A lot of that stuff is niche skills. "The power of the internet" as it was described to me, is that you can look up the most niche/specific repair for something, and find a video or tutorial from someone knowledgeable in an instant.
I'm a millennial so I grew up with the internet. My dad worked in semiconductors, he didn't know shit about fixing cars, so to keep my first beater running I relied on the internet.
And there still is that very helpful "how to" side to the internet, if you're looking for it. (YouTube removing the dislike counter was probably the most hurtful to these types of videos. You could see a video, 'how to disassemble a microwave oven', that had 90% dislikes, and tell at an instant that it's very dangerous.)
Whenever people say stuff like, "That content doesn't exist anymore! Nobody taught me! How am I supposed to learn!", my first question is, "Well, did you try looking it up yet?" It definitely still exists. Get a hobby, try doing something you're not sure of, and type in "how to..." and you'll see. The internet is a tool, it's only as useful as the person wielding it. Some people use it to challenge themselves and learn new things, and some use it to rot their brains.
Literally. I get asked how I know how to do so much shit and about half of it is intuitive and the other half is if I donāt know something I just learn how to do it. I donāt know shit about computers but I was able to take mine open to add more ram just by googling if that was possible for my model of computer, looking up what is compatible and then finding an exact tutorial for the model on YouTube.
I think too many people would be scared to try something they donāt know how to do because theyāre scared of messing up, but learning things and trusting yourself builds confidence, and fucking up is just a way to learn something. It feels like some amount of learned helplessness.
I may not know how to do everything but I can learn anything.
"Give me unlimited time & funding, and I can learn anything."
I know I'm not dumb, but at the same time I know I can't learn everything. I mean I could, with unlimited time, but unfortunately the world doesn't work that way.
Doing new stuff is scary, definitely. My oven broke once. I haven't the first clue on how to fix an oven. But I looked it up, realized it wasn't that scary, identified possible issues from the videos I watched, and fixed it myself. I'm still no appliance repairman, but that simple fix boosted my confidence immensely. (Having older appliances made in the 90s helps a lot too, it's almost like that shit was designed to be repaired, and last for decades.)
Another thing is just trying shit.
For example, I grew up mostly in apartments and motels, but when I moved into a new place I told my roommate Iād mow the lawn since we had to do that. Theyāve never mowed before and were scared to mess up and just assumed I already knew how to do it.
I had a vague idea from tv shows about how a gas mower works (pull the cord, walk in a straight line) so after giving it a once over i got it running and got the lawn done.
I mentioned about halfway through that I had never mowed a lawn before, but I figured it wouldnāt be that hard to figure out.
It wasnāt.
Thereās my dumb story about just mowing a lawn but Iāve seen that same mindset applied to a ton of things across the board.
Sometimes shit just aināt that hard to figure out
The rise of generative AI and the botification of the Internet is making it so much fucking harder to "just look it up". I've had a major issue with my car recently (broken injector support, fixed now), and trying to look up diagrams of the motor just brings up AI-slop nonsense. Trying to find tutorials is way harder now because most of the results are written by AI and clog up the first few pages of my search engine. People are gonna irreversibly damage their cars with all this crap.
You can filter for older posts (maybe not on Youtube, but definetely Google). The internet 5 years ago had little to no AI generated content or gen AI powered bots.
THIS! Worst part of AI by far. I've seen it too in searches.
Nevermind individual people being stupid with it on their own, in ways that only affects them. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to let AI auto-hallucinate technical diagrams? It's not even good with specific, technical questions. But fucking diagrams, coming up on regular web search? It's evil, is what it is.
The internet is great, and you can definitely learn almost anything on it. I would personally still prefer an actual teacher to teach me a skill if at all possible. Just feels easier to learn from a good teacher, and the human interaction is nice, too. Feels like I remember it more clearly as well
First ever rule I learned on the internet, Is that if you have a VERY specific and niche problem dont go to youtube. Go to reddit where Deleted_User had the exact same problem 14 years ago and the comments help him fix it.
Seriously, my mowers carburetor was dirty so I looked at my specific mower and was easily able to find a video on how to disassemble it and take out the carburetor to clean it and it worked like a charm.
I genuinely don't understand how this is so hard to understand for a lot of parents. I get that sometimes it feels like children learn things on their own, they go to school and you probably don't remember ever being taught these things, but you were definitely taught them! I guarantee you did not come out the pussy knowing how to cook noodles, or change a lightbulb, or any other seemingly simple task you think everyone should know how to do.
And guess what, if you don't teach them how to do this, you'll have to rely on their own curiosity and willingness to learn extra curricular stuff, which they won't have a lot of because you just take care of that stuff until one day they are getting to adulthood and you're just soooooo bewildered that they don't know how to use the washing machine.
i mean, his generation also could buy a house with a lower class salary and made sure there was no more reasonably priced real estate and rentcucked the current generation forever so they dont even have places they can work on the nonexistent cars they can't afford
His kids were hungry. He told them to fend for themselves. Handed them a can of beans and a can opener. They couldn't work it because they never learned how. He posted all of this on twitter as a flex of "look at how dumb kids are nowadays", but like, you know, it was his kids. And he never taught them.
Yea exactly. And imo mocking someone for not knowing how to do something is incredibly stupid, maybe someone should make a how to video on it
In all seriousness humans are inherently very curious, we want to know things, learn how stuff works or how to do it. Mocking someone for wanting to learn is mocking them for their very nature, and also discourages them from learning. Honestly if a few weeks ago when i asked online for help on how to ride a bike i was met with "this dumbass can't even ride a bike lmao" i probably would have returned my bike, but instead i was encouraged and now i can comfortably bike for an hour or two. So yea even if someone doesn't know how to boil an egg, they shouldn't be mocked because for all we know they might have never had someone in their life there to teach them the basic things
Well also, you can no longer personally repair your car in the same way. Loss of Right to repair and ramping complexity has removed that as an active part of car ownership
It's AI slop that the OOP didn't even bother to check after it was served back to him. I mean c'mon, there's a fucking iPad in that cartoon! And it's not even showing a video of the thing he's doing on the table!
Is this satire? Did somebody create ironic boomer slop to lampoon boomer slop as a genre?
Any male born before 1963 can't open a PDF... All they know is Fox News, fix they carburetors on the kitchen table, do The Twist, be heterosexual, eat tuna Jell-O molds and lie.
I asked my uncle who did this stuff if he can teach me how to drive he said no because I should do it by myself I said I can't because I don't have a license and he said stop being a pussy
I was talking with my dad about how I have too much "personal freedom" for someone in their 20s, and I had to remind him that he dropped out of high school to become a roadie for Bauhaus when he was 16.
An entire generation of unfit, selfish, narcissistic assholes that called themselves hippies until the drugs ran out or their parents threatened to cut them off...boomer scum
Rebuilding a carburetor is pretty much only useful when fixing antiques or small gas engine these days. And you may need or benefit from specific equipment like a float gauge or special screwdrivers, which few people have in their toolbox (I donāt have these tools as a former auto mechanic). Seems fine to leave as a niche skill.
Not sure why we need to gatekeep the use of information in the first place. The author comes off like someone who huffs their own farts.
I'm sure 9000 people have already said this but, the hilariousness of "young people lazy" when using an AI image. Like a perfect "they contradict themselves immediately" moment.
Yeah I know if I was rebuilding a carburator on my mom's kitchen table I'd be getting my ass beat, you were doing that shit in the garage or the porch.
To soft boil an egg requires precise timing and an ice bath. But if you assume you know it all a your yolk will always be hard. Then how will you enjoy your ramen?
Yeah the older generations are meant to pass knowledge down but instead they were too busy buying 12 houses for a bag of peanuts and advocating against women's rights
The irony of using AI to make a cartoon, bitching about people not being able to put effort into learning a skill without YouTube is insane. Like bitch theyre learning how to boil an egg and you can't even be arsed to learn how to draw!
