source: @n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca
Computers have been dumbed down and simplified for the masses. When I was a kid a computer did not cooperate until you raised your voice.
I do industrial programming. Everything is so far behind that yelling at the “computers” does nothing. Physical violence is just about the only thing they respect.
Percussive maintenance is surprisingly helpful a lot of the time.
As long as you don’t let too much magic smoke escape.
If the magic smoke comes out, that’s entirely the electrician/electrical designer’s fault. Their circuits shouldn’t have let me do that.
Hey now, the NEC provides ample protection against user stupidity, and I do my damndest to take it a step further. If a user is able to do something so catastrophically stupid despite me better engineering efforts, perhaps they should read up on darwinism.
Signed, an electrician.
This often devolves into Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
A blowie works a lot more often.
More flies with honey they say… but i still cant get this usb right the first try.
It broke my previous laptop’s hard drive because it wasn’t an ssd.
therapeutic at least
That’s where the term punch card comes from
FORTRAN? More like, these hands. Put 'em up, numb nuts.
I would love to have more effective means to threaten inanimate objects.
Tbh, that sounds super interesting.
Hello, COMPUTER!!!
SLAMS DESK HELLO!
FathER!
FaaaThERR!
Use the mouse, duh.
Yeah, newer generations have been raised on tech that “just worked” consistently. They never had to do any deep troubleshooting, because they never encountered any major issues. They grew up in a world where the hard problems were already figured out, so they were insulated from a lot of the issues that allowed millennials to learn.
They never got a BSOD from a faulty USB driver. They never had to reinstall an OS after using Limewire to download “Linkin_Park-Numb.mp3.exe” on the family computer. Or hell, even if they did get tricked by a malicious download, the computer’s anti-virus automatically killed it before they were even able to open it. They never had to manually install OS updates. They never had to figure out how to get their sound card working with a new game. They never had to manually configure their network settings.
All of these things were chances for millennials to learn. But since the younger generations never encountered any issues, they never had to figure their own shit out.
Or reinstall the OS on the family computer because one of your dumbass siblings downloaded a sUpeR cOoL song from one of their friends on MSN Messenger.
And that is why I’ll only allow my kids to use Linux!
It’s not so much that the tech just worked. Often it doesn’t work. The difference is that when it doesn’t work it’s not user-serviceable. Up until maybe 2010 or so, when things broke there was often something a user could do to fix them. But, especially with the introduction of locked-down mobile phone OSes, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s just “wait for an update”.
It was always a struggle to get the damn thing to do what you wanted it to. It turned out to be a good thing long term.
Even as a teenager (didn’t have a computer before that) I had infinite patience with computers, you can fix/change/make anything with enough time, nothing will be better if you get mad and ignore reading and making sure you understand what’s happening. Seeing how young people handle tech now is fucking depressing, they just click past everything without reading, get mad and rage quit after 30 seconds of something not working and think anything that’s more than two clicks/taps is too complicated.
You talking about young people or old people?
Young, most old people I know either don’t know anything and are fine with that, they get help for even the simplest things, or they can handle it themselves without problems.
And when that wasn’t enough, the fists came out.
I’m sure you meant “beat it into submission”.
I can:
- Accomplish damn near anything from a command line
- Write machine code
- Remember a fairly broad swath of special character altcodes without looking them up
- Disassemble damn near any computer or other machine, and stand a good chance of putting it back together
But also:
- Use modern programming languages, including object oriented paradigms
- Actually read what is on my screen and comprehend it, including error messages
- Understand and operate any arbitrary interface without having to have it explained to me by rote
Behold my mixture of skills, and tremble.
Can you summarize this in a vertical video? I stopped reading after the third word, I’m here for memes, not to read a damned book!
This is spot on!
EDIT: This was spot on. TL;DR below.
I stopped reading after the third word, I’m here for memes, not to read a damned book!
