• 3 hours

    Both: The climate crisis and mass extinction of other species must be someone else’s responsibility.

  • 6 hours

    As a millennial I have no idea how to block ads on my phone, and therefore refuse to use the internet on the damn thing.

  • I desktop that shit. Laptop is fine for everyday, but anything over 500 bucks has to be desktop.

    • I mainframe that shit. Desktop is fine for casual use, but plane tickets are just too important to trust to anything but a multi-million dollar supercomputer I access remotely over an encrypted line from a dumb terminal at a secure location

      • 12 hours

        Absolute bollocks. I don’t trust any computer for that that isn’t in the room with me

        • Neither do I. I sneak into the datacenter, put an EMP to the mainframe’s head, and ask it how I get from Miami to Denver for less than $300.

      • I send my highly trained executive agent for that shit. My supercomputer is fine for casual use, but plane tickets are just to important to trust to anything that isn’t my trusted right hand ninja assassin / secretary.

  • 10 hours

    Gen z aren’t buying shit in this economy.

  • Meanwhile, travel agents are coming back. Mostly because the travel industry weaponized all the tech against us commoners.

    • I was agonising over booking a long, complicated trip I did last year, and a friend who works organising corporate stuff told me to shut up and go to a travel agent.

      A nice fellow just rattled away at his keyboard and came up with an itinerary that was cheaper than anything I’d come up with myself. No charge - they scrape from the airlines I guess - and I got a free ballpoint. After decades of planning my own travel, I am converted.

  • 21 hours

    A big purchase needs a big screen!

    When you can plug your phone into your workstations USB c dock and you have DeX or another equivalent, the lines start to get blurry.

      • 21 hours

        Its true! One needs a couple windows and/or several tabs with different things open. Itineraries, transport options, budget stuff, its a research project.

        • Yeah you can’t compare prices when using a phone. On my computer I can have a dozen tabs open searching different flight options to compare and find the cheapest/ most convenient option

    • 19 hours

      Thank you. Plane tickets, like doing my taxes, is a PC task, not a phone one…

    • I still wouldn’t enter any of my credentials on a phone though. Don’t even trust it enough to open my main email account on it.

      • 21 hours

        I’m tech literate enough to understand potential points of failure and that level of security. I do, however, have an earnest question: how is this more secure when your information still exists on ~public servers in the form of credit assessors and the like? All of those credentials that you enter into your secure machine still go through the same pipes to the same bank that is ultimately still a target using AWS for all their internet-banking needs. So again, I understand limiting the points of failure, but then why not use graphene or another similar OS and keep convenience and security?

        I mean no offense and am definitely not trying to convince you to change your habits, I am just genuinely curious as to your reasoning. Cheers, friend.

      • Exactly. I want all my protective software in play. The big screen is preferable too.

      • 21 hours

        Thats interesting. Do you have a smartphone but dont use the app store?

          • 20 hours

            Wish I could have graphene on my phone. I had an android tablet that I didnt log into and had F droid and Aurora and I was able to do everything with it. Changed my view on google play services.

      • 20 hours

        Yes. Right now there are significant functional differences. In the future, maybe. Human Interface capabilities are always going to be the primary limiting factor, and as of now there are plenty of people who still much prefer actual tactile responses to computing to verify interaction. Physical buttons very clearly respond to inputs - except of course when they don’t for [insert IT guy sigh here].

        Plus, I can tell you for sure that Linux ARM distros are functional, yes, but don’t compare to what an optimized PC distro or a dedicated mobile OS on ARM is like. My RaspberryPi with its fully optimized OS and ARM processor can’t handle the same thing my phone can do in the background while I browse several tabs on the internet. Is it the RAM? I dunno, my laptop had the same RAM as the Pi until a couple months ago and still could multitask better. Play a game and watch a video and have multiple tabs open for the game. The Pi struggles on certain websites and that’s all I ask of it.

        Just because it exists doesn’t mean it is ready for primetime.

        • Upvoted for truth, I was going with the idea of a monitor out from a phone, aka DeX (a horrible Samsung proprietary version of something that could be from a Linux phone, a free desktop, I believe it can happen, but expressed poorly) which has heaps of potential for turning phones into general computers. The next PC, in your pocket, and re-purpose a whole lot of e-waste, perhaps through LLM decomposition.

