source: @n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca
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 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.
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.
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.
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”.
Hello, COMPUTER!!!
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.
we really need frutiger aero back man
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.
Yeah, I hate using the internet via a phone and only do it when there’s no other option available. It severely limits what you can do, which of course is perfect for the 5 or so corporations that run most of the internet.
My wife is similarly aged than me. I was raised around computers and she was not. It’s a chore to get her to actually send me a URL or tell me where she is so I can actually get a full browser experience. I’ve slowly been converting her over and trying to show her the benefits of browsing online.
It doesn’t have to be full of ads on mobile either, just use Firefox or a fork (ironfox is great) and add ublock origin as a start.
This is true for Android, but sadly not so for iOS. All browsers on iOS use Safari’s engine WebKit under the hood, yet only Safari can have extensions. There is no uBlock on Safari, either. We have alternatives though, like AdBlock Pro and similar
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’
It’s not just dismantling of education. It’s the corporate creep into the education system from companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple. They want people get locked into their systems. So they start them young. Instead of learning basic os agnostic computer skills, kids at school are locked into cloud dependent apps.
I think if they were using windows they’d be far more computer literate, but they’re just using iPad and chromebooks
The companies started it in the 1980s.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
Hey, I was never taught how to rotate a PDF.
I just looked for the button in the viewer.
Sometimes, I just rotate the screen instead.
No it’s just that Zoomers only use touchscreen, which are vastly simplified devices compared to a desktop computer
Personally I’d blame parents more than the schools, especially in America. Parent involvement is nearing all-time lows and it seems a lot of them are expecting all learning to be done outside the home. I learned more about computers from my dad than any class or teacher.
one of the major benefits of going to school is you can learn stuff your parents don’t know or can’t teach.
In your country, when you were a child, how many parents out of 1000 knew more than a computer teacher about computing?
You are advocating for a world where only the children of the educated can become educated.
You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It’s free entertainment and nobody can stop you
Aphantasia can stop you.
Lol, right? I can’t even imagine the PDF in my mind, much less rotate it
Thank god I at least can rotate it using a computer or I’d be stuck
Do not try to rotate the PDF, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to know the truth.
There is no PDF?
Dude thanks for that tip…I’m watching hundreds of thousands of pdfs spinning in my mind… this is so entertaining.
For now
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.
I am not arguing in any way that there should be some basic competence required of everyone who uses tech, in the same way that despite my aversion to cars I know how to change a tyre, check and top up my oil, feel the windshield wiper resevoir and check the radiator level. It is incumbent on me to have that knowledge as a foundational level of being a driver and car owner, and yes I am aware that there are a number of drivers who do not know these things, but that is another discussion.
I think that far, far more important than all this is teaching critical thinking, media literacy and scepticism. A grade 11 & 12 (I’m Australian so not sure how closely that maps but 17-19 year olds) health teacher I was talking to recently told me that more than 80% of her students admit to recieving the vast majority or all of their health information from TikTok. It genuinely does not matter if they understand the finer points of say file system structure, if they are uncritically listening to a shitty AI voice over a video of three people doing a synchronised “dance” telling them that oranges cause shin splints.
If our society, not just a segment of it, was taught to understand what media is, how it interacts with culture, and how rich people use it to establish and maintain control. That control from a ruling elite via newspapers, or TV, or the Internet is IMHO far more responsible than anything else for the state of your country… And my country… And the world. With that in mind I put my effort into trying to get my kids to research things for themselves and to look for the hidden motivations behind the facade of everything they do.
“magic box does things when I perform this ritual”
Sounds like humanity’s understanding of tech in Warhammer 40k.
Maybe the writers at Games Workshop pulled a bit of prescience out when they did their exercise in hyperbolic projection of trends across 38,000 years.
Or maybe it was influence of the warp and Tzeentch…
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.
I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).
The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it’s worth the effort to scale them.
I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that “Ignorance is bliss.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.
I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works
THIS right here is the key factor here that I think people are missing. Learning is a skill and many people no longer have that skill
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.
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that’s not what that means. not even close.
Nah, that’s pretty spot on. The axe, conveniently forgetting what the trees are forced to remember, and then attempting to rewrite history, years later.
That’s pure Boomerism.
Okay, but that’s not what “ok, boomer” means. It’s not about the cycle of generations. It is specifically about calling out people who are critical of the consequences of poverty experienced by younger generations, without acknowledging that poverty itself, or Boomers’ responsibility for creating that poverty. “ok, boomer” is what you say when someone tells you that to get a good job, you just need a strong work ethic, a firm handshake, and the willingness to walk up to the manager and ask for a job.
Maybe that’s what it means to you. I don’t think that’s a generally shared view.