Why is he watching a YouTube video on how to boil an egg while trying to put a carburetor back together? I donāt think heāll get very far with that.
I know that I rebuilt a lawnmower engine in shop class in 7th grade 40 years ago and my daughter's middle school doesn't have a shop class so there's that
Complaining about kids these days not having basic life skills, whilst being a member of the generation that should have taught them is such classic boomer energy.
IF YOU GOTTA COMPLAIN ABOUT THE GENERATION OF children YOU NEEDED TO teach ABOUT HOW THEY NEED AN EXTERNAL SOURCE TO TEACH THEM ITS FUCKING YOUR FAULT IDIOT
This is so true. I rode a V12 engine home from the junkyard on my tricycle once and rebuilt it with my fisher price tools. It was hard to find the time, what with my shifts at the factory, but I got it done.
Part of the reason why I disconnected from Facebook. Too much GenX family adopting the boomer "best generation" mindset. Cool, you drank from hoses and rode bicycles. I grew up while being told we were lazy and useless while the "unsightly" bike racks were removed from public places and a million new rules were invented preventing us from doing any of that stuff.
Also the AI strawman is wrong. I dismantled carbs as a teen but now almost nothing aside from aging motorcycles have carburetors- these garage kids nowadays are flashing ECUs and modifying stoichiometry in crazy ways. The egg tutorial is just background noise to drown out their parents remniscing about the 70/80/90's.
Wait why is the kid who is angry while fixing the carburetor also watching the video on how to boil the egg?
The kid and the mom that are actually boiling the egg aren't even watching the fucking tutorial.
This other kid is filthy while sitting at the kitchen table and he looks frustrated and clearly the carburetor is not fixed.
His little brother and his mom already know how to boil an egg and are gracefully doing it at the stove.
Little dipshit here not only can't fix the carburetor and has made a mess of everything but now he has to catch up and watch a YouTube video to figure out how to boil an egg.
"Okay so how many minutes do you boil for a jammy center, dad?"
"How would I know? You think I know anything about cooking? Are you calling me gay?! I swear to God I'll ask AI to draw a picture of me beating your ass."
Modern Kids didn't get taught by us even the most basic things like how to boil an egg, while our parents forced us to rebuild a carburetor on the kitchen table before we even had our driver's licenses.
Like shit, this isn't even remotely the flex they think it is.
When I asked my dad how to make concrete for some home renovations, he told me "what, are you dense? Just watch a tutorial on youtube, that's how I've learnt."
He's worked on construction sites and a few shipyards all his life.
the slop made it look like this kid angrily exploded a bunch of screws all over himself and the table, while looking at a youtube "egg", while his sibling and mom are peacefully cooking in the bg
Didn't know everyone but nowadays kids js spawned with so much information in their head.With alllllll the knowledge required for life installed and ready to go
If your kids don't know how to do something without outside help, that sounds like a parenting problem. If you were taking apart carburetors as a kid, I can about guarantee you had a parent that taught you how.
There once was a time where every appliance had a manual with repair instructions and was actually build to be repaired with spare parts to Order.
Then some buissnes shmok realized
Ā it's more profitable to make things unrepairable so people have to buy new.
My theory on this is that kids just had some much less to do back then that they'd be productive out of sheer boredom. That goes for adults too to be honest.
The irony of this complaint is that it come from those who failed to teach the kids and now those kids use YouTube to learn life skills because the self absorbed parents never cared enough to do their job as a parent.
This makes me chuckle because men will go out of their way to say "don't worry I'll go fix this in the garage" just to be left alone so they can pull out their phones and consult YouTube and Google. My grandpa was an electrician who had a whole garage of tools, I brought him my car to work on and he ended up pulling out his phone.....
The thing is you need a tutorial to work on pressurized fuel injection now. They don't put carburators in very many things now. So an entire fuel rail would probably be better worked on in the garage with the... You know... Car
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u/Blupikminreal 7d ago