I'm not talking about change, I'm talking about progress. Progress is not necessarily positive.

Best reply

No. Each generation was fucked in their own way, regardless of the two edges of the progress that they grew up with.

I'm not saying everything is lovely and we are at the peak of civilization. I'm saying that every form of progress comes with challenges and downsides, and this saying of "Next generation will be fucked" is a cognitive bias every generation has had for a pretty long time.

They also have positive sides.

I don't know if I expressed myself that poorly (I was pretty tired after all), but I did not mean at all that there are no downsides to any of these. I meant that despite these sayings, every generation so far has ended up as fine as the previous ones.

Are they really more fucked than generations who didn't have access to social media, internet, and video games? It seems to me that you are biased by the negative effects these had, and ignoring the positive ones.

Saying that they haven’t been fucked is reminiscent of my grandparents saying ADHD and Anxiety aren’t real.

How is that in any way comparable? I'm not saying the downsides of social media, internet, video games are not real, I'm saying "People growing up with X will be fucked" is a saying that every generation has been saying, ignoring the positive impacts. This is a cognitive bias in the likes of the rosy retrospection.

And a catchy one, but not really meaningful or correct.

The whole comment showcases how little they know about running a business. Marketing works. But of course we the consumer don't notice it works, because we think "Well I never click on an ad..." which also reflects on advertisement statistics.

But that's not the point of ads, at least not anymore. The point is you saw the brand. You saw what they do. Everytime you see the brand name or logo, everytime you see the product, your brain registers it. You might not realise it, but it does. And when the time comes you need a product like that, that's where the value of marketing shows. Because you'll browse, research, or whatever you do when you decide you need something. And you'll see the brand, and you'll see the name, and you'll think "Hmm I've heard of them before" and immediately place them higher in your mind than a competitor with 0 ad budget.

Of course! But sometimes, most often even, the optimization is not worth the development to get it. We're particularly talking about memory optimization here, and it is so cheap (or at least it was... ha) that it is not worth optimizing like we used to 25 years ago. Instead you use higher level languages with garbage collection or equivalents that are easier to maintain with and faster to implement new stuff with. You use algorithms that consume a fuck ton of memory for speed improvements. And as long as it is fast enough, you shouldn't over optimize.

Proper optimization these days is more of a hobby.

Now obviously some fields require a lot more optimization - embedded systems, for instance. Or simulations, which get a lot of value from being optimized as much as possible.

Programs that care about memory optimization will typically adapt to your setup, up to a point. More ram isnt going to make a program run any better if it has no use for it

In most cases, you either optimize the memory, or you optimize the speed of execution.

Having more memory means we can optimize the speed of execution.

Now, the side effect is that we can also afford to be slower to gain other benefits: Ease of development (come in javascript everywhere, or python) at the cost of speed, maintainability at the cost of speed, etc...

So, even though you dont always see performance gains as the years go, that doesn't mean shit devs, it means the priority is somewhere else. We have more complex software today than 20 years ago because we can afford not to focus on ram and speed optimization, and instead focus on maintainable, unoptimized code that does complex stuff.

Optimization is not everything.

Of course. Nothing is black and white. This was a real issue, but still abused by anti-EU propaganda to weaken us.

This is not helped by the Linux community who in a general rule are not particularly accommodating towards novices.

Luckily this trend is shifting! More and more linux distros oriented towards users new to linux, and helpful communities.