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I introduced my kids to video games (the “good ones” 😁) and they have always had a PC+old consoles, so now they know at least the basics, and mods gta5 and minecraft, etc and are generally at ease with things.
Still prefers mobile apps to photoshop though 😔 you can only bring the horse to the water, you can’t make him drink.
I’m a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.
I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.
I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren’t amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.
I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can’t comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.
You were a nerd interested in computers. They still exist in younger generations. Just became way less common because the necessity disappeared for most people. Most prefer computers (or any device or tech really) that “just works”. Some are interested in how things work. 90% of Lemmy is the latter, from all generations but many in their 30s and 40s because that was peak computer learning age: rather cheap hardware, software still needed to be hacked together somewhat, clear rewards when doing so (for example messing with game settings IRQ etc to get it running).
I’ve met people born late 90s early 00s doing PhD in computer science who barely seem to know basic general computer stuff… All they know is that one extremely niche thingy they’re into. They never needed to learn general basics that much, stuff just worked out of the box.
Yeah it’s wild. I don’t think it’s good but I’m not doing a great job teaching. One of my gen Z nephews expressed an interest so I gave him my old PC, took it apart with him and put it back together, explained everything.
He rearranged his room and told me when he hooked everything back up his games were super slow. Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
But this time was different. He’d plugged his monitor into the motherboard instead of the graphics card. He recently redid his room again and got it right this time! Small victories.
Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
Let they that never borked the family PC with “boobs.exe” from limewire castle the first stone!
Carving an entire castle from one stone would be incredibly impressive engineering. Or a very small castle.
Fucking Autoassume…I’m leaving it because it’s fucking funny 🤣
At first I had assumed you’d look at my profile and were making a topical joke. I’m a Stone Mason, and I work in Conservation. So, this is incredibly fun/funny and I’m absolutely here for it!
Gen Z here and I can agree. I used to mess with computers, especially when I got older, so I could play games. Later I kind of slipped into the open source and tech bubbles. If there is a problem that annoys me enough to overcome my laziness I will fix it. I have no problems with writing scripts so I don’t have to do stuff manually each time. And then I look left and right and realise that most people in my age dont even have a computer and only use iPads and such stuff. They have zero fucking clue what happens behind the scenes.
I think the real cross-generational parallel here going back is Boomers and cars. Their parents before WWII had the equivalent of bare bones stuff, but Boomer era cars were more complicated, but also meant status and were a hobby.
Looking forward, the Gen Z and A kids are just utterly abused by the social media that we xennials/millennial told them was a safe new requirement for life. It wasn’t. It was our leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke. However, their opportunity environment is that they don’t behave like we did as consumers. Their expectation that all media should be free and immediately available is where the world needs to bend to them. As Boomers loose their grip on the economy, open source everything is going to be the world they created for us.
We don’t need to expect everyone to learn like we did because it was a unique moment in time where tinkering got us somewhere in that specific area. But can you fix a carburetor float? No, and Boomers see your lack of awareness there the same as you see deficiencies in others.
I can fix a carb float and also use a computer
People who can do both certainly exist, but they exist within a sliver of purple in the Venn diagram.
Can also fix a carb and write code too. Skills are useful!
Specialization is for insects
What’s a computer?
It’s like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.
What’s an iPad?
Touchscreen computer sold by Apple commonly used for multimedia consumption. The only input device is the touchscreen: no keyboard, mouse, everything is done with the touchscreen. It is commonly associated with Gen Alpha due to its ubiquitousness, cost, ease of use, portability and the ability to shut a kid’s mouth up in five seconds attracting Millennial parents who don’t want to have to give their Gen alpha kid their phone for brainless entertainment. Commonly seen with children under five in restaurants/aeroplanes/whatever in a bulky rubber case.
Imagine a raspberry pi hooked to a cheap LCD for a 100x mark up
A laptop that lacks the bottom part. Really useless most of the time.
Why would you use a rodent to control an iPad? Wtf?
Lmao
Me today with a co-worker, discussing Kingdom Come 1. They were impressed with the game’s attention to detail but one thing stood out, the save-game potion label/icon “doesn’t look quite right”…
Well, it’s a floppy disk!
“Huh?”
You’re right, my bad, it’s Total Commander smh
There’s any number of those kinda skeuomorphic icons that don’t have a connection to anyone past, say, a 2000 birth date. Save, Phone, Voicemail, even Email and Camera to an extent. They just know them as a pictogram that means that thing
Phone cameras at least still partially resemble point-and-click cameras. I don’t think there’s any way to develop out of the need for optical lenses, so that will always be recognizable. That said, I was at a wedding recently and it was hilarious to watch children run around with disposable cameras and get confused that they had to wind them between shots and couldn’t see the photos immediately, hah.
As someone that is currently going through KC1 and is old enough to have used floppy disks, this hurts me so deep.
They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)
You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…
There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.
This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use “recent”), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don’t know typing.
To be fair, file structure navigation became more of a pain in the ass when Microsoft decided to rework their start menu to feed into their fucking store/web browser. It’s not a hard fix but tablet natives wouldn’t know any better. At work I still end up accidently searching the web sometimes when im searching for a file that wasn’t important enough to pin. I know basic file structure the modern UIs are just trash and not designed for local users.
Fuck Microsoft. I’m out on my build coming up.
With the search Powertoys can help, it is really good. Plus the other features it has is just amazing, windows without it is pure trash.
On windows the best search is https://www.voidtools.com/ by voidtools.
And by far, it hooks up right into the mtbr in the drives and knows instantly where all files are at all times. Copy 100.000 files? They are already “indexed”! Clean GUI too.
One of the few tools windows has that’s better than the linux ones. Or if you have an equivalent please let me know!
Granted, but the inability to learn what isn’t “intuitive” is staggering.
On iOS for example it’s also hard. Every app has its own silo of files and then there’s a shared file system. The file manager app is far less capable than Finder on macOS.
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I blame the education system, not the parents. Most parents can hardly work a computer themselves, much less teach it to a kid who will ask 20,000 questions
i’ve said it time and time again, the second you simplify an interface, it lessens the bar for entry, we’ve only done this over the last 20 years in tech, it should be no surprise that people who never have to use C drives, don’t know what the fuck a C drive is.
Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don’t mean “programming,” per se, and I don’t mean “scripting,” per se, and I don’t mean “piping together commands on a text command-line,” per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and (c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they’ve never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.
It’s shocking how few people know things I consider using a PC like organizing, customizing, automating tasks etc.
I always have to hold myself back and think I am not going to tell you how exactly to do this.
And expecting a list they can work off instead of thinking? Infuriating! These people are not old, it’s a mentality.
I wish this were the case, and in a world where software was perfectly documented and there was clearly one (or maybe 3) ways to accomplish a task I could see this being the case. Unfortunately there really is an intuition that needs to be built up over years of the underlying logic of how the most prominent software packages work and how to efficiently accomplish some basic workflows. There is no chance that someone with zero prior knowledge of excel is going to reach the same level of competency on their own as someone with 5 years of supervised experience.
I hate that Microsoft products are the de-facto standard in every workplace, but what I hate more is that they have shaped how we expect software to operate: the underlying logic (or lack thereof), where to look for tools, what keystrokes/operations result in what actions, etc. In this way they’ve also monopolised software design in a way that prevents innovation, since we all already understand how to use Microsoft’s products (at least to some extent) it makes breaking that mould a really dangerous proposition for competitors. It also means that someone with a really deep knowledge of the M$ suite is going to be far more valuable to most businesses than someone with less experience but a better grasp of how to acquire knowledge.
Grown up in Microsoft-contorted concept space, hard to think of anything better. Thinking limited incremental, starting from a bad place.
Free yourself, unlearn, wash eyes, air the brain, make a clean slate, pure design, intuitive for a new generation of children, helping all life.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.
But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.
But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.
But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.
But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.
I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.
Reading this felt like the computer version of whatever the SAW movies are.
Torture porn? It’s so repugnant but I want more.
I had someone take an email they received about a technical problem someone else was having. They then printed it out, highlighted the important part, then scanned it back in as a picture all offset and grainy, then used that picture in a web chat to request help for that third person without direct contact
They were an IT Manager
Hopefully they were fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
The worst sentence is the last sentence, when you really think about what it implies.
Nah. While the text does successfully destroy the notion that “if it works it isn’t stupid”, I still see this as an improvement over so many people who are incapable of anything…
You’re like a real-life xkcd comic.
Rube Goldberg machine of office workers
Okay, I guess there’s one more criterion for computer literacy: being able to distinguish between a reasonable workflow and a batshit-insane one. (That might even include a little bit of understanding of complexity: not enough to be able to classify an algorithm using “big O notation,” but maybe enough to avoid a basic “Schlemiel the Painter” situation, for example.)
When you don’t understand the tools, every possible solution that reaches your end goal seems equally valid, no matter how convoluted. Unfortunately, the design philosophy that attempts to make every tool as compatible as possible with every other tool enables this sort of Rube Goldberg-esque nonsense (and creates development hell and permanent legacy dependencies).
It’s… difficult for someone who does understand the tools to even imagine being in the mental space of someone who doesn’t, which is why IT people frequently come off as arrogant, judgy, even rude - they expect other people to understand things the way they do, when they’ve been taking computers apart since high school. What seems reasonable to you is perfectly opaque to them. Also… sometimes people who are technically literate are the hardest to pull out of their batshit processes (doctors are the worst patients).
When you are trying to help someone, always keep the XY Problem in mind. They’ve arrived at a solution which seems insane to you, not because they’re unreasonable, but because they ran into an obstacle and bounced off of it in a path-of-least-resistance direction and they have shit they need to get done. Try to solve the real problem, not the problem that is presented.
Please tell me this is sarcasm meant to push the limits of their statement.
Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
I can kind of see the reason though. If she’s old enough then digital storage space was a really big issue. I can totally see someone having been told 30 years ago to make sure they leave nothing in memory and never updating that knowledge. I don’t know what to say about the rest of it though.
Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20’s at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It’s not a generational thing, it’s an aptitude and interest thing.
oof, yeah there’s no reason for even the deleting stuff then.
I remember reading a story where the persons job was literally copying data from one program into another, may have even just been between two excel files
New hire came in and wrote a script that did it, and automated that person’s job out of existence
And the new hire made less than the person they fired. Efficiency is supposed to save us but if the benefits aren’t shared with the workers, we end up where we are headed today.
Man I think this is just ensuring job security. Until you hired the interns and ruined it!
Corporate IT is fun!
Oof, I hope they pay your bar tab.
Holy crap, this meme is on point! Both in the Indy movie grab and the base message.
"We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you
You, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do"
Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet (2021)
At a recent gaming expo one of the tables was showing a new game for pc. 50% of the kids that approached the table didn’t know how to use mouse and keyboard. The next day they added Xbox controller support and more than half of the people that didn’t know before then were able to figure out how to play.
I think this boils down to not education but poverty. Entry level computers cost way more than an entry level console. Sure you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING. A $250 Xbox does everything you need and more. Most games today are not made to be played on $250 computers.
Me who grew up with old thinkpad from my dad’s work’s ewaste box:
you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING
a thinkpad t490 can’t play anything new but it can play quite a bit. I play emulators on mine.
A brand new T490 was over 900 bucks retail depending on the specs, and a used one is still less cost effective than, let’s say, a used PS3 or PS4…
cost effective
I’m not so sure. A used Thinkpad comes with everything you need, whereas a PS3 or PS4 also needs a screen and a controller at bare minimum. The Thinkpad also has access to a game library of (checks notes) almost every single game ever made excluding mainly AAA titles from the 2010s onward. The PS3/4 is only the better value proposition if you specifically want to play those kinds of games, or if you highly value plug-and-play ease of use.
True, but most modern games are focused on online play and very few are cross platform. So if a kid’s friends are playing one particular console they’re going to want one too.
Fortunately my kid is always going to have his own Linux desktop at home. Even though the hardware is older than he is, the PC still runs better than most Windows machines I’ve used recently.
I commented elsewhere that his school laptop (for 2nd grade, 8 years old) is at least a lightweight Windows PC. And while Windows is much more relevant to the PC & professional world than chromebooks or iPads, it’s still important to not get pigeonholed into that one proprietary thing.
Or they stopped using Windows and only use UNIX for development.
They didn’t have to learn what irq is the hard way and I am so thankful for the ability to read and edit bootloaders and ini files with no guardrails and error diode manual pages for giving me barely enough clues to learn from the ground up
I run a Makerspace and teach technology to kids. I don’t think they are getting worse, but the difference between the lowest and highest skilled is bigger than ever before.
Those who are interested, learn so fucking fast and so thoroughly, because they have things like YouTube tutorials and Discord chat groups with like-minded nerds to teach themselves. BUT at the same time, it’s easier to just remain a consumer, and never gain any deeper knowledge.
I think curiosity and attention are quickly becoming the most important skills by far.
Why was it called C and not A or 1 or something
Cuz mass storage was a quirky extra, not something essential to your system, like your A: floppy drive was.
Well there you go, thankyou kind stranger
How to tell if someone was born after 1998:
Because the A: drive is your floppy drive
B: drive was the.other floppy drive!
Trump’s next executive order: all computers in the US must be sold with two floppy drives pre-installed.
Renaming the C:\ drive to A:\ for America.
You know what? At that point, I think I might just be done with computers.
But where will you get your porn and misinformation?
The woods.
You can assign them manually but to this day, they are the last to get used when auto-mounting drives.
Unix rules
Is a floppy drive different form the floppy disk? Cause i remember floppy disks, vaguely.
The drive runs the disk in my mind but I don’t know the classroom right answer. My thought process on the matter is you insert the floppy disk into the floppy disk drive then your computer mounts it. Your hard drive runs your hard disk. Drives run disks. shrug
Yer that’s what i had thought, same kinda thing as a cd drive, not that it’s means much to anyone who isn’t 100
Needed to run the OS from one.
