this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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[–] Xanthrax@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

All the kids I've met are good at navigating UI, regardless of the platform. They know how to use websites well, but they don't know how they work. This is a generalization, though.

I actually had a nightmare last night: my boss took me offline while I was making a script, and I think that's even scarier for younger generations. This is coming from an older Gen Z.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 341 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (27 children)

We are the bridge generation.

We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.

We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn't work the way we wanted them to, they weren't fast and they didn't have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.

Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state ... they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.

We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 96 points 1 week ago (3 children)

We got to live in the most interesting times in history, so far. Most of us are depressed for it.

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[–] RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com 54 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The PSU is the only thing you can change easily. I love that everything is USB-C and that I can plug in everything, everywhere.

But I'm kind of happy everyone uses handhelds, I got really tired fixing everything for my entire family and friends.

"My printer seems to be defectiv..."

Entschuldige, ich kann kein Englisch. Muss weg, keine Zeit. Bye!

[–] balderdash9@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago

The PSU might be easy in practice but all those cords are daunting to the novice. Much easier to swap the RAM or even to take out and put in a new GPU.

I love that everything is USB-C

Well, maybe things are easier now. My 12 year old PC build has a modular PSU with a bunch of different cords.

[–] Sammy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I work in Tech and this is my mantra: printers are Of the Devil.

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[–] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 180 points 1 week ago (28 children)

Kids don't even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.

[–] MashedTech@lemmy.world 111 points 1 week ago (6 children)

That's my biggest gripe to be honest with modern OSs. My files in my folders are organized like I organize my house. I live in and around that. I hate the idea of a "Downloads" and other stuff with "automatically in the cloud backup for this app". Give me a file to save you stupid app.

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[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 139 points 1 week ago (8 children)

iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. "iPad kids" aren't especially gifted, "iPad adults" are especially stupid.

But on the bright side, those same groups think they "know computers" because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.

It's also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just "feel" like they get it.

[–] JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 90 points 1 week ago (20 children)

My boss very confidently proclaimed that all serious IT professionals use a Mac. Said Linux "is for programmers and nerds"

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 56 points 1 week ago (4 children)

So, programmers != IT professionals, huh...

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[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Linux is for programmers and nerds

...and your ideal system administrator is neither of those?

[–] Sabata11792@ani.social 34 points 1 week ago (7 children)

As an IT professional, Macs are used by people that couldn't figure out Windows. Linux is for people that understand enough about Windows to live in constant fear of the next newsworthy workday.

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[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 137 points 1 week ago (13 children)

Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 79 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.

[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 72 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I fix my parents’ computers. I fix the computers of the super old people in the neighborhood. I fix my kid’s computer. I fix my friends’ computers.

I don’t think it’s generational.

When your car breaks down, do you fix it? At what point do you take it to a mechanic?

At what point do you call an electrician or plumber? Who biopsies their own cysts?

It’s all the same shit. We live in a society of specialists because there’s simply too much potential knowledge for everyone to be able to do everything.

And if we start arguing about what things people “ought to be able to do themselves”, we turn into a bunch of old farts lamenting about the good old days.

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[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 68 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 58 points 1 week ago (10 children)

When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.

I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.

Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don't remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.

In twenty years, I'm sure they'll know more than me, just because I'll be retired and they'll be in the thick of it.

Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents' generation learned. I'm clueless.

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[–] Apytele@sh.itjust.works 56 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

As a millenial nurse watching gen z new grads hunt and peck with their index fingers to write a shift note, 100%. I don't think my parents really appreciated how much constantly being on AIM with my friends as a tween actually really benefited my typing skills in a way that's been much more valuable to my career than algebra.

All the math you need to be a nurse is ratio / proportion and kitchen measurements to track I/O. With a modern EMR system (electronic medical record) that does most of the math for you you don't even need that. The rest is latin and greek root words for various body parts and fluids and a vague understanding of how they're all related (hyper-tension in the cerebral is bad because the cerebral is surrounded by a bone case and bones no stretch. That means the cerebral pops out of the bone holes and once it's done that it does NOT go back in correctly like a squeezy ball toy). That gets you through the board exams.

After a year or two in practice you've just seen the same shit with a millimeter of difference over and over and over that you either know what to do about it or who to call to do something about it. And when shit is about to go REALLY wrong that's also happened enough times that you get a weird feeling and just start calling everybody because your psych patient has been trying to kill you for the past week and an hour ago they suddenly stopped trying to kill you and now you have to explain to an RRT nurse (rental ICU nurse) why you're upset that the patient isn't trying to kill you.

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[–] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 54 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

Our parents didn't think it was important. Our kids don't think it is necessary.

Imagine how horse farmers felt about engine maintenance on the first automobiles. Early adopters probably knew everything about how to fix tractors and cars. But today, how many people know how to change their own brakes or flush the coolant?

Life evolves, and transitions come faster with every generation. It's good that nobody knows how to use a sextant or a fax machine.

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[–] shonn@lemmy.world 52 points 1 week ago (10 children)

The next generation doesn't know how to use a mouse because they do everything on the phone. And yes, I have met people like that.

[–] Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

My four-year-old daughter is shockingly proficient with a mouse and keyboard. Kid goes to town on Spyro: Reignited. My wife snagged an old PC from her office and we want to set it up for her eventually for learning, light gaming and MS Paint. We figure in another year or two we can set up a family Minecraft server and get her in on it. The dream is to get her playing Valheim with us when she's older.

Hoping she will be as good with PCs and I am, and would love to help her build one when she's grown.

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[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's worse than that: we're a small subset of the only generations that know how computers work. The vast majority of my peers would balk at using a command line, much less anything deeper.

I say generations because it's obviously not limited to one, but, it sure as fuck isn't many.

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[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 34 points 1 week ago (14 children)

I work in tech.

My dad was a teacher, his subject was computers, at that time "computers" class was heavily programming. Basic stuff.

It seems that kids from gen x, and the millennial generation had the timing to learn the tech before it "just works", so we're used to figuring it out as we go, because there was no way to look it up on the internet, so we had to.

The zoomers and younger generations are largely "it just works" users, where all the basics of getting things to just plug and play was a thing. If it didn't work it was either "incompatible" or broken. So don't try to make it work, or you'll be sued for DMCA related violations.

IMO, there's a sweet spot, somewhere in the late 70's or early 80's to about the early-mid 2000's when people had to know something about tech to operate it. Anyone with the aptitude for tech, who was born during this time is generally working in tech.

People born before that are generally the old school pen and paper types, and anyone younger is generally the plug and play digital era.

If course, everyone is different, so the dates are probably liable to be different depending on the area, and each person may have different motivations, etc.

My generation (early millennials) are generally known for being the "tech" person to friends/family, and ADHD; at least, as far as I can see, from my little bubble of friends who mostly work in/with tech.

[–] SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

BORN INTO WINDOWS 3, STAYED FOR 7, FORCED TO 11.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago

I've used most versions of Windows since 3.11 I didn't bother going backwards because as far as I'm concerned, before 3.11, it was better to use DOS. Since then I've used 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and of course 11.

About the only one I "missed" was NT, and I'm not unhappy about that. My notes are: 3.11 was basically just an application running on DOS, which was fine, but it's not really improving much. Few applications supported Windows at that point, so there was little reason to have/use it. 95 was hot garbage at launch, and did not improve much over time, however it was such a drastic change from DOS/3.11 that it was the best we could have hoped for at the time. 98 was forgettable, very little improvement over 95; at least until 98 SE came out, adding USB support, which changed a lot of things. ME was fine for the most part, they put to much emphasis on making it look better without making significant improvements beyond that; however, ME was fine and stable after a few service packs.

XP was the favorite for most, I saw it as Windows 2000 with makeup. That said, the biggest improvement here was the change over to the NT kernel, something we still use today. Windows 2000 was a favorite of mine, it was visually simpler than ME/XP, but all the functionality you needed was there. It was fairly barebones but that allowed for Windows to take a back seat to whatever you were actually using the computer for.

Vista was hated, but not because it was actually bad. The problem with Vista was that the system requirements to run Windows shot up significantly with Aero. At the same time, Microsoft introduced driver updates for security, so many older devices, built for XP, that were more or less abandoned, never got drivers that met the security constraints added in Vista. Vista also launched around the netbook era, when "a computer for every child" was a thing. The hardware was trending towards less powerful, cheaper chips, while Vista was requiring much more from the hardware, creating a perfect storm of people buying Celeron systems pre-installed with Vista and having a very bad time. Anyone using a Core/Core2/first gen Core I* chip had a lot fewer problems.

When Windows 7 launched, most people had abandoned Celeron as a product, and most hardware manufacturers were distributing drivers with the extra security needed for Vista (which was also required for 7), so everything went smoothly and 7 became the next favorite. I don't have any complaints with 7, and I would be happy to keep using Windows 7 if it wasn't for the fact that it's abandonware.

Windows 8 was a solution looking for a problem. This was the era of Android honeycomb, the odd version of Android made exclusively for tablets. Microsoft seemed to think it was a good idea to do the same, however, sales of tablet windows systems are fairly paltry overall, so forcing everyone into a tablet optimized interface proved to be a bad idea, they "fixed" it with 8.1, and nobody cared. I had purchased a Microsoft surface pro 3 at the time, which was pre-installed with Windows 8, and I found that it was fine, but it was both a lackluster tablet, and a fairly bad laptop, it was an inbetween hybrid that was (again) a solution looking for a problem. Despite having one of the "more powerful" pro 3 units (I think I had the second from the top SKU, core i5), it frequently overheated, making it uncomfortable to use as a tablet, and due to thermal throttling, it was not performant as a laptop. It was a nice idea, executed poorly, solving a problem that nobody had.

10, in my opinion, is the gold standard. At least, until they started loading windows up with spyware. Any tracking, advertising ID garbage, or similar, was basically the worst part of Windows 10, and everything else was essentially a return to form and function for many things. To me it was like an evolution of Windows 2000. Not many frills, and windows mostly fades into the background so you can focus on what you're trying to accomplish.

11 is trying to overhaul your experience, and doing so badly. Control panel, apps, and even your right-click menu is being done differently... They're pushing you to do it the "new" Microsoft way, and so far, I haven't met anyone that prefers anything that way.

IMO, 11 is a lot of Microsoft shoving terrible options in your face by default and whispering in your ear "you know you like it like that"

No, we don't. Fuck off with your bullshit, fuck "new" teams, fuck "new" Outlook, fuck everything you're slapping a "new" label on. We don't want this.

Windows 11 is the best advertisement for Linux and Mac products so far.

[–] KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My housemate is completely incapable of installing mods without using a mod manager, so when my subscription to vortex lapsed he wanted my help and I was like, "look.... just read the fucking instructions man, odds are it'll tell you exactly what to do"

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago

The old RTFM technique, classic.

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