Computer literacy is weird because it feels like millennials were born into it and had to learn how to use the tools available… Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them, and Gen Z was born into apps and saas and did not have the chance to properly learn
We generally only taught a single generation to master our tech, I think it’s scary, but also I trust the Zoomers to figure it out, they’re creative
You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can’t use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of ‘dumbing down’ tech.
I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I’m not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).
I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.
Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.
I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.
(to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days)
The problem is if you don’t know basic concepts of computers you cannot transfer your knowledge from one program to the next. Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people and if they see one in program A, then they won’t understand that in program B it works the same way.
I have never had any issues learning any new software from scratch, but I see people my age not figuring out where to click next or where something they are looking for might be hidden in the options. Then an update comes that changes things and they are back to square 1 and helpless.
I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.
He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.
So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.
This could be a very formative memory even if he get disinterested from computers, getting this kind of perspective on things can go a long way !
I have memories of some random afternoons at the consulting firm my mom worked at, where everyone’s just poking at spreadsheets. I can’t imagine how cool the memory of going into the server farm and doing some hardware work there would be
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
Good on you. You can teach your son some valuable perspective, while getting in some quality time as well. Please let us know how it goes, if you don’t mind. I feel invested now.
Remind me in two months, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.
!remind 2 months
do we have something like this on lemmy?
No idea. I’ll look into creating one.
@RemindMe@programming.dev exists, but im not sure if it is whitelisted
2 months
Best I can do is “[voice assistant] remind me about that post in two months”
Drat, gotta open the reminder and paste in the comment URL too. Do wonder if that bot mentioned is whitelisted or not. More social, beyond just being native. And hopefully it has “send me a PM to reduce spam”
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
I just had a baby and I’m already planning how to get her to help me run my home lab as a way to get her to figure all this stuff out, maybe run some game servers or do a little local blog. Then I think about how I can teach her to solder a hand wired keyboard or maybe build a little fpv drone with me and then I start to remember that kids sometimes just don’t like what you do so you never know what you could get them interested in or not or if you will each have the time when they’re older
3 and 5 years old here. They can get interested as long it’s short and they can do meaningful work. I’ve teared down a second hand game boy color that had his fair share of Pepsi in it. The old one helped me clean with a toothbrush for 10 minutes, then he had to show me what parts were going where (with guidance). Then boot up and verify it works. We try to include them in everything we do and they love to help. We try to avoid the “it’s adult business” and they just sit around and never be interested on whats going out around them. The 3 year old can cut mushrooms with a wood knife and the 5 stir them when cooking.
It’s definitely more work, stuff will be broken but I think it’s worth it.
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people
When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents
In my country, this generational divide doesn’t make much sense. But comparing those born in the 90s and early 2000s with those born from the late 2000s onwards, there is a fundamental difference: there was, even in the public education system, a variety of computer courses available to many people. With the arrival and hegemony of the app model, which is designed with the idea that it is intuitive and does not require anyone to be taught how to use it, computer courses have been disappearing. As a result, millions of young people use computers daily and have no knowledge of simple concepts such as shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, let alone advanced features of Office suites, not to mention that they have no idea what LATEX and Markdown are.
That’s super interesting, I do remember being taught as a kid how to use Google Image search (circa 2005), Gimp for photo manipulation around the age of 12 in 2008, we had technology classes with electronics, technical drawing, even some plastic bending machine, and light programming (made a robot figurine execute recorded moves in sequence)
I do wonder if it’s still the case in my own country
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of people regardless of age don’t know what LaTeX or markdown are. Not the best examples. I’m a millennial with a 4 year STEM degree and I maybe used LaTeX once because it was required, and before Discord became a thing, I’d never heard of markdown. Most people who use Discord probably don’t even know it supports markdown.
I agree that is a extreme example. That’s precisely why I started with keyboard shortcuts. I don’t think anyone is required to know LaTeX and Markdown, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer younger people know them. If there are fewer people who know the basics, there are proportionally fewer people who know the advanced ones.
