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.
This often devolves into Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
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
That’s where the term punch card comes from
FORTRAN? More like, these hands. Put 'em up, numb nuts.
And when that wasn’t enough, the fists came out.
we really need frutiger aero back man
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
this. 👆👆
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I found the second part of the comment super funny.
TL;DR: User has programming and sysadmin skils.
… and have a dance video playing with music and flashing lights with the text over it … but not too much text because I can’t read that well
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written”
Okay but can you rotate a pdf?
I’d argue at a certain depth in an OS its actually harder to do things with a GUI than a command line
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 meant, how did you delete all files??
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.
Maybe what you’re claiming is true, I don’t know whether is ‘probable’.
I poked fun at this before, but I don’t think it came across. If I’m not mistaken, millennials were the subject of a lot of boomer complaints about “kids these days”, being called lazy or entitled etc…
Maybe zoomers are dumber, maybe they’re full of microplastics and entitlement. Or maybe this thread is an example of the “chastise the next generation” history repeating. One generation is lumped together and shat on by older generations, some of which then make similar claims about the next generation(s) all backed up with nothing but anecdotes and confirmation bias.
I’m not trying to take dig at you, but I do want to highlight the similarities between claims like these and when a boomer might’ve said “I know a millennial who spends more on coffee than I would, so millennials are bad with their money. Millennials, who are bad with their money, cant afford houses. Yet they act entitled to homeownership, and so, they are lazy.” It’s a claim that assumes something about the integrity and intelligence of a swath of people and ignores the systemic issues that made homeownership hard for many millennials compared to past generations.
Again, maybe you are right, I do not know. I don’t think, though, that boomer rhetoric that shat on millennials as a whole was particularly accurate or productive.
I certainly don’t blame them for these pitfalls I don’t think it’s laziness. It’s 100% a lack of education. Teachers have all but given up trying to get kids to pay attention in class. It’s become a snowball effect.
When I was in school, most of my classmates took it seriously and took much of the education at face value. And almost all of my classmates are people that could handle the full Office suite.
Now it seems every kid thinks they already know computers because they started with an iPad at the age of 4, but what they don’t realize is phones and tablets are the equivalent to toys.
You don’t ever actually learn how to use a phone. Just individual apps. People don’t even really browse the internet blindly anymore.
I think it’s probably the difference that a lot of boomers probably saw with cars in the 2000s-2010s. It used to be everyone had a rough idea of how a car worked and most people could learn in a year or two how to do basic stuff.
Now it’s all a closed magic box requiring a full technical degree. Phones fell the same. Its a magic box that they never had the opportunity to wonder how it worked.
Silly millennial, even Boomers were using regexen in the 70s, and they were commonplace by the time GenX nerds started playing with them in the 80s and 90s. Your elders also know that regexen are fun but extremely dangerous, and should only be used in cases where they won’t make things much worse.
… 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.
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.
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.
Hold on — why can’t you do proper ellipses and dashes on your phone? I don’t understand…
This message brought to you by Android.
Well there is no em dash or en dash key on the mobile keyboard. And there isn’t a … key either.
I typed my comment above on my mobile keyboard. I’m just using the standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy. Em and en dash are available by holding on the hyphen, and the ellipsis is available by holding on the period (annoyingly, only when on the numbers/symbols page).
standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy
The issue is that I am using something fancy.
Write machine code? For what kind of processor?
That is one ability that doesn’t really belong. That’s much more of a Boomer thing. Not all boomers, obviously, but the ones who were computer experts were the ones who had to learn machine code. By the time even Gen X came along, assembler and C were already much more common.
I bow down to thee. Please don’t smite me o’ holy one.
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
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.
My copy was on a casette
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.
Yup the PET. I had a copy if the game I got off a friend which was weird as I didnt have a PET though my 1st grade classroom did.
I heard millennials can’t even grow a proper long beard
Yea but our mustache game is unmatched by anyone pre-1920’s.
Punk kids can’t even manage enough of an attention span to grow a Gentoo long beard!
Please don’t attack like this… Ma kokoro, ma sole.
Probably. But if I’m being generous, we’re really only talking about younger X and older millennials.
Honestly? Why do we let people who have no clue what’s actually going on decide the generations?
Oregon Trail generation sounds great.
I’m in the Minecraft generation.
Don’t know what the next generation would want to be called, but they’re the iPad kids for sure.
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
deleted by creator
As soon as the download notification is gone, the file doesn’t exist anymore.
That seems to be how Android literally works though.
There are two generations that can do this task X and millennials.
Forgot the forgotten again
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.
In high school I had to teach a kid how a mouse worked.
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.
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.
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.
My daughter (5) uses WASD proficiently, so I have hope.
Absolutely. At 10yo I’ve tried my best to teach my kid video editing and basic computer use. A bit ago I made her network two computers using chatGPT as a guide. So freaking proud of her.
Thinking of forcing her to do something new. Does Roblox run on Linux?
roblax is extremely absolutely vile, manipulative, and not a safe place for anyone let alone children. it’s genuinely worse than 4chan for some time now.
tell me how is brickhill supposed to compete when roblox isn’t down?
What makes you say this? The parental controls are pretty good. Just don’t give access to age range stuff that you feel the kid isn’t ready for. And turn off the chat. The only thing that bothers me is some of the annoying sounds some of the experiences use.
I’ve been told some pretty fucked up shit slips through the cracks like ‘holocaust simulator’ or ‘beating pregnant women’ or assorted bizarre block people sex dungeon stuff, then the literal real money gambling paired with fomo, child labour exploitation through game development hopes and dreams combined with extremely exploitative advertisement options.
Maybe parents from exactly the correct generation can handle the parental controls but the parents I know IRL gave their kids free reign and the ones that cut it off after seeing soulless violent content had a hard time with the kids being straight up addicted. Kid’s shouldn’t even be on online stuff since the average parent has no idea how to use anything other than an iphone and even that they barely know shit.
Back in my day we played reader rabbit and math blaster off of five and a quarter floppies
These days roblox barely runs on windows. Now in order for it to update it needs local admin privileges. So no more roblox.
I commented on my own comment. Need coffee.
Roblox? sober just began working again.
I made her network two computers
How did she do it? Just plug a crossover cable into both of them?
Me: Behold!
*quickly presses Control+V
Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!
True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.
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
Hey, I was never taught how to rotate a PDF.
I just looked for the button in the viewer.
Sometimes, I just rotate the screen instead.
Personally I’d blame parents more than the schools, especially in America. Parent involvement is nearing all-time lows and it seems a lot of them are expecting all learning to be done outside the home. I learned more about computers from my dad than any class or teacher.
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? 😀
It’ll depend on their hobbies. PC gamers will know this stuff, or at least how to figure it out.
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
Wait until they are asked to split and merge PDFs.
Would 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.
I think you’re spot on with “young people dumb”. Takes a while to figure out… like, everything.
Generations will have different strong and\or weak areas because their environment changes, but our sum total of “competence” will stay the same IMHO.
We were equally dumb when younger, it is just that we look at them now with the experience we accumulated.
And we can flip the table and ask why no one is taking the time to train these young people. Stop being an old grumpy person and help the next generation.
Seems kind of like he’s shaming people for asking questions at work, which is kind of a bad take. Does he know that they didn’t examine the problem first?
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.
