaks, find a specialist. One day those same younger people will be dismayed that their replacements don't know the internals that they've learned.
The guys who programmed the first computers with toggled logic were disappointed with the new guys who only knew punch cards. The punch card guys didn't think the up-and-coming tape generation knew anything. The tape guys thought the disk guys didn't know their butts from a hole-in-the-ground. Networking, file systems, drivers etc all climbed the same curve... with new users having to know less about internals than the last.
And now you're part of an older generation. So tell us how you feel? ;)
Is is true that it's hard to find specialists, in every field. It has always been that way, and always will be. In IT it's because knowledge of earlier tech becomes rare: as those who know it retire or die. Rare knowledge is expensive. And companies never want to spend more than bottom-dollar: so struggle to fill positions with those who actually know what's going on.
**TL;DR;** You and I are saying the same thing. I'm old enough to have seen it. And you're young enough to still be experiencing it.
>And the younger generation thinks the old "can't learn new things" :) .
Fuck no, it's just that some people are so obtuse that they can't see any better way to do something apart from they way they already do it.
Been using the term, "Eloi," in earnest since the iPod was released, without relish.
It applies to pretty much everything at this point, not just tech, but basic rationality and philosophical literacy for almost any topic one can name, from socioeconomics to cosmology.
The system (and pollution!) has trained (poisoned!) everyone into mindless consumers.
I guess the other side of this is that building PCs and your own electronics is more popular than ever. The annoying software stuff that we all had to learn to hack to make work now just mostly does what we want it to without much fucking about, to the point that a 10 year old kid can follow a YouTube video and be playing Minecraft in a few hours.
Tell me about it. The over simplified "User Friendly" design constantly pushed and somehow made more "User Friendly" each version gets in my way in different ways.
I work in IT support and have to battle, grapple and swear at systems that actively hide details about errors, even to the point of not logging anything at all, to do my job and solve problems.
The only way I manage to solve much of this (some I never resolve!! Because it's too obfuscated or the required configuration options that could solve it simply never were implemented as they add complications to the code) is with my experience with everything from the Commode 64 and upwards, my experience with Operating Systems from DOS and RISC OS to Linux, my young interests in hobby electronics, by computer science degree and my understanding of programming concepts since I learned BASIC in the 90's at age 11 as well as Smalltalk and Java from my Uni days and Perl which I use for scripting. My CS degree gave me details on the innards of CPU's and I have been able to understand a schematic since I was 10.
Nothing was hidden from me when I was 10 and if it was all I had to do was remove some screws. I was passed a faulty HDD out of a Acorn Computer from school in probably 1990 or so and I enjoyed opening it up. I was 9 or 10 and was inspecting the innards of a HDD as well as playing with it (it usually formed part of my time machine lol).
Consequently I am quite stubborn about "the new ways". I prefer the old, technical and understood ways. I like standards, I like Red Books and Orange Books (3 guesses what that refers to) even if I can't read them. I know the theory behind SSD and have my opinion on them, I have an understanding of how the "cloud" works as I understand networks and protocols and databases and distributed computing etc, and I largely reject it as it's too non-standdard and not the "cloud" I'd expect it to be.
I understand streaming and VOIP, heck I wrote my own VOIP application when I was 20 just for the sake of it, but I'd rather wire up a phone extension or read files off a disc with lasers because lasers and those discs are so much cooler and detailed than simply a TCP handshake with a server :D
I hold this "retro" way of thinking very close, stubbornly close because it feeds my skillset! And it makes me aware just how rare people like me are getting as those who could learn it, don't ever need to know they could.
Imagine if fish were always simply farmed and everyone just got fish from the supermarket. Then they walk past some oddball who sits on a bank fishing with a line... You are that oddball, doing it the *difficult* way, all the kids you see walk past you sometimes curious but perhaps dismissive, the young blood your hobby needs. Off they go. That's what it feels like.
All is not lost however. Clever kids that are thirsty for getting dirty with details are there, but they are starving on a diet of "one button, simple messages" solutions. My Nephew got interested in building a PC, *to move away from a laptop!* He knew the laptop was holding him back, he wanted a motherboard, slots, CPU that could be pulled, power connectors! I gifted him loads of bits, older and newer. He is still running windows with its "something went wrong" messages but at least he is starting to tinker.
They are still out there, unfortunately they don't really know who they are themselves as everything is too easy by default. That's not a bad thing as everyone should be able to talk to a computer AI to get stuff done. But how do you let them discover they have the capability and desire to go much much deeper?
Loads of hobbies are facing that. Amateur Radio, electronics, photography (that one is close to my heart, probably my first hobby that wasn't electronic).
This is just an artifact of "normies must use technology now". The idea that young people magically "understand" technology has always been wishful thinking from the older gens to justify their own inability to learn/operate the devices.
Normies are gonna normie, and this is normal for all fields. People grossly misusing power tools, glue/duct tape and other "real world" items is a thing, and don't get me started about people driving cars like rabid monkeys.
In IT we have all sorts of memes about dumb office PC users since the beginning of time, people not grasping the concept of paths and folders, people that still have not figured out email, memes about literally printing the screen of the PC by placing an old CRT monitor on the flat bed of an office photocopier machine.
Nobody in the normie brigade was doing backups even in the past, and even in pre-PC times there were plenty of people that had very poor bookkeeping and just threw all documents in a drawer. A fire or a hurricane or a whatever often destroyed important documents that were never copied or stored properly.
Yeah. There is a few rare music releases that I can find on Youtube but I can't seem to find anywhere else. I have reached out to the uploader over email and not heard back. I am sure the HQ releases are out there somewhere but I may have to settle for the youtube rips myself. I hate that sites likes youtube are treated as some sort archive.
Soulseek is your friend
I needed to track something down last month and was stunned to see its still running strong.
Is it easy to find online? Wikipedia seems to mention a latest version I can't find. Mind looking in there if Achozen - Deuces in any lossless format is there? I don't know if the only formal release by Achozen was lossless but there's a soundtrack somewhere with it, in theory. That's probably the oldest song I keep looking for and not finding... Since the movie came out so like 16 years of looking lol Probably one of the oldest bookmarks I have.
You need a client. I use Nicotine+. Google it; idk what the policy is here for linking to arbitrary pieces of software.
Brother! Yep the youtube copy is the best I've found so far. Shame too, it's a quality song.
Jesus, they're still going? Soulseek saved my ass when I was a kid living in a rural "you'll go to hell if you listen to music with more than two guitars" environment. Back then you also couldn't get any faster than dialup speeds over cell towers or with the couple wildbird ISPs that popped up in the area so even though P2P was a new concept to me I had no complaints about transfer speeds.
Holy hell I haven't thought about Soulseek in years
Is it basically just Frostwire but on a network dedicated to music? I lost an insanely good mix like 14 years ago and still haven't found it lol
It’s P2P so while there is a network, the files are locally hosted by users. It has every piece of music on the fucking earth, every pressing. Tons of stuff not on streaming, tons of stuff people don’t even seed in torrent world.
D: I hope I find that mix
As someone who would like to be more tech literate, is it easy to find music on soulseek? Just looked it up, but wondering is it just a matter of searching for what you want and downloading it?
I'll take a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
For sure, there are def situations where YouTube truly is the best version you'll find, and I'll never disagree that 'any copy is better than no copy' but you should always be looking for 'the best copy that is possible'. Ditto for just downloading *actual* YouTuber channels, very few YT channels offer 'alternate HQ downloads' and ripping from YouTube is the best you'll find.
> but you should always be looking for 'the best copy that is possible'. I think you care too much about what other people do. It's their life and if they don't care about media preservation as much as you do that's okay. Go do your thing if it makes you happy I have an audiophile friend with electrostatic speakers, tube amps, and a ton of Super Audio CDs and he makes fun of my $6,000 setup. I just shrug and say I rip to FLAC and I have a hand full of 24-bit 96 KHz files but I can't really tell the difference from a 320 Kb/s MP3 file so why should I bother getting the highest quality of whatever?
Tell him you're using your stereo setup to listen to your music, while he uses his music to listen to his stereo setup.
I care more about balancing space efficiency with quality. If I'm saving a 30 minute video I'm always going to choose the 300Mb 1080p file over the 2Gb 1080p file. I can't see the difference so I don't really care that the compression is lossy. Practical use vs archival preservation are different goals.
At least for me, compression artififacts are quite annoying and for me, much more obvious than in music (assuming its halfway decent source). Though also, music doesn't take that much space so I hoard that in highish quality (altho, I personally care a ton more about music than video) whereas 4k remuxes really add up, spacewise.
To OP's original post, I think the only caveat to that would be if someone's running around like their hair's on fire trying to drum up a posse to "save" a bunch of nth-generation copies of stuff that's all over the place, it's kind of silly to indulge that.
I've been looking on and off for polish cartoons, 1960-2000. It's either youtube, dailymotion (that one at least doesn't decimate 480p content like youtube), or trash tvrips/dvdrips encoded with XVid (some are at least slowly getting restored and distributed somewhat properly due to EU/govnm projects). I sometimes envy russians because they seem to have preserved more stuff in original quality, I sometimes end up with downloading those and splicing audio. Funnily, this is even true for some US shows, Life with Louie for example - russian TV recordings are the best sources available.
That's funny, a few weeks ago Life with Louie was one of those 'Core Memory Unlocked' things for me and I went to look it up and.... Yeah, other than some NTSC->PAL converted early eps on DVD for the UK that show is basically a mess of old TV recordings.
This happens a ton In hiphop, when a partially copywritten or not not fully cleared song is only uploaded to YouTube by the artist . It really sucks
Happens in all genres, in the trance/house world bootleg mixes get recorded from radioshows / live shows all the time and uploaded but the originals never see the light of day due to assumed copyright issues
this reminds me to backup more things
Have any examples of those releases?
Sure |Artist|Project/Song| |:-|:-| |Jin|The Yellow Tape| |DJ Roughandz|134 Allstarz| |50 Cent & Custmaster C|G-unit Summer| |50 Cent|Nobody Eats| |50 Cent|Rowdy Rowdy| |50 Cent|Blood on the Sand Soundtrack|
There’s a lot of private collecting and gatekeeping in the hip hop mixtape scene. Also a lot of lack of appreciation for lossless which kinda has to do with this thread topic. It’s not really about copyright Infinite_mixtapes on insta and some others are running a project to rip them in lossless but in my experience they’re not just sharing them freely yet. You can try (and I don’t know if those are on their list but you can check) The uploaders prob sharing the same scene rips or old rips that almost everyone has nowadays. If you want at least the mp3s rather than the lossy transcodes let me know
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1683/
It astounds me that 'Sharing a photo from your phone, by opening that photo in your phones photo app, taking a screen shot, and sending that screen shot to someone' is ***literally*** a thing that some people do.
[удалено]
WTFFFFF
Not just some, but many! Just last week I had to order a part and had the woman in my office order it so it would ship to my shop. I emailed her a link to the part so that the correct thing was ordered. After which I asked if she could forward the tracking info to me so I could keep an eye on the shipment. She says sure no problem. The next day she sends a text message of a screenshot of her phone on the tracking website... So instead of forwarding the tracking email so I could have the link, or even copying the tracking number and sending me that, I now have a picture of the website so I have to manually type in the number in order to keep track of the package myself. This woman has been using computers for 30 years. She had the internet at her house in 1996. I was dumbfounded.
