- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
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I don’t get it. I was never this stupid as a kid.
Edit: thank you for explaining to me that many of you were that stupid. I guess I never hung around any of you.
Are you sure? Kids are pretty stupid.
I never intentionally destroyed expensive electronics to “try to impress” anyone in real life, let alone online (although that didn’t quite exist yet).
So, yeah, I’m sure.
When I was a kid schools didn’t have expensive electronics to destroy. But we sure drew a ton of penises in expensive textbooks.
I used to be a teacher in the 2010s. I remember boys having this ghost pepper challenge they would do that would put them in literal tears.
I never stopped them. Some just have to learn through experience that being an idiot to impress your buds isn’t going to result in a good time for you.
That’s, like, a normal logical one. It’s actually food, it’s spicy. It makes sense to compete to see who can handle the spicy food. This is independently invented every day.
Stealing faucets from public bathrooms? That’s not a normal logical one. That’s a devious lick, and something invented to be highly memetic and propelled by a highly optimized algorithm that incentivizes recency, novelty, and dopamine hacking. It even effectively had a brand name!
How about pooping on top of the toilet reservoir?
That’s actually harming someone, at least the janitor but it’s a hygiene issue and potential disease source. Yes it’s a stupid teenage prank but it does actual harm to someone else. Not cool (plus i don’t get why this would be funny: I’d groups it with the crayon eater and glue huffer , possibly complain to the school about special kids that need more assistance)
I defend that one, it’s just challenging yourself, no harm to anyone else or any property, almost no danger of medical harm. What’s the harm in letting them embarrass themselves for the right to claim they did something others couldn’t?
That’s why I let them do it. If it would have harmed them seriously or someone else I would have stopped it. But still doesn’t make it less stupid. They put themselves in legit pain due to peer pressure.
If anything it served a good lesson so they might be less likely to succumb to peer pressure on things which may cause real harm in the future.
If so, I never learned that lesson. When I first heard about the one chip challenge, I was seriously tempted to challenge my teens to see if they could beat me
I’ve done something similar and it was completely harmless and only served as good entertainment for everyone involved.
Same, but I had classmates who were.
You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
Most of us were differently stupid, only because we didn’t have access to other people’s stupid ideas.
My worst moment of stupidity was lighting off fireworks in a barn full of dry hay. That could have gone so much worse than just ruining some cheap disposable electronics
Ditto. I grew up helping fix VCR by replacing displaced bands and gears. I knew to be careful not the let the magic smoke come out. Bad genie!
Same. To me, messing with a computer seemed like a great way to be on the hook for destruction of school property.
(That said, I did once disable the USB inputs for a computer in the BIOS so the keyboard and mouse would stop working, as a practical joke.)
I guess I never hung around any of you.
Lol, good point. I often forget how I was put in advanced classes at an early age with other students who performed well. I need to consider that more in my adult life, that most of the adults I’m encountering were the people in the regular classes.
Some of my shenanigans definitely involved breaking electronics
I was. When the bell would ring and the halls were hectic I would put popcorn in the communal microwave and put like 20 min and leave and sometimes nobody would notice till it catches fire
I almost burned down the school a couple times
Hopefully you’re less of a piece of shit now
Woah
Dude I was like 12 and severely bullied haha I’m a grown up now with a mortgage and a job
Dude, Sounds like you were old enough to understand that almost burning down your school intentionally, multiple times, was bad. Bullies or not. I’m not sure why you’re taken aback by someone thinking a little arsonist in training isn’t a good kid.
It never burned down just ruined the microwave
You literally said you nearly burned the school down multiple times.
Exaggerated obviously. The school is made of brick it wasn’t going to burn if I tried
I was a victim of this prank in college. We were on a road trip, sleeping in a lounge at another school and were awakened by a fire alarm. Somehow while we were sleeping a toaster with broken spring appeared on a table, filled with bread we didn’t have. The room filled with smoke, the entire dorm was evacuated, the fire department came.
After the fact, I realized I was probably explaining the situation to the perpetrators, but I don’t know if my annoyance at stupid prank was still amusing. They did keep straight faces.
TikTok is poison for the mind.
It literally shrinks your brain with excessive usage.
Youthful rebellion transcends technology.
Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?
