MudMan

I swear, the online AI haters think AI is so much cooler than I do.

I get crap for being on the fence about it or for saying it’s useful for some stuff, on interesting on principle. They’re out there being exactly as bullish about its capabilities as the shills who invested retirement money in Open AI and are terrified it’ll all blow away.

That is explicitly not what I’m saying.

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

I mean, I don’t know how much clearer that can be about not saying what you say I’m saying. Yes, you can bundle people consistently on how old they were during the dotcom bubble or 9/11 or whatever else. That’s the same thing you’re saying. I mean, very clearly what you’re saying.

For the record, that doesn’t mean everybody will react to those events the same way. 9/11 didn’t matter as much in some places of the world as it did in the US or in the countries unlucky enough to be on the reciving end of whatever the hell the US was doing immediately after.

But insofar people of a certain age experience history and culture together, it’s a global-enough situation to tag the people that lived that period together. Under no circumstance are Polish or Romanian people who were young adults in the 80s and 90s “Gen X”, though. That makes zero sense relative to the reference Gen X is going for. They weren’t the aimless drones of capitalism seeking meaning in a lifelong peacetime, they were in “holy shit, stuff is going down” revolutionary mode in a way the US Gen Xers weren’t even in living memory of at all. That’s not Gen X. That’s the opposite of Gen X.

OK, but… you just said the same thing I said.

To reiterate:

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

Is the experience of each of those bundles of people homogeneous worldwide or even in any arbitrary slice of “Western world” you want to pick? Absolutely not.

Or, to go back to the very first post:

I’m annoyed by this on principle and across the board, but I do want to point out that “Greatest Generation” all the way to “Baby Boomers” makes zero sense in most of the planet. You can sooooort of get away with Millenials to Alpha because the Internet is a bad idea, and Gen X at least applies to probably most of Europe as well as the US and Canada, although it’s still weird across the board.

But everything before that? Super specifically US-only.

So… is there a point you’re making in addition to mine? Because you sound like you disagree, but what you wrote doesn’t seem to disagree.

Is it? I mean, to start with the obvious, not every Western country was on the same side of WW2, and not all of them had the fighting happen in their territory, which means not all of them were levelled. And not all of them were Marshall planned after. And of course not all of them were on the same bloc during the Cold War. Gonna guess the Polish have a slightly different recollection of the 70s and 80s. Which then means for a whole bunch of post-soviet countries the 90s played out very differently, too. And of course the 90s probably had a slightly different flavour if you were in or around former Yugoslavia. And that’s Europe, don’t get me started on South America, which is fairly Western, last I checked. I don’t even need to start thinking about Africa or Asia.

Post-9/11, maaaybe. Before? You’re glossing over so much stuff it’s hard to even conceptualize it.

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

Is the experience of each of those bundles of people homogeneous worldwide or even in any arbitrary slice of “Western world” you want to pick? Absolutely not.

Right. That’s my point, though. Depending on where you are in the world and how joined at the hip with the US you are culturally this particular set will start making sense at a different point. In some cases not at all.

Where I am millenials are the first that definitely sync up. Up until GenX we are in a completely different set. I bet in other parts of the world even with how fully online we all are even then it doesn’t click.

See, I kinda see it the other way. Generational demarcations used to be cultural and thus geographically determined back when different places had different media. Now we all have the same garbage social media, so since the 2000s it makes sense that we’re all on the same boat made of crap and hate.

For example, my parents had a moon landing, but it looked, sounded different and meant very different things. Also for example, I had no idea what Oregon Trail was or what it was about until the Internet told me it was a staple of US computer classes. If you think about it for a few seconds it may be no surprise that my equivalent was some combination of drawing dicks in LOGO, Defender of the Crown and Saboteur II.

We have local names for people born in the late 70s to mid 90s, too. After that we just use the US-designed universal names, though.

Did you just… figure out thinking?

Yeah, as people insist on new names for “the youths” that they can use to write derisive articles it becomes almost impossible to match any of these arbitrary things.