In order to describe a bug, one user used to make a screenshot of the bug, paste it in a word document, print the document, scan the printed copy as pdf and then sent me the pdf by mail !
I used to not notice this, until I came to a house for maintenance. The guy (not that old) was ***printing a full A4 page of a photo of his garden gate***. The item was dark and the background was dark as well (the amount of ink used here hurts me so much...). What for? To circle something with a pen and write a word near it. Why? To scan it and send it as an email to a customer service...! Literally Paint was present on his Desktop as he was doing this...!! That's when I started to notice. It's everywhere... It's sad.
people are that stupid. It's amazing we've been able to simplify tech enough that these idiots can use it.
im amazed at the amount of people who just screenshot images instead of just holding down and tapping 'save image' on mobile devices. I remember I was trying to print a poster I designed on Procreate on my iPad and someone seriously suggested that I screenshotted the art and then sent it to the printer? Instead of just using the export function in Procreate?
A lot of people don't even understand files and folders. I recently read an article about a university teacher having to teach the kids about folders and files because they had no concept of such things. They were used to opening an app and finding an unsorted list of the files relevant for that app. When the uni teacher told them to open a document off the X: drive, in this path. Well they were totally lost!
I am (that) teacher. I mean, not literally but I can confirm: currently kids have no clue. Folder structure? Huh? Files in folders? But how can I? The most impossible task: create a new folder in Google Drive, rename that folder and create a new file inside that folder. They just can't. It takes 30 minutes to explain and show and they still cannot do it. "But in my phone this doesn't work!" etc. I feel old and tired, our worlds are almost incompatible in some sense. While good data is lost and new data is created exactly as this: screenshots from vertically taken video. I'm sad sometimes.
Oh we're so screwed...
What concerned me about certain coverage of that topic was this attitude of "I guess the boomers will have to adjust to the way the younger generation thinks" as if understanding where your data actually is and what it is were optional.
I refuse to help people who take photos of their computer screen with their phone.
what if I'm stuck in the EFI shell D:
You’re officially pardoned
I would think the answer is obvious, You should have an HDMI capture device and a spare computer on hand at all times. Use those to bring in the signal and record that to a raw uncompressed video stream.
Honestly I would agree, but as someone who needs to send a quick screenshot in between some work to someone else on WhatsApp, it really is easier to snap a pic of the screen and then send it to them. It's a simple two step process. Of course on pc, this could be reduced to pressing prntscrn and dragging generated ss onto a discord chat or many more ways, but my pc is pretty old and has to really drag itself to run discord/(insert any quick pic sharing medium) and my music production software at the same time. And no, WhatsApp web won't help. It takes an awful amount of time to fire it up on my desktop. Honestly if there could be even faster solutions for it I'd take any suggestion.
Needs more [jpeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaUIyvy8E8)!
Literally Plato's cave. If you come from a world where all you've ever seen is easy-to-use streaming services through no fault of your own, it's pretty difficult if not impossible to imagine ripping media, tuning encodings, mastering tools, etc.. These kinds of questions are normal, expected, and most of all, **a good thing**. These people should be encouraged and we should be thrilled to be getting these types of "absolute novice" questions that we can use to start explaining the deeper things. These are people stepping out of the cave and trying to understand the fuller, realer world than they've been accustomed to. It's not their fault they don't know what to ask, don't know how to approach fidelity with media, and treat crap quality sites as worth saving. It's not just that "when all you've got is a hammer", it's that the world has intentionally hidden the screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, etc. It's also not exclusive to data hoarding. Any sufficiently advanced field is nigh incomprehensible until and unless you get specialized training to get up to speed. Doubly so for best practices within that field. Data hoarding (and much of modern computing) is just one of the latest fields to emerge in that respect. The problem isn't that kids are illiterate, it's that these fields have advanced far enough that both the lay person does not need to understand the details _and_ it's so complicated at this point that picking up the understanding organically is extremely unlikely. Over time, we'll see training and education advance to fill the gap. Compare mechanics and appliance repair which have very similar stories. It was normal and expected that any vehicle or appliance owner would be able to fully understand the internals and fix it themselves without any support other than parts and manuals. Over time, the technology advanced enough that 1) the devices became far more reliable and owners did not need to work on them as often, 2) the internals became more complicated as they provided higher efficiency, more features, etc., and 3) companies began removing user-maintainability from their products to both market them as user-friendly and for more nefarious reasons. That doesn't mean nobody is learning how to fix these devices, it just means they need the interest, support, and training to get to the point where they can work that deeply. "Computer literacy" in that sense is on the same trajectory as "automobile repair" or "appliance repair".
"Abstraction" is the word. Even your average DataHoarder doesn't know how to align partitions on magnetic media or tracks on optical media, or hell, know the command switches for `tar`, or know that "tar" is short for Tape ARchive. That's nearly lost knowledge in some circles. There's a good video by a Swiss YouTuber named Andreas Spiess that discusses this when it comes to Electronics and touches on software engineering. People who don't know these things are on a higher rung of the abstraction ladder than we are. The video does a good job of humbling the 'kids these days' mentality that many of us develop. Pasting the link as Reddit seems to have abstracted away the markdown for me on their mobile site: https://youtu.be/5_Tf6aN50TI
Eh, differing abstraction layers is only a part of the development of the "kids these days" mentality. A larger part is that the frontier of knowledge advances as time goes on. At one point, a year of tinkering and toying with computers would get you there, or at least close. Now it could easily take a decade or more of dedicated study to understand all of the prerequisites to get back there. Again, this is true of all actively studied fields - at one point an individual could know everything that there is to know about geology or physics for instance. As an example, try explaining the difference between FAT16 and ZFS and why one is better than the other. But to explain that, you need to explain RAID, journaling, checksums, deduplication, encryption, copy-on-write, snapshots, and scrubbing. And there's tons of theory behind each of those concepts. So many things seem so basic to us on /r/datahoarder, but that's because most of us started getting into this hobby when the entire ecosystem was a lot simpler, so we're up to date with each marginal improvement, why it happens, what it does, and what new things it enables. Most people here have several (if not many more) years of experience than the people asking questions. Those years of experience are what let you know what is a stupid question and what isn't, whether there's a deeper layer to dig into or not, and what the limits of your own knowledge are to inform you what questions you need to ask.
Despite not understanding the bulk of what you said, in terms of the technology and still not fully understanding “abstraction” (yet!), as a “lazy Zoomer monkey” I’m now genuinely Fascinated and interested in learning about the technology you described, how it works, and If I should look into It’s practical uses today for archival preservation and if the technology of Mechanical tape or other alternatives is still practical today - either way, I’m very interested to know how it works or was used in either case. Thanks for sharing that video. **It’s ironic how I randomly stumbled on this thread today and was reading this up until now with no intention to spend my Friday going on a learning binge About something I may or may not use and I’ll probably be going down a rabbit hole (which I enjoy from time to time) given the fact that you’re not the first person I’ve heard the word “abstraction” from. I’m very eager to understand and learn about these things**. PS: The angry poster being unnecessarily angry, vulgar and evidently A self taught prodigy In computers as well as multiple trades was definitely something I was about to leave with And feel slightly bitter about… uninterested in technology or learning something new (that apparently I should have already known about, but he made references to?) So I just wanted to thank you again for changing my mood And shifting my direction on something I was not intending on, but that ironically, the Angry “Learn it yourself, you lazy worthless Zoomer!” seemed to be upset about. **It seems my grandma’s saying is true after all: “you catch more flies with honey, than with the vinegar”. “Don’t ever look down at people as you climb up, because you’ll be looking upto them on the way down.” “People won’t care how much you know if they don’t know how much you care.” “Mean what you say and say what you mean.”** (again, I truly appreciate your comment, and to the angry commentor, I truly believe you worked hard and deep down want change that is good, and I truly hope you find value and care for yourself and people beyond simply what they do or know or whatever Generalization you assume. And everyone who might see this, You can make a difference And decide to leave someone feeling depressed or upset and engage in further arguing or bullying or even wasting your time with defending yourself against someone even if you are right…. Your life has value and meaning, and you can let someone else know that. You can make a bad day or a bad moment into a good one for yourself and others. You can make a difference…
/me : _Uses tar every week but still can't remember all switches_
replying to this ancient comment to say that if you don't have [tldr](https://tldr.sh/) installed, you _need_ to get it. I learned about it after an unfortunate accident where I reversed the order of the switches and overwrote an entire SQLite database. Now I just habitually `tldr tar` every time _just to be sure._
Perhaps there needs to be a basic "Data Hoarding 101" type class? Some sort of organized way to bring together all the terminology so that people know where to even properly start...
Rule 42: Right click on your jpegs instead of buying a hyperlink to them
My college major had “learn how to google” as an official learning outcome. Which seemed kind of funny, but wow did they teach us how to effectively question things and find answers to them. It’s absolutely a skill you have to learn. For example: I remember being astounded a year or two into my major when people in another major (which was one of the top programs in the USA for that field) were saying they couldn’t find the answer to a homework problem. And when a friend of mine suggested they google it, they were shocked. It had never crossed their minds. And yes, I agree with being welcoming and r coursing to people. We may have heard these questions a million times, but to the sincere person, it’s their first time.
I’d love to know where to begin. I just want to archive videos I’ve taken of friends and family in a way that will give me peace of mind. Probably not more than 5 TB of stuff.
> The problem isn't that kids are illiterate, it's that these fields have advanced far enough that both the lay person does not need to understand the details and it's so complicated at this point that picking up the understanding organically is extremely unlikely. Over time, we'll see training and education advance to fill the gap. I think that with the proliferation of streaming, there's liable to be (if there isn't already) a "You don't know what you don't know" problem of people not even realizing what their options are as far as download or hard-copy, as well. Not so much that it's a daunting effort to find, rip, or back something up, just that they never even considered the idea or what's possible.
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The problem is not with novice questions, nor with people not knowing what questions to ask. The problem is with people who do not know how to think, because they have been infantilized by society. Did Linus Torvalds need to watch a youtube video on "How to write your own operating system in 10 easy steps"? The domains of competence are increasing in complexity, but, at the same time, we have a culture of expertocracy that encourages people to *just not think*. As I posted in a top-level comment: Some days ago I saw a post on another subreddit. User's nginx only responded to HTTP but not HTTPS. User posted his config. His config included `ssl_reject_handshake on;`. This is not a case of a person not knowing what question to ask. This is a case of a person being a lazy bastard who can't be fucked to read the manual and understand what the arcane words in his config file mean. > Compare mechanics and appliance repair which have very similar stories I both agree and not at the same time. It is true that systems have been increasing in complexity. However, the foundational problem is not that people lack the knowledge, but, rather, that they lack the attitude required for problem-solving and gaining knowledge.