Desks are cheaper, and the hole only slightly impairs functionality.
I’m not so sure about cheaper. A quick google search shows the desks I used in school are priced around $400-$600 depending on type (different subjects had different desks), whereas the Chromebooks are around $250. I definitely agree with your second point, though.
Huh. Never realized chromebooks were priced that low.
Thanks for the correction.
Chromebooks are designed to be cheap and disposable. I’ve seen some as low as ~$100. That doesn’t mean you can’t get some very expensive ones, but since they basically only allow you to use Google and a select few apps from the play store, I don’t know why the expensive ones exist.
I used to have one as my primary work device for a few years. Honestly, it was surprisingly usable once you find online analogs for all typical things you do on a computer.
The biggest issue is you’d be using a free online service for some application, and then they start charging per month or the company goes under and you lose your work, so you have to keep finding new services and exporting your work to a common format that won’t disappear to a central file system like Drive diligently.
They are very cheap. We had to buy them ourselves for our kids, which at least gave choices. We settled n $400 because for the cost of the cheapest piece of shit laptop, we could get a high end Chromebook that ran circles around it: faster, much more durable, much lighter, multiple times battery life
i don’t know much about school desk but I can get a nice standing desk for $600. That is nuts.
Also I wonder if they sell replacement parts.
Industrial strength furniture that can withstand decades of abuse is not cheap.
I’m sure the schools don’t pay that much for the desks (or the Chromebooks) since they buy in bulk – those are just the prices I could find for single units. I was more trying to show the difference in price, rather than exactly how much the schools spend.
Not even that, but they are simple and repairable. I remember we had these sleigh-style desks (same idea except the seat was one-piece molded plastic) that were a total of four parts (two rails, the seat and the desk top) aside from bolts/hardware, and they had a graveyard of parts to replace pieces as needed. And those desk were tough as all hell.
Sounds great, but… unfortunately, it seems impossible to tilt on the chair with those, which I see as an essential part of going to school.
Also, the heights of the chair and table seem unadjustable, and it seems the pupil is seated too far away from the desktop to actually be comfortable.
What a useless piece of piss. Yeah, at least it’s repairable, but is such a stupid piece of faulty furniture even worth repairing?
Again, that was the style and not the exact ones we had, but yeah they were all fixed position, however ours weren’t too bad. I dunno, I don’t remember anyone complaining much, I was on the taller side of my peers and fit fine while I recall even the smaller kids were alright too. Id wager a big reason they were chosen was so kids couldn’t balance on the back legs, fall back and crack dome. They were great for cracking your back!
Also, most school laptops are old. Someone did this at my school and got charged (iirc) $175 since it was the really old kind
They also don’t release magic smoke. All my homies hate vandalizing desks.
Pen is less likely to start a fire and or create toxic smoke.
Drilling a hole in your desk doesn’t lead to cancer.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a computer programming class surrounded by clunky towers and desktops.
Suddenly, a loud popping, then one of the machines starts belching smoke like a budget fog machine. The kid using it is calmly moved to another station while the prof investigates.
Fifteen minutes later - pop. Smoke again.
Turns out the kid was jamming a paperclip into the power supply like he was playing Operation: Arson Edition.
That was his last day.
On the bright side, computers are a lot cheaper now - and kids are still dumb. So, maybe progress?
This seems like something they should have engineered out of a product primarily used by schoolchildren.
Engineer out the electricity?
You can design something to survive pin shorting.
They said 20 years ago. We literally had ‘use a paperclip to turn on the computer on the test bench’ as the standard practice. Designing things for people to do them wrong was very much not the style at the time.
I have the same memory, except the teacher would just pop his head out from the office and tell us to knock it off. Someone managed to draw a giant line of Axe spray across the electronics desk/counter things and made a massive fireball. Nobody really got in trouble in that class.
My cousin partially set his bedroom on fire doing something very similar with the foil from chewing gum. This was in the 1980s though so no one really cared, I’m pretty sure he just got shouted at.
We just pulled stupid pranks, like setting a repeating function with sound at the highest frequency in BASIC and locking the machines… on all the computers.
I remain utterly convinced that Tiktok is nothing but a chinese psyop experiment to see how far they can manipulate people into actions that would otherwise be prevented by our brains screaming in self preservation.
