this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
66 points (92.3% liked)

Technology

59675 readers
4666 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

TL;DR (by GPT-4 πŸ€–):

  • The author reminisces about life before the ubiquity of cellphones and the internet, particularly focusing on the after-work hours.
  • The concept of being unreachable after work hours is alien to younger generations who are constantly connected and expected to be available at all times.
  • The author and his peers recall the days when work emails didn't exist, and work communication was restricted to work hours only.
  • The article highlights how the growth of remote work and the pandemic have blurred the boundaries between work and personal time, with a survey suggesting that U.S. workers were logged into their employers' networks 11 hours a day in 2021, up from 8 hours pre-pandemic.
  • The author interviews people of his age group about their experiences around 2002, when they were about 27 years old. They recall waking up just in time for work, commuting with newspapers or books, and using work phones for personal calls.
  • After work, they would engage in activities like swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone or via work email, and people were less likely to flake as there was no option to send a last-minute text.
  • They recall the days of watching whatever was on TV, renting movies from Blockbuster, and playing games on their desktop computers.
  • The article concludes with a reflection on how different life was before the internet and cellphones became a constant presence in our lives.
top 34 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] V4uban 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for the GPT-4 summary!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No problem! It does a really good job (compared to 3.5 which often hallucinates).

[–] V4uban 4 points 1 year ago

Definitely. Also, as a suggestion, have you considered posting this to a Technology community with more people, such as https://kbin.social/m/technology ?

[–] dep 2 points 1 year ago

What prompt did you use to get the summary? Always looking for tricks to get better article summarizations

[–] nivenkos 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Watching TV and playing video games hasn't changed that much. Except that people rarely play video games together in person now sadly.

[–] V4uban 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

"Let's play a round of slappers only!"

"Okay, but nobody is playing as Odd Job!"

[–] CannaVet 2 points 1 year ago

I hate having to cut out one friend who was my biggest local mp buddy. Oh well dudes a fuckin nutter lol.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not only that, but matchmaking being a "required" part of every remotely-competitive online game has destroyed any sense of community that can be built within the game.

Before matchmaking took over everything you'd have dedicated servers run by groups of users who actively fostered a community. They would manage admin/mod duties on their server and so you could find a server with a like-minded user base.

It actually has interesting parallels to the enshittification of sites like Reddit. Before there was more of a focus on small groups and communities that self-regulated (dedicated servers / subreddits) and over time it has shifted to an algo-driven feed of content (feed of default subs / matchmaking).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been a single player JRPG dude since the NES days. I had never been a social gamer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I have a friend who tried to get me to join him and his online buddies on every new big multiplayer game. Out of the literally dozens he recommended to me, I bought maybe two, and those two have a great single player campaign.

I've always preferred single player games, and I feel like I don't waste money like I would on whatever the current hot MMO is. MMOs go stale or the community changes, and then you will probably never play it again. Single player games just largely don't go that way and are repayable.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Who else remembers sitting on the toilet reading the back of your shampoo bottle for the millionth time bored out of your mind? hahaha.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Old magazines were always a nice surprise, even if at some level I knew they were coated with invisible poo particles.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"People with no boundaries or employment rights have no idea what we do after work" - In Europe we have a right to disconnect, everyone I know is more than able to use it. This is not a technology issue, this is a rights and culture issue.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

In the USA, work culture means losing rights. Those of us that have pushed back against illegal behavior in the workplace are pretty quickly blackballed.

Trust me, we know workers have more rights in Europe. There's little-to-nothing we can do to enact those sorts of protections here. The rich have us by the throat.

[–] CthulhuDreamer 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Seems like a typical "everything was better when I was young and had energy" article. It is easy to remember good old times fondly and fail to acknowledge that young people might have same fun just slightly differently and that times might be harder for younger generation as wages are not that great and higher education is more competitive and demanding.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

We are so much busier than earlier generations ever were, but pay has stagnated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I can see pros and cons either way. Dnd is a blessing, not just for work but for those drunk-dialing friends.

[–] Oodleskaboodles 13 points 1 year ago

I give employers my Google voice number and turn off notifications. Keep the tab up during work hours and don't have to worry about being reached after work.