          Right now I’m exploring SBC versions of the idea, nothing dramatic, give me books to read, music to listen to and whatever else a free OS has to offer and ideally a 5. something inch OLED or maybe a drawable eInk (currently remote desktop to my phone) screen and I’ll be happy, especially if I plugged it together myself.

          Not at all prime time, not sure I even want that. But fair criticism if it was, idea may have some resonance?

          And no, you couldn’t have guessed from one sentence. Seems we’re mostly aligned?

          • 15 hours

            Look up Project Ada, I believe it was. Google/Motorola had a functional mockup of basically a Lego kit for phones. Abandoned for lack of general interest.

            If you want it DIY, then DIY. The vast majority of people want something that just works. There’s a slice of that who care about the specifics, the nitty gritty, the full capability and functionality. I’m somewhere in that surprisingly broad range of a slice. You are too, it seems, but even then my willingness to tolerate jank with the amount of processing power available to literal children these days is extremely limited. My 8-bit NES ran better with only a few spare kilobytes and you mean to tell me actual gigabytes isn’t enough room to do flying cartwheels? Sorry, fuck outta here.

            Proof of concept is one thing and I can run with that, but daily driver? I need more.

      • 20 hours

        I dunno. Someone should give me a linux phone so I can find out. Ive been searching forever :(

  • 19 hours

    The number of Gen Z students who write term papers on their phones (not even tablets!) is alarming to me. It’s like 30% of them in my class. Their thoughts aren’t necessarily bad, and I grade them seriously, but yikes-- the formatting!

    • Touch screens are just fundamentally a shit way to efficiently do any sort of text input. Not to mention the screen size and OS tooling is completely insufficient for any kind of research.

      Little screen for little info. Big screen for big info.

      • OS tooling

        I was once writing an assignment last minute. On a full train. Where I could only use my phone while standing.
        Not the best experience, but using Vim and LaTeX in Termux is pretty doable.
        Although in that case I didn’t have LaTeX directly on my phone, instead I SSHd into my computer, and then rsynced PDFs to preview the document. But TeX Live is even in the Termux repository, if you want. After all, you can SSH into your phone just the same.

        Termux is awesome. I sometimes even use it to off-load stuff I don’t want my computer to be choking with, such as large downloads, video encoding or compressing large files with high xz settings.
        It’s just a battery-powered highly portable passively cooled computer.
        But of course, a full-fledged Linux phone would be even better.

        • VIM ON TERMUX?? This person is totally nuts idk if i should pay deep respect or suggest to got in a psychiatric hospital

          • 10 hours

            I have to do it occasionally when SSHing home and I can confirm anyone willingly doing it should go to a psychiatric hospital

      • Blue tooth keyboards are a wonder with phones, the apps are still a headache, but I’ve made due when finals were coming up and my computer shit the bed.

    • 14 hours

      I assume the students in my class are all gen z, they all have laptops as far as I can tell.

      • 13 hours

        To be honest, so do mine. The giveaway is when the formatting is horrible and it’s a . notes file, plus I’ve asked them about it. My current guess is a lack of typing skill, but that’s concerning none the less.

    • 17 hours

      Its been so long since I’ve flown that I think my butthole has tightened up too much to handle the cavity searches.

      • Last flight I was on transferred through China and the security guy cupped my balls with a determination that no one’s done since the guy who checked me after my powdered mashed potatoes set off the bomb detectors in the US.

      • 13 hours

        I literally haven’t flown since before 9/11. It would be a huge culture shock for me

  • 13 hours

    Gen Z with big hands, fuck typing on phone… Took me a good two minutes to write this.

  • 20 hours

    My friend arranged a mortgage on his phone. He is a traitor to our generation!

  • 20 hours

    Yeah, it usually involves typing. And it’s not like you’re buying plane tickets while already on the way to the airport so it usually can wait a few hours and you don’t have to torture yourself by typing anything on a phone.

    • you don’t have to torture yourself by typing anything on a phone.

      I think that’s part of the generational divide, gen z / alpha can type better on their phones then on a keyboard. Also probably very reliant on auto correct.