My boomer trait is that I frequently type in my password where the username is supposed to go. What’s yours?
Being older that some people, which is apparently what 30% of people call a “boomer”
I still avoid online dating no matter what. Also, I don’t take dick picks. Not that I have any dms that would solicit that anyway, but I also just don’t do that. There was a major breach for one of the popular dating platforms recently and similar to that, some dude in OZ land setup an evil twin WiFi at airport and managed to grab a bunch of naked photos from people’s online activity. Just don’t do it guys. It’s not worth it. Just go somewhere ffs and bang someone.
Owning a house
I’m constantly ragged on for still calling remote controls “the clicker”.
I’m often slow to adopt new tech. Unless that tech actually demonstrates a benefit to me, I don’t really want to deal with.
A lot of this is due to cynicism regarding things like privacy/security, planned obsolescence, and enshittification. I also don’t want to adopt something that is then discontinued (“unplanned” obsolescence?), so I often wait until something becomes well-established.
I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.
I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.
There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.
I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.
Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.
I’m also a software engineer who doesn’t care about most new tech. I strongly believe that human made objects and software can both reach a state of doneness. For example, books are a technology that’s “done”. Both physical and digital books do a great job at delivering written content, so there’s no need to keep buying the same damn thing every couple years. Phones are similar, yet the new ones just get shittier (no removable battery, no headphone jack). Kind of reminds me of how Microsoft keeps trying to solve the “problem” of programmers being needed to create programs. Powerapps being one of the latest examples.
Sometimes I look old just by the way that I touch the screen of my phone. Wtf.
I have twice now tried to pinch to zoom a book or something I was reading. Is that the opposite of boomer? Or boomery because it’s so stupid?
Yeah, me too. I’m doing the smartphone equivalent of typing with two fingers.
I despise overly-liberal and even overly progressive-minded young people who are absolutely naive and delusional about society, and can only view the world through their bubble that gets reinforced by their friends and online social groups. And I ain’t even talking just about tankies and people down at the bottom of internet brainrot barrels.
I am a progressive and believe in socialism and a borderless world and would fight to the death against fascism. But I’m seeing way, way too many young people tuning out of reality and supporting absolutely dumb-as-fuck takes and having unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen in our world.
The lack of ability to recognize how and why a side you oppose wins and gains power is a biproduct of living with those blinders. The dismissal of millions of people who don’t think like you is just as bad as the millions of people who hate you for your identity. We have to get a lot smarter and accept a lot more hard truths about how we’re going to keep pushing the needle towards progress. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices like getting out and voting even if you don’t like the candidate. Supporting and physically getting involved with community and groups even if you’re a self-diagnosed introvert with autism.
For some screwball reason, the concept of forcing yourself to do hard things so you get better at them has become very conservative-coded but it’s how we’ve succeeded against evil for generations. We have to start being a lot tougher and stop balking at people who don’t share all your values. We win with community and organized resistance, not constant scolding and trying to be the smartest lefty in line for the camps.
I hear you and what you say sounds reasonable but I haven’t actually met any younger people in real life that do that shit. The kids seem to be fighting mighty hard to me.
Now, closely related but I think different (correct me if I misunderstood you) I do know some real-life accelerationists who felt that not voting would “bring down the system faster so it can be replaced by something better” which is horribly, laughably naive.
Conservative-coding of things that are actually just healthy personality balance is a real thing. Bravery, duty and basic acceptance we’re mortals in an ugly world also come to mind.
There’s enough history written down to say for sure it’s going to self correct. Hopefully not in the “everyone like that went to a camp, but some of their ideas found a new audience a century later” way.
I am developing an increasing worry that with the way society is atomizing, that our progressive side is going to collapse under the tendency to make “everything I don’t like = conservatism and nazis” and I know that sounds a lot like the conservative complaint that the left calls everything they don’t like “nazis” but there is truth to it and the term “nazi” is just one word in a growing list of ideals and tools of power that are being discarded because “the other side” uses them.
For example: the US flag. It has become a stereotype in the US that if you fly an American flag on your house or car, you are a conservative/right-wing nationalist. “America bad” is a lefty stereotype for good reason.
Meanwhile, until we get to that post-scarcity Star Trek universe, we’re all still just tribes. And groups of nationalists have been the number one strongest force for change and power on our planet since we started drawing borders. It’s pure political capital to have the support of armed groups of “patriots” and this is why everyone in politics is so deferential to our orange clown president, because he commands a political nuclear weapon in the form of history’s oldest power source. January 6th was a weapons demonstration, not a real attempt at coup.
You simply do not get the massive global political machine to move with finger-wagging and lectures. You need force to back up your demands.
I wish I could get the left to reclaim the flag. I know America isn’t a source of pride for the people harmed by America, but if you’re here and you want to make the place better, you should show that you support at least it’s potential and promise.
Don’t get me started on guns.
Totally agree. I hung a flag for the same reason, why should the right get to “own” the symbol of America. I ended up taking it down though since my wife thought it would give people the wrong impression of us…
Guns are a great example under “accepting we’re mortals in an ugly world”, actually. Nobody is seriously claiming they’re going away, but the way they’re talked about by the left, you would think undoing a technology is on the table.
I mean, you can still want more gun control, and most other nations have gone that way, but the only people mentioning they’ll still be around in some way tend to be on the right - because that’s ugly.
