hyper2What's your boomer trait?
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rustydrdMy boomer trait is that I frequently type in my password where the username is supposed to go. What’s yours?
My boomer trait is that I frequently type in my password where the username is supposed to go. What’s yours?
Menus at restaurants are to be printed not via a QR code and a shitty website.
To be fair, telling people to scan QR codes with their phones is a huge phishing vector. I’ve seen a few places with new stickers over the first one, which is very easy to do. Is it an updated menu? Or a scam page for a session stealer?
Related - I hate having that goddamned tablet at the table.
I’ll accept a tablet. But the first time it malfunctions, Miss Minimum Wage is standing at the table writing my order down on paper.
I FUCKING HATE QR CODE MENUS SO MUUUUCH!!!
If your wifi is bad or I just don’t want to wait to load a tiny goddamn webpage, I’m gone.
It’s really not hard to print a menu for a restaurant. The minimal amount of effort.
Or worse a PDF of the menu.
That is 500Mb+ because the ‘designer’ just stuffed the highest quality image in they could as a background on the whole thing
I’d be inclined to blame the restaurant for that one. The designer would normally be making it for print, in which case higher quality is better. If the restaurant wants a digital menu, they should ask for that.
I feel like this is probably common sense. The council of people over 20 have decided this months ago, and it should become law any minute now.
I’ve seen restaurant where you need to order on a smartphone. That’s just ridiculous
That’s just less tip for the server if I have to do their job for them.
I know a bar that does this but you can place orders for the table (your friends too and you can see their orders), call the waiter and pay the bill. I was impressed it was functional.
Ok, while we are on this one
If you have an online menu, why does it have M.P. instead of having the actual price?!?!
I get you can’t reprint the physical menu every day, but if you can update the point of sale computer, you can let me know how much it costs before I order it.
Mp? Mama points or multiplayer?
There is a psychological thing where removing the currency symbol from prices will make people more likely to pay more as they dont associatie the number with price.
I don’t want to have to create an account for everything. Even when account creation was required in the past, it would be enough to have a username and password (sometimes email address). Now often times there are so many unnecessary mandatory fields.
I like my devices and appliances to have one dedicated function and to do it well, without extra features, preferably available offline. Music is listened to on the mp3. The TV is only the display and never the content source.
I still prefer in-person interactions, jobs, lessons, and shopping to online ones (but support having online options for those who prefer them).
I genuinely think you should be able to get a job interview by walking into a business and introducing yourself with a firm handshake
writing a billion versions of my resume with matching cover letters and manually inputting all the information already on my resume into individual application forms and then getting rejected by AI screening scripts is making me wish i was dead
In person interaction is infinitely superior to anything done online.
“Meeting” people online just doesn’t hit the same, even with video calls.
Online interactions register a tiny bit above screaming at the TV in socialisation scale.
I’m always amazed at how personal everything still is in Germany. When there was a problem with a tax form, I got a call from a guy at the tax office who gave me his name and number so I was able to call him back with any other problems. When I had to get insurance for my mother in law’s car, I got a call from my MIL’s insurance to discuss a discount. Referred to surgeon? Doctor called surgeon, made an appointment for later that day and every day for the rest of the week.
I prefer calling people to texting them.
But I also don’t like being called.
I guess those are my two wolves.
You’re a living personification of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
I avoid smart home type shit
Okay we need to talk about this because in my opinion this hasnt become a boomer opinion that, as proven over and over again, is just a better and smarter decision. Most of things that are “smart” dont need to be. Why does a fridge, toaster, TV, matress or oven need to be connected to the internet??! For what?!
I’ve recently seen an add stating that, big brand washing machine have WiFi, we have quality and low pricesbut indeed, it’s getting crazy, and what happens when you change ISP?
I do not know what happens during an ISP change, but i do know that during the recent amazon server outage, these smart appliances stopped working. There was a case where someone with a smart matress (yeah apperently that exists), couldnt sleep because the matress was launched into a weird W shape position and heated itself up.