By most metrics “Gen Z” is coming up on their thirties, but people still want to flag them as “the kids”, where the Gen A batch that’s still in school still aren’t the target, so you end up with this weird ongoing reclassification. It’s all kinda dumb. At the end of the day if you think about it anything since just pre-Millenials is all the same bundle of anxiety-ridden online natives that can’t afford a house. They’re all just at different stages of that process. The big cutoffs happened in the 00s with the one-two punch of the post 9/11 US imperialist nonsense and the big mortgage crisis. Everything after is just fallout.

That’s one of the places where it landed. And certainly the stupidest sounding one.

I didn’t make up “Gen Y”, it was a thing you’d hear at the time, it just didn’t stick. Iliza Shlesinger has a comedy special called Elder Millennial, which is also a thing I’ve heard elsewhere. She was born in 83.

It’s all a dumb mess, I guess is my point.

You are telling me Germans consider people born in the first 20 years of the 20th century to be “the greatest generation”?

Holy crap, you may hang out with the wrong Germans. Did they seem particularly excited about the recent NRW elections?

Why the hell do you feel the need to slippery slope this? Isn’t the actual thing that we’re actually dealing with bad enough? Do you really need the disproportionate Facebook meme or you just don’t care?

I’m annoyed by this on principle and across the board, but I do want to point out that “Greatest Generation” all the way to “Baby Boomers” makes zero sense in most of the planet. You can sooooort of get away with Millenials to Alpha because the Internet is a bad idea, and Gen X at least applies to probably most of Europe as well as the US and Canada, although it’s still weird across the board.

But everything before that? Super specifically US-only.

You’re getting super stuck on that part, which comes after “never been in a fight in my life”. Feeling insecure about your masculinity when mouthing off to parents in public or something?

For the record, nope. Turned around to face the guy, who immediately stopped shouting at the lady. I don’t think anybody noticed. Never done something like that before, I expect to never have to do it again.

He was being a dick about it, though. So… there’s that.

Whether you perceive a difference or not doesn’t change that it’s not happening to you. It’s happening to the kid, first of all. If anything it’s happening to whatever parents or relatives are with the kid.

You’re just there, being a dick about it.

I get that it’s an edgy shitty joke, but man, do I get a rise of messing with people who act all uppity when kids and dogs refuse to behave like 50 year old middle managers.

I’m talking James Gunn levels of “this thing will do damage to your eyeballs and I’ll cheer for it”. I’m talking Gremlins “we’ll shoot an old lady out of a mobility aid like it’s a rocket launcher and I’ll cheer for it”. I’ve never been in a fight in my life but the one time I squared up with a guy it was for aggressively talking shit to a mom about a loud child in public transportation and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

It bothers me how Generation X has been stretched out over time. It should be more people in their 60s. Coupland is 63. If you’re 55 now you were barely in high school when his book about late 20s-early 30s people came out.

Intellectually I understand why we gave up on the “Gen Y” stuff once the idea of Millenials surfaced, but I’m in that gradient where during my lifetime I went through waves of being post-Gen X, then a millenial, then all the way back to Gen X, then sorta millenial again once it became OK for millenials to have kids and jobs and be old and stuff.

Generational designators are bullshit anyway, but if you’re in that gap between X and millenials, or between millenials and Gen Z, now going through that exact process, they become annoying bullshit.

Yeah, it’s way more customizable than it seems to be, both visually and functionally. Definitely dig into it, it’s worth it even just in the amount of time it’ll save you menuing on each restart.

There are even ways to switch to Windows from within Linux and bypass having to mess with the menu (the other way around is a different story). Like a lot of Linux things, what’s surfaced, what’s approachable and what’s possible are very different things.

I don’t know what the Mint default is off the top of my head, but you may be interested to know you can set up GRUB to default to your last booted OS as opposed to a fixed one every time.

It can be useful for updating through reboots or when you spend several days at a time on the same OS but you go back and forth every so often.

If you already have it set up that way, carry on. If not, you can find out how with a quick online search. It’s one of those things that really feel like they should be a menu toggle but Linux still defaults to adding some line of text in some config file because GUIs are for cowards.

Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.

To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little, too late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

I mean too little, too late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.

That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.