Don’t know no C, only /dev/sda1.
Calm down they’re like 16yrs old
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.
You wouldn’t download a C drive.
This. The fundamentals of things computers do is so heavily abstracted now days, all kids know how to do is work with those abstractions.
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.
There’s any number of those kinda skeuomorphic icons that don’t have a connection to anyone past, say, a 2000 birth date. Save, Phone, Voicemail, even Email and Camera to an extent. They just know them as a pictogram that means that thing
Phone cameras at least still partially resemble point-and-click cameras. I don’t think there’s any way to develop out of the need for optical lenses, so that will always be recognizable. That said, I was at a wedding recently and it was hilarious to watch children run around with disposable cameras and get confused that they had to wind them between shots and couldn’t see the photos immediately, hah.
"We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you
You, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do"
Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet (2021)
There exists a generation of people today that do not know that the save icon shows a floppy disk. They have no idea what a floppy disk even was.
I feel old now and will go back into my cave and weep quietly.
Amiga user: “Everyone knows the floppy save, but how do you save to the hard drive?”
Save to folder:
iOS users: "What the hell is a ‘Folder’?!?”
I tell younglings this fact all the time
I was still using floppy disks in 2014… for work.
Thank you for your service.
What’s a computer?
It’s like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.
Why would you use a rodent to control an iPad? Wtf?
What’s an iPad?
Imagine a raspberry pi hooked to a cheap LCD for a 100x mark up
Touchscreen computer sold by Apple commonly used for multimedia consumption. The only input device is the touchscreen: no keyboard, mouse, everything is done with the touchscreen. It is commonly associated with Gen Alpha due to its ubiquitousness, cost, ease of use, portability and the ability to shut a kid’s mouth up in five seconds attracting Millennial parents who don’t want to have to give their Gen alpha kid their phone for brainless entertainment. Commonly seen with children under five in restaurants/aeroplanes/whatever in a bulky rubber case.
A laptop that lacks the bottom part. Really useless most of the time.
Omg dad thats so antiquity
Fortunately my kid is always going to have his own Linux desktop at home. Even though the hardware is older than he is, the PC still runs better than most Windows machines I’ve used recently.
I commented elsewhere that his school laptop (for 2nd grade, 8 years old) is at least a lightweight Windows PC. And while Windows is much more relevant to the PC & professional world than chromebooks or iPads, it’s still important to not get pigeonholed into that one proprietary thing.
Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.
Oh no, does this mean Gen X are going to be the wisened graybeards that holds arcane knowledge and seemly executes feats of magic when related to technology?
Based on how often I have to explain very obvious error messages to ostensibly qualified system admins: Yes.
(Though I insist I’m the oldest millennial and not Gen x)
Xennial!
True, late stage millenials are the same kind as Gen Y/A.
Yes.
Going to be? We already are, along with older millenials.
X and the millennials both had to deal with computers that were computers, it’s the people that grew up in the smart phone/tablet era that have no idea what to do in front of an actual computer…
My litmus test is: “Have you tried Linux?”
Even if they just used a live cd for curiosity, it means they know enough about computers to grasp the concepts that make them versatile, and were exploring around the net enough to read about it.
Now I know I am relatively young (just making the cut off to be considered a Millennial). But my parents were very against allowing kids access to the internet but not ani-technology. As a result I was using a 1996 Toshiba satellite when I was 4yr for Scholastic Reader Rabbit preschool games, but didn’t have regular internet access until I was 15. So I am familiar with the eccentricities of Windows 95, this did help me at work once when we had to use some legacy software from the 90’s that would only run on Win 98. But anyway I only recently have started using Linux in Docker containers for testing environments.
So I’ve been in the DOS/Windows world for at least 30 years. I have never used Linux, but I can configure a Cisco server or switch and stack a rack. Yet I fail your test?
Look up the term “outlier.”
Go back to Reddit asshole.
You first. You’re far more hostile, so that’s where you belong.
You were working with computers since before smartphones existed, that’s a pass of course.
Only the 10% or so that paid attention to “nerd stuff”.
All the rest are, at best boomer level, at worst smug about being at boomer level.
Gen X is gonna be the tech equivalent of my grandma who knows everything there is to know about sewing and cooking
I wonder if that’s true. Sewing machines haven’t changed much since they started. Cooking hasn’t either. But, if you’re a computer-using Gen Xer, you can’t still be running Windows 95 or something. You’ve had to keep up with the current tech.
Now, you might be using Windows 11 the same way you used Windows 95, and missing out on some of the newer features. But, I think most people who knew how to debug a networking problem in Windows 95 still can figure out how to do it in the newest Windows releases.
It’s like driving. Yes, older drivers are worse drivers, their eyesight and hearing is worse, their reaction speed is slower, etc. But, cars have changed pretty considerably in the last 50 years, and most older drivers know how to use modern cars. They may not be as good at using some of the gadgets, like the GPS system, as younger people. But, they’ve adapted to keyless entry, push-button starts, push-button windows, backup cameras, traction control, and so-on.
More like Millennials. Gen X may have been around for the duration of the silicon boom, but it was largely niche “nerd shit” when they were kids, and only became widely accessible/acceptable to them with the same changes that have left Gen A lacking basic computer skills. Millennials, though, grew up through the full development of PCs and the Internet and had to learn how to navigate them at their early stages, as well as keep up with the rapid changes. It of course still isn’t universal knowledge there, either, but anyone that used a computer regularly through the early 2000s is going to be levels above most people getting into it now.
Tsss, calling me an old nerd on lemmy. You’re a nerd! You’re on Lemmy!
