I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour…and they’re in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦♂️
I don’t think the exercise was even successful.
Yeah, smartphones don’t teach kids file structure at all.
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.
I love that Gen Alpha won’t even get this reference because the movie came out 30 years before they were born.
The original star trek released 40 years before I was born yet I still absolutely love it :3
Computer natives are millennials. In due time, millennials will be what cobol programmers are in the coding world.
“On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you.”GenX. We started with nothing and went from there.
Finally some gen X representation!
I still know my way around autoexec.bat and config.sys
I had my hard earned ZX81 thankyouverymuch.
Well, now that I think about it you’re right, before that there was absolutely utterly nothing at all.
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.
My second grader’s school laptop is a cheap lightweight Lenovo Windows machine. So not ideal, but better than many options. At least it’s something I’d be willing to call a PC.
The password situation is just as funny though. His login and password are on a nice printed label stuck right below the keyboard. The login is typical, lastname-firstinitial-middleinitial, but the password is just his 6-digit student ID number. So not only is it the classic “post-it on the monitor” situation, but it would be pretty trivial to log in as any student.
Though so far in elementary school the laptops have been a teaching tool and occasionally a remote learning tool. Somebody couldn’t log in and mess with his homework or whatever.
I completely blame schools adopting ChromeOS for this generational failure.
At least give them a functional OS god damn. People out here not knowing you can do more than access like 5 websites and apps with literally anything that has a microprocessor in it.
My municipality also bought all students Chromebooks. Then they proceeded to block Google Drive on all government and school WiFi, because for some reason they thought OneDrive was the only safe and therefore allowed cloud storage. Fucking hilarious.
As if the average schoolteacher knows how to properly teach how to use a full OS to kids. Many millennials lack basic IT skills as well.
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:
I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.
My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.
But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…
Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.
It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.
It’s funny. You’re telling us that the technology was too complicated for some people to use, then you say we got to the point that it just works and you end with this being bad. Why do you think that?
In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.
The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.
Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.
The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.
When technology was too hard for the tech-illiterate to use, your grandma wasn’t sharing stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs, and your deadbeat cousin didn’t waste his life savings on Trump’s cryptocurrency
It goes back to critical thinking, the struggle to learn something is the most important part.
Gen Z: Where is my file and what is a directory?
I would say that this is not just to blame on the Generation, but to large extents of how stuff is designed these days. It has been becoming harder and harder to control where stuff is stored, and to find it outside of the intended app, and this, IMHO is by design, to wrestle the control of your own device from your hands. Just look at how aggressively Microsoft is pushing one drive in its office suite, they want control over those documents so they can lock you into a subscription model.
Of course it’s not the fault of the generation. It’s the school system who still doesn’t teach proper basic IT skills. Schools should have never touched Chromebooks or even MS products. A Windows like Linux distro and Libreoffice would teach kids the basic IT skills that are transferable across different OSs. Would have been cheaper as well. Bet if you follow the money that somebody in the school system with executive decision on IT matters gets massive kickbacks from Google or MS
My ssd is sda (with a sda1 boot partition and an encrypted root partition). I may be in Gen Z but I also have Autism, granted I didnt grow up with a lot of technology but I always squeezed every ounce out of them. When I was 13 I installed Linux, by 16 I already knew how to use a terminal (and manage the entire system with it), today I would say im relatively good at basic IT and basic network management (although im struggling greatly at installing coreboot).
Conclusion: Gen Z/Alpha probrally wont be great at computers but there will probrally be many individuals who will be significantly more advanced at computers. I was watching YouTube and a found a video of a 15 year old installing Arch manually in less than 10 minutes on a Chromebook. So tbh I wouldn’t be worried tbh (at least about this specifically).
I can use the internet to look at all types of buttholes.
I expect nothing less from Satan’s maggoty cum fart.
My ssd is sda (with a sda1 boot partition and an encrypted root partition).
That’s because is a SATA SSD.
Conclusion: Gen Z/Alpha probrally wont be great at computers but there will probrally be many individuals who will be significantly more advanced at computers.
Yeah, I’m Gen Z as well and watching people use Google without knowing what to put in the search box drives me nuts, but that’s why they pay for me so…
I remember telling my dad “Computers aren’t that hard. You just need to read what is the thing saying” and most people won’t even read, let alone comprehend.
Thats because is a SATA SSD
Correct :3
I remember telling my dad “Computers aren’t that hard. You just need to read what is the thing saying”
The problem is more and more systems these days won’t let you read what they’re saying, systems like ChromeOS, Android (AOSP is better but only if you’re a dev), IOS, IpadOS, MacOS, and Windows are going out of their way to hide “power user” features. At this point the only real choice of operating systems for people who want full control over their computer are Linux distributions.
At this point the only real choice of operating systems for people who want full control over their computer are Linux distributions.
I couldn’t agree more with you, and the same can be said about most consumer devices. If you want a full control over any device, you are gonna get the best experience flashing a custom firmware. But manufacturers don’t like it, they lose the telemetry data and revenue so they do their best to impede that.
AOSP is better but only if you’re a dev
AOSP is the way android phones should be sold, and to have the option to escalate privileges in a terminal, so you can actually do some work without relying on Google Play Services + a 200MB app to send a file to your laptop. The custom vendor images should be something people can opt in to get a vendor locked dumbed down experience.
If you want a full control over any device, you are gonna get the best experience flashing a custom firmware. But manufacturers don’t like it, they lose the telemetry data and revenue so they do their best to impede that.
Thats why I use a Thinkpad T440p with Libreboot, sadly some proprietary blobs are still present. Hopefully my next laptop will be completely open source and running on Risc-V.
AOSP is the way android phones should be sold I disagree, security is absolutely horrific. I use a pixel 7 with graphics and tbh for a phone the privacy downsides are well worth it for security. Sadly thats a compromise that must be made (at least until a phone brand can offer both security and privacy).
but I also have Autism,
I rest my case your honor.
Yes ik that gives me a massive advantage but anyone can hyperfixate on technology :3
I think… Idk I dont know what its like to be neurotypical
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
As someone that is currently going through KC1 and is old enough to have used floppy disks, this hurts me so deep.
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.
It’s gonna be really funny when all us millenials die and the tech infrastructure evaporates.
What age do we think they’ll be set back to? Pre industrial? Bronze?
My prediction seems extreme but don’t forget that while books continue to exist, the average adult born after 2000 would rather die than read one.
I’d say that technologically millennials really have it best over everyone else.
Us millennials had to figure out the technology as it evolved into what it is today we know how bad it really was before it got really good.
I remember back in high school around 2002 we got cable internet for the first time we had all of three megabytes download. That was tremendously fast.
Movies were in divx format and could be dled from peer to peer networks. Morpheus, zazaa, Ares.
Dang those were the days.
Gen-X here. We had to figure out acoustic modems and we didn’t have internet, we had local BBSes.
We also had to figure out the C-64.
LOAD “$”,8,1
LIST
LOAD “WHATEVER”,8
RUNO ya… Then you had to sit there and watch a trippy light show for three days before it actually loaded the game! 🤣
I’d say that technologically millennials really have it best over everyone else.
You misspelled gen x.
Anyone who dismisses an entire generation as lazy or stupid is, ironically, revealing their own ignorance. Even Socrates complained about the youth of his time, yet civilization kept moving forward. If every new generation were truly worse than the last, we’d have collapsed long ago. So no, you can’t generalize an entire generation as foolish—doing so only highlights your own lack of perspective.
