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Hey! As a 46 year old I am offended by this - I am definitely not Gen X. We’re a weird X/Millenial hybrid I’ve seen referred to as Xennials.

Also F ZScaler - we use this officially sanctioned MTM attack at work and all it does is make my job harder.


Impressive how many people posting here love the gen [XYZ] categories and feel offended when they are not put in the correctly labeled drawer. ...Shouldn't we move on from this and obsess about something more fun?


The label unless you grew up in the Anglo sphere is also especially meaningless, yet certain people insist in labelling the rest of us :) I got to enjoy Phreaking well into the era most others already had ADSL…


you were born in 1980 you are gen x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X by definition.


But also:

> Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation.

> Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials


Depends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000


Yeah, I grew up in N. GA in a rural area and my family still had a rotary until the mid or late 90s. lol. No internet either


> Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

Pretty bang on description actually. As a 46 yo, sometimes I can't believe I have actual memories of using a rotary phone, or when my family first got a microwave or even VHS recorder. Yet I do. Feels like eons ago.


I’m quite a bit younger and have the same experience.

I feel blessed for this actually. It’s like I lived 3 generations at once.


Can't be really strict with the dates, the generation thing is cultural and depends on the time and environment of your socialisation.


ngl as a 45 y.o. Gen Y i was not so surprised to read what stupid things 46 y.o. Gen X do


I believe the term is xennial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Rare and intersectionally have an unfair advantage.


I am definitely more triggered by the mention of ZScaler than the Gen X scope creep


Yeah, by most definitions at least 50% of “40-somethings” are solidly millennial.


People on the borderlines often are overlooked. I'm an old GenX, a few years too young to be a Boomer, and even the younger Boomers grew up with a quite different experience than the mainline Boomer generation. And I was already an adult and married by the main part of the GenX era.


Dividing generations across decades might work for marketing to them in general, but it's otherwise about as useful as horoscopes and the BMI scale.


Duodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem.

Duodecades:

  * 1968-1980
  * 1980-1992
  * 1992-2004
  * 2004-2016
  * 2016-2028
Overlapping generations:

  * GenX: 1968-1992
  * Millennial: 1980-2004
  * GenZ: 1992-2016


Precise boundaries are clearly problematic but you can’t claim that someone born in the late 60s had the same type of global view that someone born in the late 80s did.


The BMI scale is useful. Yes, athletes and bodybuilders it may not be accurate for, but being on HN I think you are neither :)

Currently, I am at 20 BMI, for reference.


I feel like looking at a photo to judge how fat they are is probably equally effective tbh. It is a rule of thumb at best.


You might be Generation Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones


I'm slightly younger than that, but certainly shared parts of their experiences. Closer to Jones than Boomer for sure. And my father was too young for WWII and too old for Vietnam so I have no direct ties to either of those experiences.


“But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.”

You’re right. Instead of implying, we should be taking active steps to do it.


Right, giving up is actually how these things end up becoming principles/laws. Power centralizes because people become complacent and ignorant on matters of power, so there ends up being a power vacuum, to which others seize the opportunity. But absolute power centralization almost never occurs, due to the delegation that is necessary to wield that power in practice, and so these two forces end up balancing each other. As such, the equilibrium point (or point of maximum entropy) ends up being some type of oligarchy. But anyone can take steps to address this and adjust this equilibrium point, but it takes active work.


I have no eyes and I must take a vision test to prove I'm blind.


I would hope that "any physician taking one look at you in the waiting room" would be a sufficient test.


"Cover your left eye .... look straight at that chart and tell me what the third line from the bottom says ..."


> It was never used in real work

Does this mean I need to return all my paychecks from 2004 to 2007?


Are you talking about UberMedia? I used to work there!


This site might be able to help also: https://www.vacuumland.org


This reminds of the internet classic VerizonMath: http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...


Can one be nostalgic for articles like this? Every few years I see this linked and I read the whole thing every time.


Very much so. I can't believe it happened over 15 years ago!


Ha, never heard of this before. I had to hunt the audio down (found it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU) but it was definitely worth it. Very funny! Thank you!


There's Emoji Mashup Bot+ - "Tries to create new emojis out of three random emoji parts"

https://twitter.com/emojimashupplus


Nice! A more "old-school" procgen-like approach, but that makes it all the more elegant in how effective it is in its simplicity


Page 16, from a review of the "Disposable" Commodore 64: "It works great, but it's not destined to become a family heirloom"


No computers of that era (or any era) are going to be heirlooms. The C64 shipped with a power supply that failed often and in a way that fried the computer.

https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-...


RDU (between Raleigh and Durham, NC) has one: https://www.rdu.com/observation-park/


also conveniently the best spot to wait to pick up an arrival (as they like to keep traffic flowing outside the terminal)


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