My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
That every generation of device is going to be the next greatest thing and they should all have huge leaps like in the early 2000’s.
I doubt people switching from the rotary phones to touch tone phones were complaining a year later about not having something better from the phones.
I’m old and tech-y, and my contemporaries still use the “I’m too old to learn” line on me - and then ask me to sort out their issue. Deeply annoying.
this post reads like an entitled youth complaining about old people.
you know that video of the kids that can’t figure out how to use a rotary dial telephone? yeah, that’s exactly what happens to old folks who can’t figure out how to use a smart phone, or computer, or a smart TV, or a, or a, or a…
technological context is important. you can’t just pick up a piece of technology and immediately understand how to use it. you have to understand not just how it works, but why it works the way it does. knowing the why takes a history of the whole feature.
it’d be like if I posted a meme you have zero context about and I make fun of you for not understanding it and call you an old dumb fuck for not grasping on the basic understandings of why it’s funny.
The issue as I have presented isn’t one of “Old People Dumb”, but one of the idea that older people shouldn’t refuse to learn about something because they are “too old”. Or enabling that line of thinking. I recently had a customer buy a new computer for me and paid for a setup. I needed account details, and he had no idea what his accounts were, his passwords, just that he wanted his computer setup. When I asked for any passwords to get the setup done, he didn’t know because his kids set all that up. If the kids took a moment to show him what was going on, how things worked, maybe he would have had an idea when he needed it.
to riff off your example, what’s an account? is there a bank involved or should I get in contact with my financial advisor? Did I get mail about the accounts? perhaps some kind of ID card came for me in the mail?
what’s an account?
my point still remains. not only were you asking him to understand what an account is, but also the nuances between different accounts and what they do. like knowing what the difference is between a Facebook and email account is.
you take your historical knowledge of technology for granted. one day, sooner than you think, you’re going to be that old man ranting about how nothing works and technology sucks.
I fucking hate that word ‘Innovation’. It is spammed by corporatebros who think their shit doesn’t smell.
“XYZ company already has all my data so I don’t care that they’re spying on me and selling my data to advertisers”
Fucking makes my blood boil. These people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, or self respect
blood boil
I’m the same, but I try to explain the errors of their ways in the most relaxed manner.
Most times it doesn’t make a difference but once in a while someone is receptive and makes a change. and it’s really rewarding.It has been theorized once 25% of the population accepts an opinion the rest tends to follow, so I try to be optimistic and take it one step at a time. Lately I’ve had the impression I’m seeing progress.
The thing is though, that most people don’t know why that’s a problem, and privacy advocates seem to think that ‘you’ve got a door on your bathroom’ is a gotcha.
If someone is giving Google their home address and work address, and planning the route to get traffic data, they’re not going to be concerned when Google Maps suggests their work address as a destination through the week. Same for their shopping data. ‘Of course Amazon knows what I like, I do my shopping there!’
We need better ways to explain it to people who don’t understand it, and who are not interested in it or the tech behind it. We have a big problem on Lemmy where we tend to assume that everyone understands the same issues as us, just not as well.
People with no technical background insisting that “AI” is taking over and is sentient, even when I try to explain how it actually works. They refuse to believe that maybe all of those breathless “news” articles are clickbait hype-mongering.
“You just don’t like it because it’s gonna take your job!” Keep believing that, imbeciles.
I hear a lot of people worrying about this being the case in the future but I don’t remember hearing anyone claiming that about our current LLMs.
If you’re entering or exiting the tram, heads the fuck up.
Linux nerds screeching about how Linux desktop works perfectly out of the box and with less time and effort then Windows/OsX.
It’s entirely counterproductive to adoption.
Yeah, I tell people Linux is like driving a custom built car. You can make it do anything you want and have absolute control and freedom, and often do things other cars can’t, faster and more efficiently and cheaply. But sometimes it’s going to break and you need to get in there and wrench. If you don’t enjoy learning, or work 80 hour weeks and have no time to tinker, don’t use Linux desktop.
I got my SO to change because they like to customize, and I’m there if if breaks.
It works out of the box - if you do nothing at all to it and just browse.
But to do anything like getting all of your favorite programs, that’s going to take effort.
With older hardware sure. I largely have a flawless experience with anything 10 years old or older. And as long as it’s simple anything 5 years old works perfectly too.
But somehow my 5 year old network card is basically unusable on Linux unless I disable 6ghz WiFi.
Not even. I need custom scripts for audio, can’t turn my display off and on I need to pull the HDMI cable, and Bluetooth is basically unusable.
Bluetooth Linux sucks ass. No one can solve my Bluetooth issue and I’m using a good tp link dongle and updated kernel and keep getting skipping randomly over Bluetooth. So bad.
