Yea surprise some people are good at using computers some are bad, has nothing to do with whatever generation someone is apart of, generation labels are so dumb. Literally every “milleinal” I’ve known comes to me for their computer problems.
I used to know everything there was on 95 to windows 7 but things keep changing so I just stopped caring.
Yep. Why bother learning when it won’t work tomorrow. I miss software that was bought and didn’t change, says the old man to the cloud.
And I’m pro learning but for most things I’m not a pro user. So my flow is learn something, think wow this is great I can do so much. Set it aside for weeks/months. Come back to it, download a huge update and and spend the time I had to work on it waiting. Come back again later and find out I need something else or whatever. Eventually it works but now I the thing I wanted to do has changed. Pretty much gave up on pcs years ago. Am looking for one for the first time in years because I actually want to try linux again.
Linux has some advantages in that a lot of the basic stuff, someone from 1985 would pick it up pretty fast, I think. Commandlines are very conservative. I have scripts I haven’t changed in 15 years.
Are they the same generation whose parents said “they’re really good with computers …they go on the iPad all the time”?
WhAt’S a CoMpUtEr?
If only we knew at the time how prophetic that damn commercial would be…
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.
I’d argue at a certain depth in an OS its actually harder to do things with a GUI than a command line
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!
Okay but can you rotate a pdf?
Depends, my browser has mostly taken over as my pdf viewer and I think it lacks the functionality but if I were to install a cracked copy of Acrobat Pro or PhantomPDF then that’s like a 2 click operation.
I bow down to thee. Please don’t smite me o’ holy one.
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written”
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.
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
They’re a witch speaking in tongues! Burn them!
You just made me realize the Zoomers are actually much closer to making Warhammer 40k a reality. IT engineers are like Tech Priests to these Zoomers.
If you’ve never read it Vernon Vinge a fire upon the deep had a type of programmers in the future known as programmer archaeologists. The tldr is nobody wrote new code just dug up old code and bolted it together. I used to think that was silly, after llms lately and dealing with interns I no longer think of it as fiction.
I’ve always viewed programmer archaeology is just trying to understand your old code or the team you are working withs old code and also trying to understand the why it was done this way.
I think AI coding is a programmer archeologist based on your definition, and I think I may start using that now.
I mean it’s kinda both, I just thought the idea a bit preposterous but as time goes on that book gets closer to reality.
I don’t know much of Warhammer lore, so I had to look up tech priests:
"No longer the master of its creations, the Cult Mechanicus is enslaved to the past. It maintains the glories of yesteryear with rite, dogma and edict instead of true discernment and comprehension. For instance, even the theoretically simple process of activating a vehicle’s engine is preceded by the application of ritual oils, the burning of sacred resins and the chanting of long and complex hymns. "
Its clear to me the author of this block of text was having trouble starting his vehicle’s engine, and was pissed off when he/she was asked to put in a ticket before help would be rendered to the him/her.
he/she
What’s this nonsense? Why don’t you just say “they” like a normal person?
I’ve been called a wizard a lot in my career because I can google an error message.
I’m old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel this meme in my bones.
I actually thought I am part of this blessed generation that can use a computer. But rotating a PDF? That beats me.
The real skillset isn’t necessarily knowing how to do these things off tbe top of your head, but knowing how to look them up.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for the next generation is how thoroughly Google has enshittified.
LibreOffice Draw should work just fine for that :)
Are you joking right now? I tried opening a pdf with Libre Draw recently but it didn’t work.
No sir or madame, I actually verified by hand before posting that exact comment because while I did recently use it to edit the contents of a pdf (increase contrast on hiking map for BW print), I haven’t that often and thus I wanted to find the rotate button myself to make sure I was giving legitimate advice :)
PDF is a pointless file format that should not exist. Come at me.
Pointless?? Really? We should have just stuck with postscript? I’m pretty happy with pdf for almost anything as there’s a good chance it’ll render how whoever sent it to me was seeing it. What would you suggest/do different?
It’s good for sending documents you don’t want to be tampered with because most people don’t know how to edit a PDF.
You can lock other file formats too though
Pdf will always look the same though. A doc/docx file can look wildly different depending on the editor you are using.
This. I care about graphic design and aesthetics. So when I send a document to a group for review, I’m not taking the risk of giving them something they could mess with.
Sounds like something imagemagick could do so that would be my first strategy to try
Ctrl+shift+plus sign
Or ctrl + alt + down arrow also work
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.
Yeah, newer generations have been raised on tech that “just worked” consistently. They never had to do any deep troubleshooting, because they never encountered any major issues. They grew up in a world where the hard problems were already figured out, so they were insulated from a lot of the issues that allowed millennials to learn.
They never got a BSOD from a faulty USB driver. They never had to reinstall an OS after using Limewire to download “Linkin_Park-Numb.mp3.exe” on the family computer. Or hell, even if they did get tricked by a malicious download, the computer’s anti-virus automatically killed it before they were even able to open it. They never had to manually install OS updates. They never had to figure out how to get their sound card working with a new game. They never had to manually configure their network settings.