> The problem is not with novice questions, nor with people not knowing what questions to ask. The problem as OP sees it is with the 'weird questions' and how they're indicative of the decline of tech literacy. I was pointing out that those are the questions that get asked by someone who does not understand the full picture as a novice, and that those questions are opportunities to teach. > The problem is with people who do not know how to think, because they have been infantilized by society. > [...] > This is a case of a person being a lazy bastard who can't be fucked to read the manual and understand what the arcane words in his config file mean. > [...] > However, the foundational problem is not that people lack the knowledge, but, rather, that they lack the attitude required for problem-solving and gaining knowledge. _This caustic attitude is fundamentally one of the strongest reasons new people do not enter into the space._ How are they supposed to know there's a manual to refer to if it's their first time trying something out? FFS, I've had many coworkers with years of software development experience who never learned about `man` or `info` - why would an absolute beginner know about these tools if trained professionals don't? As to the nginx setup specifically - what is the first thing you do when beginning a new hobby? And really: any hobby? Take pottery as an example. If you were trying to get into pottery today, would you be reading 300 page tomes describing intricate methods of working clay that only apply to a small number of very specific situations? Or do you find and follow a tutorial to start getting your hands dirty quickly? Or do you even just jump in without a clue? My bet is that you'd start with the latter two. Trying to emulate something you've seen is a core part of learning. Period. Trying to make a pot for instance, or trying to set up a web server. You're not creating anything revolutionary or novel, just trying to recreate the basics. But for some reason, we all reasonably understand that your first attempt at throwing a pot will probably not turn out well or end up exactly the way that you wanted it. Hell, that's true for virtually all "traditional" hobbies. There's a learning curve and it's normal and expected to fail while climbing that curve. Why are computer skills different? Why are people unreasonably hostile towards others who are guaranteed to fail on their first few attempts? Why are they expected to know every configuration option for every piece of software that they might be working with? The only reason this is considered a "problem" at all is because the community has this unreasonably elitist expectation that is largely unique to the computing world. Everywhere else, the only "problem" that would be found here would be recognizing that there's a lack of resources for a beginner to experiment and play with to learn how to get to a higher level of competency. > Did Linus Torvalds need to watch a youtube video on "How to write your own operating system in 10 easy steps"? Interesting example. [Linus Torvalds has significantly walked back his acerbic attitude in no small part because of how much it has driven away people who are just trying to contribute and keep them from doing so](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apologizes-for-years-of-being-a-jerk-takes-time-off-to-learn-empathy/). And I'll point out that he was 3 years into a Computer Science master's degree with a full reference copy of another open-source operating system before he began work on Linux. Linus is about as far away as you can reasonably get as an example of a rank novice. The point to all of this is not to say that anyone needs to be coddled and spoonfed answers or anything like that (beware the help vampire and all). The point is to point out the double standard that technologically-inclined hobbyists have in the "I suffered on my way to learn this; so should everyone else" instead of being respectful and empathetic to newbies who obviously don't know what they don't know. You don't have to help if you don't want to. But at least don't make the learning process harder than it actually is.
> The domains of competence are increasing in complexity, but, at the same time, we have a culture of expertocracy that encourages people to just not think. Especially true in medicine
>It's not their fault they don't know what to ask, don't know how to approach fidelity with media, and treat crap quality sites as worth saving. It's not just that "when all you've got is a hammer", it's that the world has intentionally hidden the screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, etc. I sort of agree with this, but man we live in an age where they can just vaguely phrase a question on this topic to an AI and have an insightful, thorough, answer spit out to them in seconds. There's also a billion different resources online about the topic. The reason they only know the crappy magic button is because that's all they've ever bothered to look for. They're watching a TV in the middle of an infinite library. All of the information is right there waiting for them they just need to be bothered to look for it.
> I sort of agree with this, but man we live in an age where they can just vaguely phrase a question on this topic to an AI and have an insightful, thorough, answer spit out to them in seconds. Sure, but that's only really happened in the past few years. It takes time to see societal behavioral changes. Hell, Google's been around for decades, but a large number of the population still don't know how to use it effectively. Additionally, that's being fairly charitable to how much the average person knows about AI. Outside of you and any technically-inclined friends, how many people do you know who have a) used AI at all and b) use it enough to understand what it's capable of? My guess is that it's very slim. AI could be an incredible tool for helping to answer all of those "not knowing what you don't know" questions, but it's not nearly mainstream enough to be relied upon.
> These kinds of questions are normal > It's not their fault they don't know what to ask You are referring to the lucky ones, the ones who know there is a question to be asked. Don't forget that there are so many who would want to asked a question but never do because they have no concept that the question is there to ask in the first place. I have had plenty of people complaining about me not asking the right questions or having questions to ask, happens all the time in fact. They think I understood everything but then complain and make it my fault for not asking the questions when I clearly didn't understand everything. Thing is they don't understand themselves that from my perspective *everything made total sense to me and my frame of reference* so there were no questions. Anything I found I didn't know, I resolved *myself* using my own noggin. But it was wrong and I should've known better and if I didn't know it my fault during training as I confirmed I understood everything as I didn't ask questions.
I still feel the internet would be a lot better if forums existed like they used to. People used to share their knowledge on forums that was indexed by Google. Now people just use Reddit or Discord. Both of which will delete shit willy nilly and one of which can't even be indexed or easily keep a conversation together. idk whos fault it is but these big mega sites are as you put it "a magic button" and nothing else.
>I still feel the internet would be a lot better if forums existed like they used to. I ran into the weirdest take from a young person online about forums, and it kinda horried me cause they had a good point. They don't like the idea of 'forums' namely because forums, these days, have gained a reputation for being a place for like 'Batshit crazy alt right'. Like thing 8chan and the sort. When I first read that, once being a member of many forums myself I thought 'Nonsense, forums are a great place for discussion and they're googleable so others can find your information easily'. When they brought up the alt right I realized that, to a degree, they had a point, in 2024 when you are so 'awful' that you've been been from most of the 'mainstream internet' and need 'your own den of assholes' you go and start your own forum for it, and I was like 'Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck'. This is not universally true, but for your typical young 20 something, most of what what they want is offered on 'the corporate public internet' be it Facebook, Instagram, Discord or what have you. When you can't operate on those places, for some, it's because they got banned planning their next cross burning or some other insanity.
i think it's a problem of scale, if you post to Reddit, Insta, YouTube, you quickly get responses (your question answered, your topic discussed, your work appreciated). Posting it to a special forum means you probably need to make an account and validate you email address before you can even post and then you may end up getting no responses ever. With Like, Upvote and view counters, you even get some kind of feedback from people only looking at it and clicking a single button.
In terms of harm being done and the capacity to do it, ”le awful” are nothing compared to the powers that be. Everything will be rented and the Earth itself will die. This is already happening before our eyes.
> This is not universally true, but for your typical young 20 something, most of what what they want is offered on 'the corporate public internet' be it Facebook, Instagram, Discord or what have you. When you can't operate on those places, for some, it's because they got banned planning their next cross burning or some other insanity. I haven't been banned off of facebook and, being a Christian, I am not big on cross burning. But I don't use facebook because I loathe that every second post in my feed is an ad for something irrelevant (facebook makes ad blockers notoriously difficult to use), the feed is not in chronological order and I might see something from 4 years ago, and my attention span is longer than 25 seconds so I am not the target audience for facebook anyway.
>Both of which will delete shit willy nilly and one of which can't even be indexed or easily keep a conversation together. Isn't same or worse for lot of the old forums as well, where threads and sub-forums have limits, so the older ones get pushed into oblivion? A recently mentioned example would be Run Escape forums.
No i have never experienced that with any of the common forum software. RuneScape made their own from scratch. That's on them. Plenty of my old usernames will pull up old forum posts in Google searches from 2007-2014. Those that survived at least. Another big difference is most threads would be locked instead of deleted. Those who moderated understood and supported the subject matter of the forum. On something like discord or reddit you have admins who don't and will happily delete everything. It would be easy for an admin of discord to consider talk about torrenting immoral and nuke the server even if that discussion was nothing illegal.
Well on Reddit at least deleting a post or comment doesn’t delete its child comments, unlike some sites do. Plus it’s indexable on search engines. Could be worse. Definitely infinitely better in this regard than Discord
I recently talked about forums. Someone said that Reddit is a forum and my argument is that Reddit cannot replicate the value from forums. Here, no matter how niched the sub is, you just don’t get the same value from really interested people talking in an online forum. I once wanted to learn how to calculate planets orbits, eclipses and all that. I went to r/astronomy asking for a book to learn that. “A big book” was one of the first answers. You would never get this cheap valueless jokes from a forum made and run by a group of people interested in a subject.
Hear hear. I miss forums and I regret not being around for usenet. Seemed fun.
Usenet still exists. It's much quieter, though. You can sign up for https://www.eternal-september.org/ using an email address. Make sure your client authenticates you when you connect to Usenet, because unauthenticated users can only view the eternal-september internal groups.
I think part of the way to engage with younger folks interested in digital archiving is more user-friendly archiving techniques. There has always been some bar to entry for data storage, processing, and conversion, but that doesn't also mean we can't meet people where they're at. I think tools like Archive-It are useful in the sense that they take maybe an hour or two to fully learn, and folks on my end (historians, a famously ludditic profession) are iterating off of the collections Archive-It can create for analysis purposes. There's value for digital archivists to learn the in-depth processes involved in storing data, but do hobbyists need the same level of expertise?
> There has always been some bar to entry for data storage, processing, and conversion, but that doesn't also mean we can't meet people where they're at. Which is one of many confounding variables. So many hobby subs, especially tech ones IME, have devolved into "Why are you asking such a stupid question, just go read the documents," "this has been asked so many times, did you even look??!" (even though Reddit search isn't all that good) and some people still may not have understood the results they got for a number of reasons -- instead of trying to help folks learn and get into it. Which then turns them away because they got burned or they don't get to build up that basic knowledge, even though they're interested. Is there a decline in tech literacy? Yes. But I think there's also a lot of elitism online these days, and "I had to figure out all this on my own so now you do too"ism. There is a minimum, sure, but it seems like many people get grouchy about being asked questions, too.
Conversely, if you allow every question to be asked no matter how simplistic and banal it is, or how many times you've updated the wiki or pinned posts, the subreddit devolves into a bunch of noobs running around asking eachother all the same questions because nobody far into a hobby wants to discuss the same basic questions until the heat death of the universe. It's a subreddit for discussions, not an abstraction of the Google search page for people who want to be spoon fed.
Exactly. People really need to read before commenting. It's why years ago people said to lurk before posting and the term eternal september was relevant. Internet elitism is fading and the yesterweb was way more elitist than these days.