It’s really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.
The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don’t care about tech.
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This is quite a few years old now, but I think the main points are still valid. As you said, everything is so polished, kids don’t need to figure out how it works.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
Im surprised that a lot of people that are my age, even if they are using computers a lot, dont know how to search the solution for a problem or follow some instructions on how to do something
Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them
Which needs to be reversed if we’re to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I’d wager 50% of them don’t understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies’ payrolls.
I’m Gen Z and I still know all this stuff because that’s just what I’m interested in. I don’t think it’s a huge issue that those things were made simpler for the average person and that they don’t know how it works. It’s not like you can or need to know everything.
The weird thing is I know a lot of millennials that could use a dos computer just fine but struggle with anything modern
So maybe we shouldn’t worry after all? Future generations will make fun of us because we can use Windows XP fine but we don’t understand how TikTok works?
Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?
Gen-z here - I know how to torrent lol. It’s insane how tech illiterate a lot of my friends are, even in my IT classes don’t know what HTTPS is or what an ethernet cable is so… yeah
Feels weird being known as “the guy who’s an expert at computers” despite being a noob
bro you’re on lemmy, you’re already outside of the curve for most gen-z
I’m probably the only person in my entire school who knows what lemmy is lol
16 years ago, that was Reddit for me.
Guess we’ll see.
I wonder if anybody at my uni uses lemmy
Edit: Anybody from cal poly pomona feel free to comment below
I wonder if anybody in my town uses Lemmy lol.
I feel like if you know how to look up the answer and can follow a guide to apply 5 steps, you are probably more capable than 80% of the people on this planet.
That applies for most things tbh
I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.
My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.
It’s absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:
This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They’ve been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this “hacker culture” which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn’t afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.
Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.
And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it’ll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.
That’s a theory I can actually agree with. Sounds plausible enough to be true, given what we know about large corpos.
thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program
Now I get why Windows XP had an alert that said you weren’t going to uninstall the program when you tried deleting a link to a program
20yrs ago I had to help my comp sci housemate build a website for his module. I was not a CS student.
Some things never change.
yea we’re fucked
torrenting is a little bit more complicated than turning a light switch on
I think the core of the problem is that back in the bad old days, things needed to be tuned up a bit before they would work right and there was a marked lack of standardization. Now, not only do our devices work right out of the box, bit they also have little quality of life stuff as well. I haven’t bought a battery-powered device in years that wasn’t partially charged when I got it, and most devices come preinstalled with all the basic utility apps.
Gen-z too, finding can be somewhat hard but the mega threads help. Torrenting itself is easy of course. Just get transmission or any other FOSS client, put on a proper VPN and good to go.
qbittorrent search makes it stupid easy too
I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.
I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.
There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.
I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.
I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.
I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.
Get a certification?
What, like the CCNA? Which I achieved and it expired last year, and got me nowhere?
Yeah.
Next step, modify your resume to say you did networking at previous positions. Don’t lie, just focus on the network stuff. I’m assuming you did that too.
Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.
I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.
I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.
I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.
Fellow Zer here, my elective IT class had grading done depending on how well you could use the computer:
‘A’ if you could do everything perfectly well, ‘B’ if you needed some help from the instructor, ‘C’ if you needed a lot of help, ‘D’ if you couldn’t even get past the login screen on the windows machine.
We had a lot of people who got a pity ‘C-’
With the amount of password resets I have to do at work, I can’t say I’m shocked
I’m in the same boat. I’m a comp sci student but the amount of tech illiterate comp sci students I meet every day is astounding and concerning
Dude I was born in 2000 and I get so mad when I realize how true this is. Apps/“smart” phones might be regarded as the biggest double edged sword in the history of technology.
It literally feels like we are at a moment in history where we are evolving backwards by force. This will only worsen as the ipad babies grow older.
You will own nothing and be happy. You will also know nothing and be happy.
You will also know nothing and be happy.
Ignorance is bliss after all
We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.
Might be a bit dramatic. All sectors of industry are using more and more tech, we have more people in the workforce now that are tech literate than we did decades ago.
These are random numbers to explain my point. Look at it this way, in the 90s maybe 20 percent of people knew how to use computers but 12 percent of those were truly tech savvy and knew the ins and out of using a pc.
Now a days 90 percent of people know how to use a pc (regardless of the form it presents itself, be it pc, phone, tablet, etc) but only like 30 percent of them might be truly tech savvy.
It’s still a step up from back then, and because of the nature of tech in industry there’s always gonna be plenty of people who know how to use pcs well and if there aren’t then that’s just more money for us who do know.
People thought the same thing about written language, that it would ruin everyone’s memory cause they could just write things down and wouldn’t have to go through the honorable effort of rembering everything
Although, to be fair, they didn’t have capitalism then so our similar worries might be more well founded lol
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Because its convenient for them. For people who only have a phone Netflix for $2 or so a month is great.
Good luck finding Netflix for $2
It’s $3 a month and called RealDebrid + Stremio
Regional pricing exists. The cheapest plan is $2 in some countries.
Regional pricing exists. The cheapest plan is $2 in some countries.
Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).
At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?
Get into a private tracker, or rent a VPS in a country that doesn’t bend to the whim of capitalism, torrent to that vps and stream or sync it locally. I find that to have more peace of mind than using a vpn w/Killswitch.
To get into a private tracker you need to have a good seed to leech ratio, and to do that you need to upload a lot, which is what gets you on the ISP hitlist. This solution is by definition not useful for people in countries where the ISPs enforce no torrenting
First, torrenting isn’t illegal, and No ISP “enforces no torrenting” lol
Your understanding of the solution here is a snake eating its own tail. Might wanna think on that one bud. Did the chicken or the egg come first? Solid Ratio or the private tracker account? Figure out how private trackers work first, then come correct.
The real answer here is that there are intro private trackers one can join on an invite or free join days. If one desires, one then works on their ratio there to get into a better private tracker.
Copyright holder’s pay people to take snapshots of all the IP addresses currently leeching or seeding specific material on public trackers, so they can contact the ISP with the info and request they do something about it.
Are you deliberately being obtuse? They do enforce no torrenting of copyrighted material. Downloading they tend to not care, but uploading will get you legal notices in many EU nations
No you’re just not understanding. Torrent is a web protocol, like http, ftp, and more. It’s not inherently illegal.
When you’re downloading you spend less time on the public tracker and have less chance of being caught downloading than if you’re seeding, or uploading. In the states, the copyright holder takes snapshots of the public trackers IP address pool for specific torrents of their intellectual property, and requests your ISP send you a notice and threaten disconnection.
Usenet seems to work really well, and can be surprisingly cheap. Try FrugalUsenet. If you want both VPN and Usenet then try something like Eweka. They do deals where you get both Usenet access and a cheap VPN. It’s about €105 for 15 months or €6.99 per month.
“be bisexual” ???
When you’re a pirate, you can’t be picky on which booty to plunder
You know what they say, something is better than nothing
😂
I think they’re using this style: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-does-eat-hot-chip-and-lie-mean-the-viral-copypasta-and-meme-explained
I mean it’s true here.
Ahh the halcyon days of downloading one song from a private FTP server with upload ratios, found by Lycos FTP search. Over a modem, natch, so it took about 50 minutes…and that’s when your mom didn’t kick you off the internet so she could make a call.
This is the first time I see the word halcyon being used irl
This isn’t real life it’s an online forum in a video game
Yea yea, but in the wild then
This isn’t IRL, though.
Glad I could be of service.
I heard that some employers are having to teach new ‘gen z’ employees how to download email attachments…
Gen Z struggles with file systems in general, because the vast majority of their technical experience is on mobile OS’s. However, Gen Z compsci students are somehow far beyond the skill set that millennials had at their age. Or at least that has been my experience with interns over the past 12 years.