All of these things were chances for millennials to learn. But since the younger generations never encountered any issues, they never had to figure their own shit out.
And that is why I’ll only allow my kids to use Linux!
It’s not so much that the tech just worked. Often it doesn’t work. The difference is that when it doesn’t work it’s not user-serviceable. Up until maybe 2010 or so, when things broke there was often something a user could do to fix them. But, especially with the introduction of locked-down mobile phone OSes, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s just “wait for an update”.
Or reinstall the OS on the family computer because one of your dumbass siblings downloaded a sUpeR cOoL song from one of their friends on MSN Messenger.
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Hello, COMPUTER!!!
SLAMS DESK HELLO!
FathER!
FaaaThERR!
It was always a struggle to get the damn thing to do what you wanted it to. It turned out to be a good thing long term.
Even as a teenager (didn’t have a computer before that) I had infinite patience with computers, you can fix/change/make anything with enough time, nothing will be better if you get mad and ignore reading and making sure you understand what’s happening. Seeing how young people handle tech now is fucking depressing, they just click past everything without reading, get mad and rage quit after 30 seconds of something not working and think anything that’s more than two clicks/taps is too complicated.
You talking about young people or old people?
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.
That’s where the term punch card comes from
Percussive maintenance is surprisingly helpful a lot of the time.
As long as you don’t let too much magic smoke escape.
If the magic smoke comes out, that’s entirely the electrician/electrical designer’s fault. Their circuits shouldn’t have let me do that.
Hey now, the NEC provides ample protection against user stupidity, and I do my damndest to take it a step further. If a user is able to do something so catastrophically stupid despite me better engineering efforts, perhaps they should read up on darwinism.
Signed, an electrician.
Until your trackpad is acting up a bit and you become so frustrated you smack it and now it hardly ever works.
Same with flinging a laptop across the room, which ultimately became my excuse to replace a 12yo Sony laptop.
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.”
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.
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.
We are getting this teached in 6th grade what country is this from? Edit: Įn 8th rudementary python.
Let me guess: they’re talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.
For once they didn’t forget gen X-- I think OP is about xennials
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.
Probably. But if I’m being generous, we’re really only talking about younger X and older millennials.
Hahaha its funny each time that happens.
My uncle is GenX and way smarter than my millennial ass. They paved the way for child free poppin off and being tech savvy with a normal tech free upbringing.
Anecdotal I know. But always funny how self centered us millenials can be thinking were the last normal generation.
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Some can’t. Computers weren’t commonplace until many GenXers were in their 20s, so some never learned. Those that did learn often learned the deep magic.
The generation that used them to create the new generation of smart devices? Sure.
The generation that grew up with ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga etc knows how to use computers.
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The generation that made most of the websites and software associated with the internet?
Gen X could write a program that’ll make a floppy drive’s loading noises play the Imperial March.
For fuck’s sake, give us 2005-2007 kids a microgeneration. We’re like late zillennials.
ZILLENIALS ARE HEREBY A RECOGNIZED SUBSET OF COMPETENT COMPUTER USERS
Yeah, but I technically fall outside of the zillennial microgen. We’re right in the middle of Gen Z, and yet we barely fit the stereotype.
As a 2007 kid I don’t many of my peers actually are but we are pretty different than post 2007 kids. I still grew up with satellite tv for the most part.
Ahem, there are TWO generations between Boomers and Zoomers.
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
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
It isn’t their fault, but it did happen.
No one taught me how to use a computer, I figured it out as I went. I had to tell my 25 year old brother that theres more than one USB port on the back of his computer because he only saw the one in the front and asked me where he plugs in the keyboard and mouse.
Part of the issue for a lot of the older and younger crowd is “Well, it’s not immediately obvious, so therefore its impossible and now I’m mad at you for it.”
That’s… part of it, but part of it is just ease of use. In growing up, I had to figure out issues with my computer,and getting games etc working took some work to do. I build a gaming PC for my nephew(under 10, but games a lot mobile and with consoles) and he played a few games on it, but then my sister (a gamer herself) said he couldn’t really get used to keyboard over controller (at which point I reminded her she could just get him a PC controller or use one of the console ones that also work on PC).
He just seems to prefer to use things that are already intuitive, and since my childhood things have gotten much better in that regard for consoles and mobile stuff. You can definitely do it on PC as well, but it often means more accessories, sometimes figuring out issues . I got another sister of mine a controller for pc and it took a bit of effort getting it properly synced for the game she wanted to play. It would show up properly in the OS, but then the game he issues, so we had to switch through modes and such, and sometimes even though one mode may work an update or something may break it.
I like using controllers for some games, and WASD for others, but even though IT is my job and I’m good at fixing things, some games have weird issues with some controllers, especially if they have mode options. All that extra fixing and finding the right settings is just frustrating for some, and with easy to use alternatives they may not bother to learn. I had no choice, just SNES and pc while growing up.
So what this suggests to me is that zoomers are so up their own cell phones that they never bothered to learn how to use pepper computers. That almost funny. Mocking laughter is warring with weary head shaking in me.
I never learned how to use pepper computers either. But I do salt my hashes.
