memes

You're old

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.

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.

Let me guess: they're talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.

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

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!

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.

There are two generations that can do this task X and millennials.

Are they the same generation whose parents said “they’re really good with computers …they go on the iPad all the time”?

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."

It only relatively recently occurred to me that the vast majority of people use the Internet either solely or mostly with a mobile phone. It blew my mind since I grew up with PCs and modems and the Internet is so much better on a large screen that's not half full of ads.

Me: Behold!

*quickly presses Control+V

Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!

True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.

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'

You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It's free entertainment and nobody can stop you

My daughter (5) uses WASD proficiently, so I have hope.

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?

Boomer don't know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don't know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can't help themselves and have low standards.

There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.

There are TWO generations between Boomers and Zoomers.

It's funny how Bs and Zs kind of horseshoe into being ignorant about how computers work. Boomers never had them growing up, while Zoomers were born with phones in their hands using corporate apps and never learned how computers actually work. Those of us in between had to learn how they worked to use them.