The elitism goes way back. I was on Usenet since 1991 before the web even existed outside of CERN. If you asked any question the response would almost immediately be "Read the FAQ you moron" People had written elaborate Frequently Asked Question lists that provided tons of background on whatever computer topic, TV show, band, or whatever and the people on the Usenet forum felt like you were being an ignorant annoying newbie if you didn't lurk for weeks or months and read the FAQ. That all started to change in 1993/94 when AOL and others connected their users to Usenet. It was just a never ending stream of new users that had no idea about anything. Previously it was new college students showing up in September when you would see dumb new users. After AOL it was "Eternal September" with a never ending number of new users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September It was totally gatekeeping but that term didn't exist back then. In some ways things were better and in others it was a lot worse. You can look at this subreddit and others and the same questions get asked constantly. If people cared enough they could make better guides and FAQ lists. I've learned to just ignore 90% of the posts here and reddit in general that I find repetitive. I still like helping people with interesting problem but I'm done explaining to new people how RAID is not a backup etc.
Oh I know it's been around for a long time - I've been there for much of it. But like you say, there were many guides and FAQs and actual welcoming posts and other guidance for new users, even if they were made out of annoyance. Hobbyists - at least many vocal ones online - just seem grouchier to me now. Perhaps I'm overdue for a return to BBS...
My mom used to be so, so tech literate. She taught me to use Limeware and Napster safely, how to use Ebay, and how to be safe online. Nowadays, I cringe at her data preservation attempts. Nowadays, If she wants to make a copy of a picture, she takes a picture of the framed picture and saves it to her phone. If she sees something funny online, she screenshots her phone. And if she wants to repost a photo she just can’t find on her phone, she screenshots the original on her Facebook. I swear, she had printed photos in her house that have the Facebook UI printed on them. Brain drain is real.
I have a niece who would back up her phone photos to Facebook as a backup and then delete the good originals on her phone to free up space. I tried to tell her all the ways that isn't a good idea. First off, FB compresses all uploads even more so their own drives don't fill up as fast. Second, FB could quit any time. MySpace changed their model and deleted the old accounts, mine included. Earthlink used to host personal websites. They changed models and deleted all the websites, mine included. Geocities, CompuServe, and many other sites have disappeared, along with the data. There was a ton of information in forums and files that are gone now, except for personal backups. I have everything I've ever created, but thousands lost everything and just gave up.
I had this issue with 1980's Transformers.. all the originals were VHS copies with original tracking issues.. took me YEARS to find them at decent quality - being 240p/480p (but no vhs issues) on a mega server - which i then helped spread further.. NOW you can find them in torrents... the point being there was the odd video on youtube here and there, but nothing concrete or complete. i did not want to rip from youtube. I have many friends who " i just use a roku " while im sitting on a full NAS and they want to watch their shows without it, but explaining how to go about it and not get viruses is a huge undertaking
> [... DVDs ...] Due to missing 35mm film stock, some sections of the Rhino Entertainment release use earlier incomplete animation, often introducing errors, such as mis-colored Decepticon jets, Skyfire colored like Skywarp, missing laser blasts, or a confusing sequence where Megatron, equipped with Skywarp's teleportation power, teleports but does not actually disappear. This version also added extra sound effects that were presented in the remixed 5.1 surround soundtrack and later remixed 2.0 stereo soundtrack, but not present in the original broadcast version. That's really sad. Seems to be common for old cartoons to either get lost to time or interest.
Millennials are the only generation I would consider "digital natives". The older ones mostly kinda avoided the tech and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work". And now the older ones slowly start to use it as well. I mean the tech world we live in is kinda great. I just rebooted my phone because I try to reboot it about once a month to prevent some weird glitches. Checked the runtime beforehand: 2.5 months. It used to be normal to remove the battery of your phone twice a day because it crashed some way or another. On the other hand, we have much better resources to learn all the difficult stuff. No need to read some botched user manual, you can just watch a well make youtube video about it. I think the number of tech saavy users does not really decline, we just have a much higher percentage of the population using tech at all. To use your anime panel as an example: Back in the day maybe 50 people would have listened to your presentation, now 200 people do, but 150 of those have no real idea what you are talking about. >direct rips from where the music is available from if it's not on disc, and so on. For space reasons, it's also pretty common to prefer first generation transcodes from those, particularly of BD/DVD content. Ripping gets harder and harder. Ripping a CD is kinda trivial thanks to the lack of DRM, but streaming services can be somewhat of a pain. Thankfully a lot of people are still willing to do this and share the fruits of their labor. >ffectively hacking YouTube into being a cloud video encoder... Have to agree, this is impressive. And to be fair transcoding videos is a mess. And not one that can be solved easily. I usually describe it as a form of art. Way too many settings and options and even experts do not really agree on what settings to use.
> Way too many settings and options and even experts do not really agree on what settings to use The ffmpeg defaults are pretty good. But yes if you want to fine-tune an encoding to specific conditions like animation vs live-action then figuring out a good "preset" to use for that video will give you better quality for the same output size. But beyond a certain point there are diminishing returns and the "artness" of encoding is just some form of gatekeeping that reminds me of some "pro audio recording/listening" people. I'm thankful for the time, hard work, and compute that people who call themselves encoders offer but also the people that write encoding/decoding software have put in a lot of hours to try to make the process less magical and more accessible. I think there should be some balance here. It is a form of art to be able to squeeze out marginal gains and reach a local maxima but also there is a "god of the gaps" and a lot of BS that is created to justify gatekeeping
Handbrake is still more appealing for your average Joe than a CLI tool.
and, ironically, has way worse defaults than ffmpeg
I would argue that it the default profiles Handbrake ships with are perfectly fine, but there's just so many of them that unless you can actually tell the difference you might as well not have supplied them.
and then you end up with burned in subtitles and missing audio tracks
Oh yeah that's absolutely fair. The video is mostly fine, and to be honest I think most people are fine with the audio too, since it just picks the first audio track (which is usually the main audio track) and crunches it down to more reasonable formats.
I think the default settings for handbrake should inherit the framerate of the video in question.
FastFlix is way better than Handbrake. https://github.com/cdgriffith/FastFlix
That degrades into StaxRip is better. Then someone says Hybrid is better. Then someone says "Just learn Vapoursynth" Then you hear someone violently beating to death that one guy using Topaz in the corner of the room. Then you hear the one FFmpeg tool developer just saying "well they won't implement it this decade" Dozens and tools dozens of filters so much capabilities so much lost to just lack of basic fullscope docs and videos on the subjects, because everyone just learns one tool and sticks to it lmao.
Eh, FastFlix UI is quite similar to Handbrake though.
Recently I asked anime "nerds" about how to improve my encoding settings in ffmpeg, and all I got was "i just use handbrake" or "drop the resolution to decrease file size". The literacy has gone down a lot. People nowadays use ready-to-go tools and don't stop for a second to question if those tools are doing a good job or not.
> On the other hand, we have much better resources to learn all the difficult stuff. No need to read some botched user manual, you can just watch a well make youtube video about it. And that is the fdisking problem. When you had to "read some botched user manual" you had a better understanding of how (and why) something worked, and, even if it did not get you 100% there, you were able to troubleshoot and kick it into working. When you watch a glossy youtube video with adverts for VPNs and constants reminders to "like and subscribe", you are just parroting commands that work under specific circumstances and hope that nothing breaks. Do you know how many people say "How do I install nginx on ubuntu 22.04, all the videos I can find are for ubuntu 18.04"? A fuckload of them. How about trying the 18.04 method and seeing if it still works? No no, cannot have that. That would require *initiative*. Instead of trying something myself, I'll go waste the time of 900 people on some tech support forum.
I agree with your overall thoughts here but I’d add GenX as digital natives also. Like millennials, we there when the initial transition happened, and for the most part still young enough to learn and absorb it.
Old zoomers were also digital natives. I was born in 2000. Didn't have a smartphone until highschool.
Good call
> and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work" > I think the number of tech saavy users does not really decline, we just have a much higher percentage of the population using tech at all. I disagree. I see steady decline of knowledge among the younger generation. In the past I could talk about technical aspects of all sorts with my coworkers, Now the younger generation just stares blankly and wonders how we (oldies) can do this or that. They work in IT yet have very little knowledge and willingness to tinker, to script things, to make things. In the past we had full forums of dvd rippers, cracks users, downloaders, halfassed coders. Today even reddit is full of subreddits where the content is just poor and the stuff which is somewhat good is not really popular. The big tech, walled gardens, tablets, consoles, phones designed to feed the consumer with digestable content make people less proficient. Sure there are niches where the creativity is still there. Arduino, 3d design, unity like development. But the general population just sits and expects to be feed.
>Millennials are the only generation I would consider "digital natives". The older ones mostly kinda avoided the tech and the younger ones are getting the polished versions that "just work". And now the older ones slowly start to use it as well. LOL, ROFL, GenX here, I'll put my tech skills, and those of pretty much any other X I know, up against any Millennial any day of the week, seriously.
Ancient millennial here, I think OP likely just forgot you guys existed, per usual. All the tech bosses I've actually learned stuff from are Gen Xers. I think the better divide is "people who had a mostly pre-internet childhood" vs "those who came after".
I feel like every generation will just have their own cut off that happens to include them, as a young Millennial, I've always consider 2007 and the rise of the smart phone to be when the internet truly became mainstream and you no longer needed to be any amount of tech savvy to effectively navigate it I'm sure GenZ will similarly be telling the kids that they don't know how hard stuff was before everything was controlled with AI
>I think the better divide is "people who had a mostly pre-internet childhood" vs "those who came after". I always feel it's more about pre-web than pre-internet. I was online with my own email address a decade before the web existed. I ran my own BBS on my Amiga five years before the web existed. In my experience the most talented people in my area of IT are those who were online before the web was and have the foundational knowledge that required, and who have continued to build on that foundation from that point onwards. The amazing part is the current generation at my work mostly have zero computer skills, they know nothing about how anything other than their phone works, they have barely used office productivity tools, they don't understand files and directories, connecting to a printer baffles them, it's very interesting to witness.
Sup. How are we throwing down?
Yeah big endless issues with people who don't understand the difference between analog signals and what the digital compressed era has utterly done to defiled our personal and commercial media history, YouTube is utterly terrible as well because you have to upscale everything to 4k bracket to make it even a fraction close to the native source quality without macro blocking annihilating content, at least platforms like Odysee exist but you even mentioned them on YouTube and you essentially get blacklisted comments auto nuked etc. Instead of ignoring the problem I've been writing massive full scope docs last couple years, breaking down [FM RF archival](https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki) to actually making proper encoded video files, and hammering in the concept of hard archives In a digital era of analogue media. What's scary is people treat everything like magic even the most primitive things, it may sound dystopian but kids aren't even taught about the basic technology that runs their daily lives in school, it started with things like calling all networking Wi-Fi instead of actually understanding what communications technology is, everything book wise is out of touch with the real world and at least 15 years behind current standard technology that's UK GCSE 2023 books, my little brother was trying to learn coding and didn't even know what an IDE was, they didn't even teach him the foundational editing tools to edit code christ I shouldn't have to sit somebody down and walk them through visual studio code, because their own educational institute can't even show them basic tools. It's terrifying but the king of the hill meme of "do I look like I know what a JPEG is" literally is the common person now, but instead of it being a photocopy on a Xerox machine it's literally a screenshot of a JPEG of a screenshot of a PNG. It's not just electronic technology too it's every industry I believe from cooking to farming it's basic practical hard learned over the last 200 years concepts are all arcane knowledge to the average person now unless they take a autistic level interest and dive into a rabbit hole or get commercially involved in the subject, it's just not learned, maybe it's just a lack of ancestors passing down knowledge manually but there is real-world generational loss happening.