TL;DR?
frfr no cap
On god
this. 👆👆
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I found the second part of the comment super funny.
TL;DR: User has programming and sysadmin skils.
I feel like if someone doesn’t do a TikTok remix of this… did it even happen?
… and have a dance video playing with music and flashing lights with the text over it … but not too much text because I can’t read that well
“I can: Accomplish” kind of sums it up though
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written”
Okay but can you rotate a pdf?
Depends, my browser has mostly taken over as my pdf viewer and I think it lacks the functionality but if I were to install a cracked copy of Acrobat Pro or PhantomPDF then that’s like a 2 click operation.
I can
- reinstall VLC
oh wait that was all the dependencies VLC needed, I deleted them??, oh no, oh crap. Why isn’t my password working, help???
(real reason why my first Ubuntu distro got nuked)
I once wanted to move all the files in the folder was I in to another folder and I did something like
mv /* ../. What is important here is that I did/*and not./*. Fortunately it was only a raspberry pi so it went fast to flash the SD card.Also, how did you go about reinstalling VLC if you deleted all dependencies?
that I did
/*and not./*that’s so funny but so sad 😭😭
how did you go about reinstalling VLC if you deleted all dependencies
I just distrohopped to kubuntu instead lol
I meant, how did you delete all files??
The day I started learning Regex was the day I felt like I was really learning computers. I went from 2 hour tasks to 15 minutes.
I doubt you’d even be able to reasonably explain what they are let alone how they work to the average person outside the Millennial generation.
I fear AI data processing will replace much of the Regex skill set. Why learn Regex when the computer just does it for you… 🙄
Silly millennial, even Boomers were using regexen in the 70s, and they were commonplace by the time GenX nerds started playing with them in the 80s and 90s. Your elders also know that regexen are fun but extremely dangerous, and should only be used in cases where they won’t make things much worse.
I agree that regex is an important thing to learn. Not sure any old LLM would do a very good job, and I hope that no tool replaces people actually learning how to write regex.
I’m not sure what you mean about the average person outside the millennial generation not understanding them, though. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I don’t think the ‘average’ person in any generation knows what regex is. Unless there is some reason the average millennial was actually exposed to them and forced to understand them?
As for being doubtful that anyone could understand them aside from a millennial, I assume you’re being hyperbolic? Sort of sounds like “Kids these days can never learn what I learned!” (I’m teasing).
Anyway I’m in agreement with you. This thread did remind me of a pretty neat project that, while still requiring domain knowledge, could save some time and be a good learning tool without being as fallible of a crutch as an LLM.
Have not tried it, and am not an experienced developer, so I am curious to your thoughts/criticisms: https://github.com/pemistahl/grex
Yeah, I am exaggerating a bit, but I’ve not met anyone under the age of 25 that’s even remotely interested in putting in the effort to learn (anecdotal, I’m aware). Many have expressed wanting to learn, but then they never follow up when I try and pursue teaching anything.
And I’m not necessarily saying that the average person already understands them, but someone from our generation will probably pick them up far more quickly then your average Gen Z/Gen A.
Maybe what you’re claiming is true, I don’t know whether is ‘probable’.
I poked fun at this before, but I don’t think it came across. If I’m not mistaken, millennials were the subject of a lot of boomer complaints about “kids these days”, being called lazy or entitled etc…
Maybe zoomers are dumber, maybe they’re full of microplastics and entitlement. Or maybe this thread is an example of the “chastise the next generation” history repeating. One generation is lumped together and shat on by older generations, some of which then make similar claims about the next generation(s) all backed up with nothing but anecdotes and confirmation bias.
I’m not trying to take dig at you, but I do want to highlight the similarities between claims like these and when a boomer might’ve said “I know a millennial who spends more on coffee than I would, so millennials are bad with their money. Millennials, who are bad with their money, cant afford houses. Yet they act entitled to homeownership, and so, they are lazy.” It’s a claim that assumes something about the integrity and intelligence of a swath of people and ignores the systemic issues that made homeownership hard for many millennials compared to past generations.