[–] emptyother 9 points 1 year ago

swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone

Oh, was that what everyone else where doing while I sat home in front of a book/offline computer?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In 2002 I was working for an Internet company (Genuity), had a cell phone in my pocket at all times (this one: https://mobile-review.com/phonemodels/sonyericsson/image/t68i-1.jpg), and had cable broadband (1.5MBs) at home. When I bought my first house (condo) at the time I specifically selected a location that had high speed Internet because being without it would be unbearable! I remember telling the real estate agent that I would only buy a house that had high speed Internet and she looked at me like I was crazy! I'm sure she was thinking, "Like that's important. What a weirdo!"

I guess what I'm saying here is that the people mentioned in the article were out-of-touch scrubs! It wasn't as bad as they described. My friends and I would all chat with each other online to coordinate and we'd show up at various events/locations (people's houses, concerts, theaters, etc) with tickets already paid for (usually over the phone though because not every venue had it but TicketMaster let you buy tickets over the phone since like the 1980s).

It definitely did feel like a VIP experience a lot of the time showing up with your group of friends (all in our early 20s)--bypassing the often enormous ticket line--then proceeding to walk up to the bouncer/ticket people and just giving them our names which they would verify by checking a printed list that was attached to a clipboard with a white sheet of blank paper over it to hide the names (so people couldn't just glance at it and say, "that's me!"). A few years after 2002 such tickets finally started getting bar codes and it became a bit less, "VIP" hehe.

What I'm saying was that all these things and more were available to the people in the article and they weren't expensive "luxury" features that only the rich could afford. They were available and advertised extensively for everyone to use. It's just that these folks in the article were just like soooooo many people at the time and just refused to explore or try things out on the Internet. They saw URLs (and AOL keywords, LOL) in ads and it probably didn't even register in their brains. They were probably also afraid to buy things online (a very, very common attitude back then).

These people were the early Gen Xers that would be dumbfounded when you'd ask them for their address to get to their party/event/whatever and you'd have to interrupt them when they'd start rambling off complicated landmark-based directions, "No... I just need the address." (because you were going to just print out directions using MapQuest). Then you'd be the only person to show up to the party on time because you were the only one that didn't have to navigate via landmarks ("Go three stoplights and make a right after the Sunoco station...").

Edit: I just remembered that in 2002 I was subscribed to Netflix's 3-DVD plan. DVD players were not luxury items by then. My girlfriend and I had watched so many movies thanks to Netflix we were had long since run out of good things to watch and ended up getting DVDs like, "Jack Frost" LOL!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Ugh, more "get off my lawn" articles. There are tons of young workers who will 100% ignore their employer the second they clock out. Anyone who has the option to do so, and complains about constantly being pinged, has no boundaries and frankly deserves it.

Your employer doesn't own you, you can turn off your notifications.

[–] mjhagen 6 points 1 year ago

I'm probably weird, but my life more or less looks exactly the same as it did 25 years ago. I program for work and as a hobby and the lines are as blurry as they can get.

[–] CrunkBy 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The only thing I can agree with on this article is that. yes. I too had a "social life" outside of my first job when I was younger. I went to work at min wage job. Came home at 5. Dropped $100 every Friday on the kitchen table (because I had to pay rent to my mother), and immediately went back out to who knows where.

The thing is that was the only thing I had to worry about back then. I did not have a car. I could not rent an apartment because at 18 in 1995 how the hell are you gonna have Credit in the first place out of High School? And I'm from the glorious chest-beating, so proud to be neglected by my parents, Gen-X.

Other than that, I didn't read the whole article because I agree with everyone else's sentiment. I for one am happy a lot of those things are gone today.

A lot of these old farts like to point their fingers at youth today because they didn't immediately move out of their parents home at 18... well I wonder why that is?

[–] ulu_mulu 4 points 1 year ago

That resonates lol, I still remember when cellphones didn't exist, what a more "peaceful" world it was :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would agree that the modern environment no longer has that "3rd Place" that previous generations got to enjoy.

There is a virtual realm we can interact with, but it doesn't share the same benefits as a physical place to go outside of work and home that you can socialize and interact with. My assumption is the costs of doing so now days has made it near impossible to consistently "go out".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The stuff the article talks about doing didn't disappear. Bars are still a thing. Clubs for hobbies are still a thing. Not much is that different from whatever time they're thinking of in terms of options. Cost is an issue but that is more of a problem with stagnant wages and people not really wanting to be outside or do cheap things.

