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As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.

I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.

Cryptocurrency or cryptography?

The former you don’t really need to understand fully to use, but the latter is vital and indeed brain-melting.

It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.

Why you gotta do me dirty like that?

It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.

Crap. I'm an elder now?

Yeah, let’s see you write a new autoexec.bat file with whatever text editor came on a DOS3.2 floppy that’s infected the the Stoned virus after you stupidly deleted autoexec.bat from your 386 by going to the library and checking out some books.

8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.

6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers

When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.

It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.

So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.

Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.

This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.

The elders had to rewind the movies after watching

If only the pace of technology was the only paradigm shift to have to worry about since the 80s/90s