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.
Until your trackpad is acting up a bit and you become so frustrated you smack it and now it hardly ever works.
Same with flinging a laptop across the room, which ultimately became my excuse to replace a 12yo Sony laptop.
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.
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”.
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.
Hello, COMPUTER!!!
we really need frutiger aero back man
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?
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!
I’d argue at a certain depth in an OS its actually harder to do things with a GUI than a command line
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written”
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… 🙄
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
They’re a witch speaking in tongues! Burn them!
You just made me realize the Zoomers are actually much closer to making Warhammer 40k a reality. IT engineers are like Tech Priests to these Zoomers.
I don’t know much of Warhammer lore, so I had to look up tech priests:
"No longer the master of its creations, the Cult Mechanicus is enslaved to the past. It maintains the glories of yesteryear with rite, dogma and edict instead of true discernment and comprehension. For instance, even the theoretically simple process of activating a vehicle’s engine is preceded by the application of ritual oils, the burning of sacred resins and the chanting of long and complex hymns. "
Its clear to me the author of this block of text was having trouble starting his vehicle’s engine, and was pissed off when he/she was asked to put in a ticket before help would be rendered to the him/her.
he/she
What’s this nonsense? Why don’t you just say “they” like a normal person?
If you’ve never read it Vernon Vinge a fire upon the deep had a type of programmers in the future known as programmer archaeologists. The tldr is nobody wrote new code just dug up old code and bolted it together. I used to think that was silly, after llms lately and dealing with interns I no longer think of it as fiction.
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.
Reasonably intelligent is already the minority
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
About the same level… Put a subject people can search for.
As soon as the download notification is gone, the file doesn’t exist anymore.
That seems to be how Android literally works though.
If you get an actual file explorer it’s fine. I’m using a fossilized asus one because I got used to it years ago.
in today’s edition of “why are the kids I raised so damn incompetent?”
i long for a day where people understand that it’s not the ipad kid’s fault they were given a tablet at age 2
It isn’t their fault, but it did happen.
That’s… part of it, but part of it is just ease of use. In growing up, I had to figure out issues with my computer,and getting games etc working took some work to do. I build a gaming PC for my nephew(under 10, but games a lot mobile and with consoles) and he played a few games on it, but then my sister (a gamer herself) said he couldn’t really get used to keyboard over controller (at which point I reminded her she could just get him a PC controller or use one of the console ones that also work on PC).
He just seems to prefer to use things that are already intuitive, and since my childhood things have gotten much better in that regard for consoles and mobile stuff. You can definitely do it on PC as well, but it often means more accessories, sometimes figuring out issues . I got another sister of mine a controller for pc and it took a bit of effort getting it properly synced for the game she wanted to play. It would show up properly in the OS, but then the game he issues, so we had to switch through modes and such, and sometimes even though one mode may work an update or something may break it.
I like using controllers for some games, and WASD for others, but even though IT is my job and I’m good at fixing things, some games have weird issues with some controllers, especially if they have mode options. All that extra fixing and finding the right settings is just frustrating for some, and with easy to use alternatives they may not bother to learn. I had no choice, just SNES and pc while growing up.
No one taught me how to use a computer, I figured it out as I went. I had to tell my 25 year old brother that theres more than one USB port on the back of his computer because he only saw the one in the front and asked me where he plugs in the keyboard and mouse.
Part of the issue for a lot of the older and younger crowd is “Well, it’s not immediately obvious, so therefore its impossible and now I’m mad at you for it.”
Gen Z is not the same thing as Gen Alpha. Gen Z grew up on PC.
Kind of interesting how quickly the smartphone usage exploded but also how it wasn’t that long ago. Early Z most definitely grew up as PC users while late Z grew up with mobile being the primary website visiting tool.
I had to do some quick checking and this is what I found.If we use Wikipedias timeline picture then Zoomers are born 1997-2012 (the text also references 1995, but I used the graphic):
In 2011 (Gen Z are now -1 to 14 years old) web traffic was predominantly according to smartinsights.com:
I think that here the main point to remember is that many users will continue to access the web via their desktop PCs. In 2011 most companies I talk to still have a tiny proportion of their web traffic via mobile searches - it’s usually much less than 5% - so it’s worth checking your analytics for mobile usage first and foremost.
https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-usage-statistics-2010-2015/In 2015 (Gen Z are now 3 to 18 years old) things has begun to switch with most western countries reporting between 15% to 30% of web traffic being mobile:
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2015-global-digital-overviewIn 2020 (Gen Z are now 8 to 23 years old) 61% of US website visits are from mobile devices:
Mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites in 2020, up from 57% in 2019. Desktops were responsible for 35.7% of all visits in 2020, and tablets drove the remaining 3.3% of visitors.
https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-desktop-usage
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.
For once they didn’t forget gen X-- I think OP is about xennials
Probably. But if I’m being generous, we’re really only talking about younger X and older millennials.
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.
Gen X could write a program that’ll make a floppy drive’s loading noises play the Imperial March.
GenX can’t use computers either.
The generation that used them to create the new generation of smart devices? Sure.
The generation that made most of the websites and software associated with the internet?
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 generation that grew up with ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga etc knows how to use computers.
Fine. Gen X can’t use modern computers.
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.
In high school I had to teach a kid how a mouse worked.
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.
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.
It doesn’t have to be full of ads on mobile either, just use Firefox or a fork (ironfox is great) and add ublock origin as a start.
My wife is similarly aged than me. I was raised around computers and she was not. It’s a chore to get her to actually send me a URL or tell me where she is so I can actually get a full browser experience. I’ve slowly been converting her over and trying to show her the benefits of browsing online.
Yeah, I hate using the internet via a phone and only do it when there’s no other option available. It severely limits what you can do, which of course is perfect for the 5 or so corporations that run most of the internet.
Expectation: these new generations are practically born with computers in their hands when they grow up they are going to create a new world so fast and develop new technologies
Reality: if tik tok doenst work they don’t know what else to do with their 1000+ euro smartphones
We’re dumbing everything down. When I was a kid Imade my own tower defense game inside warcraft3 world editor, with custom models and everything. Everything was moddable, customisable. Now everything exists in walled gardens where you can’t even switch anything
It’s like the classic essay, “Why Jonny Can’t Code”.
I remember entering program listings from computer magazines into the Vic 20 as a kid, then modding them to make new things. But still, it was a minority of kids who had a computer back then, and even most of them (and myself most of the time) would just play games rather than write games.
The difference now is that everyone has a cell phone, but it’s still only a small minority that care.
You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It’s free entertainment and nobody can stop you
Aphantasia can stop you.
There are two generations that can do this task X and millennials.
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.
Let’s be fair though. Adobe changes the Acrobat interface every two weeks for no reason. PDF has always been an absolute shitshow, super slow, walled garden format. After like 30 years it’s still a 30 step process to add a note box with an arrow that looks half decent
Adobe did that to me twice and then I uninstalled it and never gave Adobe another chance. There are plenty of good free pdf editors that I don’t need to support such a terrible and greedy company
Fawk you. Boomers are happy, what about you?
Boomers are what they believe happiness to be, but they are very much not actually happy. Happy people don’t belligerently complain about every little thing every opportunity they get like boomers frequently do.
