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Forgot the forgotten again
I remember watching an interview with the CEO of SUN microsystems in the 90’s argue that you didn’t need to know how to run a nuclear power plant to use a light switch, and you shouldn’t have to know how a computer works to use one.
I guess his vision came true, and we’re mad about it?
No?
It’s not like you need to know how to write processor code to format an image or make an excel sheet. You may still be obliged to know more than run a touch screen though.
Only people working on them need to know the ins and outs of how a nuclear power plant works, though I feel like people should probably have still some education and be able to describe it in a very generalized way. But if you can’t rotate a document, you’re having trouble with the light switch.
Like, that’s fine if you grew up without electricity in your house, but is that really the case with Zoomers?
I mean, I’m a moron, but I know the basics are: nuclear reaction creates heat, boils water into steam, steam turns turbine, turbine spins magnet inside copper coil. Magic! I still don’t understand some lightswitches though…especially the kind that require an app. I’m not downloading an app to turn on a light in my house.
Any basic household things that require an app belong in the trash.
You don’t need to know how to run a nuclear power plant, but you do need to know what wires are
This analogy actually works kind of well. Like, you don’t actually need to know anything about wiring to use a light switch, but if something goes wrong in your house and you need to fix it, having just a little bit of knowledge about how the device works can save you hundreds of dollars and days of downtime.
It can also help you avoid making the mistakes that cause those problems in the first place, whether the issue is that you don’t know what setting you accidentally changed, or you don’t know how many watts you can safely pull out of an outlet
It can also cause you to set fire to your house.
Home handymen are a great example of how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, in many cases you’re safer knowing nothing.
Fella, the stuff Gen Z struggles with is the light switch.
They know how to use the light switch, but they have no idea what to do when the bulb burns out.
So what this suggests to me is that zoomers are so up their own cell phones that they never bothered to learn how to use pepper computers. That almost funny. Mocking laughter is warring with weary head shaking in me.
I never learned how to use pepper computers either. But I do salt my hashes.
i disagree. Training boomers is easier because they know what computers are. Zoomers often see computers as “web browsing machines” or “gaming machines”
Let me guess: they’re talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.
Or those of us from Gen Z that where born just at the cutoff and got tech acces at a way to young age.
Probably. But if I’m being generous, we’re really only talking about younger X and older millennials.
I heard millennials can’t even grow a proper long beard
Yea but our mustache game is unmatched by anyone pre-1920’s.
Gen X could write a program that’ll make a floppy drive’s loading noises play the Imperial March.
For once they didn’t forget gen X-- I think OP is about xennials
GenX can’t use computers either.
The generation that grew up with ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga etc knows how to use computers.
Fine. Gen X can’t use modern computers.
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.
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The generation that used them to create the new generation of smart devices? Sure.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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
For fuck’s sake, give us 2005-2007 kids a microgeneration. We’re like late zillennials.
I’m old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel this meme in my bones.
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 that is why I’ll only allow my kids to use Linux!
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.
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”.
Hello, COMPUTER!!!
SLAMS DESK HELLO!
FathER!
FaaaThERR!
we really need frutiger aero back man
And when that wasn’t enough, the fists came out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A blowie works a lot more often.
More flies with honey they say… but i still cant get this usb right the first try.
therapeutic at least
This often devolves into Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
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.
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!
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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…
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.
I have a coworker who named a file template after the person they were sending the file to. I cannot follow the logic.
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
About the same level… Put a subject people can search for.
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 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.
I’d argue at a certain depth in an OS its actually harder to do things with a GUI than a command line
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
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.
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.
… 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
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.
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!
TL;DR?
this. 👆👆
frfr no cap
Yeah but can you rotate a pdf?
To any angle you want.
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 bow down to thee. Please don’t smite me o’ holy one.
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.
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’ve always viewed programmer archaeology is just trying to understand your old code or the team you are working withs old code and also trying to understand the why it was done this way.
I think AI coding is a programmer archeologist based on your definition, and I think I may start using that now.
01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001111 01101101 01101110 01101001 01110011 01101001 01100001 01101000 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110010 01100101 01110011 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100001
1001001…SOS…1001001…In distress
I’ve been called a wizard a lot in my career because I can google an error message.
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?
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written”
I actually thought I am part of this blessed generation that can use a computer. But rotating a PDF? That beats me.
The real skillset isn’t necessarily knowing how to do these things off tbe top of your head, but knowing how to look them up.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for the next generation is how thoroughly Google has enshittified.
Cobbling together four different online tutorials about a vague idea you think the damn program should do is the original “vibe programming”. I am looking at you Power Automate.
Ctrl+shift+plus sign
Sounds like something imagemagick could do so that would be my first strategy to try
Just pick up your laptop and rotate it to whatever angle you want.
PDF is a pointless file format that should not exist. Come at me.
It’s good for sending documents you don’t want to be tampered with because most people don’t know how to edit a PDF.
You can lock other file formats too though
Pdf will always look the same though. A doc/docx file can look wildly different depending on the editor you are using.
This. I care about graphic design and aesthetics. So when I send a document to a group for review, I’m not taking the risk of giving them something they could mess with.
Pointless?? Really? We should have just stuck with postscript? I’m pretty happy with pdf for almost anything as there’s a good chance it’ll render how whoever sent it to me was seeing it. What would you suggest/do different?
10000 times better than the previously mainstream way which was people sending you office docs expecting you could open that shit.
Yes, but not just that. Opening a document in Word is for the writer.
A pet peeve of mine is when I’m sent a user guide as a Word document complete with squiggly lines under the words it doesn’t know.
Even worse is when a colleague sends a document like that to a customer.
PDF is a published file format, I find it hard to imagine a world where you could convince me downloading the user manual for my motherboard or downloading Lego assembly instructions should come as a word document.
I bet this person thinks all raster images should be bitmaps. Sorry maybe that was too harsh.
LibreOffice Draw should work just fine for that :)
Are you joking right now? I tried opening a pdf with Libre Draw recently but it didn’t work.
KDE Okular to your rescue!
Try OnlyOffice.
Or just open it with Firefox like a normal person.
There should be a class where they force you to install arch Linux without the automated install script and force people to learn how an OS works, or even make them do a Gentoo installation. You only pass it if you get to a fully functioning PC with a web browser and desktop environment
Why stop at Arch? I had to write my own kernel in college let’s make everyone do that.
Yes, I’m posting this to point out the silliness of your idea.
the x and millieials designed a system to keep them employed and minimized the number of future prospects to replace them. saying with half sarcasm