Again, maybe you are right, I do not know. I don’t think, though, that boomer rhetoric that shat on millennials as a whole was particularly accurate or productive.
I certainly don’t blame them for these pitfalls I don’t think it’s laziness. It’s 100% a lack of education. Teachers have all but given up trying to get kids to pay attention in class. It’s become a snowball effect.
When I was in school, most of my classmates took it seriously and took much of the education at face value. And almost all of my classmates are people that could handle the full Office suite.
Now it seems every kid thinks they already know computers because they started with an iPad at the age of 4, but what they don’t realize is phones and tablets are the equivalent to toys.
You don’t ever actually learn how to use a phone. Just individual apps. People don’t even really browse the internet blindly anymore.
I think it’s probably the difference that a lot of boomers probably saw with cars in the 2000s-2010s. It used to be everyone had a rough idea of how a car worked and most people could learn in a year or two how to do basic stuff.
Now it’s all a closed magic box requiring a full technical degree. Phones fell the same. Its a magic box that they never had the opportunity to wonder how it worked.
That’s a good idea actually. I hate writing regex, so I asked Gemini to do it just now. Once I explained it in the format it wanted: what the source would be, what I wanted filtered and the language I planned to use it with it spat out a perfect expression without me needing to even use my brain. Technology is wonderful.
I’m sure LLMs can get it right, but if I was going to use a tool for something like that, I’d want one that was more deterministic like the linked tool claims to be.
Why would you write machine code outside of uni! Assembly exists for a reason?
Assembly is just machine code in a dress.
I’d argue that it’s not as useful to write machine code as it is to read it.
Understand and operate any arbitrary interface without having to have it explained to me by rote
Omg, this all the way. I’m in a class for learning AWS stuff and its crazy the amount of people who suddenly can’t do anything when one button is on a different screen than the instructions told them it was. Like come on, use some basic thinking skills.
Another infuriating situation was having to do a class on Microsoft Office. It was infuriating because it was incredibly basic stuff. I’ve never used Outlook before, but I completed each task they asked of me in like 5 seconds because I have a basic understanding of how software works.
… modern … Object oriented
wat?
Bro that shits like 30 years old and most langs released after lets say 2010 have put that stuff in the backseat for backwards compatibility. Anyway I get your point
operate any arbitrary interface
Dont believe it. Behold the shittyness of modern UI
I bow down to thee. Please don’t smite me o’ holy one.
Yeah but can you rotate a pdf?
To any angle you want.
Bobby no one’s paying you for this shit, go show Billy how to sum numbers in Excel.
Write machine code? For what kind of processor?
That is one ability that doesn’t really belong. That’s much more of a Boomer thing. Not all boomers, obviously, but the ones who were computer experts were the ones who had to learn machine code. By the time even Gen X came along, assembler and C were already much more common.
Remember a fairly broad swath of special character altcodes
I use the compose key. When you message with me, you are sure to receive proper dashes and real ellipsis.
Well, unless I happen to be using my phone or another computer at the time.
Hold on — why can’t you do proper ellipses and dashes on your phone? I don’t understand…
This message brought to you by Android.
Well there is no em dash or en dash key on the mobile keyboard. And there isn’t a … key either.
I typed my comment above on my mobile keyboard. I’m just using the standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy. Em and en dash are available by holding on the hyphen, and the ellipsis is available by holding on the period (annoyingly, only when on the numbers/symbols page).
standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy
The issue is that I am using something fancy.
Let me guess: they’re talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.
Hahaha its funny each time that happens.
My uncle is GenX and way smarter than my millennial ass. They paved the way for child free poppin off and being tech savvy with a normal tech free upbringing.
Anecdotal I know. But always funny how self centered us millenials can be thinking were the last normal generation.
I figured they were talking about the Oregon Trail generation. It’s made up of the folks who were old enough and young enough to play the game in schools and spans across parts of X and millennials.
My copy was on a casette
Commodore? I know they had a tape drive and the game. I had an old TI 99/4A with a tape drive and we had Chisholm Trail but it was different.
Yup the PET. I had a copy if the game I got off a friend which was weird as I didnt have a PET though my 1st grade classroom did.
That’s a great way to describe our larger cohort! I’m going to use that. I’ve got so many friends across the Gen-X to Millenial range that all feel like members of the same generation.
Not my term, I just happily co-opted it.
For once they didn’t forget gen X-- I think OP is about xennials
I heard millennials can’t even grow a proper long beard
Yea but our mustache game is unmatched by anyone pre-1920’s.
Punk kids can’t even manage enough of an attention span to grow a Gentoo long beard!
Please don’t attack like this… Ma kokoro, ma sole.
Who?
Probably. But if I’m being generous, we’re really only talking about younger X and older millennials.
Yup!
Gen X could write a program that’ll make a floppy drive’s loading noises play the Imperial March.
Or those of us from Gen Z that where born just at the cutoff and got tech acces at a way to young age.
*were *access *too
Yup, you’re a Zoomer alright.
GenX can’t use computers either.
The generation that made most of the websites and software associated with the internet?
The generation that used them to create the new generation of smart devices? Sure.
Some can’t. Computers weren’t commonplace until many GenXers were in their 20s, so some never learned. Those that did learn often learned the deep magic.
The amount of my students that wrote the whole email in the subject line is crazy. At first I thought it was a mistake or something. But there are sooo many…
They also don’t know what a file browser/explorer is. As soon as the download notification is gone, the file doesn’t exist anymore.
Giving files proper names? Unheard of!
So many Boomers I know do the subject line thing, I had no idea it was a Zoomer thing too. Oh no…
I often leave the subject line blank, is that better or worse?
Yes, officer, this one right here
IMO, that’s absolutely not as bad.
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I’m pretty computer literate (I’m using Fedora silver blue now and I’m a cyber college student), and I’m gen z.
I hated our digital literacy units in school, because it was always the most braindead shit every year. Stuff that you shouldn’t have to explain to a person every year, like digital footprint (think before you post), make sure it’s a https website, and misinformation vs disinformation. I wanna cry because my tech and society class I’m taking right now feels like the same shit, but I’m paying now.
I’m not sure how they should revamp, but maybe they need to show modern examples like the honey scam, the thousands of Tiktok influencers who admitted they lied about the stuff they sold when they thought the service was shutting down, and how Google search is forcing shitty AI results. But we do have the unit, it just feels braindead to anyone like me who gives a damn about the services they use online. But I’m a nerd who looks at privacy/cyber shit for fun for hours, not TikTok dual screen braindead…
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Giving files proper names? Unheard of!
What kinda monster manages to live like this??? I say hushedly deleting flsjfjsjfksj.pdf
Asdf.txt, asdf2.txt, asdf.m3u, asdf.odf…
I have a coworker who named a file template after the person they were sending the file to. I cannot follow the logic.
As soon as the download notification is gone, the file doesn’t exist anymore.
That seems to be how Android literally works though.
I think Zoomers need a generational divide in their generation, tbh. In my experience, older Zoomers are intelligent, capable, motivated, and largely leftist. For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide, and I can’t point to any stats or evidence to support this belief, but anecdotally I have noticed this trend within my own life and spheres of influence.
For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,
The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.
That, and it’s unsurprisingly connect to the piewdiepie fascist pipeline thing, Helldivers popular as fuck, Warhammer 40K having a renessaince, I see plenty of shorts about how boys want to die a heroic death, that’s a fucking staple of fascism
This is such a good video on this stuff, how young kids get sucked into fascism layer by layer https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw
Most of the reasonably intelligent people playing Helldivers know full well that it is satire with a side of sick sarcasm.
If anything it’s antifascist indoctrination on a grand scale.
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I’M DOING MY PART!!!
lol no hope for zombie bootlickers I guess
Reasonably intelligent is already the minority
Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.
I agree with this, but what made this different then our generation or early zoomers? I was raised online as a house with an internet-connected home PC in the early-to-mid 90s with two parents who worked until night; there were grifters and proto-manosphere groups then and I’m sure moreso for the early zoomers, so I have to assume there was either some change in the methodology behind the delivery in these messages or, more likely, some change in the parental oversight, but I can’t identify exactly when or what
Yeah but there wasn’t an algorithm picking out all of that shit and giving us a constant stream of 100% pure troll heroin.
Seeing one post in fifty telling you garbage puts it into the context of “that guy is saying some weird shit”. Seeing only garbage in your feed makes it seem normal and those opposed to it are the weirdos.
This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.
I think perhaps in tandem with education - parental or institutional - getting even worse/changing from what you or I might be used to. The shift from search to algorithm as the primary way to interact with the Internet is also a significant factor, the Internet might’ve changed significantly before I was really there, but it certainly changed 2008-2016 mostly in that shift from search to platform/algorithm.
And early zoomers might’ve started their online existence just around the start of that transition while late zoomers, basically only know the Plattform/App/Algorithm world we have today.
If you were to be really cynical about it : The powers at be started losing the control over the messaging specifically to the online world, and managed to grapple it back starting in the mid 2000s just as the size/power of the space became significant. Zoomers might be here or there depending on how and when their first online experiences played out.
I’m just on the very earliest of zoomers, and my cohort largely got hit with 2008 as we were just starting to grapple with politics, and with 2016 right around graduating high school. For me Search was the Internet starting point, Wiki, YT and forums all in service to my curiosity and also there for my entertainment/ placating.
perhaps for someone a bit later it’s all just entertainment, no problem solving, no strange sub subculture, just whatever you desire to see or listen to or read imidiately there, without you even needing to think about it, so accurately getting your attention that it’s perhaps more attractive than thinking, or making a decision.
The bad habit is there for me too, I think some younger people might not be able to even recognize it as such, maybe for them that’s just how the world works.
Tik Tok
Nah tik tok is plagueing everybody but maybe the younger kids just grew up with it even more
Maybe the younger ones still elastic brains were just too vulnerable
E: Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…
Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…
I think there is a lot to this. One of the big divides I’ve noticed is that these younger zoomers seems to conflate what is socially acceptable with what is advertiser-friendly, and I have to assume a lot of that comes from growing up in these heavily corporate-controlled spaces in comparison to the “wild west” of the internet that raised us.
Even with millennials (1981 to 1996) there is a big difference when you where born.
If you are an early millennial you grew up with MS-DOS, so you had to learn the terminal to get anything done. You probably had your first smartphone after you where 25.
If you are a late millennial you grew up with Windows XP and probably had a smartphone as a teen.
Circa 1990 didn’t get smartphones as teens. The iPhone launched on only AT&T in the US in 2007. We were all locked into 2 year contracts back then with LG Envys and Motorola Razrs.
Of course, it just seems to me like there’s a more distinct mid-generation cultural shift rather than just technological in comparison to our generation, and I am curious about potential catalysts. But again, I can only speak from my experience and personal exposure, so there is the possibility of locality specificity as well as other variables, so everyone remember I am just a layman and weigh my experience anecdotally rather than definitively.
Smartphones came a little later. Early adulthood for most.
That sounds like gen alpha more than late zoomer. Perhaps they are simply too close in time to gen alpha.
That has not been my experience, no. I am speaking younger adults, not teenagers; I don’t really have many interactions with teenagers or children these days so I don’t have enough experience with alphas to have really any sort of opinion on them. As I understand it, Gen A starts after 2010, so any adult today would still be a Zoomer. Granted of course that “generations” are a loosely-defined concept so the years they are defined as may vary, but it is my understanding that the typical understanding of Zoomer goes as far as 2010 at least.
Boomers 1945-1960
Gen X 1960-1980
Millennials 1980-2000
Zoomers 2000-2020
Gen alpha 2020-2040If we’re going to have a made up system with no rules, it might as well be well ordered.
Convenient as that potentially would be, that does not seem to be the popular understanding, and I see no reason not to use to the conventional understanding in a case where stubbornness is unlikely to shift said understanding.
Hopefully unnecessarily preemptive “if you don’t like Wikipedia” invitation to websearch using the engine of your choice and observe the general response without hunting for a cherry-pickable example which defines them as such.edit: i noticed you were downvoted and feel compelled to mention that I did not downvote you; it’s weird to downvote people for normal conversation.
15 year generations don’t really make sense though, the whole concept of a generation is that they’re the previous generation’s kids.
I don’t disagree, but unfortunately nobody granted me authority on the general consensus on this one. I will say though that lineagial generations feel like only one possible definition, and cultural generations defined by common cultural experience (as is the case we’re discussing) feel like they have some validity for me as well.
That is not at all the case in this context.
As an old zoomer I’ve observed a sharp difference between 2001 zoomers and 2004 zoomers far beyond a simple 3 year maturity difference. Its jarring.
There are two generations that can do this task X and millennials.
Forgot the forgotten again
Are they the same generation whose parents said “they’re really good with computers …they go on the iPad all the time”?
WhAt’S a CoMpUtEr?
If only we knew at the time how prophetic that damn commercial would be…
Thanks for reminding me, now I’m angry.
Glad I could brighten up your day!
An IPad is a computer with a touchscreen interface instead of mouse and keyboard
We got a new kid around 19 working at our office for processing data and I hate how true this is. The amount of times I’ve had to say “No, you have to double click to open folders” is entirely too many. Either that or “You have to actually right click on the icon you want to copy you can’t just click anywhere on the screen.”
Fuck me I’m not ready for that. You expect it from the old people but I might have to leave the room if a young person asked me something like that.
I teach undergrads, and every year basic computer skills get worse and worse. I guess it’s not entirely their fault, but things like just asking them to save a file to their computer is insanely difficult. Lots of universities are starting to get task forces to figure out how to teach (or where to teach rather) basic digital skills, it it’s all going to hit the workforce really soon en masse.
Let it all implode. I’m sure the companies will thrive with this reality with the bonus of AI slop on top that all these people will be using and putting in all system across our society.
In high school I had to teach a kid how a mouse worked.
I mean, I know millennials who don’t own a computer. Just phones. They got young kids. Not sure if those are alpha at this point or whatever, but how are they supposed to learn it if they got nowhere to practice?
Quite a few working class kids and teens grow up like this.
You know, I can forgive tech illiteracy. I don’t like it, but I can forgive it. What I can’t forgive is a basic inability to retain new information.
You gotta teach someone to double click on something to open it? Fine. But you should only have to do that once.
The amount of times I’ve had to say “No, you have to double click to open folders”
That’s a real problem when you’re used to Kde and have to use a windows machine.
(Why is this damn thing so slow ? Oooh, right, double click)
You can absolutely configure Windows to open folders – and all other shortcuts – with a single click, and IIRC one of the knocks against Windows ME was that this was the default option. And it was godawful, along with the “click” noise it made on navigation. (I think it was WinME. I’ve probably suppressed the memory, and rightly so.)
But the long and short of it is if you want consistency between your UI’s in that regard you can indeed have it.
I think I tried it years ago. But it didn’t really work with the windows ui for some reason. Nowadays I don’t use it often enough to bother personalising it.
I use KDE Neon and have used Kubuntu before. Double click to open a folder is the default, same as Windows.
It is in the latest versions but it’s very recent. The default has always been single click. They changed it because of windows users.
We are getting this teached in 6th grade what country is this from?
You get one guess.
US?
That’s a BINGO!
(I’m old enough to have received a decent education here and capable of observing the noticeable decline over the past ~30 years)
Me: Behold!
*quickly presses Control+V
Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!
True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.
Former boss: How do I make my computer run faster?
Me: you could install more RAM.
FB: Oh do I download that from the internet?
Me: …no, it’s hardware…you have to open the computer up and physically put it in there.
FB: I should have known that, I majored in Computer Science
…I was fired a week later because she “felt threatened”. Lol.
I had that happen after I told the IT manager who always showed up drunk that his flash drives weren’t working because he couldn’t expect to buy an 8 pack of 1TB flash drives of amazon for $30 and that he was at worst handing out viruses.
I also told the interns to demand full time positions for doing all the work and not be taken advantage of so that didn’t help with the HR director.
yeah there are noobs at everything in each generation. maybe some change in percentages but still. you could tell this story a million times
10.000 per day, in fact!
xkcd
There’s one for every occasion.
My daughter (5) uses WASD proficiently, so I have hope.
Absolutely. At 10yo I’ve tried my best to teach my kid video editing and basic computer use. A bit ago I made her network two computers using chatGPT as a guide. So freaking proud of her.
Thinking of forcing her to do something new. Does Roblox run on Linux?
roblax is extremely absolutely vile, manipulative, and not a safe place for anyone let alone children. it’s genuinely worse than 4chan for some time now.
What makes you say this? The parental controls are pretty good. Just don’t give access to age range stuff that you feel the kid isn’t ready for. And turn off the chat. The only thing that bothers me is some of the annoying sounds some of the experiences use.
I’ve been told some pretty fucked up shit slips through the cracks like ‘holocaust simulator’ or ‘beating pregnant women’ or assorted bizarre block people sex dungeon stuff, then the literal real money gambling paired with fomo, child labour exploitation through game development hopes and dreams combined with extremely exploitative advertisement options.
Maybe parents from exactly the correct generation can handle the parental controls but the parents I know IRL gave their kids free reign and the ones that cut it off after seeing soulless violent content had a hard time with the kids being straight up addicted. Kid’s shouldn’t even be on online stuff since the average parent has no idea how to use anything other than an iphone and even that they barely know shit.
Back in my day we played reader rabbit and math blaster off of five and a quarter floppies
Child labour.
These days roblox barely runs on windows. Now in order for it to update it needs local admin privileges. So no more roblox.
I commented on my own comment. Need coffee.
I made her network two computers
How did she do it? Just plug a crossover cable into both of them?
It only relatively recently occurred to me that the vast majority of people use the Internet either solely or mostly with a mobile phone. It blew my mind since I grew up with PCs and modems and the Internet is so much better on a large screen that’s not half full of ads.
this is less a problem of ‘people are stupid’ and more ‘educational institutions have been dismantled over the last several decades and large numbers of people are pushed through school despite being functionally illiterate, if they graduate at all’
Boomer don’t know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don’t know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can’t help themselves and have low standards.
There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.
I can’t tell you which window was the best XP or 7 but for me it’s somewhere between the two. Although I used vista for a long time perfectly fine and people hated that one.
I feel privileged that I got to use these great operating system for so long.
It’s what made me good at computers to start with.
Every other Windows distro is okay, since XP. XP ->7 ->10. I’m holding out for 12 because 11 blows, but…Linux looks more attractive every day.
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I finally took the plunge and installed Mint about a week ago. It’s definitely better.
I partitioned my hard drive so I have both systems available. If everything goes well with Mint for the next few months, I’ll just wipe Windows entirely.
If there’s nothing specific holding you to Microsoft’s ecosystem, you should go for it.
Congrats! Be aware that Windows loves to wipe foreign bootloaders though. If your computer suddenly can’t boot Mint anymore but goes right into Windows, that’s another way of MS screwing with you.
