theres a generation of kids who don’t understand basic directories because of the mobile market and never actually used a pc in a regular usecase.
put in perspective, there are those who are more proficient on a touchscreen keyboard more than an actual keyboard.
I’ve also found (I’m a teacher) this generation is far less proficient at search. They (generalisation) type a whole question into Google, and read the Google created text box to get their answer, taking it as gospel - regardless of if Google has completely gone off the mark.
Contrast this to a generation that grew up with needing to refine search terms with key words, who can find far more relevant info quicker.
It’s hard to get them out of the rut and teach them to be more critical of sources. They’re so used to having what they need served straight up for them. LLMs (AI) are feeding into this more - they struggle to believe that AI hallucinations exist until I show them.
Again all this is generalisation - when I say ‘they’ I don’t mean ‘all’.
Couple of years back I used to help this kid with computer related stuff, and it really baffled me how he was nearly computer illiterate. He had no idea what make his laptop was, no idea what OS he was on, or any of the specs.
He called it a gaming laptop because he played games on it, but it was a pretty decent school/work thing without a dedicated GPU.
I’d always envisioned the younger generations getting better and better with tech, but it makes sense that won’t be the case as tech moves to be easier to use, more reliable, and less intrusive.
Modern iPads are nothing like the BS DOS/98 I grew up with.
Similar thing happened with cars. My grandpa would take them apart and reassemble them. my dad (somewhat generalizing to generations a bit) were really into cars and engines and would do some basic diy. I know nothing about them and don’t care to learn much.
I think computers are doing a similar thing. Millennials sit in the middle of the adoption and saw it emerge from more of a technology wild Wild West to being central to modern society. We could take the time to delve into details (since they mattered), but now it’s more taken for granted and things are there.
I guess, I’m just thinking it’s some sort of technology adoption thing that naturally plays out in a “victim if it’s own success” way.
I think the situation is also somewhat different with cars. Old cars used to be much simpler to take apart and tinker with than modern cars. Computers and operating systems are still just as easy to pry apart (since the fundamentals haven’t changed since the 90s lol).
My theory is that as tech came to a wider appeal and became more user-friendly, more people are using it who don’t run into issues that need technical knowledge. Early OSes needed highly technical knowledge to use. Modern OSes can be operated by a monkey. Therefore, their inclination to learn about the computer is less because it just fades into the background.
I think you have some good points, but I’m not 100% sure I agree though. Modern computers are much more complex than earlier ones if the 80s and 90s. (I guess I’m ignoring the earlier VAXs and stuff and thinking more of personal computers.) I saw a keynote from an OS conference which was pointing out that there are very few actual os papers, as the hardware is so much more complex and actually multiple smaller os’s managing the various system on chip components.
Also, Mac has over the years gone to great lengths to hide how things actually work. Like 5 years ago I remember getting really confused just attaching a debugger to a c simple C program I was toying with.
At the end you say that OSs are so easy monkeys could use them, and I think that’s my point too. They intentionally get easier to use and fade into the background and don’t really encourage tinkering with the lower level stuff.
You are correct that the basics of computers are similar and that’s why arduino and other microcontrollers are still basically the same as they were years ago, just the main difference I’ve seen is moving to more and more RTOS and trading off a bit of speed and memory, whereas a decade ago it was a lot more low level assembly optimization.
Good points though! I appreciate them. I teach some computer engineering stuff and I think about a lot of this and how best to talk about some of the lower level stuff.
That’s such a good point. Kind of blew my mind with it haha.
I would guess that’s it’s a combination of what you mentioned and also the generation rasing it not bothering to actually teach them properly about that sort of stuff. I never learned about car stuff, never had anyone to teach me. Now as an adult I know enough to do the basic oil change stuff but nothing more.
Yes but unlike ChatGPT giving you made up answers, cars don’t drive you to 200 km away from where you wanted to go on their own. At least not yet.
Oh, that’s definitely happening when the five-years-away promise of fully self-driving vehicles as promised a decade ago make their appearance in 2050.
Fr I think this is my problem with the new “advancements” and why I find myself more drawn to Linux as time passes. The “foolproof” of modern tech is also troubleshoot resistant and difficult as hell to do anything with.
I often say I am lucky that I grew up in the narrow window between when computers became a household commonality and when running and repairing them was affordable, because in that narrow window it was learn or buy. Learn to fix it or shell out for a new one, and they weren’t stable enough for buy to be an option for most households for what was basically a toy. So fam being broke, I learned. I’m not in IT or anything (don’t have the credentials to get hired and entirely unwilling to get them when I already know how to do all the things, I’d rather be unemployed than spend more on worthless credentials… see? Millennial.) but I love running my own hosting and stuff, which means constant learning how to maintain. If I didn’t grow up at that exact time, would I bother, considering this isn’t a job for me and never will be? Probably not, honestly.