“I got my 107 year-old great grandmother running Arch from the command line in 20 minutes! Now she browses with Lynx and hosts a Matrix server.”
Something I absolutely hate is when people say shit like “do you sell an apple charger?” The complete ignorance of what port your device uses or even what it’s called is infuriating. Look, you either have a usb-c or lightning port, and you only have a lightning port if your phone is from like a decade ago or something. You should know by now to look for usb-c cables. It’s especially frustrating when they get angry at me when they don’t understand what I’m talking about.
I’m a sales supervisor in an office supply store, and I get this ALL THE TIME! I once had someone argue with me over the name of the cable connectors and wondered why I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then they said, and I quote, “Well, to me that’s what I call them, so I’m going to just keep calling them that.”
People need to learn innovation is not always progress, and that some paths forward are dead ends.
“Innovation” under late stage crony capitalism is just newspeak for “further surveillance for poors and enrichment for billionaires”
Clicking OK without reading the box.
It won’t work, I get an error.
What’s the error say?
Let me try again. Ok it says enter a time.
Did you enter a time?
No.
Except that there are about 100 questions on the page and there is no prompt to go to the question you missed.
Many sites are just poorly designed.
dear god, if people actually read the screen, most Helpdesk jobs would be gone. read the damn screen, put that into your favourite search engine. bam. profit.
And an actual search engine… Not an LLM prompt. A plain regular search engine!
Put the error wording in quotes. Scroll past the AI LLM response they force at the top. That first result under there almost certainly gives you the answer.
Or someone on Reddit with the ever-useless, “That never happens to me”.
You’ve met my mother in law, I see. And my dad. Why do they do that? It must be an age thing.
It’s a “can’t be bothered” thing: age is irrelevant.
That transcends all ages, it has to be related to the irresistibility of big red buttons.
Totally. There’s old duffers at work that struggle to open a word doc, but are strangely adept at Navigating Facebook…
I would love to see a majority of people stop considering ‘new tech’ as the magical wand/solution to all their problems, and see them stop considering ‘new tech’ as a necessity in their lives. Whatever their age.
My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
Beware of that kind of shortcuts, they often can be very wrong.
Also, do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
I don’t disagree with you. I’m just amused that your example is printers and copiers, the tech that has been notoriously devilish to get working correctly from like the very beginning. New tech has certainly NOT made printing any easier or more convenient. Sometimes they simply require arcane incantations and a blood sacrifice. I still think people should at least try, but I totally understand why their threshold for “I’m over this shit and I want someone else (e.g. a pro like you) to fix it for me.” is so low specifically when it comes to printers and copiers.
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
Well, I do believe and hopefully you will believe me too when I tell you I regularly meet young people that can’t be bothered to learn much either. Does that mean all young people are lazy as fuck and unwilling to learn shit? Certainly not.
Laziness (like stubbornness, like all vices and like all qualities) is not an age thing. It’s a choice and a way of life.
It’s the way some persons chose to relate to the world around them in a mostly (self-)destructive manner. Real sad I will agree with you, but there is nothing new and it certainly not age-related.
Those ‘old people’ you regularly stumble upon at your workplace were young people themselves a few years ago, maybe even your age, and I’m willing to bet a whole penny that they were as lazy when they were young. Exactly like those young people I regularly meet nowadays will still be lazy once they get old.
Those persons we talk about, some of your older customers and those of my young people, are (probably) lazy but that should not mean all person their age are the same. And that makes a huge difference.
BTW, you did not answer my previous question: do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Edit: there is one thing that I think I need to add: getting old (you most likely are still young) you get slower and things become harder to do, your body gets tired quicker and even your brains start to feel… somewhat less agile. It slows and one can fight against it (nearing my 60s I started learning Russian this year, and plan on brushing up on my Latin too… probably need to relearn it from scratch to be honest as I have not used it for decades), but this aging is happening and, well, it’s impossible to completely avoid it and to magically stay young. You will experience that too yourself, hopefully not in a self-destructive way.
I’ve meet younger folks like this, but they are usually acting too entitled to do things for themselves. When it’s someone from an older generation, they actually start asking for help, and when we guide them through the process their remarks are usually about how simple it was.
Being completely uncritical of it. This ties into being unwilling to learn, if they’re introduced to word processors via MS Word, many people are completely unwilling to move to something else like LibreOffice Writer, even if it’s not actually that different.
