this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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i was the go on the computer on in my family. nobody else seemed to have the patience for its mysteries and once one of us had the aptitude, they just had me do their fixes. after i moved out/away, they just bought new devices when the old ones weren't behaving. every new iteration of devices is more duplo and less lego.
now they all phone and tablet, so their children are all phone and tablet. i'm the eccentric.
phone and tablet are so easy, so they think they are experts now. when something doesn't behave properly, they buy the new one and send the old one back.
they legitimately have no concept of how the underlying technology functions. like i will be on vacation with them and they'll say, "you download whatever movies you want at home. just do that here so we can watch it on this TV" like at a hotel. to be clear, i never bring tech shit anywhere on vacation. i bring books to read. i get enough screen time at home and work. so no, i didn't bring a bunch of pirated material on a plane, or a seedbox or a jailbroken streaming device. my phone is pristine.
the warhammer 40k shit is close to real. like they know i can do computer, but think that means i am a cyborg that can just touch a screen and hack the gibson and that i was born with this capacity so i should just do it for them. no, i don't care how, that's boring. just do the thing you magic fucking elf so i can have my treat.
i also taught myself (by learning from/assisting friends and colleagues) to cook, bake, garden, do small engine repair, drive a manual transmission, be handy, do woodworking, and went to school/grad school in the biological sciences... none of these are areas where my family felt like investing any time or effort into. they have money so they find poor people to do everything for them.
i don't even really conceptualize myself as a computer person. i just tinker. i like to fix things rather than replace them. i like to understand how things work and tweak them to suit my needs/wants. i love to show people what i've learned, but far too many people (including my family) couldn't give half a fuck. just buy new and by the time its all set up with pretty colors, you'll forget what you were even getting frustrated about with the old one you returned.
all my friends and chosen-family are tinkerers. i don't know how to relate to the incurious.
The good thing is if it's not too hard to repair, you can get a lot of free shit from the "trash" that you've graciously offer to dispose for them.
that would be cool, but so much shit is designed to be fragile and unrepairable or at least repair-hostile, plus many companies offer to provide credit towards a replacement when the user sends the old device back to them.
so its hard with the type of e-shit they buy, but i admittedly drive a 25+ year old little gas-sipping car that my sibling dumped as "old" over 12 years ago. ive replaced headlights, tail lights, interior lights, fixed some wiring, regular maintenance, console shit, and had more done by the local mechanic over the decade but the thing is so reliable. theyve totaled and replaced 2 cars in that time.
and thats the problem. they don't know anything about this stuff, so they treat it like shit, and increasingly stuff is made crappier now so it doesn't survive their use.
so i save up and try to find "buy it once" type of items or just try to stretch the life of things until maybe something in this trash paradigm shifts enough for me to make it to being able to buy a BYD or some other grey market item that will last forever but doesn't hold my hand to help me get it.
too real.
i just talk out loud using terms from cyberpunk 20xx if I mess with anything outside the walled gardens of my family's laptops or even my own stuff now
using archive.is to get a round a paywall is just breach protocol.
i jack into every phone or tablet i touch.
installing an ad blocker and firefox on my mom's new laptop is netrunning. shit watch out for ICE (two meanings there lol)
it at least makes it a little fun i guess to live in the fantasy of a cyberpunk dystopia but at least we have cool implants and where gender affirming care is like having a wart removed
That's not Cyberpunk but Battle Network /lh
All of the terms you mentioned were originally coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (published in 1984 btw). I couldn't finish the story, but his prose is incredible as always, it's worth reading at least a chapter of it. He also coined the word cyberspace. I thought that was cool!
I was the one that helped my parents upgrade their latest computers and yeah it is pretty much this. Just being able to look into a problem and go "oh I should google this and see if someone else encountered this problem on a rando forum" makes you seem smart and in reality it's like nah I'm just curious especially since my job more or less suppresses that shit (I work in healthcare but not fun research healthcare). My parents aren't exactly rich but I have noticed them sliding from wanting to do things themselves into a more basic way of thinking that's common with boomers sadly that uses a lot more paid labor or dismissive attitude towards skill development. I enjoy a lot of art and tinkering, I was lucky enough to have been able to buy a trio of used thinkcentre minis last year with good storage before the RAMpocolypse went into full spring and have been playing with proxmox and creating home hosted services (mainly just for streaming movies, music and shows), I brought this up to my family on how much it can save money compared to having 5+ streaming services and it's like you've shown fire to a caveman.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: