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!
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.
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?
About the same level… Put a subject people can search for.
I am what you would call a boomer. But I do not only know how to rotate a PDF, I also know how to generate one from a number of sources with software I have written…
You’re a computer boomer, basically don’t count. A lot of millennials, with no relation to tech, can use the computer at least for basic stuff. That can’t be said about any other generation.
It can be said for Gen X.
I think that entirely depends on where at in GenX you were born. My mom, aunt and uncles were older Gen X (65-72) and can barely use computers at all. My friend born in 78 gets along just fine though and has never once asked me for tech support. Our school didn’t get a dedicated computer lab until most of the older GenX students had graduated. By the time I entered kindergarten in 91 we had a dedicated computer class with Apple (IIes or IIcs maybe?) and by the time I was in high school we had an A+ and CCNA elective class.
You’re old
lol did you get this from whoever posted it an hour earlier? Or did you just both get it from the same place?
Crossposted from them as part of ongoing boycotting efforts against the .ml instance.
Though it doesn’t show in this case because they put the image link in the body, and I really hate that, so I fixed it on crosspost lmao
To take stuff off .ml you must be reading it - strange version of “boycotting”. I just ignore it.
Since Lemmy doesn’t suck down data like corporate social media does simply lurking doesn’t contribute to an instance’s growth.
And when you crosspost that content elsewhere, with no comments or upvoting on the original, it diminishes that instance’s power and influence just a bit and contributes to a more decentralized Lemmy-verse
We should be doing the same with .world, not because of toxic propaganda pushing admins, but just so that content is more decentralized in general. But I’m just 1 person who refuses to automate it, soo I can only do so much lmao
On Lemmy, big comms, user counts and content are an instances influence, the more you have the less others will be willing to defederate from you. Kinda why .ml can get away with so much crap
Good explanation, thanks!
This is just following the capitalist model: steal stuff without any credit/payment to the originators, feel smug for “your innovative ideas.”
Honesty is an option. Go in with good faith, not like you have the truth. For example, “this publication says…how can I believe the publication’s refute? I don’t know what to believe because propaganda everywhere. How can I know this isn’t propaganda? Additional information please,” or something. Then take the time you spend in self-congratulatory mockery to follow up. I mean I honestly dk, I’ve said some really uninformed stuff over there and am somehow not banned.
Sometimes we just can’t always know what to believe and that’s okay. I usually just wait for more information, and sometimes that takes a really long time, or never comes.
This is just following the capitalist model: steal stuff without any credit/payment to the originators, feel smug for “your innovative ideas.”
All my cross-posts that have been identified as OC are credited back to the user in a way that does not link back to the .ml comm
Honesty is an option. Go in with good faith, not like you have the truth. For example, “this publication says…how can I believe the publication’s refute? I don’t know what to believe because propaganda everywhere. How can I know this isn’t propaganda? Additional information please,” or something. Then take the time you spend in self-congratulatory mockery to follow up. I mean I honestly dk, I’ve said some really uninformed stuff over there and am somehow not banned.
Sometimes we just can’t always know what to believe and that’s okay. I usually just wait for more information, and sometimes that takes a really long time, or never comes.
.ml does not return that good faith, I don’t consider banning and censoring the opposing view to be welcoming good faith arguments:
https://lemmy.world/post/28480760
https://lemmy.world/post/28481615
https://lemmy.world/post/28482147
https://lemmy.world/post/28480936
https://lemmy.world/post/28482273
https://lemmy.world/post/28481272
https://lemmy.world/post/28481064
https://lemmy.world/post/27674360
https://lemmy.world/post/27674117
https://lemmy.world/post/27673934
https://lemmy.world/post/27673724
https://lemmy.world/post/27577337
https://lemmy.world/post/27378634
https://lemmy.world/post/27346630
https://lemmy.world/post/27341283
https://lemmy.world/post/27288224
https://lemmy.world/post/27156418
And they’re almost as conservative as boomers too. Fucking shame.
Are you sure?
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? 😀
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 am genuinely having a hard time with my Gen Z employee. I have to go through everything step by step each time and it just seems like nothing sticks. I even create documentation for him and he just can’t follow it fully.
I’m truly baffled and any advice is welcome.
Fire him. Not able to follow procedure. So many people do not deserve jobs.
So much fucking this. So many people these days are straight up just useless at their jobs, but companies and managers tend to fall into some sort of toxic positivity bullshit and it’s just so hard to give negative feedback to someone notoriously bad at their job somehow. An advice would be to just keep it honest and expect some sort of improvement, otherwise they may try their luck somewhere else.
Have you tried video tutorials? I have noticed that a lot of younger people are more likely to look up tutorials on YouTube than written ones.
As a GenXer, I’m kind of horrified by how much of the “how-to” universe is shifting from written instructions to video.
(No, I don’t want a video tutorial for how to knit a scarf. I want a normal pattern. Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.)
Seriously, though, the next time you go through something with this employee, use a screen recorder to capture the process and then share the recording with him. Maybe it will help.
I also don’t want a video because I can READ a helluva lot faster than it takes to watch a video.
I can also reference back to WRITTEN information much faster. Everything about shifting from written medium to video is about commodifying content, rather than a better exchange of information. And it sucks.
Make a tiktok with “apple” by charli xcx in the background, subway surfers footage in the corner, and make the camera move further away from the screen (whats screen recording?) at random points.
spoiler
/s , hopefully obviously.
OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.
With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.
I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.
I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.
However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.
So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…
They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.
Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?
Nah, no breaks. Their ignorance is the foundation upon which further learning will stumble.
Is it their fault? No. But neither has it been Millennials’ fault for inheriting a vast slew of fuckery dropped at our feet since the late 90s.
Baby Boomers ARE the culprits in most cases, but they’ll never accept their roles in destroying the greatest and broadest reaching wealth engine in the modern world.
Fun read, but the zinger of “it… Just… Isn’t… Important” really damages your argument.
The difference in knowing how our technological systems work versus just using them is how you wind up in a world where capitalist rule, intelligence dwindles and choice is stolen. We’re seeing these effects in real time. And it’s just not technology; take the electoral system here in the US. It stopped being about the functions of our government and became flag waving and baby kissing. Now our tax dollars kill children, the rich are all but unstoppable and we’re at each other’s throats all because we, collectively, let the systems work without understanding how and why.
Tech today being a glass and aluminum block feeds our lust, insecurity, inequality, comparison etc all in an effort to generate wealth and further divide, all by design. Didn’t you think it’s very important to know that?
As a zoomer (17) I kind of agree but I really don’t think its that deep although big tech does seem to profit off people’s incompetence. Yes kids my age know very little about the computers they use. Hell most kids don’t even seem to know where their files are or how file paths work. I recently in Comp Sci class had a kid look at me confused when I mentioned the folder he was looking for was in his home directory. The dumbing down of Tech is definitely a culprit. Not always even in ways that the tech easier to use. Finder on MacOS outright hides things from you on purpose like file paths and being able to access arbitrary folder on your system. There are a considerable amount of features locked away in the settings menu where the vast majority of people will never even look. I highly think all of this is malicious as it severely degrades user experience and sets them to fail in the long run. Don’t even get me started on the whole random files will end up in ICloud/Onedrive and there is nothing you can do about it.
During a zoom, I was presenting my full screen and was opening a new tab instantly with the scroll wheel click and the zoomers on the call was mind blown.
Me trying to show a zoomed where a file is on the network. Me: “Open file explorer” Zoomer: “What?” Me: “Files…” Zoomer: “Huh?” Me: “Just click the folder.” Zoomer: “Ohhhhhh”
Almost as bad as watching my boomer coworker open notepad and drag a file into it. Just double click or right click open with. Ahhhhh.