It moreso means “Ok, old, out of touch person who wants to bloviate and/or gaslight me about some minutiae. I hear you, and I reject your input, but because you take any pushback as a threat to your identity, I’m going to be incredibly succinct to avoid further back and forth.”
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I figure they are just joking, using the opportunity to pretend-razz a boomer as satire.
ain’t none of us are all that bright.
If I ever get a bumper sticker, to announce my views to the world - you’ve given me the words for it. Thank you.
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.
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
It’s like the classic essay, “Why Jonny Can’t Code”.
I remember entering program listings from computer magazines into the Vic 20 as a kid, then modding them to make new things. But still, it was a minority of kids who had a computer back then, and even most of them (and myself most of the time) would just play games rather than write games.
The difference now is that everyone has a cell phone, but it’s still only a small minority that care.
Must point out that this essay was published in 2006. World of Warcraft was big 2002-2006 yes? So @jnod4 is mistaken about having grown up on the good old days.
Also mistaken, as you point out, that any such experience can be generalized to the rest of a generation.
I’m not much of a gamer at any stage of life but I feel like there is a ton of modding going on and there are certain games that are very well known for it. I’m sure there are opportunities to get into stuff for younger people.
Tho I do agree with the general sentiment that slick interfaces and anti-hacking legislation really does us all a disservice.
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
Do same from vivo. Or iphone.
We grew up in an analog childhood, but digital adulthood.
We’ve been at the cusp of all the changes, we probably had to boot into Ms DOS and navigate to the A:// drive to play whatever was on the floppy disk with a whopping 1.44mb.
Now you download almost instantly to your phone/tablet. The internet as we knew it is mostly dead, everywhere is a walled garden of shit.
A:\
Guys I found the zoom zoom infiltrator
It’s been a while ok? 😀
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.
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 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
Pro Tip: Press Shift - Ctrl - numpad 0 to rotate it in Acrobat
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
Could be completely misreading this here, but I’m assuming they’re talking about when you get some rando pdf and the pages are laid out in portrait but rotated at 90 degrees such that they’re in a portrait orientation, so all the writing is going up the page etc.
Yea if its just text its very understandable.
Wait until they are asked to split and merge PDFs.
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.
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,
The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.
That, and it’s unsurprisingly connect to the piewdiepie fascist pipeline thing, Helldivers popular as fuck, Warhammer 40K having a renessaince, I see plenty of shorts about how boys want to die a heroic death, that’s a fucking staple of fascism
This is such a good video on this stuff, how young kids get sucked into fascism layer by layer https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw
Most of the reasonably intelligent people playing Helldivers know full well that it is satire with a side of sick sarcasm.
If anything it’s antifascist indoctrination on a grand scale.
I think a lot of people meme too hard and you end up with a the_Donald situation where all of a sudden the people agreeing with your jokes aren’t aware you’re joking. I have seen multiple right wing review channels unironically praise the helldivers government.
I’M DOING MY PART!!!
lol no hope for zombie bootlickers I guess
Reasonably intelligent is already the minority
Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.
I agree with this, but what made this different then our generation or early zoomers? I was raised online as a house with an internet-connected home PC in the early-to-mid 90s with two parents who worked until night; there were grifters and proto-manosphere groups then and I’m sure moreso for the early zoomers, so I have to assume there was either some change in the methodology behind the delivery in these messages or, more likely, some change in the parental oversight, but I can’t identify exactly when or what
Yeah but there wasn’t an algorithm picking out all of that shit and giving us a constant stream of 100% pure troll heroin.
Seeing one post in fifty telling you garbage puts it into the context of “that guy is saying some weird shit”. Seeing only garbage in your feed makes it seem normal and those opposed to it are the weirdos.
This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.
I think perhaps in tandem with education - parental or institutional - getting even worse/changing from what you or I might be used to. The shift from search to algorithm as the primary way to interact with the Internet is also a significant factor, the Internet might’ve changed significantly before I was really there, but it certainly changed 2008-2016 mostly in that shift from search to platform/algorithm.
And early zoomers might’ve started their online existence just around the start of that transition while late zoomers, basically only know the Plattform/App/Algorithm world we have today.
If you were to be really cynical about it : The powers at be started losing the control over the messaging specifically to the online world, and managed to grapple it back starting in the mid 2000s just as the size/power of the space became significant. Zoomers might be here or there depending on how and when their first online experiences played out.
I’m just on the very earliest of zoomers, and my cohort largely got hit with 2008 as we were just starting to grapple with politics, and with 2016 right around graduating high school. For me Search was the Internet starting point, Wiki, YT and forums all in service to my curiosity and also there for my entertainment/ placating.
perhaps for someone a bit later it’s all just entertainment, no problem solving, no strange sub subculture, just whatever you desire to see or listen to or read imidiately there, without you even needing to think about it, so accurately getting your attention that it’s perhaps more attractive than thinking, or making a decision.
The bad habit is there for me too, I think some younger people might not be able to even recognize it as such, maybe for them that’s just how the world works.
Even with millennials (1981 to 1996) there is a big difference when you where born.
If you are an early millennial you grew up with MS-DOS, so you had to learn the terminal to get anything done. You probably had your first smartphone after you where 25.
If you are a late millennial you grew up with Windows XP and probably had a smartphone as a teen.
Circa 1990 didn’t get smartphones as teens. The iPhone launched on only AT&T in the US in 2007. We were all locked into 2 year contracts back then with LG Envys and Motorola Razrs.
Of course, it just seems to me like there’s a more distinct mid-generation cultural shift rather than just technological in comparison to our generation, and I am curious about potential catalysts. But again, I can only speak from my experience and personal exposure, so there is the possibility of locality specificity as well as other variables, so everyone remember I am just a layman and weigh my experience anecdotally rather than definitively.
Smartphones came a little later. Early adulthood for most.
Tik Tok
Nah tik tok is plagueing everybody but maybe the younger kids just grew up with it even more
Maybe the younger ones still elastic brains were just too vulnerable
E: Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…
Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…
I think there is a lot to this. One of the big divides I’ve noticed is that these younger zoomers seems to conflate what is socially acceptable with what is advertiser-friendly, and I have to assume a lot of that comes from growing up in these heavily corporate-controlled spaces in comparison to the “wild west” of the internet that raised us.
Millennials overall are pretty bullshit proof. They didn’t call us the why generation for nothing.
That sounds like gen alpha more than late zoomer. Perhaps they are simply too close in time to gen alpha.
That has not been my experience, no. I am speaking younger adults, not teenagers; I don’t really have many interactions with teenagers or children these days so I don’t have enough experience with alphas to have really any sort of opinion on them. As I understand it, Gen A starts after 2010, so any adult today would still be a Zoomer. Granted of course that “generations” are a loosely-defined concept so the years they are defined as may vary, but it is my understanding that the typical understanding of Zoomer goes as far as 2010 at least.
Boomers 1945-1960
Gen X 1960-1980
Millennials 1980-2000
Zoomers 2000-2020
Gen alpha 2020-2040If we’re going to have a made up system with no rules, it might as well be well ordered.
Convenient as that potentially would be, that does not seem to be the popular understanding, and I see no reason not to use to the conventional understanding in a case where stubbornness is unlikely to shift said understanding.
Hopefully unnecessarily preemptive “if you don’t like Wikipedia” invitation to websearch using the engine of your choice and observe the general response without hunting for a cherry-pickable example which defines them as such.edit: i noticed you were downvoted and feel compelled to mention that I did not downvote you; it’s weird to downvote people for normal conversation.
15 year generations don’t really make sense though, the whole concept of a generation is that they’re the previous generation’s kids.
I don’t disagree, but unfortunately nobody granted me authority on the general consensus on this one. I will say though that lineagial generations feel like only one possible definition, and cultural generations defined by common cultural experience (as is the case we’re discussing) feel like they have some validity for me as well.
As an old zoomer I’ve observed a sharp difference between 2001 zoomers and 2004 zoomers far beyond a simple 3 year maturity difference. Its jarring.
COVID happened. Splitting you right down the line as boz Skaggs says
I’m sure this had profound impact, but frankly we all lived through it so I find it hard to accept as the sole or majority-dominant reason alone, personally.
It’s not that we all experienced it but what stage of mental development we were at when we experienced it.
Not everyone experiences a shared experience the same way.
That’s fair. This may be it then; as somebody who sort of “speed ran” childhood due to my circumstances it might just be hard for me to understand and relate to the normal developmental cycle and the impact of such things during it. Thanks for the perspective, cheers.
I was never a “main friend” in any of the groups I interacted with. I hung out with a lot of people on a very shallow level. When covid hit I stopped talking to all of them. it was nearly a year of me only seeing my parents and sibling because a family member is immunocompromised. I still struggle to make real connections after that and I was at the end of highschool. If that had hit in middleschool when I was still taking “cool” seeming peoples sord as gossiple I have known idea what it would have done to 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.
I can’t tell you which window was the best XP or 7 but for me it’s somewhere between the two. Although I used vista for a long time perfectly fine and people hated that one.
I feel privileged that I got to use these great operating system for so long.
It’s what made me good at computers to start with.
Every other Windows distro is okay, since XP. XP ->7 ->10. I’m holding out for 12 because 11 blows, but…Linux looks more attractive every day.
I dropped windows on my gaming rig after they decided I could not opt out of co-pilot easily. So I opted out of paying them.
I finally took the plunge and installed Mint about a week ago. It’s definitely better.
I partitioned my hard drive so I have both systems available. If everything goes well with Mint for the next few months, I’ll just wipe Windows entirely.
If there’s nothing specific holding you to Microsoft’s ecosystem, you should go for it.
Congrats! Be aware that Windows loves to wipe foreign bootloaders though. If your computer suddenly can’t boot Mint anymore but goes right into Windows, that’s another way of MS screwing with you.
I have heard that. I’m backing up everything that’s important.
I’ve installed Mint and Ubuntu before (over a decade ago), and would manage. I remember having a lot of issues with drivers back then. I’d also be putting it on an HP Spectre x360, and I hear there are some difficulties booting linux because of a firmware issue.
I still remember the XP error sound. It was the stuff of nightmares. And in those days, we weren’t taught how to use a Modem because my mum didn’t like us using the internet and instead brought an encyclopedia for school stuff, so I would have to fix all the shit I fucked up without google before anyone found out. Fun times. Really improved my troubleshooting skills, though.
During some practical school training (basically two weeks where pupils are send to work in companies full-time without pay) at an electronics shop, someone brought in a Windows XP machine that caused problems. Heard that sound so often…
Turned out they still ran it without any Service Packs. Windows Update also refused to work… and it was registered to those fine people called “Skidrow” (the cracking group). 😅
At that time those registration cracks already supported Windows Update, they should’ve updated that one!
I bet there are a lot of machines like that. I knew this one person, a biology teacher whose lab computer still had 7, but it ran perfectly well. She refused to upgrade it to 8/10 because there really was nothing wrong with it. Many people I know with very old machines still have their OS because it just … works. Might differ in the States though, tech becomes mainstream here at least five years after it is released.
So your mom spent around $4500 in today’s dollars for a standard computer set up of the time, then spent thousands more on an encyclopedia set because she wanted the computer crippled so you couldn’t look at porn.
My god we humans are repressed.
An Encarta CD would have been a lot cheaper, just saying.
No, lol. She got a ~400 page ‘children’s encyclopedia’ because she liked it and I liked reading. Fairly cheap, and useful if you want to look up something like ‘types of volcanoes’. Besides, it was a little home laptop, which my dad used before. I doubt if she had even known how much porn existed on the internet, since we used it rarely and it was terribly expensive (dunno about the US, since I am not an American) at that time. I’m pretty sure the reason she didn’t want me using the internet was because kids are dumb and break stuff. Laptop was already sluggish as hell.
Also, it was far easier to just pick up a book you’ve read many times and find the section you’re looking for than turn on the laptop, wait for the damn thing to boot, call an adult to connect it to some outdated Modem that’s slow as hell, ask that person to search something because you have no idea how that stuff works and then get some long ass site, summarise it and finish your homework. Just saying. Has got nothing to do with repression, since we also had a book full of paintings and quite a few were nude. If anything, my mum was kind of more open than most since she had a masters in biotech and taught high school science for many years.
Right on, thanks for the story! This is later than I thought because when I think dialup internet, it was before laptops were really a thing. They existed but I don’t think I ever saw one in person, just in catalogues.
Vista was a’ight, so long as you didn’t get that memory eating bug.
crazy thing is that they were being enshittified even back then. we just couldn’t identify it back then as easily as we do now
Oh yes, Microsoft got to be literally the richest company on earth and Bill gates the richest guy on earth for decades by not “enshitifying” computers. You got it, boss!
that wasn’t enshittification… that was just marketshare
It was both… Do people forget Windows ME? Vista?
That’s literally the same, people complain about “enshitifying” because things were free/cheaper/ad-free before.
> be me
> zoomer
> use linux
> i use linux
> i don’t know how to use windows, or macos
> i dont know how to use the most popular operating systems
> wait
> i am the joke nowMy gen z son is like a computer wizard to me a fairly proficient millennial so I don’t think it’s a generational thing
Both outliers. I teach high schoolers and watching them use a computer is a suicide claxon.
Ever seen an adult open Google Chrome, type in google, click the first link to www.google.com, then click the search bar on the page and begin to search? I have.
I once watched an adult need both hands to click on a button and haven’t been surprised since.
Gonna need the story on that one. It reminds me of trying to teach my grandpa to use a mouse. Not his fault, he had a fifth grade education then went into the mines. This was all magic to him. So every time he wanted the cursor to go higher on the screen he’d lift the mouse in the air. We couldn’t get past it- this motion on the horizontal plane becomes that motion on the vertical plane.
I’m sure I could teach a man like him now that I know how to teach. At the time I was an impatient young teen.
It was the cashier on a stationery shop. She had to hold the mouse in place with one hand so it wouldn’t move, then used the other hand to click it.
Might have had a tremor disorder. Might have been an alcoholic, I’ve been there before shaking so bad. My friend has essential tremor. It’s actually had a big impact on his life and the way people perceive him.
Damn, now I feel bad for laughing at the original comment
You have my first two-handed upvote.
