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Or pretty much any other person. I think a lot of people in HN forget that they are in a silo, and the majority of internet users don't add additional security features like containers to use their social media.
What do you mean by that?
It is a bit an "elitist" comment in the beginning of the thread. The original comment can easily be interpreted (whether it was intended like that or not ...) as "there's no problem, I'm not affected, easy to avoid" to which the GP reacted "well, yeah, good for you, but other less tach davy people won't do" to which I would append "and they shouldn't have to. We should try to get such traps out of the net. Joe Average should be able to use the net in a productive and safe way"
It's an ageist way of saying that this exploit is less critical for people who take proactive counter-measures, and more affects less technically inclined or security-minded people.
Ageist how? Who says you have to be a certain age to be a parent or grandparent? Sounds very ageist to me.

And that is an example of how political correctness is an arms race.

> And that is an example of how political correctness is an arms race.

Is it so hard to be nice?

It’s very easy to be nice. For example by saying that you shouldn’t just think about yourself, but also your parents and grandparents.

What isn’t nice is then to say that that is an ageist thing to say. Even though it is a perfectly valid thing to point out real people who are affected by certain online threats.

You misunderstand: it's ageist to suggest that parents and grandparents are by definition not likely to be technical enough to use mitigations like containers and such.

Which it is.

Haha, he's kind of right - there's two assumptions there. Saying grandparents are old and saying grandparents aren't technically inclined.
The commenter said "your" parents and grandparents, who are by definition one and two generations older than "you", in age. I can't think of any other reason to invoke "your" parents and grandparents.

If the point is that it's unhelpful to make irrelevant assumptions about parents and grandparents, then this is in complete agreement with the parent's point and is not a critique of it.

This is not a clever gotcha.

I think you misunderstand. Ageism is about discriminating on the basis of someone’s age.

The original comment was about grandparents and parents neither of which you need to have a certain age to be one. Assuming that it IS about age is in turn actually ageist because you are signaling that people should be parents at a certain point in their life.

To be clear, I don’t think your intentions are wrong: you are just trying to right a perceived wrong. I am just asking you to grant others a more favourable interpretation of their intentions as well. I do this by pointing out that your well intended call out of ageism is in turn also interpretable as something unwoke.

Hence arms race. There is always someone who can be more politically correct.

What is the point of this conversation? We're sanitizing language to protect the egos of everyone, at the expense of derailing a conversation that actually could relate to a lot of people here.

My parents are NOT AT ALL technically savvy. My mother's web browser has a ton of bullshit addons all over it, or at least it did last time I looked at her computer in 2014-ish. I can't imagine she's gotten much better about this stuff. But we can't talk about this pattern because it could hurt the identity of older HN readers who are technically savvy, it's offensive.

Ageism is bad when it's preventing people from getting work or engaging in society in a meaningful way. I simply do not care if it's used to make casual remarks with the specific intent of getting people to relate to an idea, e.g. people who don't know any better about privacy are actually people you know, most likely your parents or grandparents or some of their friends. And taking part in shutting down that conversation because of "ageism" is, IMO, worse than the ageism itself.

It’s a flawed mental model that doesn’t even communicate what the poster intended without assumptions that aren’t justified.

How do you think you get the sort of ageism that prevents older people from getting the job?

> How do you think you get the sort of ageism that prevents older people from getting the job?

I think you get it from a multitude of reasons, including allowing interviewers to come up with bad faith assessments on culture fit and other un-quantifiable employment parameters that amount to nothing more than, "I liked or disliked the candidate." I'd even extend that logic to a larger cause, allowing coworkers (i.e. same level individual contributors) to interview candidates, as I don't think coworkers necessarily have the proper skills or incentives to neutrally evaluate future coworkers, especially not beyond, "I like this person because I can relate to them because we look the same, have the same interests, etc." This isn't strictly ageism either, it can affect people by class or race or other things that set them apart.

> it's offensive.

I'd rather say: it's wrong.

HN readers' parents are likely far more technically inclined than an average person.

(The commenter did not invoke their own parents, which might be a slightly more reasonable position)

Making a claim that HN's parents must be technically incompetent adds nothing to the thread, is likely to cause momentary confusion, and only contributes to the "bad" ageism that you are concerned about.

My grandmom was a programmer on a university mainframe in the 50s and learned haskell in her 90s
Great. 99.999999999% grandmothers weren't.
And let face it, 99.999999999% of the pedantic privacy-performative Hackernews posters will also browse the web exclusively in Chrome while logged in to Youtube (and Facebook and Twitter and and and)...
Well if that's the standard, it's also true that 99.999999999% of people haven't programmed mainframes in the 50s and learned haskell in the 90s, so to avoid redundancy we can just say people instead of parents and grandparents.
My grandma programmed an arduino with stepper motors to change her Depends adult diapers. It does not yet auto-detect wet diapers but that’s next on the road map.