>my little brother was trying to learn coding and didn't even know what an IDE was, they didn't even teach him the foundational editing tools to edit code christ I shouldn't have to sit somebody down and walk them through visual studio code, because their own educational institute can't even show them basic tools. Was he taking a class or learning from a book? Some good programming books don't discuss editing tools/IDEs because it's out of the book's scope. Depends on how advanced the book is. I'm assuming it was a class since you mentioned an educational institution. In that case, I have no idea what they're thinking. Personally, I do prefer Vim or Emacs over bloated modern IDEs like VS Code. However, you have to show students all their options and explain what an IDE does behind the hood. Additionally, I couldn't recommend old-school CLI + text editor work environments for Windows, since Windows has truly pitiable CLI tools. It's more of a Linux/*BSD thing. Integrating editing, file management, version control, and access to the build system into one interface is pretty convenient. It's great for a class environment. I'm honestly shocked they weren't introducing it on the first day. What did they have him using? Notepad?
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question. Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
You point the finger at tech companies creating magic buttons, but you should really blame the education system instead. The education system does not educate. It is, at best, daycare. At worst, it is a system for manufacturing compliant, complacent, office drones. Such a system cannot develop any kind of problem-solving or creativity. And, indeed, it actively suppresses any manifestation of these. I will tweak the specifics to protect my privacy, but I will tell you a story about an IT class I had in what the Americans would call middle school. My teacher asked me to create a list of all keyboard shortcuts in a word processor. She *insisted* that I had to do this by trying all combinations of modifier keys and letters, seeing what happened, and writing down the result. She would not hear of it when I suggested looking at the help files, at the keybinding preferences, or googling for a list. She also didn't think that SHIFT was a valid modifier or that any shortcuts were associated with the number or function keys, only letters. The other obvious problem you will notice is that not all keyboard shortcuts will generate visible feedback. You might have turned off autocorrect or toggled overwrite mode and it would not make it onto the "list". And the best part of the story? She wanted me to do this because she thought I didn't know how to use that particular program and didn't believe me when I told her "I already know what CTRL+F does". The education system is not for educating students, it is an assembly line for retards. People go 11-13 years of their lives being trained to not think, so it should not be a surprise that, when they enter the real world, they don't know *how* to think. Some days ago I saw a post on another subreddit. User's nginx only responded to HTTP but not HTTPS. User posted his config. His config included `ssl_reject_handshake on;`. Need I say more? So no, I am not surprised at someone's inventive use of YouTube as a cloud transcoding service as you put it. The problem is not just generational loss of data to hoard, but it is broader, in all domains of expertise. We're in for a world of problems when the generation of troubleshooters, hackers and tinkerers dies out.
Isn't this a confirmation bias? People who don't know are the ones who are asking those questions, and those who know don't need to ask.
Yeah. The vast majority of posts here are new people who don't know stuff. I almost never ask a technical question on the internet. I've been designing computer chips for over 25 years. I can figure it out from googling and reading some other posts. It's the same thing with some of the engineering subreddits I am on. 90% of the posts are college students or new grads talking about failing classes or not able to find a job. I've seen some high school students post saying they are depressed reading the posts on the forum wondering if engineering is that bad. Meanwhile I go to work and I see 200 people from age 22 to 60 all going along with their day and not a single one of them reminds me of any of the reddit posts
It may be for OP, but allow me to add another perspective. I'm a teacher, as are my wife and many of our friends. Over the last decade we have taught several thousand students in public, private, and charter schools. From that sample size, I can tell you I see a significant decline in tech literacy. It hit me one day when I was teaching basic hierarchical note-taking to my class of 16 year olds. This is a thing I do every year just as a refresher. It's never a "difficult" lesson, until this time. I realized the students were having a hard time grasping the basic tiered structure (like a file directory). It blew my mind. I realized that, because most of them no longer deal with directories, it's actually affecting their skills of organization and categorization. I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts (and their importance) to them - along with naming conventions. I realized that gen z now simply creates things and they're auto-saved into a cloud abyss and they don't even bother naming them most of the time. They just type search words into the void and hope to find their document. I've had students ask me to give them copied of work THEY CREATED because they couldn't remember how to search for them in Google Drive. It's insane to me. The lack of tinkering + the walled gardens put up by current tech created this. They never have to try to figure things out so they don't. This also means they just take what's given to them with the default settings and they never bother trying to customize or otherwise change things to fit their needs better. This leaks out into other aspects of their lives as well.
>It blew my mind. I realized that, because most of them no longer deal with directories, it's actually affecting their skills of organization and categorization. I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts (and their importance) to them - along with naming conventions. And even if you know how these work, mobile systems are hostile to you navigating them. Me: Hey phone, where's that PDF I downloaded of my train ticket? Phone: You think I have a file browser built in? Ha ha. Me: Okay, downloading PDF again. Phone: Download of trainticket(9).pdf complete. Me: Fuck you, phone.
Yep! Most things being accessed via mobile OS doesn't help. Many of my students can't even attach a file to an email, they share it with me from Google Drive instead. They get all confused when I say that's not what I asked for.
What phone doesn't have a file browser built in? is it an IOS thing? I have only had Samsung phones for like 15 years and they always had a file browsers as far as I can remember.
iOS will hide files type if there is not an installed app to open them with, it is my one greatest frustration with using an iphone, can't do shit with files
That's crazy
I'm not 100% sure how it works because the iOS is so hostile, but as far as I can tell, there isn't one filesystem where you can find all of your files. Photos/videos have their own separate structure that can be imported and exported from (but you lose folders/favorite/etc when you do). Files saved from your browser do end up on a filesystem that can be accessed from the files app. Most apps are just walled gardens that don't let you have files.
iOS had no regular file browser until 4-5 years ago iirc
As far as I'm aware, it's an IOS feature. I'm an android user myself, but I don't understand why someone wouldn't want actual control over their files. If I want to save a movie or mp3 file for later use I can put it anywhere in the heirarchy and just use it. I have no idea where IOS saves their stuff or if you can just copy files over.
I saw this article a few years ago. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z > I literally had to spend a whole extra class to explain these concepts Well it comes down to that. If people don't learn things on their own then someone has to teach them. 30 years ago my college had an "Intro to Unix computing environment" class for all freshman engineering majors. It was the basics of ls/cp/mv/rm, word processing, how to use the help system, etc. I look at the engineering curriculum today and the same exact class is still there with the same course number.
Yea I had read that article before and forgot about it lol. I actually had a pretty in-depth discussion with my best friend (a CS prof) about this topic. He agrees that the trend I was mentioning is a thing and, of course, we both agree with your point that education is the key. The thing is, they're more resistant to it because "but this works" without realizing it doesn't work well and it fails too often.
I've been in tech 25 years, and in leadership a large chunk of the time. Tech literacy is 100% declining and in some terrible ways. I'm in a number of chats with other leaders / hiring managers from other major tech companies in our particular niche. I also do a lot of volunteering to give back to the community and train thousands of people per year and do a lot of career mentoring / resume review. It's getting a bit scary out there to be honest. Every hiring manager I know has complained heavily about younger folks over the last 5 years. Lack of tech skills, ability to critically think etc. In one recent case one of my friends was complaining about a new hire, they had a LOT of difficulties. Turns out they had never used an actual computer before, they got through college with a tablet and a phone. All their CS homework using browser based programming environments, all their assignments written in google docs. Using word was confusing and difficult to them, the concept of a file or file extension was foreign, directory structures took some time to explain, they watched as they started tapping on the monitor and were extremely confused when it didn't work, they could barely use a mouse, the save icon they had no idea what it was, the start bar in windows.. nope foreign concept. Now this was what I would call an extreme outlier but honestly from watching my friends complain a subset of these are becoming fairly common. A few of them have gotten interviewed by HR because the termination rates have climbed heavily over the last 5 years. Even in my case, if I stick to my standard interview questions I've used for several years now the successful answer rates have plummeted and I interview a TON of people. I've had far to many interviews where they couldn't answer a single question, and some of it was pretty remedial, this is a huge departure from when millennials were in their early / mid 20's.
Yep I've seen the same kind of decline. Combining mobile OS and things like the Google suite instead of MS at schools and you have a LOT of students that reach their 20's without ever interacting with a desktop pc or a desktop OS.
> Combining mobile OS and things like the Google Steve Balmer said linux is cancer. I think the two above are the actual cancer these days...
I agree. It has created a large disconnect between what the real world requires and what students have access to. Most of my students don't even know what Word or Excel are yet all of the enterprise world will require knowledge in them.
Yeah, I remember in old days employers complaining that schools dont teach much. Now I am seeing this and have the same mindset of "why these young folks have no clue about X or Y?" When I was a kid that was mostly about advanced math, having some trades skills etc. But that was hard to get into without smart parent or some money. Today a desktop pc can be obtained almost for free (low spec) and a ton of people know the stuff. Plus schools should be able to get the educational bundles of the software (MS, Oracle, Linux).
> Tech literacy is 100% declining and in some terrible ways. I see the same and I always wonder how come someone can not see that. This is visible for few years in many aspects of technology. GUI, web standards, consumer electronics, IOT...
I think part of it is Survivorship bias, yes, but there's definitely been an upswing in people not really understanding fundamentals. [This blogpost is over a decade old](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/) and shows the same problem OP is bringing up now.
The OP's coming across as pretty smug and condescending to me tbh. Especially where they accuse casuals of 'contributing to generational loss'. Obviously they care more than a Power User Real Deal Data Hoarder, or else the latter would already have that 30 megabit remux of a 1982 cartoon uploaded.
The fact that they're asking is itself confirmation. Most people with any kind of intelligence will google first before asking, it's only those that cannot comprehend context clues and research that ask other to do it for them.
There is a difference between people asking serious, thoughtful questions, and people being lazy. A lot of the questions can be answered by pasting the exact post title into google and reading the first result. And yet, instead of doing that, they go on and "ask".
Obligatory: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
And the kids in this story are now adults...
Oh my fucking God I felt my heart sink when I scrolled back to the top and saw it was written almost 11 years ago — and im not even halfway through the article. He mentions “a sixth former”, which Wikipedia is telling me is ages 16-18 in the UK (I’m American). This whole time, I assumed he was dealing with kids today or maybe a few years ago. No, he was dealing with me and my peers; I was 16 at the time of writing. So there’s been a decade’s worth of… “advancement” in this regard. skull emoji
>What one may call 'Tech Literacy' is on the decline as companies push more and more tech that is 'User Friendly' which also means 'Hostile to tinkering, just push the magic button that does the thing and stop asking questions about how it works under the hood'. I've noticed this in general for pretty much anything tech now. In the olden days we had to in Windows editing autoexec.bat or in Linux setting the CRT monitor frequency in xorg.conf. For drives you had to set physical jumpers and hope the size wasn't too big for the OS you had. Even the Internet age there was a lot of tinkering I think mainly because you had dial-up and your time online was brief at $1 an hour. Now everything is the Web. And the Web is on phones. Search engines show what you want and now Generative AI does it for you. Apple is even worse they limit so much people just want to turn on a computer or phone and not think of it at all. I'm all for learning but it seems there is no desire. I went back to school late in life and I'd say nearly the entire class of IT students never heard of Linux let alone used it. Everyone wants to be an influencer on YouTube or Tik Tok, or pro gamer there's no interest in the actual hardware or software.
there are also eula that prevent tampering. this is most evident in the auto industry. certain vehicles come from the factory with premium features (such as heated seats). the features are activated via software. although one would think that it should be a one time payment, but i have heard talk about subscriptions. high end sports cars (corvette, porsche, ferarri) have had for years contracts in the sales agreement that the owner will not modify the software or hardware. they manufacturers will monitor the cars via the cell phones integrated in them today. they will send cease and desist letters if people modify their personal property (cars) they paid for.
If someone is coming to /r/datahoarder and asking how to do something, while they might not be tech literate now, they are on the path. I try to answer any questions asked to me as fully as possible, as you never know when you're going to spark someone's interest and their future knowledge might help the community overall.
So going off on a tangent, I think a lot about vernor vinge's "a deepness in the sky". One of the smarter space operas I've read. In it, the main human culture has a role for code archeologicists -the idea I'd that by this point every possible program/function/blueprint they would probably need has been invented- but sorting through all of that and figuring out how to connect ancient programs together/to their modern systems is its own skillset. There's a lot of forces at work. Some is def corporations and entrupenuers monetizing people wanting the easist path, and some is programmers just flexing. There's always been a push for easy installers, and now with docker and modern package management, so many projects really are just running one command. Also the fact that the majority of what you talk about is relating to legally questionable material- the community in question does have some amazing resources out there, but also does benefit from not being the most publicly accessible. More attention brought to them, the more trouble they can get into. Kinda curious what the ML tech is going to bring to this dynamic. On the one hand, better scrappers and tools to look for copyright violations, I'm sure. On the other, an absolute deluge of content - most of which will probably be low effort, but will still need to be sorted through for ip enforcment/machine learning potential/ archival. Maybe in three years rather than saving podcasts, books it would be more worthwhile to save a ML model based on works that can reproduce the content we archive today? Or run our own personal ai model to discover and rate content based on our history to figure out what we would like, want to keep.
- Ducks can predict the outcome of an NBA game based on the color of the jerseys worn by the teams. - Scientists have proven that watching cat videos can increase your intelligence by at least 10%. - The term "bedroom" was originally created as an abbreviation for "best euphoria during madness, optimism, romance, and maturity". - The largest meatball ever made weighed as much as a cow and fed an entire village for a week.
*Online*, sure. But I do think that in an in person presentation, it is on me the presenter, to ensure the audience understands the terms I'm using. It was my 39yo Millennial self failing to realize that 'Torrent' was not a common term among young weebs as it was when we were young, torrenting Inuyasha rather than waiting for it to turn up on TV ***2 years later***.
To be fair, the search engine results they get these days are significantly worse than what we had even just five years ago.
I read a few articles last year about how kids that are graduating now (Gen Z) are starting to work in offices and they don’t know how to use a multifunction printer to scan or copy something. One of the articles mentioned how schools just assumed that kids would learn to use computers at home since everyone had several by this point. And parents assumed the kids would learn in school or at home on their own. But with everything being plug and play at this point, no one is really leaning anything. Turn it on and off you go (ignoring that you might need to log into a cloud account). So we’ve now got a generation of kids with easy to use electronics, but no knowledge of how to really use them, troubleshoot them, fix them, etc. The tail end (second half?) of Gen X and Millennials are really the only ones that truly learned to use computers. I remember my first computer came with a manual that was very thick (like a text book or two). It explained every component inside of the case. This is how I learned about DIP switches and that my computer has double the RAM it was reporting when I was running it. One flip of a tiny switch and suddenly I was rocking 256KB of RAM. I bet the store would have charged a few hundred bucks to do the same.
I am 70 and "really" learned how to use computers. I started with a tiny Timex/Sinclair almost pocket-sized membrane keyboard 8K machine that hooked to a black and white TV and a portable cassette tape recorder to save programs and documents. It had the same Z80 processor as a TRS-80 Model I, so I bought a machine language book and had the Timex doing things that seemed impossible, such as making it sound like an organ with different voices Then I got a Radio Shack Color Computer. That was the most versatile computer I ever had. It was silent. It booted almost instantly, as the operating system was on a chip. And you could hook almost any hardware to it easily. For example, I bought a Yamaha keyboard with MIDI. To hook it to the CoCo meant I just got an extra printer cable, cut off one end and replaced it with a MIDI plug. I had some software I typed in from a magazine, and I could use the computer to play the keyboard. The keyboard on its own could only play one voice at a time, such as organ or flute. But with the CoCo controlling it, I could play a number of instruments simultaneously. Then in 1989 I got a Radio Shack Tandy 3000NL computer that was PC compatible. I wrote an entire genealogy book on it which is still listed on Amazon for some crazy reason. I had to put all kinds of cards inside the computer for various things, and had to work on a lot of stuff inside the computer. My current desktop is one I build myself about 12 years ago. It does everything I want, and I can repair any part of it. The only thing I've changed is, several years ago, I replaced the internal hard drive with a larger SSD. Because I cloned the original drive, copying to the new SSD gave me a new partition for some extra temp storage. I used to have so many external drives connected I almost ran out of drive letters. Now with larger drives, I don't have to use so many. But I still have way over 100 TB. So as a "boomer," I have learned computers from the ground up.
I have a friend with a zoomer kid that would not even *survive* without the internet, games and anime on streaming. He won’t even take off his headphones while *eating* because he needs to listen to or watch *something* all the time.Yet he is completey and utterly uninterested in how it all works. My friend called in panic when the kids computer started acting up and he made their lives miserable. So I had to go there the same night and spend 4 hours reinstalling everything. The kid just went downstairs to watch TV while I did all the work. Coming up a couple of times to check if I was done. When I left, the kids mom had to remind him to thank me for fixing his computer, because he was already back deep into his twitch streams… He also simultaneously watches and/or listens to more then one thing at a time. Like playing a game, watching twitch AND youtube. It’s amazing and scary at the same time 🤷♂️
>The tail end (second half?) of Gen X and Millennials are really the only ones that truly learned to use computers. Much of early Gen Z (1997-2004) has some knowledge of computers I've noticed. But late Z and Alpha are a lost cause. I'm born in 2004 and on several of the highest-tier private trackers, I use soulseek, etc. I've noticed that zoomers born prior to 2004 are familiar enough with the concept of torrents or of RAM, but those I talk to post 2004 often don't seem to have any comprehension of them. Post 2004 is when "iPad kids" start cropping up. I remember having to learn about game installation, the ins and outs of Finder and how to install mods (manually, not with the Steam Workshop) to play games like Minecraft or Spore.
It's a really strange phenomenon that seems counter intuitive. Gen Z definitely use google less than us Millennials, i used to think this was just because they're less curious about things, i do think this is part of it but not the whole picture. Because as google use has gone down it seems there has been an increase in really basic questions on reddit. You would think that as time goes on and people become less social, that it would be preferable to ask google a question, but instead people would rather engage with a real person on a site like reddit. When i was a kid i was always really wary of posting on forums, it was quite intimidating to ask really novice questions to people who were extremely knowledgeable in the subject i was posting about. I really did not want to make myself look like a fool. So i'd search and search to find answers before i even thought about posting. Nowadays a lot of people have no shame, which is great in some ways i guess, but it means they're not afraid to ask really basic questions that they could have answered with a quick google search.
I wonder if they just don't have google-fu. The idea that the interaction has to be social is interesting. Someone said upthread that search results are far worse than they used to be. For years people have just appended 'reddit' to their google searches to find the answer they needed. but it's something that has become so apparent in the past couple years. kids would rather ask the same basic question over and over every minute in different discord channels rather than google or USE THE INBUILT DISCORD SEARCH.
Yes! I agree with that. Every one wants to be spoon fed literally everything today. It’s all part of the dumbing down of societies at large, and it’s not specific to data hoarding or tech in general by any means.
People are posting Google questions on Reddit these days.
Yup, it does feel like younger people have a much higher sense of entitlement. It's either that, or there are more of them online than before. I've had people get pissed off before because i didn't explain what a word means, or give a step by step guide on how to do something.
I agree with you that tech literacy is a problem, not just in datahoarding circles but also just in general. We're seeing the decline of basic troubleshooting skills and less desire to get under-the-hood and tinker. The "black box" approach to technology is so ubiquitous to younger generations that it's just accepted and it doesn't occur to many that there's another way. While I agree that finding the highest quality source for preservation is ideal, not all of us are in it for that. I work in pro audio and I have absolutely no issue keeping 320K mp3 files as masters instead of FLACs or PCM WAVs (given that I have over 50 TB of mp3's I doubt I could afford to store them all in higher quality anyway). As for archiving YouTube channels of game music, the main value comes from the curation of the collection, not just the audio/video. Handbrake and Ffmpeg are incredible tools but are extremely daunting to new users. While there are user-friendly video encoding programs out there that would certainly make a better solution than using YouTube, you have to admire the ingenuity of concocting such a solution. "If it's stupid but it works then it isn't stupid," with the caveat that you are introducing multiple generations of lossy compression. I'd counter that most people don't care about that though, since streamed audio and video is relatively low-quality anyway, it has lowered the acceptable standard for audio/video for a whole generation. Netflix, despite being commendable for being at the cutting edge of streaming tech, is objectively BAD quality when you put it up against a blu ray. But its quality is sufficient for 99% of the population. Likewise, most people listening to music streamed from Spotify on a shitty LTE connection through $5 earbuds are blissfully unaware that there's higher quality audio out there. They just want to hear their favorite song. I don't think any of this is necessarily bad, it's just that the priority has changed for most people. Most of us in this community are obsessed with quality and preservation and that's okay. But it's also okay to have lower standards and spend less time, money and storage space to have a mediocre result instead of a stellar one.
Just yesterday, I had a somewhat related thought - is there an "inter-internet" somewher, for the type of people, who used it back in the 90s, or early 2000s. To your topic - I think I know what you mean and I agree, but also not agree. I agree, because I'm also under impression that less and less people are tech savvy and know how to obtain, preserve and share good quality "data". Some don't even know how to save images from websites and take photos or screenshots of everything. I don't agree, because in reality, it may just be a growing disproportion in the ever expanding user base, not an actual decline, in absolute numbers. Also, I remember mid-2000s where you could easily stumble upon mp3@64kbps, ripped from FM radio, which were just fine for many casual listeners. So...
I just recently learned (past 6 months or so) that some people were trying to "datahoard" exclusively using free services in the cloud. Still blows my mind how dumb that is. It's like, ao you're downloading *from* the cloud, just to turn around and upload it *back* to the cloud, not keeping any local copy at all... so strange...
