Ha I was actually just thinking that we need to teach them as I was reading this. We had to go through a shit ton of trial and error. God forbid if he started with something like LimeWire. Viruses... Viruses everywhere
I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn't have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.
I've seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.
Ahh the halcyon days of downloading one song from a private FTP server with upload ratios, found by Lycos FTP search. Over a modem, natch, so it took about 50 minutes...and that's when your mom didn't kick you off the internet so she could make a call.
I only learned to torrent because my dad used to when I was a kid. But these days I use XDCC instead because it's just so much more convenient. Though to be fair most of my friends who are also GenZ probably don't know how to do that either.
Gen-z here - I know how to torrent lol. It's insane how tech illiterate a lot of my friends are, even in my IT classes don't know what HTTPS is or what an ethernet cable is so... yeah
Feels weird being known as "the guy who's an expert at computers" despite being a noob
I think the core of the problem is that back in the bad old days, things needed to be tuned up a bit before they would work right and there was a marked lack of standardization. Now, not only do our devices work right out of the box, bit they also have little quality of life stuff as well. I haven't bought a battery-powered device in years that wasn't partially charged when I got it, and most devices come preinstalled with all the basic utility apps.
Gen-z too, finding can be somewhat hard but the mega threads help. Torrenting itself is easy of course. Just get transmission or any other FOSS client, put on a proper VPN and good to go.
Fellow Zer here, my elective IT class had grading done depending on how well you could use the computer:
'A' if you could do everything perfectly well, 'B' if you needed some help from the instructor, 'C' if you needed a lot of help, 'D' if you couldn't even get past the login screen on the windows machine.
I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.
My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.
It's absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It's also real scary to think since I'd assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren't properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we're too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
It's also real scary to think since I'd assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren't properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we're too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:
This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They've been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this "hacker culture" which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn't afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.
Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.
And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it'll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.
I feel this, especially since I'm more into networking, but my work is more generalist.
I open my mouth about networking and people's eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can't really understand what I'm talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that's networking focused and they're basically speaking Latin for me.
There's so much that I don't know. I get the broad strokes of things but I'm hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.
I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won't take me seriously as a networker and won't even sit down for an interview.
I'm good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I've been at just don't care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN.... Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.
I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I've raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn't able to be managed remotely.
Next step, modify your resume to say you did networking at previous positions. Don't lie, just focus on the network stuff. I'm assuming you did that too.
Well, I'm probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I'll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I'll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.
I'll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.
I'm pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I've worked, plus it's work from home, so I'm pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I've gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I'm not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I've seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD... So I'm around $20k/yr shy.
I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I'm aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I'd be pretty happy with $73k USD.
I feel like if you know how to look up the answer and can follow a guide to apply 5 steps, you are probably more capable than 80% of the people on this planet.
Depends on what you're looking for, really. I'm unsure about the rules regarding sharing specific sites, but if you DM me, I can throw a few recommendations your way.
Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?
I'm sure there are actually good private trackers, but I've found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I've found
I mean some of them are less good than others, and the economies on them vary. Most decent ones these days though use a points system where you earn points based on how long you've seeded torrents. You use points to purchase upload credit which artificially raises your ratio. Not all of them require you to have accounts on other trackers, some of them have an interview process that after you've passed you can create an account, I'm not sure if this is what you mean by "open/effectively open". These are still private trackers, and from them you can get access to invite only trackers. There's several avenues you can take to get onto different private trackers, it's not hard it just takes time (and seeding!)
I got in one private tracker and I like that system a lot. I seed my torrents for years because I don't do a ton of very popular stuff, and I like some older shows. Like The Mentalist season packs on TG are at like a 30:1 for me because not many others seed them.
However, the private tracker doesn't use standard naming which sometimes fucks up searches and *arr, also, there are barely any seeders or leechers so a lot of media is hit or miss both downloading and uploading. Of the 50 or so things that I downloaded since I got on, 1 has a positive seed ratio, so thank mods for duration seed points...
have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition
They give you a bit of leniency after you first sign up. All that share ratio means is that you leave your computer seeding for a while after your download finishes, and when your torrent client has uploaded the file you got from them to e.g. 5 other people you can stop seeding it. They're asking you to give back, is all. If you download a 3GB file from other people in the swarm and then immediately close the torrent before anybody can download it from you, after enough repeat times of you doing that, they'll stop letting you download new files.
Trackers cannot read, and are not interested in, the number at the bottom of your torrent client, or your history with other trackers. They just care that you seed their torrents after you've finished downloading them so other people can download them too.
I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it's infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don't want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I'll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)
I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that'd be fine, but from my experience most "entry level" private ones don't, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it's hard to build up a ratio.
The system isn't closed though. More people join the tracker all the time, and that's to say nothing of the people who already have access to the tracker downloading a new file.
I don't think you understand how it works... An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that's because ratios are nonlinear - I can't recall the mean type but it's the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn't matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That's what I meant by a closed system.
An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.
Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?
1337 is fine for most stuff, I think. Private trackers start to make sense when you want to automate downloading shows and movies but if you just wanna pirate some game, you'll probably find it on 1337 with a ton of seeders anyways.
