Talk to kids about cryptocurrency mining and suddenly you have teenagers who understand Merkle trees and zero knowledge proofs. They understand mining rigs and

Talk to kids about cryptocurrency mining and suddenly you have teenagers who understand Merkle trees and zero knowledge proofs. They understand mining rigs and GPUs, which are about as ground up as anyone in the PC generation ever got. They also use raspi's, there are real advantages to learning reverse engineering (Hackaday is evidence of this), and I'd even say ethereum is the new netbsd. The abstractions we spent the last 30 years on (operating systems, protocols, etc) will fade like musical genres. There were literaally people who spent 5+ years of their lives learning OS/2, SCO, VMS, Novell, and others. I"m optimistic about kids. Also, there are demographic issues. Consider that aptitude is Pareto distributed, which means the population lull between millenaials and the younger zombie apocalypse generation creates a smaller total sample of people in that range, so you don't encounter as many upper percentile people in that cohort because there just aren't as many of them. Any minority demographic is necessarily going to appear less exceptional because even if the distribution is the same (pareto), you're going to encounter more of the long tail cohort, and fewer of the very tiny exceptional elite in that selection. This guy is on about a group of kids who have the same aptitude distribution as older folks, but since there are fewer of them than the mega generations like X, Y, and M , he's ignoring their exceptions and focusing on their long tail.