[bertil]

I stand with everyone on Hacker News in admiration for young’uns sticking it to the man and learning about command-line secret power.

_However_, I’m a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI, with the caveat that it’s widely used for pr0n)

That doesn’t feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don’t tell me: that’s one shred of innocence I want to keep) or, inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who were saying that if you didn’t pay for CDs, you would end up empowering “pedonazis”. That felt ridiculous at the time. It feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web principles.

I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can’t just stand in the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.

[npteljes]

>hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Not really, porn and gore were integral parts of the internet even "back then". Rotten.com launched in 1996 for example, Ogrish at 2000. Eating disorders are also fluorishing in the current era, on TikTok for one, but I remember the pro-ana websites from my youth as well, distributed on private websites, because creating a website or blog was easy. It was also very easy to find porn, even if specific websites were banned on your network, because it was just everywhere. Peer to peer networks also happily distrubuted whatever, let that be gore, hardcore porn, or any illegal thing you can think of, including abuse material.

I do agree about your conclusion though. Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a lot, and a lot of the horrors are created specifically when these are missing from one's life.

[killjoywashere]

> Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a lot

The first time I got called to the office was as a freshman in high school for fixing the 4 computer lab computers another kid had borked. That was Windows 3.0 and there was no network. The vice principal sat us down together and said the other kid was headed for a life of trouble and should be more like me. It was his considered opinion that I would go on to solve computer problems for a living and get paid $100,000. Honestly, I was way more impressed with him than myself. Unfortunately I went to medical school and never got to solve other people's computer problems for money. I mean, I solve computer problems for people, I get paid, but those two events are thoroughly decoupled.

I now have a 17 year old and a 21 year old. I think they are more aware of their maturity level than I was. They sit around and think of what they are probably capable of doing. Which is a level of introspection I rarely have even today.

[npteljes]

This kind of introspection sounds like a good thing to me too.

[bertil]

Technically, I was talking about the late 80s, early 90s. But Buffy did start in 1997, so I guess I was reading about Warhammer alternative rules at the time? Probably not very healthy either.

[knodi123]

> In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

lol. In my time, hacking the school network meant you could access programs that belonged to other schools, or print to their printers. And that was pretty much it.

[Taywee]

In my time, hacking the school network meant you could put cracked versions of Starcraft and Diablo II into the public drives and turn CAD class into a LAN party.

[rlmineing_dead]

Modern day applocker bypasses are fun, dump the registry, look for path exceptions you can write too, profit

[beepbooptheory]

The kids will figure it out like you did. Maybe the terrain has changed, but there was noone to tell you whats what back in the day anyway, so why worry? Or rather, emotional maturity can go both ways here: jumping to a paternalistic mindset will rob you the wisdom the kids themselves can give. I think its natural and probably right to feel concern, but don't overcorrect it into presumption or into a false idea that you can just give to kids what you had to learn/discover yourself.

[XionXIV]

This really is not something that I have thought about very much as they very likely have phones where they are able to view all of the same content, anyway.

[bertil]

My mobile provider has an adult filter that has a strong opinion about the maturity level of Cory Doctorow, so I trip upon that porn filter more often than I’d like. I never asked to have it, but it was there. I tried to take it off once because it felt ridiculous and violently ironic to have to put stuff on Pocket to read about the latest fuck-up in copyright. Still, I literally couldn’t figure out to play the real-life role-playing game of saying the right thing each one of to the unending stream of customer service reps on the phone.

Wouldn’t parents set up something similar when they first get a contract for their kids? If I had mine on by default, wouldn’t they insist on having one?

[rlmineing_dead]

Why would you watch porn at school

[jonfw]

Kids are dumb

[XionXIV]

???

[rlmineing_dead]

Um, we didn't create the exploit to look at porn, that should be blocked on the network level anyways

[bertil]

I guess people making and hacking those things are smarter than me. That’s a good thing.