But yes, i wildly, loudly concur woth most of this thread: my kids can’t be bothered with HOW something works. It just has to work. No interest at all in tcp, udp, whats a bit, byte why is everything in multiples of 8: that’s all nerd shit. And, indeed: my shit. Dad! You’re the nerd: fix this!
You in NYC area? I’m hiring.
NYC = new york city
This is a translation provided for free by me because this user has defualted to american defaultism
To the person I’m replying to, THIS IS THE INTERNET, NOT america
NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:
- Rio For Rio de Janeiro
- HK For Hong Kong
- TJ For Tijuana
- KL For Kuala Lumpur
- TO For Toronto
- Joburg For Johannesburg
There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.
So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.
If he’s from NYC, he knows what NYC means. If he’s not from there, it doesn’t matter anyway
My dude, he’s from America lol
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Gen Z are good at using tech, gen A are still learning how to use tech
It’s honestly a toss up whether sysadmins know what the fuck they’re doing. I’m working on a deal now that’s hampered by the fact that a Linux sysadmin for a huge finserv company doesn’t know how to administer a Linux system.
This is why the humanities are important: So you learn how to think about a problem and not just rely on someone writing down every goddamn keystroke for you.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
People who think like you make my job a lot harder.
How are you supposed to understand instructions when you read at a third grade level?
How are you supposed to do research to understand an error message if you’ve never looked anything up before?
Mathematicians can usually read.
Except we’re not dealing with mathematicians. We’re dealing with sysadmins who must read well and quickly to do their job effectively.
They need to comprehend complex technical documents. They need to break things down into principles so they can apply them in novel contexts. They need to understand what the words “could not connect on port 4242” mean.
Except they don’t. They get me on the phone, throw their hands up in frustration, and have me push the buttons for them.
Because they didn’t pay attention in their humanities classes.
Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works.
Millennials don’t, either. A tiny fraction of a fraction had technical literacy 20 years ago and now they think they’re top shit because they can write simple CMD commands.
All this jerking one another off is crazy. I work in the industry and I’m surrounded by people my own age who don’t know what Active Directory is much less Linux.
People don’t need to know how to write a program from scratch to have useful tech knowledge. Knowing basic keyboard shortcuts puts a person above the vast majority of other people in terms of tech literacy.
For real. I’ve taught people copy paste shortcuts and they act like I’m an alien.
I guess I’m one of the fractions of a fraction. I remember back in the late 90s when that catastrophe of an OS called Windows ME was plaguing our society. Having to manually change registry keys just to make the damn thing recognize a sound card.
It makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through. If/when I have kids I’m going to start them off with DOS 6 and gradually move them up to current OSes. They need to know the pain we went through.
In sorry but this really sounds like boomer-esque mindset
Why should the younger generation have to go through the struggles of the older generation when those struggles are not relevant today
I’m gen z myself and I’ve changed Windows registry settings to disable stuff like caudiolimiter and change a few other things but I only learned to do that out of necessity
Things should not be forced on people unless they want to learn them, people will only learn things they are interested in
Force them to learn something and they won’t bother actually learning it because they aren’t interested and it won’t stick
This mindset is the same thing as passing down generational trauma to a a younger generation
t makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through
I mean, whose motherboard still needs a sound card in this day and age? But then I could tell you about fiddling with the settings of an old dot matrix printer. I don’t think that qualifies me to set up a Kubernetes cluster or administer a data lake.
The “you kids today” rants seen to miss how hyper specialized computer hardware and software has become. No, Gen A is going to magically intuit an Azure DevOps Pipeline from first principles. Setting that up feels like I’m working through a Master’s Thesis on arcane file types. People need to stop pretending that knowing a bit of Regex from middle school entitled them to talk shit to a guy ten years their junior struggling with a customized .yaml file.
Same as it ever was. The only thing that has changed is accessibility. All these discussions seem to miss that. Most people have not, do not, and will not ever care.
if a 3 year old can use a smart phone it’s not because that child is a genius it’s because the phones designer was.
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:
you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING
a thinkpad t490 can’t play anything new but it can play quite a bit. I play emulators on mine.
A brand new T490 was over 900 bucks retail depending on the specs, and a used one is still less cost effective than, let’s say, a used PS3 or PS4…
cost effective
I’m not so sure. A used Thinkpad comes with everything you need, whereas a PS3 or PS4 also needs a screen and a controller at bare minimum. The Thinkpad also has access to a game library of (checks notes) almost every single game ever made excluding mainly AAA titles from the 2010s onward. The PS3/4 is only the better value proposition if you specifically want to play those kinds of games, or if you highly value plug-and-play ease of use.
The Thinkpad also has access to a game library of (checks notes) almost every single game ever made excluding mainly AAA titles from the 2010s onward.
The same can be said of (Checks notes) a console with a Custom Firmware, plus a cheap TV brand new is around 90 dollars. The thinkpad is only good to play retro games or non demanding titles, also the experience of playing in a 14" display with laptop keyboard and a PS/2 trackpad sucks.
True, but most modern games are focused on online play and very few are cross platform. So if a kid’s friends are playing one particular console they’re going to want one too.
And they haven’t heard of used or sailing the high seas.
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.
And on top of that, I feel myself losing skills too. So if other millenialsare like me, it won’t be just gen alpha.
I sort of feel that way. I don’t think I’m losing skill so much as not wanting to spend more than 3 minutes thinking about a problem.
Let’s not make the inevitable mistake of assuming what was an essential skill for one generation is going to matter fuck all for most of the next generation.
Old people still think it’s outageous if you can’t write a check, read an analog clock, read/write cursive… All things that most millennials might “need” to do less than once a year.
