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.
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 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
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I found the second part of the comment super funny.
TL;DR: User has programming and sysadmin skils.
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch!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.
… 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
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.
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… 🙄
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.
I bow down to thee. Please don’t smite me o’ holy one.
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.
Let me guess: they’re talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.
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.
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.
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.
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!
deleted by creator
ability to discern facts from msinformation/disinformation
But… I love the uneducated…
I have a coworker who named a file template after the person they were sending the file to. I cannot follow the logic.
Me: Behold!
*quickly presses Control+V
Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!
True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.
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.
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.
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’
It’s not just dismantling of education. It’s the corporate creep into the education system from companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple. They want people get locked into their systems. So they start them young. Instead of learning basic os agnostic computer skills, kids at school are locked into cloud dependent apps.
I think if they were using windows they’d be far more computer literate, but they’re just using iPad and chromebooks
The companies started it in the 1980s.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
No it’s just that Zoomers only use touchscreen, which are vastly simplified devices compared to a desktop computer
The number of people in this thread stumped by the “rotate a PDF” comment, even what it means at all, while a smartphone has been 95-100% of their “computer” usage in their lives.
I was born in the 80’s, I did IT bachelor’s and then print design studies which used all of the Adobe suite and I genuinely don’t understand what rotating a pdf means.
My first OS was DOS.
Edit my point is I’m sure I know how to, I just don’t know what it means
PDF is in landscape orientation, you need it portrait (say someone scanned the documents in sideways, it happens annoyingly often), or some similar situation
Well it would entirely depend on the document how well it rotates.
Rotating isn’t the issue, really, just how well it rotates.
Prints designed for portrait or landscape can be hard if not impossible to rotate properly.
Pure text documents, no problem. edit well the usual fuckery, can be shit. but like some are just impossible to properly rotate if the graphics are designed for portrait or landscape or etc
What do you mean “how well it rotates” ? If, e.g. an A4 portrait document is scanned in landscape it can be rotated back to portrait with no issues, no ifs or whats about it. It’s a simple file orientation change
If you have specific graphics on the page which are designed to fit a portrait or a a landscape, they may not transfer well.
Just remember the outrage people have over people not filming thing in landscape, because then one ends up watching a fullscreen video on pc that’s 80% black screen and only a sliver of actual footage on the screen, but we’re used to it.
The page layout is incredibly precise work for most things related to print, however if you’re just using PDF to relay text, it doesn’t really matter at all. But PDF is something you can have as print quality, so you work on a project, you make a PDF, then you take that PDF to the print and they print it in whatever size or colour, but the layout will be the same.
Wait until they are asked to split and merge PDFs.
We grew up in an analog childhood, but digital adulthood.
We’ve been at the cusp of all the changes, we probably had to boot into Ms DOS and navigate to the A:// drive to play whatever was on the floppy disk with a whopping 1.44mb.
Now you download almost instantly to your phone/tablet. The internet as we knew it is mostly dead, everywhere is a walled garden of shit.
A:\
Guys I found the zoom zoom infiltrator
It’s been a while ok? 😀
My gen z son is like a computer wizard to me a fairly proficient millennial so I don’t think it’s a generational thing
Me trying to show a zoomed where a file is on the network. Me: “Open file explorer” Zoomer: “What?” Me: “Files…” Zoomer: “Huh?” Me: “Just click the folder.” Zoomer: “Ohhhhhh”
Almost as bad as watching my boomer coworker open notepad and drag a file into it. Just double click or right click open with. Ahhhhh.
I teach CS at the freshman level. I don’t use a Mac, but I had to spend ten minutes over zoom teaching the basic functions to a student who didn’t know where the notepad equivalent was.
I was born in 83, and grew up in the time where being a computer need required real work and knowledge of computers.
The things got easier and easier, and then the smartphones came.
These new kids literally don’t know how to search a file directory because they are used to the apps magicing stuff where it needs to be.
All the tech executives from silicon valley that are our age all restrict cellphone use by their kids. If the people creating the tech that ruined a generation don’t let them use their own devices that say a lot.
> be me
> zoomer
> use linux
> i use linux
> i don’t know how to use windows, or macos
> i dont know how to use the most popular operating systems
> wait
> i am the joke nowWould love some older internet gen input here: is this a “gen [whatever] is so [negative trait here] because they are [generation group]” or “younger ppl be stupid”?
Context: Am a millennial. At my first “real job” (as in, in the industry I got my degree in) I worked with ONE (1) other person, who was an early Gen-Xer. After developing a report with each other and becoming friendly, he lamented to me about how it seems like “millennials (not you, of course)” seem so helpless - like they can’t figure things out on their own. Always asking “where is-” or “how do i-” before even examining the problem at hand and/or the resources available.
This dude was a self-proclaimed “blue fish in a red sea,” and we worked with a wide age-range of sales ppl. I mention this, bc in the two years I worked with this nerd (and he was a fucking nerd, taking into account modern day and late 80s-early 90s standards of the term), his complaints about millennials never sounded like media parrot-speech. He was literally befuddled about the operational differences between generations.
It 100% seemed like an ageist thing. This was the late 2010’s, pre-covid.
I’m in my 30s now and am equally baffled when my teenaged niece (weird familial age gap - not relevant here) doesn’t know how to make the tap water hot when there’s only one knob instead of two. She asked outloud but I refused to acknowledge or answer her. Niece figured it out shortly on her own, as expected.
So-… maybe younger people are just, yknow, dumb? Or recognize that, when surrounded by more experienced others, it takes less effort to ask for guidance than to waste energy through trial and error-?
Not trying to prove a point here. Just legit curious if anyone older has had similar experiences and can offer insight into whether this is a “zoomers are-” or “younger people are-” observation.
They are really more alike than any other two generations.
I would postulate that in past centuries when life didn’t change a lot, many many generations were much more alike.