I guess because the Gen Z comp sci students are the people who are truly fluent in computers. We were immersed in the internet and digital technology from a young age, but also had the curiosity to go beneath the surface of them, and get a real understanding of how things work. Most people just use the technology superficially, even if they have grown up with the internet and computers.
100%, as a Gen Z CompSci student lol
I was born in 2001. I didn’t use a smartphone until I was like 16. We grew up with regular computers too. I also grew up with Windows XP and 7, as well as playing Doom using DosBox. Then again I am a computer science graduate, so maybe not the best example.
Just like me, I also grew up with Windows XP and still playing Master of Orion on Linux today.
So is that like, what gets the kids street cred? Windows XP usage?
Pretty cool I guess?
Point being I’ve used tech from the era before smartphones.
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No need for that tone old bean.
Keep fluffing each other
Why are you so negative?
Why do you want to be God’s specialist little guy? You didn’t contribute anything other than “oh I used Windows XP, unlike other Gen z.” it’s so insignificant and boring. Nothing personal but I’m just calling a spade a spade.
Gen Z here. Totally agree, though I personally am a bad example for this one. There was someone in my CS class once who I was put into a group with for a project. I needed some code that they had, so I asked them to put it on my flash drive. It was taking a while and eventually I asked why. They didn’t know where their IDE saved their code, and were using Windows search to try and find it. They were pretty good at actual programming, logic, etc. though.
Tbh, that’s something I can totally understand. Some programs use very obscure savefile locations, usually hidden behind 10 subfolders somewhere under your documents.
I think the teacher specified that we use eclipse, and most who didn’t were using vscode. If I recall correctly, they did use eclipse. I don’t remember how it handles saves, but I don’t think it does that.
Everybody always says this, but I’ve yet to talk to anyone who even has an anecdote of talking to a Gen Z person for whom that’s true.
What’s the original to template? It looks hilarious!
Found it! It’s eat hot chip & lie. The text in the original reads:
any female born after 1993 can’t cook… all they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, twerk, be bisexual , eat hot chip & lie
I can torrent, I just suck at it.
Besides 1337 who is good?
Besides 1337 who is good?
Literally any private tracker is a million times better
I don’t have any invites or info, I also like to avoid accounts
Depends on what you’re looking for, really. I’m unsure about the rules regarding sharing specific sites, but if you DM me, I can throw a few recommendations your way.
1337 is fine for most stuff, I think. Private trackers start to make sense when you want to automate downloading shows and movies but if you just wanna pirate some game, you’ll probably find it on 1337 with a ton of seeders anyways.
I was born after 2000 I have to teach my parent how to torrent its not a generational thing lol
bodies_hit_the_floor_teenage_wasteland.mp3 is my favourite song
linking_park_numb.mp3.exe
I prefer linkin_park_numb.mp3.com
It just hit different
Teach us then 😭
Ha I was actually just thinking that we need to teach them as I was reading this. We had to go through a shit ton of trial and error. God forbid if he started with something like LimeWire. Viruses… Viruses everywhere
Teach us then 😭
I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.
I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.
Reading this as someone who torrents debian ISOs instead of directly downloading then in the hopes of reducing server load, while at the same time, not torrenting any pirated stuff.
But well, I was born a wee bit before 2000
Please post your address to send the medal
127.0.0.1
Based alert
There’s just much less curiosity and “awareness of what you’re not aware of” these days
It’s not just a computer problem at all it’s everything
OpenBSD predicted this in 2009: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#46 :)
Damn dude, they got it to a T. This whole page is a discovery for me, gonna have to go through and listen to all of this.
I know how to torrent but choose to use one click hosters instead since they are safer to use here and I dont want to pay for a vpn. People who get fines here are people who torrent because they want to bust seeders since they are redistributing
Yeah, living in Germany a OCH is just the way to go. Also it’s impossible to find decent content with German audio without having spent years seeding English stuff to get into a private tracker