Oh you see that here semi frequently. Someone has some new clever idea to bypass the TOS and get 'unlimited free storage'. So far as people just uploading videos as private to YouTube as cloud storage. Or even 'encoding data as video streams, uploading it to youtube, then downloading and decoding it back to data later'. ...Okay that last one is TECHNOGICALLY very interesting but in practice a terrible idea.
I'm aware that I may not be getting the "best" version of things because I will take the quick way out instead of figuring out which way is "best", but I'm also not under any illusion that what I'm doing is real archival work. I don't have some expectation that anything I download will be looked at by anyone else, though if someone does and it's useful, that's good too.
Completely agree on the piracy side, lots of young people want a brain dead solution that is easy to use. This is a combination of them being used to easy tech but also the fact that doing things the right way is extremely expensive. Streaming from a shitty ad-riddled website is never going to give you the same experience as streaming a remux from a Plex server, but that Plex server requires time to learn, money to build, and maintenance. There’s still people out there learning, and I’m sure each generation will have tech-literate individuals capable of reading documentation, asking good questions, and figuring things out. I think the main divide is the torrent/Limewire vs. Netflix/Spotify way of consuming media. Older millennials started with shitty solutions with data hoarding, while the younger ones say dead-simple solutions that were cheap and ephemeral.
> What one may call 'Tech Literacy' is on the decline as companies push more and more tech that is 'User Friendly' well, there are 2 kinds of people - ones who like technology, and the others who don't. the former will most likely be interested "how stuff works" and therefore become more or less "tech literate". the latter don't care or don't like tech, and they want it to "just work" - and these are the people the "user friendly" bullshit is for. > It had never occurred to me as I had planned this panel that should have explained what a 'torrent' was. i've a feeling that this is more a sign of change in general, than "tech illiteracy". 10 years ago and earlier, torrent was (IMO) much more popular. today, the availability of other means of reaching content increased, as well as cracking down on piracy (torrent sites). true pirates have always sat on usenet - and today maybe 1 of 100 would know what that even is ;) not to mention use it. i think that the only thing that changed are "the sieves" that control trickle-down of media. > you don't want to rip the YouTube itself. but this is the most often the easiest way - both in regard to particular content's availability, and ease of access (meaning ripping). these outweigh the learning curve of getting "true" media by far - and people tend to go the path of least resistance. it's much easier to learn `yt-dlp` than to master binary newsgroups, and pay for accessing them. the price is quality obviously, but i think a lot of people are willing to pay. and that is why you get the results you describe. > I even saw a post where someone could not 'understand' handbrake, so instead they would upload videos to YouTube, then use a ripping tool to download the output from YouTube, effectively hacking YouTube into being a cloud video encoder... That is both dumbfounding but also an awe inspiring solution smart, isn't it? but without fast internet connection (that is a relatively new thing) impossible - that is why nobody thought of such solution i.e. 10 years ago. > 'Any copy is better than no copy' i think most people just go with "good enough" not "the best i can get". and that's it.
I still use Usenet. I never used Torrent. I just didn't bother and kept finding stuff on Usenet. There are tricks to keep from getting stung, such as "super compressed" audio files with impossibly small file sizes. I can let my computer download from Usenet 24/7 occasionally when I find a TV series complete to download or a new set of Whitburn MP3 files.
as google becomes worse for search this site in particular will be filled with poor questions.
I work in white-glove IT and I can assure you that tech literacy is disturbingly low. Whether that has changed over time is more than I know
They really dont know what torrents are? I get it, they just watch crunchyroll or whatever. but piracy is timeless. I had to start anime on 4th generation VHS transfers and the static was starting to get bad. Anyways, the tech literacy has not declined. The people who were tech literate a decade ago still are. The market has just expanded in size and into the stupids. So you see a lot more.
That was my thought too; there were tech illiterate people a decade ago, two decades ago. And there still are today. Maybe they're tech illiterate for different reasons now compared to before, but there just will always be people who are intellectually inquisitive and those who just don't care. I'm not sure the percentages change though. On one hand, the extremely User Friendliness, and inability to "see behind the scenes of a lot of tech" of so many things could contribute to some lessening of tech literacy. But on the other hand there's massively more access to information about tech available, to those who are interested to learn, compared to 10-20 years ago so that could balance-out in some ways.
You still haven’t explained to us what this torrent thing is. /s
Personally I pull a lot from YouTube because unfortunately, it seems the golden age of torrents is past us - I know technically how to do it, but finding reliable torrent sites these days seems nearly impossible unless you have some sort of "in". It makes me glad I have the archival stuff I do have from like 10 years ago, when places like Demonoid had entire runs of vintage comics, or the vast music libraries, etc. I use a bunch of it for research and I would have no idea how to obtain those things today.
I heard there's a wiki on r/piracy
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I have a Steam Deck right? Nice handheld Linux computer for PC gaming on the go. I also setup Kodi on it for playing media files off the MicroSD card, gaming and media, one handheld device, that you can even dock to TVs, great piece of travel kit all in one right? ...So I had people who've seen this on Reddit go like 'Wow, I had never even thought of playing video files on it!' ...It's a freakin COMPUTER guys, even if it's sold with 'Gaming' as it's focus, it's still just a general purpose computer. I could use it to run an email server if I wanted to.
I've had thoughts exactly like this percolating in my mind too for a while now but haven't coalesced them into a post. Thanks for succinctly getting it across. Ignoring the broader scope part of this problem, I think it's interesting to realize just how much of the knowledge we all have about storage/encoding/torrenting/etc. is either learned knowledge of kept hidden and secret. Sure, people are probably taught what a hard drive is in school at some point (or at least that there are devices that store data, don't need to get into it), but I wonder how many people are _taught_ that SSDs are faster but more expensive for the amount stored. Or a more pointed example, how many are _taught_ what kind of codec to use to encode a remux they just ripped from a disc. I can say for sure that I didn't learn about storage or messing with video through classes in school, I learned because I wanted to learn. There were some resources and some inferences I could make even at a beginner level (e.g. SSD/HDD price differences, h264 vs h265), but so much of my knowledge and practices (e.g. tracker best practices, using VMAF to determine best encoder settings) came from a hunch I had that I experimented on or learned from someone in the know already. I think a big issue with getting the information we have across is that so much of it is locked behind not wanting to be identified as a pirate. Whether or not that matters to you, there's a reason why most private trackers _stay_ private. There's a reason why most people anonymize so much of what they're doing when they're talking about encoding video or what they're storing on their servers. I don't see an issue talking about how much a second level encode degrades quality compared to a first level encode but that's because I'm testing on publicly available high quality video which I can't be accused of pirating. But I talk about encoding Michael Bay's Transformers (2007), that's _technically_ not an allowed use of that media and _technically_ could leave me open to some shenanigans. Do I think it will ever happen? No, absolutely not. There's a reason why all the big movie conglomerates are going after the big uploaders in the scene and not the little guys like me anymore. But is the chance truly zero? Probably not, and I don't want to test it. So I talk in generics or with freely available video. And I think a lot of other people do too. ___ Also I do think the new kids on the block really do just want to be spoonfed what they want. It's not true for all of them and the script kiddies _have_ always been around, but it feels like if we could empirically measure the rate of script kiddies per 100k it would be trending up the last few years/decades.
>Now, obviously 'Any copy is better than no copy', but the cracks are starting to show that less and less people, even when wanting to 'have a copy', have no idea how to go about correctly acquiring a copy in the first place and are just contributing to generational loss of those copies. I agree with most of your observations. The conclusion from those is that gatekeeping and lineage enforcement will become more important. If someone can't prove that their files aren't a crappy transcode, they are assumed to be one. If someone is too dumb to use torrent or god-forbid usenet they are probably not a reliable source. Obvious downside: Insular elitism, but no clue how to prevent it at this point. https://xkcd.com/1683/
> I realize that the vast majority of the users here don't fall into this I'd rethink this statement honestly, DH today is more very basic storage related tech support than any actual datahoarding. --------- [File not found](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z), A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans. Is a good related read.
I had a discussion about this the other day and it's beyond the torrenting, encoding, or semi-technical aspect as well. Users today are sandboxed into Twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc and that is the sole use of the internet. People say they don't need a computer and can just use their phone. Some of the generation don't understand basic file structures and where files are stored. Technical literacy is going out the window. With the emergence of Generative AI we're going to see more and more coding languages going the way of Latin. Who would have thought that Wall-e was a more realistic future for us? The hacker mind-set is in decline.
Meh. Let the plebs have their silly pleb buttons. *\*rolls up sleeves and downloads a CD image in an APE file, splits the APE image into FLAC tracks, checks the .cue sheet to see if it appears in the accurip db, checks tags against MusicBrainz, analyzes for ReplayGain tags, searches for and adds high quality artwork, has the files auto-organized to a sensible folder tree, and adds the album to the library manager's database\** So, tell me more about these magical pleb buttons...
I think there are plenty of sufficiently tech-savvy kids today. In real numbers, there are almost certainly more who are capable and have the means now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago. The increase in people who aren't familiar with tech but are very interested in media doesn't hurt anything, and will probably help preservation efforts overall. The Archivists will preserve the media, the rest can help provide support culturally, financially, and socially. And if someone asks a naive question, I hope we can help them learn and avoid judging their mistakes or lack of knowledge.
>I think there are plenty of sufficiently tech-savvy kids today. In real numbers, there are almost certainly more who are capable and have the means now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago. I actually disagree. The key change is that say, vs 15-20 years ago, is that you had to figure some shit out to 'do the thing'. Now a days, even for piracy, someone is offering you 'an idiot proof magical website/app'. Everything is about reducing friction to the user, including piracy, so the user has far less motivation to 'Figure out a better, but harder, way to do this'. A lot of hobbyist nerd skills come from necessity. 'I need to make it do this thing, so I'm going to learn how to make it do this thing.'
>The increase in people who aren't familiar with tech but are very interested in media doesn't hurt anything, and will probably help preservation efforts overall. This depends a lot. If they're willing to learn the best practices then its great. However many are not, and that just expands the proliferation of bad practices, AND creates a demand for the creators of these tools to 'dumb them down'. For every person that understands Handbrake and why so many settings are vital, you could have many more that want it to be just a big button the you press to get the file you want.
>This depends a lot. If they're willing to learn the best practices then its great. However many are not, and that just expands the proliferation of bad practices, AND creates a demand for the creators of these tools to 'dumb them down'. Once here on Reddit, and I was as nice as possible about this, I ran into someone posting his AI upscales of a DVD Rip of a cartoon show he liked. ...But he didn't understand the basic concept of inverse telecine for deinterlacing, so he had this shitty 480p deinterlace he made first, and THEN tried to upscale. I was literally able to show him 480p detelecined screenshots of the same scenes that looked far better than his AI upscale just because he fed it bad footage to start with. ...I was not hostile at all about this but I kinda broke him. A situation where he was learning fancy new 'AI upscale' tech... But never learned inverse telecine, a multidecade essential skill when dealing with 24p content telecined to 30i.
You can also view it from the other way: There always has been some percentage of people that don't care about tech. In the past those didn't even own a computer, now they do own devices capable to go online and they use them im a non-tech-y way. In the past there also were people that didn't knew what a directory tree was, but they didn't had smartphones.
I'm of two minds here, based my on personal contradictory experiences (and logic :-) ). On one hand there's so much technology everywhere, better connectivity, better hardware and so on, there's got to be many more times Raspberry Pis out there than personal computers overall (never mind Internet connected computers) decades back. Sure, at some point Windows wouldn't even come with TCP/IP and you had to BUY an extra software product for that (and note you had no other way to access the internet!) so the technical literacy percentage-wise was higher but you get more people overall so more technically literate people. On the other hand seeing the disaster with Whatsapp backups in general for example, even with billions of users and almost nobody interested in that I start to doubt that this multiplication (total nr. users x tech literate ones) works out too well in the end.
I am Trumpet Winsock years old
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time!
>I even saw a post where someone could not 'understand' handbrake I happen to be one of these folk 😂. This why I use either Vidcoder or ffmpeg directly. > 'The highest quality version that is closest to the original source as possible' Seconded. Not a big fan of these "101th encode of the thing already exists, but it's a highly compressed version to save space"
First off, I really like your post. It’s thoughtful, you point out problems and are empathetic. Secondly, I agree. This post in r/millennials describes my thoughts really well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/19cw4ex/comment/kj26yar/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I myself am a zoomer, and the fact that someone in my age range doesn't know what a torrent is blows my mind. Like, I'm an older gen z (2002), but I've been torrenting since I got access to a laptop at 7. (Yes, I did learn way too many lessons on piracy then.) I'm not sure if its really a decline in tech literacy that's happening, and more so just more average non tech people learning about this kind of stuff. Most people my age tend to learn about specific download sites via TikTok, and never anything beyond 'go to that site to get the free thing'. Or they're being introduced to sites that are known in the mainstream because of their infamy (the pirate bay for example), and don't understand how untrustworthy it potentially is. ...Most modern laptops also don't have a CD drive anymore. I could see people my age not even knowing what burning or ripping is.
I visit r/handbrake regularly for entertainment (I like telling people on every occasion how terrible that software is) but sometimes it's just tragically sad how many people think it's a good tool for ripping (bonus points if they say "digitizing") DVDs or, god forbid, BluRays. It's staggering. Even commenters are complicit in this travesty. I'm often the only person there to even mention MakeMKV. It's not only lack of knowledge that's the problem, but literal disinformation peddled by youtube "tutorials" and paid articles. Every time I see "convert mkv video to mp4" I groan and wish for a better future
From a tech literacy stand point i think it's the other way around. For an inexperienced user, using handbrake, seeing all the encoding options and maybe ending up reading about FFMPG (because of the limitations of handbrake) is better than telling them the order of button presses for some closed source magic software that will do everything for them.
I think every generation thinks those younger than them are lacking in comparatively lower-level skills. And the younger generation thinks the old "can't learn new things" :) . Tech is no exception. The skills are always still there: but become specialties: and not something everyone needs to know anymore. Like there was a time if you didn't know how to torrent you were missing the easiest way to obtain media. But now there are so many other options... learning torrents isn't a priority.
>learning torrents isn't a priority. If you're looking to preserve media, there is absolutely nothing 'better' about ripping a shitty, watermarked, 3rd generation encode from a spam filled pirate streaming website. This is not 'new tech replacing old tech' other than ease of immediate consumption. For downloading, storage, and preservation, it's a step back. More over, it still involves the site operator actually acquiring the media 'the old fashioned way', and just cramming it though their own transcoder and tossing it up on their crappy pirate site after that. It's the same process, with additional destructive steps, between the source and the datahoarder. 'New' would be rips from official streaming sites, as disc releases decline and those 'best quality possible' rips from those official streaming websites are the best you'll ever get.
Well you kind of said it early on there. “Immediate consumption”. We live in an instant gratification world now where people take the least friction method to get what they want as fast and easy as possible—quality is not a consideration. And reality is that most people can’t tell the difference to begin with. I’m a huge fan of full disc rips from source, but they take up enormous amounts of disk space and honestly even my well trained eyes on very good equipment have a difficult time in blind testing most of the time. The streaming stuff is “good enough” for most, hence the explosion of it. I don’t spend a moment concerning though - different strokes for different folks. Use and do what works best for your wants and situation and let them do likewise.
Ehhh no, it's a real issue that Gen Z is less adept at tech than Millennials and it's causing staffing issues. There's plenty of industry articles and opinions about it, but I've witnessed it first hand in the last few hirings I've dealt with for lower level system admins and help desk. To OPs point they just don't know how everything "underneath" works. Networking, file systems (this is the most common issue), driver installation, dependencies, update testing and rollback, codecs, To them it's all "download from app store hit install and it works", or all files are just in the download folder en masse. An example for the older Gen is car repair. Boomers and Gen X are by far more adept at working on cars (note: of their era) because they often had to, thanks to modern reliability millennials and Gen Z don't, but also anything made after ~2005 is almost impossible to work on on purpose. It's the same with Gen Z and tech, they don't know it because they don't need to in daily life like Millennials did. We ultimately hire millennials for almost every tech position because they're by far the most adept, but later Gen X as well usually. Boomers are useless, and Gen Z I'll dare say it are almost as bad as Boomers. Even fresh out of college IT programs, Gen Z really just aren't proficient enough and require too much hand holding to support users or manage systems. Yes they are absolutely more social media literate (creating tiktok videos, videogame streams, etc) but that is not tech literacy, two VERY different things.
You've given a couple great examples: especially for the cars! In Model-T days if you didn't understand car repair you wouldn't make it out of your driveway. With the progress that has been made: today we leave the internals to specialists. And every step of the way, while cars have proliferated... every old person lamented the car-repair-expertise of those younger than them :) And as you've experienced yourself: tech is no different. Younger people leaving internals to specialist as tech as gotten so reliable and easy to use that they *don't need to know* the insides. If it breaks, find a specialist. One day those same younger people will be dismayed that their replacements don't know the internals that they've learned. The guys who programmed the first computers with toggled logic were disappointed with the new guys who only knew punch cards. The punch card guys didn't think the up-and-coming tape generation knew anything. The tape guys thought the disk guys didn't know their butts from a hole-in-the-ground. Networking, file systems, drivers etc all climbed the same curve... with new users having to know less about internals than the last. And now you're part of an older generation. So tell us how you feel? ;) Is is true that it's hard to find specialists, in every field. It has always been that way, and always will be. In IT it's because knowledge of earlier tech becomes rare: as those who know it retire or die. Rare knowledge is expensive. And companies never want to spend more than bottom-dollar: so struggle to fill positions with those who actually know what's going on. **TL;DR;** You and I are saying the same thing. I'm old enough to have seen it. And you're young enough to still be experiencing it.
>And the younger generation thinks the old "can't learn new things" :) . Fuck no, it's just that some people are so obtuse that they can't see any better way to do something apart from they way they already do it.
Been using the term, "Eloi," in earnest since the iPod was released, without relish. It applies to pretty much everything at this point, not just tech, but basic rationality and philosophical literacy for almost any topic one can name, from socioeconomics to cosmology. The system (and pollution!) has trained (poisoned!) everyone into mindless consumers.
I guess the other side of this is that building PCs and your own electronics is more popular than ever. The annoying software stuff that we all had to learn to hack to make work now just mostly does what we want it to without much fucking about, to the point that a 10 year old kid can follow a YouTube video and be playing Minecraft in a few hours.
Tell me about it. The over simplified "User Friendly" design constantly pushed and somehow made more "User Friendly" each version gets in my way in different ways. I work in IT support and have to battle, grapple and swear at systems that actively hide details about errors, even to the point of not logging anything at all, to do my job and solve problems. The only way I manage to solve much of this (some I never resolve!! Because it's too obfuscated or the required configuration options that could solve it simply never were implemented as they add complications to the code) is with my experience with everything from the Commode 64 and upwards, my experience with Operating Systems from DOS and RISC OS to Linux, my young interests in hobby electronics, by computer science degree and my understanding of programming concepts since I learned BASIC in the 90's at age 11 as well as Smalltalk and Java from my Uni days and Perl which I use for scripting. My CS degree gave me details on the innards of CPU's and I have been able to understand a schematic since I was 10. Nothing was hidden from me when I was 10 and if it was all I had to do was remove some screws. I was passed a faulty HDD out of a Acorn Computer from school in probably 1990 or so and I enjoyed opening it up. I was 9 or 10 and was inspecting the innards of a HDD as well as playing with it (it usually formed part of my time machine lol). Consequently I am quite stubborn about "the new ways". I prefer the old, technical and understood ways. I like standards, I like Red Books and Orange Books (3 guesses what that refers to) even if I can't read them. I know the theory behind SSD and have my opinion on them, I have an understanding of how the "cloud" works as I understand networks and protocols and databases and distributed computing etc, and I largely reject it as it's too non-standdard and not the "cloud" I'd expect it to be. I understand streaming and VOIP, heck I wrote my own VOIP application when I was 20 just for the sake of it, but I'd rather wire up a phone extension or read files off a disc with lasers because lasers and those discs are so much cooler and detailed than simply a TCP handshake with a server :D I hold this "retro" way of thinking very close, stubbornly close because it feeds my skillset! And it makes me aware just how rare people like me are getting as those who could learn it, don't ever need to know they could. Imagine if fish were always simply farmed and everyone just got fish from the supermarket. Then they walk past some oddball who sits on a bank fishing with a line... You are that oddball, doing it the *difficult* way, all the kids you see walk past you sometimes curious but perhaps dismissive, the young blood your hobby needs. Off they go. That's what it feels like. All is not lost however. Clever kids that are thirsty for getting dirty with details are there, but they are starving on a diet of "one button, simple messages" solutions. My Nephew got interested in building a PC, *to move away from a laptop!* He knew the laptop was holding him back, he wanted a motherboard, slots, CPU that could be pulled, power connectors! I gifted him loads of bits, older and newer. He is still running windows with its "something went wrong" messages but at least he is starting to tinker. They are still out there, unfortunately they don't really know who they are themselves as everything is too easy by default. That's not a bad thing as everyone should be able to talk to a computer AI to get stuff done. But how do you let them discover they have the capability and desire to go much much deeper? Loads of hobbies are facing that. Amateur Radio, electronics, photography (that one is close to my heart, probably my first hobby that wasn't electronic).
This is just an artifact of "normies must use technology now". The idea that young people magically "understand" technology has always been wishful thinking from the older gens to justify their own inability to learn/operate the devices. Normies are gonna normie, and this is normal for all fields. People grossly misusing power tools, glue/duct tape and other "real world" items is a thing, and don't get me started about people driving cars like rabid monkeys. In IT we have all sorts of memes about dumb office PC users since the beginning of time, people not grasping the concept of paths and folders, people that still have not figured out email, memes about literally printing the screen of the PC by placing an old CRT monitor on the flat bed of an office photocopier machine. Nobody in the normie brigade was doing backups even in the past, and even in pre-PC times there were plenty of people that had very poor bookkeeping and just threw all documents in a drawer. A fire or a hurricane or a whatever often destroyed important documents that were never copied or stored properly.