Has there ever been a “good” trend on tiktok? Every week its just another destructive thing that gullible idiots are being tricked into doing.
Soon as Chump took office the moderation flipped. It was open and handled well. Now if you call a corrupt politician an asshole you get a violation.
Talk about Palestine get a violation. Critical of the Chump regime get a violation.
Chow somehow inserted himself fully up Chumps ass on like Jan 22. TT hasn’t been the same since.
TikTok always favored Trump because China always favored Trump and TikTok is operated by Chinese Military directly out of Chinese servers which also store location data, contacts, text message history, and photo library of every device which has ever installed TikTok.
It’s a weapon to be used against the US now and since always.
[…] TikTok is operated by Chinese Military directly out of Chinese servers which also store location data, contacts, text message history, and photo library of every device which has ever installed TikTok.
It wouldn’t surprise me, but can you point me to a trustworthy source confirming that claim? Also, does the TikTok app refuse to work without those permissions granted (Location, Contacts, SMS, Photos and videos)?
Years ago it was reported on by Internet 2.0 which was shared by news organizations such as Huffington Post. Additionally there was this guy on Reddit 5 years ago who decompiled the app and shared all the results on a subreddit made specifically for it LINK HERE and he claims that the app is literally more malware-like data collection than actual video playing app, like the amount of install data is mostly just the data collection tools.
There were also House of Representatives intelligence briefings that went public but god those things are hard to sit through and read.
If TikTok didn’t want these stories swept under the rug and if there wasn’t truth to these stories they could have sued these people for defamation. But they didn’t, implying they would have lost the case handily and looked bad for it.
But at the very least, why wouldn’t the Chinese government do what they think can get away with?
Same reason they could be respecting human rights but choose not to.
People have just been doing dumb things for reputation since forever. We had the cinnamon challenge back in our day.
yeah, the cinnamon challenge was dumb… but it didnt involve mass destruction, psychotic behavor, or contaminating food\ in stores.
So its hardly comparable.
Also it wasnt Tiktok. Predates it, significantly.
Has there ever been a “good” trend on tiktok?
The ice bucket challenge was making rounds again. But there’s basically infinite harmless trends that nobody thinks of. The 100 men versus 1 gorilla thing is a trend and unless somebody jumps in a gorilla pen for Harambe 2.0 it’s been harmless.
Reminder that the ice bucket challenge is something that raises awareness and funds for ALS research.
My question was “was there ever a good trend from tiktok”
Icebucket challenge was from before tiktok existed.
So kinda proving my point.
I know, but it’s recently began again on TikTok after years of being a pretty dead trend.
I agree. I was exposed to a lot of leftist content on tiktok and it’s made me want to protest. Good thing you explained that it’s stupid.
TBF TikTok wants the US Government to fail regardless of who is in office at the time.
It’s like that meme from flippanarchy the other day.
Sees teenagers doing dumb shit, like they have since literally forever
“Is this a plot by the despotic orientals?!”
Fucking listen to yourself. I’m not on TikTok. I just don’t care for vertical short-form video as a concept. But even I can tell you that not every TikTok trend is teenagers being destructive idiots.
oh wow the .ml user is getting super offended over criticism of china/russia.
how original
Russia isn’t even a part of this discussion. I’m honestly more offended by your opinions of teenagers.
But that aside, it’s not about “defending” these States. It’s that your tone is dripping with orientalist racism
Sure buddy.
Lmao what a fucking racist loser! You can’t even respond with anything meaningful
Sure pal.
Accurate username
Obligatory “China hate” comment missing the forest for the trees.
I wish we lived in a world where they’re doing it because they don’t want locked-down toys issued by an evil corporation. But of course that’s not the reason.
P.S. proprietary software should be illegal in education. Full stop.
I suppose the question would be the alternative.
Note the devices actively discouraging offline save is a huge asset to schools, since kids screw up a lot, forget their devices and need loaners to get through a day and such. Extra bonus if the device can’t be too fun, to avoid them being overly used at home and get broken more.So Chromebook is desirable because they suck so much.
I was thinking of buying a Chromebook for travelling cause it’s cheap. I was very close to buying one, but someone told me about the world of used ThinkPads. I ended up buying a used ThinkPad with an AMD R7 4750U and I am so glad I did. It can run literally every game I want lol
It depends on your use case. A same cost Chromebook would be much lighter, faster with the things it can do, and over ten hour battery life. As always, a lot depends on cost: a school districts bulk $50 buy will always be horrible but you can get a much nicer “high end” Chromebook for a couple hundred
I don’t game much and considered a Chromebook for basic travel use, but went with a tablet.
faster with the things it can do
What do you mean by this? Surely you don’t mean actual performance, right?
I don’t game a ton but having the performance to be able to do so is really nice IMO. The battery life is great as well (like 6+ hours depending on what you do etc), and being able to put any OS I want on it is huge too. I also like how durable it is too.
I feel like if I got a tablet, I’d want a keyboard, and then a mouse too. That’d still be best for portability though, most likely, but it’s kind of nice having a full laptop experience.
Actually I do. The thing is a Chromebook can’t really do things you normally associate with performance, like gaming. However I’ve found decent ones to have a snappier ui than low to medium windows laptops
That’s the thing with a tablet: what’s your use case?
I’m not a fan of the keyboard and mice: they work well enough but now you have a bunch of pieces to keep track of and you need a table or desk. If I need a keyboard I prefer a laptop/chromebook form factor because it’s just one piece to deal with and you can use it on your lap
I realized that I spend way too much time e consuming media, but with light typing, such as this reply. a tablet is great and I’m perfectly happy writing on screen. Actually I’m on my phone at the moment. I do use my phone for most things, so maybe I think of the tablet as a larger phone screen for times I don’t need to be as portable
That’s why I bought a fold, not a Samsung fan but I didn’t want to buy a separate tablet and I really like the sweet spot this phone offers.
99% of the time I’m just using the front screen, but when I want or need that extra real estate (gaming, admining my homelab remotely, partially watching a yt video while doing chores) it’s really nice that it’s the same device and I can continue exactly what I’m doing on a bigger screen.
ThinkPads generally aren’t low to medium Windows laptops though, they’re literally several thousand dollar machines. It’s just they age incredibly well, so they end up on the used market at a heavily discounted price after a while. I’d be surprised if a Chromebook outperformed a ThinkPad when it comes to actual performance.
Yeah that’s a good point about keyboard and mice, that’s kind of why I like having an actual standalone laptop. For me I feel like a tablet isn’t as portable as a phone, but it’s also not as useful as a standalone laptop, so it’s kind of hard for me to find a use case for it.
I adore my T-480! I put Linux Mint on it, and it does everything I need it to do, with basically no fuss, and no garbage from Microsoft or Google
P.S. proprietary software should be illegal in education. Full stop.
🙌
It’d be a crying shame if the students were required to complete the school year with physical books and a notebook.
Normally that’s exactly what they would do if enough students destroyed their computers to blow through the loaners. The frustrating thing is this is happening right when schools are set to do state testing and state testing is mostly online now. This requires every student in the building to have a device at the same time. Normally all the loaners would be for kids who forgot theirs that day.
Fuck chromebooks anyways, Google shouldn’t be allowed to steal so much information about our youth directly from the devices they use at school. They should be using laptops with Linux installed on them, preferably Pop!OS to preserve the kids privacy.
I don’t condone damaging school property, although I think it’s a lesser evil to Google’s privacy practices on Chromebooks.
I agree but I’m not sure why specifically popos though
Pop!OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a custom GNOME desktop.
It is designed to have a minimal amount of clutter on the desktop without distractions in order to allow the user to focus on work.
This distro was also designed with security and privacy in mind.
So students can more easily focus on their work while also being more secure and private while using an easy to use interface, I know it’s not the only one but its a good one!
Linux mint or something fedora based are also good choices. Lots of flavors out here in the linux world.
Yeah, no worry about the lithium fires. Fuck those chromebooks.
I’m with you, but that’s not the reason these kids are doing this. It’s because they are idiots.
They should be using Debian, the universal operating system.
Debian works too, it really doesn’t matter as long as its not windows and google Chromebook crap.
Linux distros aren’t all made the same, but they’re all pretty much the same in spirit. Tux is universal.
I personally think that Pop!OS is a user friendly distro that would be an easy introduction to Linux for students while also focusing on privacy and security with less clutter.
