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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.
Expectation: these new generations are practically born with computers in their hands when they grow up they are going to create a new world so fast and develop new technologies
Reality: if tik tok doenst work they don’t know what else to do with their 1000+ euro smartphones
We’re dumbing everything down. When I was a kid Imade my own tower defense game inside warcraft3 world editor, with custom models and everything. Everything was moddable, customisable. Now everything exists in walled gardens where you can’t even switch anything
Another meaningless mention of tiktok. Is tiktok making android and ios? Does it make impossible for users to install OS of their choice on their phones?
Replying to you here from a Google Pixel running Graphene OS here for no particular reason
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fawk you. Boomers are happy, what about you?
Boomers are what they believe happiness to be, but they are very much not actually happy. Happy people don’t belligerently complain about every little thing every opportunity they get like boomers frequently do.
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!
And they’re almost as conservative as boomers too. Fucking shame.
Are you sure?
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.
As a boomer, reading this thread/discussion has been so amusing in many ways while enjoying my cuppa tea this morning. A classic “the younger generations are stupid.”
The older generations looking down the ones that follow. And the following generations looking down on those that precede them. And no one understanding ain’t none of us are all that bright.
Ever has it been, and so ever shall it be.
A classic “the younger generations are stupid.”
There is some of that, but ultimately I know that it really isn’t Zoomers’ fault. They were never taught how to properly use a computer, a responsibility that should have been done by their Gen X/Millennial parents.
And of course there are many that do. This is just dealing in generalities.
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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
PDF is in landscape orientation, you need it portrait (say someone scanned the documents in sideways, it happens annoyingly often), or some similar situation
Well it would entirely depend on the document how well it rotates.
Rotating isn’t the issue, really, just how well it rotates.
Prints designed for portrait or landscape can be hard if not impossible to rotate properly.
Pure text documents, no problem. edit well the usual fuckery, can be shit. but like some are just impossible to properly rotate if the graphics are designed for portrait or landscape or etc
What do you mean “how well it rotates” ? If, e.g. an A4 portrait document is scanned in landscape it can be rotated back to portrait with no issues, no ifs or whats about it. It’s a simple file orientation change
If you have specific graphics on the page which are designed to fit a portrait or a a landscape, they may not transfer well.
Just remember the outrage people have over people not filming thing in landscape, because then one ends up watching a fullscreen video on pc that’s 80% black screen and only a sliver of actual footage on the screen, but we’re used to it.
The page layout is incredibly precise work for most things related to print, however if you’re just using PDF to relay text, it doesn’t really matter at all. But PDF is something you can have as print quality, so you work on a project, you make a PDF, then you take that PDF to the print and they print it in whatever size or colour, but the layout will be the same.
You are overthinking this. It has nothing to do with whether something is designed or not for landscape or portrait. It is whether the file itself has dimensions of 4000x2000 and you want to rotate it 90 degs so that it is 2000x4000. Same content but everything rotated so that it opens oriented the way it was intended.
I mean from my point of view you’re underthinking it.
The design of page layouts for print media is incredibly precise, but that’s not even the issue.
Just like think of any generic magazine. Most of the text is placed in paragraphs around illustrations and quotes and sidebars and whatnot.
Just rotating it will fuck all that up, much like when you move an image in word. (lol)
But yeah that’s “overthinking” it in the sense that while that was important to an entire industry, it was basically just one industry, and everyone used/uses pdf for generic documents without a designed specific layout, and those do rotate, no problem.
Edit no wait you were 100% right I was way overthinking it. You’re just basically saying you’re not rotating the content on the page, but whether it’s on its side on the reader or not, lol. Yeah my bad way overthought it you were absolutely right
Pro Tip: Press Shift - Ctrl - numpad 0 to rotate it in Acrobat
Me: Behold!
*quickly presses Control+V
Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!
True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.
yeah there are noobs at everything in each generation. maybe some change in percentages but still. you could tell this story a million times
10.000 per day, in fact!
xkcd
There’s one for every occasion.
I remember watching an interview with the CEO of SUN microsystems in the 90’s argue that you didn’t need to know how to run a nuclear power plant to use a light switch, and you shouldn’t have to know how a computer works to use one.
I guess his vision came true, and we’re mad about it?
Fella, the stuff Gen Z struggles with is the light switch.
They know how to use the light switch, but they have no idea what to do when the bulb burns out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
