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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Accurate username
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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So you mean there are laptop USB ports out there without current limiters?
I would want to check my PC’s ports, but I am not filthy rich, so I’ll just assume stuff is not current limited.Just got a notification about this from my kids school district in Northern CA.
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?”
Behold the next generation of voters.
Chromebooks are absolute garbage.
Most computers I have used over the last 15 years will disable USB power if you short out the port (working with electronics you tend to replicate the “sticking scissors into a USB port” with some regularity)
Pencil lead I am sure causes other issues though… it gets red hot and melts eventually
Is there a better option schools should be buying at a similar price point?
I would ask what value chromebooks add to education?
We are not teaching kids to do anything with them other than consume Google and Adobe services.
It’s no better than schools were when I was in school where we used windows and mainly learned to consume Microsoft products.
Welcome fellow codger. Back in my day we had books made from real paper and we loved in. Handing in an assignment meant writing by hand in actual paper and physically handing it to the teacher.
Everything is online. My kids have had very few physical textbooks in years. “Writing a paper” means typing into a n online document. “Handing in” an assignment means dropping some sort of file into an online folder. It’s not really a matter of learning anything, but that school resources are all online and every student needs access.
Also the online services are all “free”. Yeah they might be exploited by advertising but no kid pays and no kid is locked into a commercial vendor (Google at least doesn’t charge)
I’m not entirely sure, but I found having easy access to a computer helped me with school work. I imagine these level the field a bit since perhaps not all kids have easy access to computers otherwise?
Usually, organizations would want to manage all of then from a single interface and keep the devices locked down. Chromebooks usually won’t allow you to tamper with the OS in any way. (not easily, anyways)
I mean, you can’t have kids playing video games on a school-issued laptop in the back of the classroom, right?
Plus, only a large corporation could even provide the device support like repairs and stuff. Unless small companies can manage to provide support for schools around the country (or even the world, depending on how large they want to expand), for the mean time, its seems like Chromebooks have won. 🤷♂️