For example: the US flag. It has become a stereotype in the US that if you fly an American flag on your house or car, you are a conservative/right-wing nationalist. “America bad” is a lefty stereotype for good reason.
Fun fact, it was leaking into Canada for a while. Unnecessary maple leafs meant you probably didn’t like vaccines or Trudeau. Then you guys (well, Trump; we know there’s another party) talked about annexing us and made patriotism neutral again. Thanks?
January 6th was a weapons demonstration, not a real attempt at coup.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it, although I’m not convinced it wasn’t just stupidity on their part. The right also have hangups that will self-correct, in their own way.
That’s kind of what I was going to say about tribalism as a force, too. Nobody turns their noses up at an Irish name today, and nobody will be impressed by lifted pickups and ill-informed scriptural references in the future. The idea of elected representatives has been around for centuries, though.
I do believe we need gun controls, strict federal systems to track and manage people who shouldn’t have guns, all the authoritarian nightmare stuff to gun nuts. It would sting at first and people would worry, and I wouldn’t want to see it under the current leadership, but that’s what instills some level of societal respect for a thing. A generation later and suddenly everyone treats guns a lot more seriously, because humans are adaptable. That’s just a whole other massive can of worms, but I am glad that at least out of all this recent fascist takeover that it finally spurred a segment of the left to finally start arming up. I don’t want an armed revolution or standoff, but I don’t like the memes of how “easy” it would be for orcs to raid the villages and wipe out the enemy.
I’m not convinced it wasn’t just stupidity on their part.
I think I’ve learned to dance in the space that lay between stupid reactions to feelings and deeply-planned chess games, for the sake of understanding how large groups of people behave and operate.
I don’t think there was or is a single intelligent individual in the Trump administration, but if you get enough people together under a momentum of energy and fear and the power-rush of feeling invulnerable, I think they’re going to instinctively learn they need to whip out their sword and wave it around when they feel backed into a corner. At that time, a lot of fascists suddenly were worried they were going to get thrown in jail the moment Biden took over. (Sidenote: every single one of those fucks should have been thrown in jail.) It was an unplanned, unfocused display of power. Like a group of militants firing all their guns into the air, somewhere between rage and celebration. They had an idea that they were doing something extreme by egging the crowd on, maybe some had this idea forged ahead of time in the back of their mind that they could “use” the crowd to exert pressure but I doubt they really planned it until they got up there and Trump seemed to want to do it. It was a half-assed mess but it proved a point, which side you should be scared of on a basic, physical level. Political capital, original flavor.
I’m done waxing poetic about our political woes. Thank you for listening and understanding.
I miss physical buttons.
If you’re speaking whatever current-gen slang and abbreviating every other word and still use ‘u’ in place of ‘you’, I will automatically think you’re a lowly neanderthal.
“Whuh up fam? how r u?” The fuck out of here with that shit.
U ok?
Yeah, text-speak made sense years ago when the length of text messages was limited and you had to do that to get around it. Nowadays it just makes you look lazy and unintelligent.
About every 20 minutes or so, I say “That’s how they get ya”, while looking up something on my 5-years-out-of-date "smart"phone that can’t download any new apps.
Since this is Lemmy, I’m required to ask if you’ve considered a custom ROM.
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I buy music instead of paying for a streaming service like Spotify
i just use soulseek for my music needs, download it all to 1-2T mSD on my phone tmk most musicians don’t really get much from music-sales anyway, they really only make $ from ticket sales and merch from their websites
My boomer trait is that I frequently type in my password where the username is supposed to go.
Every time you do this change your password immediately. This is shockingly easy to find in logs and match up to the users. You’d be surprised how often application logs are damn near wide open in a log repo to entire IT departments. Just trying to look out for you OP.
I hate that every facet of human existence is being monetized.
You must have a very left-leaning sample of boomers.
I hate how tech is in everything now. Everything is IOT. Everything can expire because of software abandonment.
You know how you have those 70 year old fridges that still work? I’m sure that new Samsung IOT one will have planned obsolescence after 20 years tops.
You know how we have classic cars? Thing of the past. Locked firmware and phone home capabilities will brick new cars for similar reasons when they become old.
Caring about tech issues seems more like a gen X/Millennial thing to me. Most of gen Z hasn’t figured out the problem yet; most older people just see a magic box. Obviously there’s exceptions at both ends.
20 years is ambitious lol
You’re probably right 😅
My car’s radio busted last year. Instead of replacing it with a modern touchscreen, or paying $3000 for a manufacturer replacement, I’ve simply gone without it. Thing is, the radio includes the back-up camera screen. It also contains the controls to the car’s clock. So half the year the time is off by an hour, and I’ve gotten used to backing up my car “the old fashioned way.”
Thankfully, none of these are issues I can’t tolerate. But it does make me wonder what would’ve happened if I’d had a newer car. If so many functions can rely on a radio, how many more functions might somebody get screwed out of if this same issue were to happen in a newer vehicle?
I just put in a nice android auto one into my 25 year old vehicle. And added a backup camera 😂. My vehicle didn’t have the option back in the day. Did that for about 500$
I’m sure that new Samsung IOT one will have planned obsolescence after 20 years tops.
Heh, you’re off by an order of 10.
20 years sounds incredibly optimistic for any Samsung appliance.
