News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Stop Using Discord. Parent comment

Re:Stop Using Discord by joenot443 on Friday May 31, 2024 @08:57AM (#40534567)
My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn when the other cool kids are playing with LLMs and Flutter and WebGL. Obviously _we’d_ prefer if they learned to setup vBulletin and do it our way, but when Discord is free and all their friends are on it, it’s a tough sell to the other nerds.

It’s not a “kids these days” grumble, just an honest observation that some computing skills are slowly being lost generationally, and it’s hard to say that anyone’s really to blame.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stop Using Discord by hammyhavoc on Friday May 31, 2024 @11:15AM (#40536262)
I don't know if skills are actually being lost. Skilled kids were always an anomaly when it came to tech on a meaningful level.

You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available.

I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot".

The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user.

What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stop Using Discord by rrrrrrrrrrrryan on Saturday June 01, 2024 @08:35PM (#40550377)
Those kids are building Discord bots now.
[ Parent | on HN ]