If this were an unbiased and honest article; then it would read “Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for social clout.” The subtle message, in this article, is TikTok = bad, which is illogical because events such as this will occur regardless of platform or even lack of a platform. It will ALWAYS happen. The question is how to mitigate these events as much as possible, because it’s impossible to completely eradicate “kids doing X for social clout.” It’s a part of learning and being human.
Yes but without tik tok this is a kid or two being stupid and charged a couple hundred at one school. I think we had 3 kids today at school destroy their laptops.
You can replace TikTok with any social media platform. That’s why this argument is illogical in that it blames TikTok.
I don’t remember Friendster causing mayhem like this.
Lemmy seems to not be spreading challenges either.
You have a point, but TikTok has a unique power in this moment.
And if the students did see it on TikTok, then it’s factual, specific, reporting.
TikTok is at the forefront of designing algorithms that optimize for this sort of situation. Reddit isn’t. YouTube does not appear to be. They have their own issues, but it’s not exactly this sort of optimization.
VRChat is another social network not optimized around incentivizing this mimicking and reposting behavior.
Snapchat is not built around this sort of algorithm either.
If it had happened on Friendster; then it would have been because of the specific user(s) creating and posting such content, not because of the platform. To say platform = bad because a user or users post negatively affecting content is a sweeping generalization which does not reflect reality, meaning that the negative connotation of TikTok = bad is still incorrect. The users which created and posted such content, in this case, are to blame.
If students see such content on social media; then the first thought should not be: platform bad; it should be: who posted it, and for what reason(s).
It can be an issue with the people starting these challenges while also being an issue with the way tiktok works with sharing these copycat videos on the platforms algorithm.
I don’t think “omg tiktok bad” but in the case of these dumb challenges, it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying tiktok is bad, rather than “but china.”
it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying TikTok is bad
Yes, and this article reinforces that idea, regardless of whether or not TikTok = bad is correct, which is my point.
Yeah, could have been called “kids are learning how circuits work thanks to TikTok trend” and suddenly the story has a whole other meaning
I was dealing with this all last week till finally a kid did it and his battery melted the computer in my classroom. He was told multiple times not to do it so now he is getting charged with possible arson. I have dealt with him doing stupid shit for the past 3 years and now finally the admins do something because it was so outlandishly stupid they have to. I am so glad I am retiring in less than 20 days.
I’m sorry you did such good for the world but found only trash children to educate.
How about the “graduate from highschool challenge”?
Felony conviction any % speed run.
Google didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
To be fair, I don’t really see why they should. Chances are they didn’t factor in that level of stupidity when designing those things.
It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.
It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.
That’s another thing I was wondering about; Google used to design their own Chromebooks, but those always were the premium options and way too expensive for school use.
Parents and psychiatrists have been trying to wrap their heads around how some of the more dangerous Internet trends take off, especially among kids.
Kids are dumb and they do dumb things. There’s not really that much to wrap one’s head around.
And it’s not even like Internet trends are a new thing. TikTok has simply offered a platform that’s extra predatory about it.
I can imagine that TikTok has been for Internet trends, to what slot machines did for gambling.
Yeah, like, first time?
The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. All of this with an strong implicit suggestion to try it yourself. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.
The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.
I sure was, when I was one.
As I age I find myself feeling more and more like the cool step-dad or uncle.
Y’know I hate everything Chromebooks stand for. “You get 'em, kid. Now how about we get some pizza?”
Why throw the kids in the slammer? So they can eventually come back out as hardened criminals and contribute to the recidivism statistics, further circling society down the drain because they were betrayed by the corporations that injected their explosive products into our tax-funded school systems? They should give the TikTok kids full STEM scholarships for exposing these dangerous design flaws!
Hold the Chromebook manufacturer liable for the unsafe hardware design flaw with no overcurrent protection, hold the school liable for recklessly issuing these dangerous laptops that cheaped out on safety features, and hold Google liable for neglecting power handling in their Chromebook software! Get the CPSC on the phone and get every single Flamebook recalled across the nation!
It’s outrageous, egregious, preposterous!
But how else will google sell overpriced computers to schools despite lack of funding and force children to growing up with google products?
Isn’t the entire premise of Chromebooks is that they are extremely cheap compared to having actual laptops or iPads?
