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.
Man I feel like a large part of the internet is out of reach.
Why have I got to sign up for tiktok just to watch this happen?
Shit like this used to be easily finable on google or something. Now I can’t seem to find shit. All I get get in news articles about it.
r/kidsarefuckingstupid
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Well, maybe a school-issued computer should be designed differently than a consumer device.
Maybe such things should be considered beforehand.
In industrial ergonomics you are supposed to, ideally, present a worker with a few buttons with abundantly clear results of pressing them and no forbidden combinations leading to unexpected\undefined\dangerous results.
Kids sticking things into what’s given to them are not an unexpected event. I’d say kids doing that are better than kids not doing that. And if it’s expected, then this is almost entrapment.
Oh, oh, OH, you can’t just put a consumer device with a web browser with Google and MS and Apple shit into schools then? No kickbacks from those companies? So fucking sad.
Forcing a kid to wear around a centrally managed device with a microphone and a camera makes me want to vomit. That should be illegal as many other things. It’s a disgusting world.
These should be military-level (by resilience to attempts to throw them out of the window, sink them in the water, overheat them and so on) devices with something like FreeDOS+OpenGEM. That’s by far enough to run school programs. If you think it’s not, then you are possessed by collective delusions, that’s a thing in crowd psychology, so drink a glass of water, listen to cars\birds, look at the sky and answer which fundamentally new tasks you need to solve as compared to having year 1999 Internet (as in open a static webpage, follow links, send forms), WordPerfect and Basic. Especially at school.
We use axes, knives, hammers and screwdrivers and other stuff to do things, more or less as they existed 300 years ago, when we are not professionals, who of course use power tools.
That’s not cheap. Schools can’t afford that. The kids know better.
That can be as cheap as Chromebook. Expenses at reliability are partially redeemed by no need for such complexity and computing power.
Chromebooks that schools use don’t have any computing power to speak of. There’s none to lose
Compared to a machine good enough to run TIE Fighter and not more - they do. Should remove that difference.
Chromebooks are much more expensive than normal computers.
A Chromebook for school kids costs around $200 when I was in school 5 years ago… A normal computer would cost closer to 500
Chromebooks are cheap compared to average laptop but still expensive compared to identical laptops with same components.
So I should have said overcharged instead of expensive.
2GB ram chromebooks you can find on ebay are an exception as they are not getting any more updates soon.
Arguably they already do take physical abuse into account, by focussing on cheap replacements
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.
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.
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
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!
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
You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
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!
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.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.
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.
These kids know they’re gonna be replaced by tech and they’re fighting back
The ones that are dumb enough to do this won’t be getting jobs to be replaced anyway.
I thought system will turn off USB port if notice current over draw. Look like I am wrong.
What i saw they were shorting the charging ports, not the USB slots.
Both ports the same. Two girls, one port? Killing two birds with one port?
Lots of chromebooks have bog standard barrel jack plugs.