I hated the iMac lockdown (and deleted the hard drive registries from every iMac I came across while it was an option to do so, essentially bricking every device I came across, because that’s just piss poor management to allow a group user to brick the entire device… 😅) I hate the windows forced-maintenance (11 doesn’t give a fuck what my active hours are, because I have them set to everything but a 6 hour span of morning when I actually won’t be using it. Still does updates mid afternoon, breaking everything I host on it until I’m home to confirm login even with all security disabled and resume settings enabled…)
I just hate everything except DIY, and I grew up with that. It so difficult to get it to do what -you-want it to do without bowing to the overlords who dictate how it can be used and I’m so over it.
(The swap off Linux was of necessity 2x, the Beast died due to mobo failure and I bought an off the shelf win tower to replace it, but also needed to run the VM for work and Linux couldn’t manage the niche client they went with… but now I’m not employed, buh bye windows! Nevah again.)
What is a hard drive registry? Or: a properly managed Mac can’t be bricked by a user 🤷🏻
Unfortunately this generation google is getting less proficient at search as well. It’s like it treats the search term as a vague idea and any syntax as a non binding suggestion.
And many sites use seo to attract traffic but dont have any content you are actually looking for. And ads.
How do you demonstrate a hallucination?
Ask it esoteric questions on something you are intimately familiar with. Heck it doesn’t even need to be esoteric. I asked Bing who won the 2023 World Series and it confidently told me that it was Astros vs the Phillies that the Astros won in 5 games.
“I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers.”
Okay Dr. Seuss
I’m definitely better typing on my phone than I am on a kb on my pc. For reference I’m in my 30s
On a phone, I can’t touch type, so full size keyboard always wins for me. However it was quite tedious to initially acquire that skill.
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it they’d obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
If it’s an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
The greentext says “he asks for some files”, that doesn’t sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there’s no password on it).
But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
Can’t email executables.
You can’t email exes, but once you zip it there is no exe, it’s a zip. If outlook automatically unpacks and scans the zip (which i doubt) you can always password lock the archive
Edit: And my email them i mean attach them in outlook
Maybe they downloaded the zip and then immediately tried to open it in a specific program through the open dialog giving them an error. I see similar mistakes with my parents - they have no concept of where files are, it’s just “on the computer” because they rely so heavily on “smart” file picker dialogs that show you everything recent or by a file type no matter where it’s actually located.
Maybe it was actually a .7z
I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I’ll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
You’d be surprised.
The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you’d encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
While there is a degree to which there’s age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
I’m mostly afraid of these people will end up being teachers, mentors and managers for my future kids… I’ll need to do so much home schooling but at least that’ll hopefully only make me bond better with my kids.
Gen Z at uni here. Most of my fellow zoomers know what a zip file is. But some people just don’t computer that much so they simply don’t know.
However if you’re doing a computer job and you don’t know that’s ridiculous.
Some intro college CS courses have had to start teaching things like how folder structures work because enough students are missing that basic information.
Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you’re not allowed to change anything whatsoever.
We asked an intern to write a lettre for a RMA, and he printed the letter, we tell him what he has to modify. He is like “I have to type all this again” “What do you mean lil intern?!?”. Intern deleted his file after printing it. O.o
Even then they could’ve used Google lens or some other OCR thing. Hell, today I might even ask chatgpt to do that
This really bugs me at work sometimes. I’m a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don’t understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as “excel image file” (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip… But that’s black magic apparently.
I mean Excel files are zips, so that kinda checks out.
It’s Chromebooks, phones, and tablets that you don’t ever have exposure to actual files. Chromebooks especially now that they’re so common in schools because they’re cheap.
I so wish Linux phones were actually a usable thing so that we could have functional pocket computers.
The attempts made so far weren’t very convincing.Hey, you appreciate your monkey’s paw wish and enjoy your android.
Honestly we probably can just somehow shove Linux components like flatpak and other stuff like the terminal into android, make them apks somehow so they can work whenever
Of course this would be hard AF to do but I just want to run tik tok in a sealed off VM using flatseal goddamnit (I don’t trust it with my phone but I want to access the videos on it)
You can run a full Linux distro with termux https://termux.dev/en/ and proot-distro https://github.com/termux/proot-distro
Yeah, and then run a android emulator inside that and then use tik tok, reminds me of that attempt to run old Mac os on a Wii since they’re but PowerPC based, but it ended in a ton of conversions and it taking like 20 mins to click something, but it won’t be that bad probably
Gonna mess with it once I get a new phone tho, can’t now since it’s filled with crap
im a gardener. some apprentice who has never owned a computer, not bcs they couldnt afford it, but bcs due to mobile phones there simply is no need for it, asked me how to shut down a computer. not kidding. it wasnt even some obscure gnu/linux distro, it was bog-standard windows 10.
See, there is a bit of nuance to this. Windows has multiple shutdown states that make the computer appear off, but actually put the computer to sleep. The apprentice probably didn’t know that but this is lemmy and if I can’t “actually” someone with worthless information here, where can I?
Hey boss, I want to shut down the computer, should I turn it off completely or do you prefer sleep, if yes which sleep state?
Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.
But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.
It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.
That’s why everyone should use Linux.
As someone who isn’t technologically ignorant: I’d rather have things that “just work” over things that I spend 3 days trying to make work and it still doesn’t.
To not get anything done except setting up the OS till 3am
I don’t appreciate getting called out like that