I have heard that. I’m backing up everything that’s important.
I’ve installed Mint and Ubuntu before (over a decade ago), and would manage. I remember having a lot of issues with drivers back then. I’d also be putting it on an HP Spectre x360, and I hear there are some difficulties booting linux because of a firmware issue.
I still remember the XP error sound. It was the stuff of nightmares. And in those days, we weren’t taught how to use a Modem because my mum didn’t like us using the internet and instead brought an encyclopedia for school stuff, so I would have to fix all the shit I fucked up without google before anyone found out. Fun times. Really improved my troubleshooting skills, though.
During some practical school training (basically two weeks where pupils are send to work in companies full-time without pay) at an electronics shop, someone brought in a Windows XP machine that caused problems. Heard that sound so often…
Turned out they still ran it without any Service Packs. Windows Update also refused to work… and it was registered to those fine people called “Skidrow” (the cracking group). 😅
At that time those registration cracks already supported Windows Update, they should’ve updated that one!
I bet there are a lot of machines like that. I knew this one person, a biology teacher whose lab computer still had 7, but it ran perfectly well. She refused to upgrade it to 8/10 because there really was nothing wrong with it. Many people I know with very old machines still have their OS because it just … works. Might differ in the States though, tech becomes mainstream here at least five years after it is released.
So your mom spent around $4500 in today’s dollars for a standard computer set up of the time, then spent thousands more on an encyclopedia set because she wanted the computer crippled so you couldn’t look at porn.
My god we humans are repressed.
An Encarta CD would have been a lot cheaper, just saying.
No, lol. She got a ~400 page ‘children’s encyclopedia’ because she liked it and I liked reading. Fairly cheap, and useful if you want to look up something like ‘types of volcanoes’. Besides, it was a little home laptop, which my dad used before. I doubt if she had even known how much porn existed on the internet, since we used it rarely and it was terribly expensive (dunno about the US, since I am not an American) at that time. I’m pretty sure the reason she didn’t want me using the internet was because kids are dumb and break stuff. Laptop was already sluggish as hell.
Also, it was far easier to just pick up a book you’ve read many times and find the section you’re looking for than turn on the laptop, wait for the damn thing to boot, call an adult to connect it to some outdated Modem that’s slow as hell, ask that person to search something because you have no idea how that stuff works and then get some long ass site, summarise it and finish your homework. Just saying. Has got nothing to do with repression, since we also had a book full of paintings and quite a few were nude. If anything, my mum was kind of more open than most since she had a masters in biotech and taught high school science for many years.
Right on, thanks for the story! This is later than I thought because when I think dialup internet, it was before laptops were really a thing. They existed but I don’t think I ever saw one in person, just in catalogues.
crazy thing is that they were being enshittified even back then. we just couldn’t identify it back then as easily as we do now
Oh yes, Microsoft got to be literally the richest company on earth and Bill gates the richest guy on earth for decades by not “enshitifying” computers. You got it, boss!
that wasn’t enshittification… that was just marketshare
That’s literally the same, people complain about “enshitifying” because things were free/cheaper/ad-free before.
OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.
With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.
I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.
I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.
However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.
So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…
They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.
Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?
There are TWO generations between Boomers and Zoomers.
It’s funny how Bs and Zs kind of horseshoe into being ignorant about how computers work. Boomers never had them growing up, while Zoomers were born with phones in their hands using corporate apps and never learned how computers actually work. Those of us in between had to learn how they worked to use them.
Like birds and New Zealand, gen x doesn’t exist online.
It’s easy to forget us because we’ll just say “whatever” when you do.
I’m partial to “meh.”
I mean, I know millennials who don’t own a computer. Just phones. They got young kids. Not sure if those are alpha at this point or whatever, but how are they supposed to learn it if they got nowhere to practice?
Quite a few working class kids and teens grow up like this.
