• sunglocto@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Gen-z here - I know how to torrent lol. It’s insane how tech illiterate a lot of my friends are, even in my IT classes don’t know what HTTPS is or what an ethernet cable is so… yeah

    Feels weird being known as “the guy who’s an expert at computers” despite being a noob

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      bro you’re on lemmy, you’re already outside of the curve for most gen-z

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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      3 months ago

      I feel like if you know how to look up the answer and can follow a guide to apply 5 steps, you are probably more capable than 80% of the people on this planet.

    • CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.

      My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.

      • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        It’s absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.

        • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.

          Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:

          This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They’ve been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.

          In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this “hacker culture” which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn’t afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.

          Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.

          And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it’ll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.

          • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            That’s a theory I can actually agree with. Sounds plausible enough to be true, given what we know about large corpos.

    • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      20yrs ago I had to help my comp sci housemate build a website for his module. I was not a CS student.

      Some things never change.

    • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      Gen-z too, finding can be somewhat hard but the mega threads help. Torrenting itself is easy of course. Just get transmission or any other FOSS client, put on a proper VPN and good to go.

      • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I think the core of the problem is that back in the bad old days, things needed to be tuned up a bit before they would work right and there was a marked lack of standardization. Now, not only do our devices work right out of the box, bit they also have little quality of life stuff as well. I haven’t bought a battery-powered device in years that wasn’t partially charged when I got it, and most devices come preinstalled with all the basic utility apps.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.

      I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.

      There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.

      I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.

      I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.

      I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.

    • Katzastrophe@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      Fellow Zer here, my elective IT class had grading done depending on how well you could use the computer:

      ‘A’ if you could do everything perfectly well, ‘B’ if you needed some help from the instructor, ‘C’ if you needed a lot of help, ‘D’ if you couldn’t even get past the login screen on the windows machine.

      We had a lot of people who got a pity ‘C-’

    • AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I’m in the same boat. I’m a comp sci student but the amount of tech illiterate comp sci students I meet every day is astounding and concerning

  • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Dude I was born in 2000 and I get so mad when I realize how true this is. Apps/“smart” phones might be regarded as the biggest double edged sword in the history of technology.

    It literally feels like we are at a moment in history where we are evolving backwards by force. This will only worsen as the ipad babies grow older.

    You will own nothing and be happy. You will also know nothing and be happy.

    • meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.

    • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Might be a bit dramatic. All sectors of industry are using more and more tech, we have more people in the workforce now that are tech literate than we did decades ago.

      These are random numbers to explain my point. Look at it this way, in the 90s maybe 20 percent of people knew how to use computers but 12 percent of those were truly tech savvy and knew the ins and out of using a pc.

      Now a days 90 percent of people know how to use a pc (regardless of the form it presents itself, be it pc, phone, tablet, etc) but only like 30 percent of them might be truly tech savvy.

      It’s still a step up from back then, and because of the nature of tech in industry there’s always gonna be plenty of people who know how to use pcs well and if there aren’t then that’s just more money for us who do know.

    • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      People thought the same thing about written language, that it would ruin everyone’s memory cause they could just write things down and wouldn’t have to go through the honorable effort of rembering everything

      Although, to be fair, they didn’t have capitalism then so our similar worries might be more well founded lol

  • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    This might be true, but it’s rapidly changing due to a collaborative effort from big gaming companies, streaming services and hollywood. People are relearning the art of torrenting.

        • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Nothing. It’s fine. I can’t fathom why people are out here paying for their piracy. Seems like it defeats the purpose. I still find everything I ever want on the same sites I’ve always gone to.

          • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            I’ve got a server I’m mass downloading anything I or my wife can think of and quite a few obscure movies and shows aren’t on the major sites in any form that has enough seeders to actually finish

            So, Usenet it is, at least until I’m mostly done.

