Yup, I'm also curious at times...
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Technology
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How do people who know how to repair gadgets and laser cut foam deal with things that lie outside their areas of expertise? Car trouble, plumbing problems, heating broken? No-one is able to do all of these, because each requires a certain amount of time and financial investment to get to the point of being able to fix most problems.
When you can't fix it yourself you find someone who can. This may involve paying them to fix it. Fixing it may mean just buying a new one.
How do nornal people survive? I have the answers!
Power bank stopped charging? Throw it out and buy a newer better one for $15.
Face seal aging? Buy a new one for $25.
Garage door opener not pairing to your fob? Play around with it a little and if that doesn't work, contact support and make it their problem.
I'd argue it's faster, cheaper, and easier to solve all of those issues the "normie" way. Maybe with the exception of the garage door. The equipment to do this costs, in some cases, a lot of money and even enthusiasts are unlikely to have the spare parts necessary to do a lot of this stuff just laying around.
Like, in the battery example, the author replaces the actual battery part and just keeps the shell. It's really not that different from just buying a new one if you're replacing basically the only part of the gadget. And how many people have a working (I'm guessing) 10k mAh battery just lying around that isn't already in a powerbank?
Tinkering and fixing stuff like this is a really great hobby. It's fun, you get to learn new things, play with cool tools, and be less wasteful. However, let's not pretend like it's necessary for survival or even the optimal way to handle most situations.
They aren't? The whole point of AI is to use technology to rationalize severing the social contract at a basic level in order to normalize hurting people for being out of the loop. Techies in their naive smugness refused a leftist analysis of their industry, failed to unionize and now the rest of us are paying the price.
Whether it is using AI/Azure to aid in the Palestinian genocide with Microsoft, using AI and tech to mass manipulate people for profit and rightwing violent ideology such as all the major corporate social media companies, using AI to mass deny life saving healthcare and murder people with United Healthcare, preying upon tech illiterate people with the ads industry or any number of things, trust us, we aren't thankful for techies.
What y'all are doing is triage because your ignorance and willful naivety blinded you, to say "you are helping" is smugly missing the context.
????
Perhaps I'm too dumb to understand it, but I don't see how your comment is relevant to the article.
Probably because you are still refusing to look at this any way other than a naive techy who sees everything as a series of individual technical problems and cannot grasp the systematic, social forces shaping the technology and data collection around them to violent and dysfunctional ends.
This article laments about a number of things that have systematic, definable origins that society has warned tech industry workers about... as if they were simply indecipherable expressions of a chaotic universe full of people who aren't as smart as techies that always for some reason desperately need their help to accomplish basic things with the tools from the industry they work in.
There is a crisis of individuality in the politics of US tech workers, and it is far past nauseating, it is offensive to all the people being hurt right now by the tools these people are involved with building.
For techies this article is the equivalent of a humorous XKCD about losing time on the weekends helping normies, and honestly that kind of vibe is fucking insufferable at this late date. Wake up you fools, you are hurting people. Unionize NOW or you continue to be complicit in this no matter what you lament about in your words or how many family members you help in your off time set up their device.
What the fuck are you talking about?
This isn't about AI, or Palestine, or healthcare.
This isn't about AI, or Palestine, or healthcare.
No, actually it is inseperable from those things that is my point.
That is not a point you have made. You just started talking about those things. You didn't relate them to the post in any way
By having one of us as family and/or neighbor and/or friend
I'm very reluctant helping people out, especially with computers. It stems from my mother, I used to fix her computer, and whenever it wasn't working afterwards "it ins't working right since you did somethin on it". At some point I told my (and my wife's) parents that they'd be better of with an Ipad. They just work, and when they don't, I don't have a clue since I don't know shit about them.
Don’t feed the bears. I usually fade into the background when my non tech circle brings up a tech issue they are having. I know them well, they have the wherewithal to figure it out.
Why? They have also demonstrated a learned helplessness about tech that is insatiable. It’s better for them and me both to let them flop about until they find the resolve to solve it for themselves. After all, that’s how I became an ‘expert’.
LMFAO, this other 🧵 is describing exactly the mentality I am talking about that deters folks from doomsday preparing.
Modern society is designed to be complex enough to force people to become helpless, so they ask others help instead of fixing and learning how to fix stuff themselves. Once you see how super complex life is, the veil of oppression starts to reveal itself.
Folks need to start saying:
I want to learn how to fix this myself, how can I help?
for things to change.