Mattresses?! Yo, they need to stop lol
As someone who is all-in on smart home kit, I tend to agree. Everyone who visits my home loves how it all works, but I have a strict rule that nothing is connected to the Internet: it’s either a local protocol (ZigBee, Matter) or connected to a local-only VLAN and is orchestrated by Home Assistant. It’s increasingly difficult to recommend products to people starting out that don’t involve some vague cloud service that can’t be relied on, and most people don’t want to go from zero to Home Assistant.
I miss physical buttons.
I prefer buying stuff in stores rather than online. I need to see it physically before you scam me.
Edit: my back hurts
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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..
We have a pride flag & an American flag. And sometimes a Jolly Roger. I agree, you cannot let the conservatives define themselves as the real Americans. I am here, I’m from here, wanting a better America is patriotic.
Good point. I think I need to pair it with something else to make clear what it means to me.
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I refuse to use overly smart devices. Yes, I have a few zigbee light switches and thermostats that are controlled by a local HomeAssistant installation but why would I want to by my fridge, dishwasher and toothbrush to be connected to the internet?
I don’t like “smart” features, I hate being forced to create accounts for everything, I want my data to only be local, I loathe smileys, I’d much rather talk to you face to face, I don’t know wtf is an app and why yours is just a wrapper to your webpage, pure html pages with terrible colour choices are fucking class, I say “hacker” to mean “hacker” and not “cracker”, I still don’t understand the success of tablets, and you look like a dick with your mini doomscroll machine on your wrist.
EDIT: fixing rage induced typos
Agree with everything here, plus I miss cars coming in a wide variety of colors instead of just inoffensive earthy and silver tones.
The kids’ new slang is fucking stupid. My son last night was excited about his skills in the game he was playing and told me he was " cracked " … cracked?
Man, like, I know we used " bad " to mean good, but come on. Cracked? Cracked is a crazy person. Cracked is how we pirated computer games. Cracked is your engine block after you poured cold water in an overheated car.
This is even stupider than " crashing out " meaning you threw a temper tantrum instead of falling asleep after an up all night acid trip.
I fucking hate it.
Bro you’re cooked.
So is crack
Actually I just remembered that, even some 20 years ago (possibly more) in France, we used to describe OP characters in videogames as “craqués”, which could mean “broken” or “cracked”, so I was not weirded out by this one, as the meaning is similar enough.
I wonder how “cracked” came to be and whether this is one of the only contemporary instance where some French slang may have influenced the English one somehow? Probably just a coincidence.
One day as I was leaving for work, my penultimate daughter said “mom, that fit shreds” and I was like, excuse me, WHAT did you call me?
“Your clothes are great!”
My outfit, it shreds. Apparently.
I don’t hate it but don’t remember being very slangy as a teenager.
Shreds is what Kerry King does on the guitar.
But “shreds” literally means clothes.
I swear gen-z just doesn’t know what certain things mean so they just make up a meaning on the fly.
It’s like they speak AI hallucination.
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.
20 years is ambitious lol
You’re probably right 😅
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.
Edit: And gen Alpha might be old people all over again in a different way. We’ll see.
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 expect institutions to protect me…i call my representative and senators and get platitudes…i keep calling…
I don’t know why I bother doing this, it just gets me signed up to their idiotic mailing list. Hooray democracy
Owning a house
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.
Don’t leave it too long. My mother law has only just started online banking and it’s been an absolute nightmare.
I often reference my younger years in the late 1900s about how It was this or that. “Back in my day in the late 1900s” kinda thing
I like “turn of the century”.
Last century…
Last millennium….
I’m constantly ragged on for still calling remote controls “the clicker”.
The reason they were called that is becaus a lot of early models use ultrasonic rather than infrared or radio so they made a loud clicking noise. My grandparents and aunts were familiar with those so they still called all remotes the clicker.
The thing is, growing up we had a Bang & Olufsen TV remote that had clicky buttons - really, very satisfyingly clicky - even though it used RF, but I just assumed all remotes were like that and that’s why they were called clickers.