Back to the first sentence, too many people just aren’t willing to consider the ramifications of living in a walled garden made and maintained by foreign far-right groups, or if they are generally aware and critical of it, it usually still not enough to actually do something against it. That includes people who are generally tech savy, most of my millenial-or-younger friends and relatives aren’t on Signal, including one who is a software developer and vocally critical of Trump and US tech companies. Meanwhile my parents and grandparents have no issue using Signal.
And what makes so many people so willing to look at ads? I know way too many people who could easily use adblockers if they wanted, but just don’t.
My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They’re not totally helpless, they’ll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.
They’d been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn’t feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they “upgraded” their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.
Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.
My dad couldn’t quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he’s been using that just fine since then.
Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They’re old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It’s not a beefy computer and they don’t need one, I’m pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.
On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they’ve had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it’s been running smoother than windows 11.
So when I go visit them tomorrow I’m gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.
Pretty much the one program they use that’s not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can’t use that anymore, but fingers crossed I’ll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don’t think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.
I think Linux has a peculiar learning curve. If someone else installs it for you and does basic tech support once in a while, and installs a beginner-friendly distro, and the users only use very basic stuff like word processors and browser-based social media, it’s really easy, even easier than Windows. For people who know just about enough to install new software and reinstall Windows, Linux can be fairly difficult since a lot of the system plumbing just works quite differently, and these users are also tempted to install more difficult-to-use-and-maintain distros. Then once you’re very tech-savvy, Linux becomes easier than Windows again because it mostly does what you want and doesn’t fight you like Windows, and it’s often a first class citizen when it comes to software development.
Yeah, I’d really like to switch to Linux, but I’m the most tech savvy person in my circle and I know I’d fuck something up.
Edit: thanks all for the advice, I’ve got to at least wait until I finish my thesis and my husband and I have more than one computer between us
If you have a second device, like an old laptop or something, that you can put Linux on to use it for stuff, I’d suggest that.
The short story of my Linux conversion was I got a Raspberry Pi for my amateur radio hobby. Learning how to deal with Linux as a side thing that had no pressure of “I might need my computer for something” really helped take to it.
You will! But it’s pretty hard to actually do lasting damage. If your install breaks, just reinstall - can be annoying, but it’s also a great excuse to try another distro or desktop!
So I’ve been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.
- Back up any important documents you really don’t want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn’t actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that’s really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that’s where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn’t is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.
If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that’s a bit of a chore, but again if it’s anything that can’t be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.
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Once you’ve done that, you’ve got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it’s intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can’t just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend’s computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you’re not going to totally fuck up anything.
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Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can’t break anything from that live USB.
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If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you’ll have learned something from the experience. I’m actually at the point now where I’m kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I’m not trying to break something, but if it happens, it’s an opportunity to try new stuff.
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Maybe I’m weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn’t know was there before.
Yeah, it’s absolutely a weird curve like that
I’m kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I’ve managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it’s really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.
WAY too many people don’t realize “AI” is just marketing bullshit, and genuinely think that LLMs and shit are literal intelligence in a computer.
For one, it’s driving every company under the sun to shove it into every product under the sun; and two, if we ever do create a true AI (what we’re calling “AGI” now, at least until marketing drives that one to meaninglessness too and we have to move the goal posts again), it’s going to be humanity changer in par with shit like discovering fire… and people will be confused as all hell becuase “wE’ve hAd tHAt foR yEArS!” cuz they’ll think its the same spell-checker-that’s-wrong-occaisionally-and-generates-nudes that we have today.
LLMs are AI - always have been. The term “artificial intelligence” has always been broad in computer science: it covers anything that performs a cognitive task normally requiring human intelligence. A chess engine from 1999 is AI. A spam filter is AI. An LLM is AI. Narrow AI, sure, but still AI.
The confusion comes from people equating “AI” with sci-fi AGI (human-level general intelligence, HAL/JARVIS/Skynet/etc.). That’s a specific subset, not the whole category. When companies say “AI-powered” they’re not claiming AGI - they’re saying the product uses machine learning or pattern recognition in some way. Marketing inflates the language, yes, but the underlying tech is real and fits the definition.
If/when we reach actual AGI, it will be a civilization-level shift - far beyond today’s spell-checker-that-sometimes-hallucinates. People will look back and say “we had AI for years,” but they’ll mean narrow tools, not the thing that can invent new science or run a company autonomously. The goalposts aren’t moving; the hype is just using the broad term loosely.
LLMs are AI - always have been. The term “artificial intelligence” has always been broad in computer science: it covers anything that performs a cognitive task normally requiring human intelligence.
On the contrary, it’s not “AI” unless it’s a fuckton of hand-programmed
ifstatements. I dunno what this newfangled “neural network” shit is, but it’s way too brain-like to be AI! \s