A few years ago I saw an article that Gen Z struggled with file organization. In basic terms, search functions have gotten so good that the majority of Gen Z doesn’t use file organization on computers or phones. When in a work setting they are confused when digital items need to be organized into a file structure. Part of the problem is that most of them have never had to use a real world filing system. Part of the problem is that they are only used to handling their own disorganized files. In a business setting it generally isn’t acceptable to dump all your files into a local “Downloads” file and rely on the search function to locate mission critical files.
When the article I am referencing came out other people stated that they had experienced similar phenomena in the PC world. They remembered when soldering was an expected norm of PC building, but with the passage of time it was no longer necessary or expected.
soldering was an expected norm of PC building
There has never been an IBM PC-compatible that expected soldering of its user in order to function. Maybe if you wanted to upgrade the RAM on your motherboard prior to inline memory modules, but that’s hardly an end-user task, you’d take it to a technician to do that.
It’ll depend on their hobbies. PC gamers will know this stuff, or at least how to figure it out.
PC gamer no longer means tech savvy. My zoomer stepson is a hardcore gamer but can’t figure out shit when something’s wrong with his computer, and does not understand basic concepts regarding hardware, operating systems, networking, … and he doesn’t seem to care about any of it either.
Let’s be fair though. Adobe changes the Acrobat interface every two weeks for no reason. PDF has always been an absolute shitshow, super slow, walled garden format. After like 30 years it’s still a 30 step process to add a note box with an arrow that looks half decent
Adobe did that to me twice and then I uninstalled it and never gave Adobe another chance. There are plenty of good free pdf editors that I don’t need to support such a terrible and greedy company
You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It’s free entertainment and nobody can stop you
Aphantasia can stop you.
I think Zoomers need a generational divide in their generation, tbh. In my experience, older Zoomers are intelligent, capable, motivated, and largely leftist. For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide, and I can’t point to any stats or evidence to support this belief, but anecdotally I have noticed this trend within my own life and spheres of influence.
Even with millennials (1981 to 1996) there is a big difference when you where born.
If you are an early millennial you grew up with MS-DOS, so you had to learn the terminal to get anything done. You probably had your first smartphone after you where 25.
If you are a late millennial you grew up with Windows XP and probably had a smartphone as a teen.
That sounds like gen alpha more than late zoomer. Perhaps they are simply too close in time to gen alpha.
That has not been my experience, no. I am speaking younger adults, not teenagers; I don’t really have many interactions with teenagers or children these days so I don’t have enough experience with alphas to have really any sort of opinion on them. As I understand it, Gen A starts after 2010, so any adult today would still be a Zoomer. Granted of course that “generations” are a loosely-defined concept so the years they are defined as may vary, but it is my understanding that the typical understanding of Zoomer goes as far as 2010 at least.
Tik Tok
Nah tik tok is plagueing everybody but maybe the younger kids just grew up with it even more
Maybe the younger ones still elastic brains were just too vulnerable
E: Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…
For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,
The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.
That, and it’s unsurprisingly connect to the piewdiepie fascist pipeline thing, Helldivers popular as fuck, Warhammer 40K having a renessaince, I see plenty of shorts about how boys want to die a heroic death, that’s a fucking staple of fascism
This is such a good video on this stuff, how young kids get sucked into fascism layer by layer https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw
Most of the reasonably intelligent people playing Helldivers know full well that it is satire with a side of sick sarcasm.
If anything it’s antifascist indoctrination on a grand scale.
Reasonably intelligent is already the minority
I agree with this, but what made this different then our generation or early zoomers? I was raised online as a house with an internet-connected home PC in the early-to-mid 90s with two parents who worked until night; there were grifters and proto-manosphere groups then and I’m sure moreso for the early zoomers, so I have to assume there was either some change in the methodology behind the delivery in these messages or, more likely, some change in the parental oversight, but I can’t identify exactly when or what
Yeah but there wasn’t an algorithm picking out all of that shit and giving us a constant stream of 100% pure troll heroin.
Seeing one post in fifty telling you garbage puts it into the context of “that guy is saying some weird shit”. Seeing only garbage in your feed makes it seem normal and those opposed to it are the weirdos.