            If I was huntig for it all by hand I’d probably not bother but I’m using the Arr stack for automation so

          • Shyfer@ttrpg.network
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            3 months ago

            Is torrent galaxy still down? That was my go to and sounds like I have to find another. I am a little worried if they keep bringing down the big ones like that, that we’ll be left with less choices and it’ll be more difficult.

            • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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              3 months ago

              The nice thing about torrents is how lightweight they are. If one thing goes down, ten mirrors of that thing can pop up to take its place.

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
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      3 months ago

      Because its convenient for them. For people who only have a phone Netflix for $2 or so a month is great.

    • 31337@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

      At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

      • spaceaape@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        Get into a private tracker, or rent a VPS in a country that doesn’t bend to the whim of capitalism, torrent to that vps and stream or sync it locally. I find that to have more peace of mind than using a vpn w/Killswitch.

        • geophysicist@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          To get into a private tracker you need to have a good seed to leech ratio, and to do that you need to upload a lot, which is what gets you on the ISP hitlist. This solution is by definition not useful for people in countries where the ISPs enforce no torrenting

          • spaceaape@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            First, torrenting isn’t illegal, and No ISP “enforces no torrenting” lol

            Your understanding of the solution here is a snake eating its own tail. Might wanna think on that one bud. Did the chicken or the egg come first? Solid Ratio or the private tracker account? Figure out how private trackers work first, then come correct.

            The real answer here is that there are intro private trackers one can join on an invite or free join days. If one desires, one then works on their ratio there to get into a better private tracker.

            Copyright holder’s pay people to take snapshots of all the IP addresses currently leeching or seeding specific material on public trackers, so they can contact the ISP with the info and request they do something about it.

            • geophysicist@discuss.tchncs.de
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              3 months ago

              Are you deliberately being obtuse? They do enforce no torrenting of copyrighted material. Downloading they tend to not care, but uploading will get you legal notices in many EU nations

              • spaceaape@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                3 months ago

                No you’re just not understanding. Torrent is a web protocol, like http, ftp, and more. It’s not inherently illegal.

                When you’re downloading you spend less time on the public tracker and have less chance of being caught downloading than if you’re seeding, or uploading. In the states, the copyright holder takes snapshots of the public trackers IP address pool for specific torrents of their intellectual property, and requests your ISP send you a notice and threaten disconnection.

      • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Usenet seems to work really well, and can be surprisingly cheap. Try FrugalUsenet. If you want both VPN and Usenet then try something like Eweka. They do deals where you get both Usenet access and a cheap VPN. It’s about €105 for 15 months or €6.99 per month.

  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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    3 months ago

    What’s the original to template? It looks hilarious!

    Found it! It’s eat hot chip & lie. The text in the original reads:

    any female born after 1993 can’t cook… all they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, twerk, be bisexual , eat hot chip & lie

  • stinerman [Ohio]@midwest.social
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    3 months ago

    Ahh the halcyon days of downloading one song from a private FTP server with upload ratios, found by Lycos FTP search. Over a modem, natch, so it took about 50 minutes…and that’s when your mom didn’t kick you off the internet so she could make a call.

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I heard that some employers are having to teach new ‘gen z’ employees how to download email attachments…

    • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      Gen Z struggles with file systems in general, because the vast majority of their technical experience is on mobile OS’s. However, Gen Z compsci students are somehow far beyond the skill set that millennials had at their age. Or at least that has been my experience with interns over the past 12 years.

      • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        I guess because the Gen Z comp sci students are the people who are truly fluent in computers. We were immersed in the internet and digital technology from a young age, but also had the curiosity to go beneath the surface of them, and get a real understanding of how things work. Most people just use the technology superficially, even if they have grown up with the internet and computers.

      • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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        I was born in 2001. I didn’t use a smartphone until I was like 16. We grew up with regular computers too. I also grew up with Windows XP and 7, as well as playing Doom using DosBox. Then again I am a computer science graduate, so maybe not the best example.

      • HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        Gen Z here. Totally agree, though I personally am a bad example for this one. There was someone in my CS class once who I was put into a group with for a project. I needed some code that they had, so I asked them to put it on my flash drive. It was taking a while and eventually I asked why. They didn’t know where their IDE saved their code, and were using Windows search to try and find it. They were pretty good at actual programming, logic, etc. though.

        • Jako301@feddit.de
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          3 months ago

          Tbh, that’s something I can totally understand. Some programs use very obscure savefile locations, usually hidden behind 10 subfolders somewhere under your documents.

          • HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            I think the teacher specified that we use eclipse, and most who didn’t were using vscode. If I recall correctly, they did use eclipse. I don’t remember how it handles saves, but I don’t think it does that.

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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        3 months ago

        Everybody always says this, but I’ve yet to talk to anyone who even has an anecdote of talking to a Gen Z person for whom that’s true.

    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      My dad pronounced it war-easy. Some time later I played Morrowind and, well… “Khajit has warez if you have coin”

      • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        I always thought it was warez as in “wears”. My understanding is it was short for “softwares” or something. Take the end, add a dash of 1337sp34k and you get warez.

        Maybe I’m wrong.

    • ghashul@feddit.dk
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      3 months ago

      My native language isn’t English, so for me as a teen back then it was definitely the second option.

    • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Besides 1337 who is good?

      Literally any private tracker is a million times better

      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?

        I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found

        • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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          have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition

          They give you a bit of leniency after you first sign up. All that share ratio means is that you leave your computer seeding for a while after your download finishes, and when your torrent client has uploaded the file you got from them to e.g. 5 other people you can stop seeding it. They’re asking you to give back, is all. If you download a 3GB file from other people in the swarm and then immediately close the torrent before anybody can download it from you, after enough repeat times of you doing that, they’ll stop letting you download new files.

          Trackers cannot read, and are not interested in, the number at the bottom of your torrent client, or your history with other trackers. They just care that you seed their torrents after you’ve finished downloading them so other people can download them too.

          • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

            I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.

            • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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              3 months ago

              The system isn’t closed though. More people join the tracker all the time, and that’s to say nothing of the people who already have access to the tracker downloading a new file.

              • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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                I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

                An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

                Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?

        • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
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          I mean some of them are less good than others, and the economies on them vary. Most decent ones these days though use a points system where you earn points based on how long you’ve seeded torrents. You use points to purchase upload credit which artificially raises your ratio. Not all of them require you to have accounts on other trackers, some of them have an interview process that after you’ve passed you can create an account, I’m not sure if this is what you mean by “open/effectively open”. These are still private trackers, and from them you can get access to invite only trackers. There’s several avenues you can take to get onto different private trackers, it’s not hard it just takes time (and seeding!)

    • Maerman@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 months ago

      Depends on what you’re looking for, really. I’m unsure about the rules regarding sharing specific sites, but if you DM me, I can throw a few recommendations your way.

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      1337 is fine for most stuff, I think. Private trackers start to make sense when you want to automate downloading shows and movies but if you just wanna pirate some game, you’ll probably find it on 1337 with a ton of seeders anyways.

    • CodingCarpenter@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Ha I was actually just thinking that we need to teach them as I was reading this. We had to go through a shit ton of trial and error. God forbid if he started with something like LimeWire. Viruses… Viruses everywhere

    • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Teach us then 😭

      I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

      I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.

  • Neps@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    I was born after 2000 I have to teach my parent how to torrent its not a generational thing lol

  • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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    Reading this as someone who torrents debian ISOs instead of directly downloading then in the hopes of reducing server load, while at the same time, not torrenting any pirated stuff.

    But well, I was born a wee bit before 2000

  • Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    I know how to torrent but choose to use one click hosters instead since they are safer to use here and I dont want to pay for a vpn. People who get fines here are people who torrent because they want to bust seeders since they are redistributing

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.de
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      Yeah, living in Germany a OCH is just the way to go. Also it’s impossible to find decent content with German audio without having spent years seeding English stuff to get into a private tracker