I get annoyed when the price tags are too small to read
Being older that some people, which is apparently what 30% of people call a “boomer”
I’ve never used Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. I’m trying to get away from Facebook currently. I’ve successfully dumped Twitter, which I hardly used anyway. I only use YouTube because I can still block all ads, but if they ever force ads into my videos, I’ll drop it in an instant.
I’ve never cared for social media except as a way to stay in touch with friends and family, and maybe a way to meet new friends. But modern social media is just garbage content pumped into your feed constantly for clicks and reacts.
The only reason I haven’t let go of Facebook is because almost everyone I know is still there. If I dump it, I lose contact with 90% of my social group. I don’t really use Facebook anymore though, except to contact people.
EDIT: On a related note, I don’t believe children should have electronic devices. Maybe around 10 years old, they should be allowed to carry a locked down phone or something, so their parents can reach them, but they can’t browse the Internet or send photos to people, etc.
It was around 2010 or so when I first saw a friend hand their iPad to their 1-yr old to keep them distracted. That was a $600 device! Which was a lot of money for a personal electronic device back then.
As an IT professional who had to fix electronic devices all the time, I mentioned to my friend that a child probably shouldn’t have unsupervised access to an iPad, and they told me that’s why it has a thick padded case; a lesson they learned when their first iPad got cracked by the child. So the baby broke a $600 iPad and they bought another and handed it back to the kid?! Sheesh…
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?
Not alone.
Yeah, me too. I’m doing the smartphone equivalent of typing with two fingers.
Dear god there doesn’t have to be an app for everything.
Make a website and if you really want an app-like experience, make a damn PWA. No, I don’t want to download your terribly optimized, huge app to get a receipt…
I’m sorry, but to get my UK ETA for traveling for work I had to download an app that I will literally use 1 time in 2 years because it is valid for 2 years. It could easily be done with a PWA.
It is not more secure, it is less secure for the end user as apps have been caught many many more times stealing data and being malware compared to a web page where you generally have to download malware.
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.
If you are in a restaurant with your small children, actually be a parent to them and still giving them a tablet that they will watch at full fucking volume so they won’t bother you.
The one time I got called a boomer online was because I didn’t understand why artists have “eras” now instead of just albums. I think at the time an artist removed all posts from their socials and the comments are “new era coming soon?” And I asked if that just means they’re dropping a new album
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No idea. But it wasn’t Taylor Swift who I commented on. It was years ago now and I don’t remember who, but it was before the eras tour. I’m not sure when Taylor started using “eras” though
Stop recording everything in your life.
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I’m grumpy as fuck
Cooking only from scratch no factory products. Meat also only from the butcher and not supermarket. I know where the butcher gets his meat from. And wanting to learn how to do lots of things myself to be self reliant, less wastefull, enviorment friendly and its mostly cheaper. Dont need no smart toaster!
I’ve gone away from plastics and only use natural materials, perferable renewable. If something is damaged i can just repair it. Creating less waste, saving money, and the objects have a personal touch and story to it over time.
Leather instead of artificial leather
And yes i am building my PC case out of wood and glass if i need a new one
Nothing boomer about that. Boomers buy disposable razor cartridges and throw them away in extra thick trash bags. One use disposable artificially flavored microwavable TV dinner is their objective reality.
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.
Don’t lower AC below 68 during the Summer. Don’t crank the heat past 76 in the winter. We got a drafty house but it doesn’t need to be a summer atmosphere when it’s 20 degrees outside.
Also don’t run the water continuously while doing the dishes. That one was beat into me as a kid. Watching my brother and his baby momma leave the water running when they’re cleaning baby bottles turns me redder than a boiling lobster. Doesn’t help that Mom got us all together and said the water bill went up almost 100 since the baby was born. Took everything in my body to not point at those two like a dog snitching on his friend.
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Being able to see a different opinion without going completely insane.
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I thought dinasours were killed by a volcano instead of meteor for years.