People being flaky or comparing there activities to social media could be a problem. I also think some people have gotten into a bad habit of feeling like there is always something better to be doing. Or they feel like can find someone else to do stuff with in a few swaps or texts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It absolutely does. Just not in suburbia where a lot of Americans live.

[–] Bonzo 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Why does this post have chat gpt summary but not others? Love the feature, how can I implement it more?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The people who are working 11 hours either don't know how to turn off or would be taking their work home anyway. How common this free labor is depends on the company/industry. People do have to learn how to setup a good balance or they will likely burn out.

I don't think the issue is new. Certainly not limited to younger people nor only a thing because of work from home became more common. And then you have shit like "grind culture", no it isn't as fun as it might sound. The whole workaholic thing has been around for a long time. People use to refer to stuff like this as the "rat race".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Pro tip: If you're just a regular office worker and your employer messages you or sends you an email after work hours just don't respond to it until you're back at work. If your boss gives you shit about it that's the best-case scenario! Why? Because then you can demand that they document in writing that they expect you to work when you're not at work and you can send that shit right to HR (who's job is to protect the company from idiots like your boss). It could be a promotion opportunity to fill the void left by your fired boss 😁.

Always demand everything in writing. An email or instant message is fine! Bosses know that making (young) people work after hours is sketchy AF and will suddenly decide that it's way too risky to abuse you anymore. This isn't the type of thing that'll hurt your career! If it were that's not the type of place you want to be working at anyway.

Remember folks: The most sure-fire way to make more money and get a promotion is to go work somewhere else. "Rising up the ranks" just doesn't happen anymore and raises will never be as much as you'd get going to work somewhere else.

Big companies really don't like managers pushing people around, making them do more work than they're paid for. Not only is it a potential very expensive lawsuit (and really bad PR) it's also an indicator that they've got an employee (your boss/manager) that likes to bend the rules and potentially do illegal shit. If they start digging around they often find the very same people who abuse their employees are the ones that embezzle money, make false expense claims, form secret partnerships with their friends outside of work (i.e. corrupt vendor selection), etc.

Small companies are a different story and medium-sized companies often just haven't learned such lessons yet or are just such terrible employers that they just expect extremely high turnover (and take advantage of it by abusing people for as long as they can).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This mostly gibes with my experience around that time, when I was in college, working for a year, then back to school. It's a bit over-nostalgic though, and some of those "fond memories" were a goddamn pain in the ass.

  • I had to attend so many garbage events because in a fit of peer pressure, I'd agreed to to something I knew I didn't want to do, but people would give me shit if I didn't show.
  • The fact that you never knew where your friends and family were or how to reach them is not always a blessing, sometimes it's just stressful. As a parent now, YAY for constant connection.
  • Do you know how amazing it is that I have a little glass brick in my pocket that has a GPS enabled atlas, all the basic factoids that anyone ever wondered about, and a video tutorial for almost any task that more than one hundred people have had to perform? It's amazing.
  • Maybe this is just a privilege afforded to me as an X-ennial old man (with energy much more on the "X" side of that divide), but if you are willing to turn your notifications off, fewer people than you think are assholes who actually expect a response before morning.
  • Moviephone sucked. It sucked a lot.
  • And this is maybe the big one: for all the negatives of social media and "THE INTERNET" (insert menacing brass notes), the ability to break up the monoculture and for people who felt isolated to find their voice has been amazing. Imagine if you're the only gay kid in your town, or you're just struggling to connect with your peers, or even something as simple as you see a show or a niche sport on late-night cable and you want to talk about it with someone. The ability to connect has had some pretty unsettling knock-on effects, but people overlook the sense of alienation that many dealt with before we had it.

In the end, people and the world are what they are. You work to change them to the best of your ability, and you exist in the meantime. Stuff like this is fun to recall for the people who remember it, and I assume it's amusing for the younger folks to imagine how it worked, but in the end, it's always folks trying to get by and live life and find a way to fit in somewhere, and you just hope that the new technology solves two problems for every one that it creates.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@sisyphean Matt: You’d be late or they’d be late and you’d just talk to whoever was there. It was a whole skill, taking to a person you don’t know.

This is a pretty interesting quote. Being a younger person myself, waiting around for people is awkward if its busy. I've noticed older people are better at stuff like this.

Everything can be so focused and exact nowadays. Interesting read.

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί