I think it’s more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything’s dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can’t balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don’t blame Gen Z for not learning; I blame those who didn’t teach them. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Edit: “Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log for old school checks. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
nobody look at my downloads folder. It’s fine. I promise.
Organizing my downloads has been on my to do list for… Four, I think? Yeah, four… phones…
Datahoarder checking in:
Never delete 🫡
Aren’t most (sensible) data hoarders very organized? You want to save shit and be able to find it later lol
Yeah, but downloading new stuff is even more exciting then sorting the already downloaded stuff 😸
Zettelkasten users:
I’ve been interested in Zettelkasten for a few years, since I discovered Obsidian, but I’ve never been able to quite get the hang of it enough to make it stick
Obsidian user as well. I like to think of it that tags are folders.
When you put something in a folder, you have to choose one of the files identities. Tags more or less allow you to assign a file to any number of groups.
So if you’re writing about an NPC in a DnD campaign, for example: That NPC will exist in a certain place. He will be associated with particular guilds and he will have certain moves that you might want to keep track of. You can later easily search by a guild or a move or a place and there will be a link to that NPC and others that share those indentifying characteristics.
A big advantage of zettelkasten is that you don’t need to really worry about file management in the sense of needing to make exclusionary choices.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux
Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.
Yea, Im a millenial, and I remember mostly only interacting with old Macintosh LCs in elementary school, and then Windows 95 and up after that. My uncle had an old Tandy computer running DOS, that I remember at least learning how to run a game on, but by the time I was interacting with a computer, regularly, Windows 95 and AOL were the most common thing.
We did have some DOS games on CD during the Windows 95/98 era, though. Lemmings always ran better if you dropped down to DOS and ran it from there instead of trying to run it through Windows, for instance.
I appreciate this measured take. Whenever generational differences get brought up, they oftentimes seemed framed as if generations are biologically different creatures or willfully choosing to be stupid in some sector. In all, or at least must cases, it’s what you suggest: people responding and developing based on what the environment has presented them.
Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won’t touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend’s that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.
Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.
In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.
My wife’s ex always told her that she couldn’t understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn’t explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
Anyone can learn any skill if they actually invest the time.
And regarding the older brother, you learn pretty quickly working help desk that users generally don’t care what the problem is or why it happened. They just want to get back to work and not have it happen again. After a while you get conditioned to just be friendly and solve the issue without explaining what you’re doing or why.
Exactly. Basically nobody in their 30s can, say, drive a manual car without a synchro, unless they specifically practiced it, because there is zero need to learn that skill. And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.
When I wanted sound on Arkanoid, I HAD to learn IRQ settings, so I did. But now that stuff just works.
I thought this was going to be an American joke about automatics, but then realised that this is like when I explained to younger colleagues that I just drove my car home ‘crash gearbox style’ when the clutch failed, some were amazed that it was even possible. (Match the revs and feel the gear mesh) Edited to add: when I first tried linux on a pc with CRT monitor, to get a gui going I had to roll my own modeline. Bzzt, oh not that value, ctrl-c try another one. Such funsies
The first 24’ truck I learned in was a manual. Hated it but felt like a pimp shifting without the clutch.
I had the same thing happen to me on my manual. Kinda cemented my love/fascination with manuals. Too bad my partner wanted an automatic :( … next time~
I’m a zillenial that had a manual that blew its clutch while I was out and I had to relearn how to drive it back home, that was scaryfun. Where does that put me?
Adventurous young person, ready to be sent on a quest, is where you got filed in my head.
Sincerely,
~Lazy millenial wizard who wants help running errands.Flattered to be called young but I am definitely entering my own lazy era :)
And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.
Torrenting, online gaming and self-hosting ain’t dead.
This is part of why I, who am part of Gen Z, am actually really thankful that I didn’t get access to iPad until 9 (first gen, it might still be around here somewhere, kinda wonder if it’ll ever become a relic) and phone until 13, but did have access to a super old windows computer. It taught me how to install mods in Minecraft. It was astronomically difficult for me at that time with my limited understanding and all the fake green “Download here!” buttons that kept duping me and installing tons of bloatware and even malware onto the PC (yet another reason why AdBlock is a privacy and security concern, honestly deadass don’t let kids use a computer without it). But eventually I caught on and got good at identifying the scams from a young age and was able to teach other kids, and even eventually got into command stuff and writing my own mods. I memorized all of the block and item IDs before the flattening, but after that I was so disheartened that all my memorization was useless I kinda just stopped and never got really good at it. But still, just from that alone my computer knowledge was way ahead of other people’s around that time, and you might even say it set the foundation for my now linux-using open-source-contributing fediverse-loving self hahaha
Honestly I should have a bit of respect for zeds and alphas who grow up around locked black boxes and still despite that manage to come out the other side knowing how to use something like terminal or git.
I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:
In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.
The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).
The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.
This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.
I actually hire engineers and I do notice that the zoomers seem to have less general computing and IT skills, though I think some of that has to do with how the curriculum has changed. Software engineering and CS is just way more specialized than it used to be and isn’t just a slow evolution from computer engineering these days. So you don’t get that broad computing background which starts with electrodynamics and works up through digital design, comms, networking, and ultimately software.
For my purposes, this knowledge is a big part of what differentiates a developer from an engineer (and proper computer science is a different thing entirely) which has made it really difficult to figure out what to expect from a software engineering degree.
Oh don’t get me started on modern “CS” curriculum of some schools, it’s atrocious. I see them start learning about react and nodejs in year 1 because “that’s what companies need” but that leaves them with massive fundamental knowledge gaps. I’ve seen people 5 years in their degree who struggled with Boolean logic.
I believe they should start at the bottom of the stack and climb up instead of starting somewhere at the top and being left oblivious about the massive amount of stuff going on below. And the “internship” system we have in my country is massive BS. Basically instead of learning they spend 1/2 of their education time doing menial job in companies. Which means their 5 years degrees is barely 2.5 of actual school time but we still like to pretend it’s equivalent to a normal masters degree.
The “need of the industry” for “IT people” has lead to the proliferation of diploma mill curriculum that churn out monkeys lightly trained on the proverbial typewriter and calls them “software engineers”.
But we still have excellent schools that produce very well trained people, and I do not believe they produce less of them, it’s just that we also produce a lot more that went through bad curriculums.
Personally, I think both of these perspectives have truth to them but neither is the whole story.
True, there are tech savvy people in every generation, and the majority of each generation isn’t necessarily tech savvy.
But it’s also true that the tech savvy people today are growing up in a world where technology has been obfuscated and simplified whereas formerly tech savvy people didn’t have a choice but to learn the ropes to be involved at all, which meant there was more need for Millennial tech savvy people to understand the basics, while there is no such equivalent need for Gen Z.
I agree, I think many are overselling the impact of that, but it has an impact nonetheless, however small.
I know this is true or I wouldn’t have such trouble explaining to crypto (specifically NFT) enthusiasts why counting bits matters and how there is limited “space” inside an NFT for nothing but a simple URL. If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s and were learning ANY amount of networking, counting bits for subnets in IPv4 was pretty much a requirement. Now a lot of networking is obfuscated and automated with IPv6, which is finally coming into its own, and a side effect is that understanding these limitations of the technology has flown out the window for buzzwords like “smart contracts.”
You make the same mistake as the previous person. You take the exemple of the minority of people who cared to try to understand how computer worked and generalize it to the entire gen.
I have thousands of people in my office that prove everyday that millenial are for the most part tech illiterate and do not care about how thing works. I’ve seen the millenial arrive in the work env and the gen-z and there is absolutely no difference. Millenial were exactly as dumb (or as smart). If anything, I think gen-z are actually smarter because they come in not believing the corporate bullshit the X and the Y drank like cool-aid. But that’s another topic.
In any case, all the stuff we had to go through didn’t make us smarter, for every 10,000 of people of my gen who learned they had to edit autoexec.bat to launch a game, I’d bet that barely one knew what the heck himem.sys actually was. That didn’t make them smarter, just monkeys who learned a trick.
So yeah, geeky gen-Z don’t need to tweak as many parameters, they can directly launch fusion 360 and start designing parts for their 3D printers. Tech has moved on. Gen-Z geeks fiddle with other stuff than shitty windows drivers.
How do I delete this useless, obtuse, and inaccessible folder so I never lose my files again‽
Press and hold the Windows key, then tap the R. Let go of the windows key. Type cmd enter. Type format C:\ enter.
Sadly they “fixed” this.
(why not just type
format C:\ enterin the run dialog)Because the format command won’t know what the ‘enter’ argument means ;)
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Relying on edge cases in either generation is pointless. Millenials had zero tech support to help them for everything you need to do on computers.
How to load a program: Nowadays - touch the icon on the screen. Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
How to install a game: Nowadays - Click BUY on game store and choose INSTALL. Millenials - Learn MSDOS basics, Type a series of 5 commands without typos
How to configure game settings: Nowadays - Play with volume sliders, Graphics preferences, and game difficulty. Millenials - Edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to ensure device drivers are loaded, load game, assign proper IRQ, DMA variables to get your SOUNDBLASTER card to play sound, select game difficulty
How to setup a printer: Nowadays - go to manufacturers website and download drivers, run setup.exe, plug in printer to USB port. Millenials - Check Device manager in Windows to determine COM port and other relevant variables. Set values in word processing software. Employ Minor in mechanical engineering to align or correct bad ink ribbon with perforated track runners. Repeat fixes every 5 pages ad nauseum.
All that BS and more required hours of research to learn how to do in an era where guidance was buried in some sketchy newsgroup where ‘Rick Rolling’ was seeing if you’d notice “Deltree c:” in the instructions, and not just a simple 20 second video on TikTok.
I work with children using Ipads and that one kid who doesn’t get lost if the relevant icon is missing in the UI is the one I know is going to be trouble. They say average IQ increases by 3 every generation and this is the first one I don’t think that trend will hold for because they aren’t required to think at all ever.
Having to search out codecs even, that was a big thing back in the day. My entire school was passing around videos on floppies an cds and learning about codecs to play the Pamela Anderson tape it seemed like. Years after it was on vhs I think
Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
Even the oldest millennials were just toddlers when the C64 was relevant, so this is not a typical millennial experience at all. It’s really a GenX thing… so once again we are forgotten.
I would say millennials’ computer experience starts in the late DOS/Win3.11 era at the very earliest, but more typically in the Windows 9x and early XP era. So even IRQ/DMA/config.sys/autoexec.bat fuckery is not that typical.
I think your first paragraph only applies to US or US-like countries. I learned how to navigate unregulated Internet to download most things I could fit, and then expanded into more technical knowledge as I grew up. I know of the things you said in your first paragraph now, but I did not grow up beside them to have learned what I know today, or even what I knew back then. These computers were expensive (for us?) at first, so very few people had them, and then a few years later they were more abundant and easier for us to even have a chance to learn about them.
Your analysis fits neatly into what the book Because Internet describes as different waves of “internet people”. First were geeks who went there before it was mainstream, second us millennials growing up as it is getting mainstream, alongside older folks forced to use it at work or voluntarily at home. Third wave are GenZ growing up when everything is easy already and, ironically, also even older folks now that it’s accessible for them.
Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”
You say that like other generations don’t also just save everything to the desktop.
It’s not about generations at all. Some people who grew up with early computers may have used them but never really “got it”.
Gen X: don’t quote the ancient piracy to me, Millennial. I was there for BBS and Napster.
I can take that argument but also, how is that people is that unaware of how to do these kinds of process, many of those people study or work in something that relates with tech, are you telling me it is just because they didn’t learn of use it in their earlier days?
Also, it is way easier to pirate nowadays than before, that evolved too you know?
I’d say the biggest culprit is laziness… Or entitlement.
Millenials grew up using BASIC on Windows 3?!
Millenials were teenagers possibly learning coding starting from 1995, the world was using C++ on Windows 95 at best.
Born in late ‘80, I’m borderline. A Xennial, I guess.
Just yesterday I was groping on Mastodon that so much of Linux is done via the command line, which messes me up because I’ve only ever really used OSs with a GUI. Sure, we had a family C64, but my brother would load the games for me. Then we got a ‘proper’ Windows PC, where I stayed until I got my first Mac in ‘07.
I’m not unfamiliar with doing stuff in Terminal, but all I really do is follow instructions I find online.
I mean that is usually all it takes, and as time passes you learn, provided you have the will to do exactly what you are doing and you have an interest in understanding it.
FYI late 80s is a Millenial. Xennial is like 79-80. Millenials go from 81-96
You must have big hands if you can grope a mastodon!
(In all seriousness youtube “command line basics” or “bash basics” and follow along with a video or two like it’s a class, helped me when I ditched windows.)
Who owns a checkbook? I also didn’t need to learn cursive, or how to take care of a horse. If you want to learn something you will.
“Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that. Also, at first, I read that as “Who owns a Chromebook?” lol.
Outside of using cursive for my signature, yeah, I’ve never used it in real life.
If you want to learn something you will.
True, but we learned computing because we had to.
You don’t learn to drive in a round about, or use the automatic checkout, or a thousand other things that have changed…
I mean depending on the country you almost certainly learnt to drive in a roundabout (quadrupley so if you were learning in Milton Keynes)
By the time I was born, checks weren’t in regular use here anymore. I’ve never seen one in real life. I’m 27
35 and I’ve used cheques 2x in my life
I’m also in my 30s and I’ve used a bit over a hundred checks. Mostly for paying rent.
As yet another 30-something year old I’ve never even seen a cheque. Is that a USA thing?
45 year old here, I remember my father using cheques a long time ago. (non-USAian)
You probably do not know b/c reddthat has downvotes disabled, but people are downvoting your comment.
I find it the height of irony that your comment, which is relevant and contributes to the conversation, is receiving the “*I* personally do not like this idea” treatment.
A comment that aims to provide a more balanced perspective, to round out the discussion beyond “things should be the way that I am most comfortable with”, and offering not only logical facts but very relevant personal experience.
RedditLemmy can be so toxic sometimes. :-|I like the lack of downvotes, it’s nice. I get to focus on arguments being made. If someone wants to tell me they disagree, they’re going to have to actually tell me
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
It’s not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they’re quite close.
When tested with 10 tabs open, Firefox occupied about 960MB of memory, which is only slightly less than Chrome.
For awhile Firefox’s JavaScript engine used more memory, but those gaps have been mostly filled.
I currently have 130+ tabs open in Firefox and 90+ in Chrome in addition to some other programs open and running (libreOffice, vpn, and others) Everything is working fine on my old laptop with an i5 processor and 16G ram and windows 10, ssd hd
I can’t really game on this, and trying to run a virtual machine is a slog.
But VS Code, database, xshell, calibre, audacity, photopea, even basic video editing all run fine. Granted I usually do one project at a time, so I’m not using VS Code and editing videos at the same time.
The browser tabs are usually always open. Oh, and I actually just cleaned up my tabs. There were a lot more…
I feel like the memory issues are mostly worked out now for most of us.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 1900s…
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
I think pocket and quite the slew of unrelated features disagrees with you. Seems like most browsers are happy to be the everything app.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don’t know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
While I appreciate the reference, most kids probably don’t know about the whole Metallica Napster thing.
I’m sure they probably could but they don’t really have the incentive to add support for them.
Brave does I think. I didn’t allow it to do so the one time I saw the pop up and I would not want that to happen unless I was always behind a VPN.
i think brave browser for the desktop does that but i’m not sure since i switched to firefox a long time ago.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
Just call it an “app,” that’ll shut 'em up.
Stuff got too easy to really have to delve into a deeper understanding, most of the time, now. No jumpers, no dip switches, no pre-loading drivers or plugs that can be plugged into places they shouldn’t get plugged into. Everything is color coded and plug n play. You don’t have to dive in and assign com ports or anything.
I learned as I went because I wanted to get shit to work and that took a lot of educating to get there. Now, most of the time the situation doesn’t come up, so that deeper understanding is a building block that just got skipped over. The offshoot is that when the more rare occasion arises that a deeper understanding is required, it’s usually got a person way behind the 8 ball to be able to recognize and fix the issue.
Generational wars doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Yeah and let’s not pretend that everyone back in 2002 was eMuling or torrenting and cracking videos games. I knew so many people who failed at ripping a CD to MP3 or copying it with a CD burner.
Acknowledging differences is not “war”.
The meme is literally mocking gen z
deleted by creator
It’s not just one generation receiving an education vs. another one that didn’t. It’s that the platforms the generations used are fundamentally different.
Gen X / Millennials grew up with Macs and PCs, computers that were fundamentally not locked down. You could install any software you wanted. You could modify the OS in many ways. DRM wasn’t really a thing in general, and there were almost always easy ways around it.
Gen Z / Gen Alpha grew up mostly with cell phones. The phones they had are much more powerful than the PCs from 20-30 years ago, but they’re incredibly locked down. The only applications you’re allowed to use are the ones that Apple / Google allow on their app stores, unless you root your phone which is a major risk. It’s very hard to even load up your own audio files, movies or images let alone “dodgy” ones. DRM is everywhere, and the DMCA means you risk serious prison time if you bypass access controls.
Gen X / Millennials grew up at a time when there were still more than 5 tech companies in the world, and the companies out there competed with each-other. There were plenty of real standards, and lots of other de-facto standards that allowed programs to interoperate. Now you’re lucky if you can even use an app via its website vs. using a required app.
It’s not just a difference in education. It’s that companies have gained a lot more power, and the lack of antitrust enforcement has made for plenty of walled gardens and “look but don’t touch” experiences.
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas.
When you know how to use the entire toolbox, but only if you can use the entire toolbox…in order.
Congrats on making me want to pull my youngest from public school for a year or so, so I can teach her typing, scripting, the command line, etc … (also, phonics) … Blows my mind that TYPING as a late-elementary-school glass is basically gone in our school district, nor is it a class that’s even available in middle or high-school.
Its definitely not all students and, in reality, I believe every generation has been deskilled to diff degrees. So, while these skills are noticeably worse with Gen z than it is with millennials, many young people I meet come to college with some or all of these skills.
So I think you could go with a less extreme intervention lol
Why do you think “many” come to you with all of these skills? Home-schooling is more common than ever. Most homeschoolers we met were also restricted to older or no tech… Even no tech seems to be better than consumption focused devices.
I really doubt homeschooling has much to do with it. Some subset of every gen is good with tech.
The one homeschool kid Im working with this semester is terrified to use the telephone. Their entire experience in home school education was largely sitting in virtual classrooms
Virtual Classrooms were the first thing we tried and realized it wasn’t for us. We dropped it within a few weeks. I can’t imagine spending any significant amount of time stuck with such a finicky and un-reliable medium.
“Look at it wrong and it breaks” is very apt in that situation; All the while they are “taking attendance”, and none of the lessons were available for later viewing. Our kids learned more from going through stacks of worksheets* with our help, reading, and just spending time with us as we went about whatever errands.
*worksheets were over 95% of the Virtual Classroom work anyways. The rest was art and poorly thought-out “expiriments”, with the occassional form-letter/one-paragraph-a-week “essay”. Not even book reports or recommended reading!
Even no tech seems to be better than consumption focused devices.
It is far preferable to teach old relatives, who have never touched a computer, how to do basic things than it is to try to introduce a better or faster or freer way to those who have already been exposed to the officially ordained Microsoft or Apple way of doing things that should be simple.
I agree with Chapo. Maybe you can teach these things in addition to what your kid learns at school? Might be a fun way to spend time together anyway.
That’s how we handled it when we home-schooled the older three for a while. They ultimately asked to go back to regular school, but they had stayed ahead of their peers.
also, phonics
Giving up on phonics was a horrible idea. I’m not sure whose to blame for that but it clearly was a disaster.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
Whatever works for you, simple is always better
as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
also unrelated, let’s all love lain
special interest
poor skill of peers
(I’m totally with you though)
I could swear there was a wildly similar version of this particular comic that was even more on point with reference to assembly call codes.
there is, I tried to find it but I can’t seem to. there’s lots of versions of it for different interests, I love xkcd
lol I love that xkcd, but yes it absolutely applies
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).
But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.
Wait, with no folders how does apple deal with files these days? I’m a lifelong pc person so I have no idea
You may as well have asked this question in 2012 because it’s exactly the same as it was back then, except now there is iCloud. Which in some ways is impressive.
Folders are generic labels, Photos, Documents, Downloads, and within those there is folder structure, but I’ve never seen any Apple user actually utilize them beyond the most basic organizational functions (and even that is not common). Granted, my demographic for the past couple years has been the elderly, but before that I worked with kids and it was basically the same.
If you use Apple products, you don’t need folder structures because you can’t take files off your device easily, it basically has to go through some form of cloud upload, if not iCloud then Google Drive. And you don’t need folder structures for the same reason, cause why are you adding files to your device from somewhere that isn’t iCloud?
This is only like 95% facetious, it’s actually ridiculous how closed off Apple makes their products. By default when you make a spreadsheet with Apple’s software it exports as a .pages file, instead of the actually useful .xls. This is for every. Single. Program. Word files, PowerPoint files, I’m sure there’s even a PDF specific Apple file format.
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I was more talking about their mobile devices, the iPods, iPhones, iPads, I should have made that more clear.
Even so, that doesn’t change the fact that Apple does actively prohibits users from accessing files/folders within the system, computers included. For something as basic as the Library folder to be hidden is just a little ridiculous.
It’s not hating on Apple to call out ridiculous things, and none of this is facetious. Unless you are a developer of some kind, having this hidden away in some ways is good for users who might break things. It just happens to make it difficult for anyone else who wants to have control over their computer.
As a user you can’t access the filesystem. It’s completely abstracted away. At least this was the case for the iPhone 6
Those inbox ignorers are monsters. My inbox is my todo list and if it has a scroll bar I get anxious.
Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I’ll mention port forwarding at my current job and there’s this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I’m talking about.
I’m slightly younger than that even, currently finishing up my master’s but have been working as a backend dev for a couple of years.
I’ve learned an order of magnitude more about networking from just being in the vicinity of my girlfriend (who is a network technician) than from uni, and it’s definitely already paying off.
I love doing homelab stuff! it seems like at my school either you don’t know what a port is, or you actively maintain 3 web servers (the latter being the significant minority, with a total of like 3 of us)
folder
Directory?
fair. Thank you for the correction ILikeBoobies
Don’t both Windows and MacOS call it folders, and Linux calls it directories?
Directories predate them however per Windows a directory is a type of folder that points to a location on the file system - a list of network printers are a folder but not a directory
I just watched lain some weeks ago without knowing what I have let me into 😂 got pretty confused, but I think in the end I got it. Probably…
that’s basically how I felt after as well, it’s such a confusing but interesting series. I want to rewatch it though after really starting to grasp it, it’s such intriguing show
I’ve tried watching it about 5 times and get to different points before I burn out.
It has sparked an interest in the works of R.D. Laing for who Lain is named in reference to.
A Psychologist who was active in the 60’s and is famous for their work with schizophrenics; I’ve been curious if their work may give a bit more context to understand Serial Experiments Lain
It is funny, up until really far you think you have lost it, and than at the and you be like, oh yes, I got it somehow, kinda😁
When I spent a few years teaching in the local school, one thing I taught was a class on Design and 3D printing. The VERY first thing I always had to teach was “how to use a mouse” before I could even begin to start teaching CAD modeling.
I swear, smart phones and touch screens are a curse and pox on humanity.
Need more disks…
I’m in this picture and I appreciate it.
Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.
All of 4 gen-x usenet users pictured
It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
Yeah but cars have become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years. You basically need an EEPROM arduino kit these days just to get the fucking diagnostics out of the car, because someone decided that analog circuits were just too much bulk
I think their metaphor is referring to ease of use and the knowledge required for use. I have a few personal anecdotes as examples.
I’m an eighties kid. My first PC was a Commodore 64 and my first car was a 1966 VW Bug. Neither was reliable nor easy to use. I had to learn to utilize interfaces that were more finicky and complex than modern equivalents, and I spent a great deal of time learning how to make them work when they glitched out or were broken. The alternative was not having them at all. It was hard to get BBS advice when your PC took a dump and no one else you knew had one you could use, and then where would you get car advice? Certainly not from my dad!
A kid growing up with an Apple anything and driving a 20 year old car doesn’t face the same kinds of difficulties. Many things just work more reliably and aren’t as difficult to use. One can easily buy gaming systems now where we often had to build our own to get what we wanted. My buddy’s 23 year old daughter had never even heard of CLI. That’s all I had!
It doesn’t make one generation better than the other - younger people today are skilled in ways I could have only dreamed of. We just have different opportunities for excellence.
younger people today are skilled in ways could have only dreamed of.
Any examples?
Hell yeah. My experience may be skewed due to my field, but I’ve noticed my Gen Z peers are SO much better at critical thinking. If someone asks most of my millennial coworkers to do something, they generally just do it. Ask one of my Gen Z coworkers and they’ll usually ask you why, often followed by probing questions to better understand what they’re doing. They’re full of healthy skepticism.
As a cohort, they’re also better at enforcing work/life balance. I’ve been fighting for employee rights for years but for so long felt like I was alone. Now I’m at home with the newer coworkers who (politely) tell their bosses to fuck off when asked to do extra unpaid work (we’re all salaried) or to work outside of their job description.
While many aren’t technically advanced - many couldn’t build or troubleshoot a broken PC - they are as a group fairly technically capable, having uniformly been raised using technology. Teaching my computer illiterate boss to use Excel is so frustrating that it feels like repeatedly punching myself in the side of the head. Teaching my equally Excel-unskilled, twenty-something coworker the same is a breeze. He has no fucking idea what he’s doing, but he picks it right up. He knows how to use a PC, just not how to use Excel in particular. My boss knows neither.
I absolutely love working with them, Gen Z is the best.
Thanks. Gives me hope. Would you also say the males are less constrained by the macho culture of older generations? More capable of talking about emotions?
And women less constrained by their own old stereotypes?
I find it hard to be sure because both stereotypes are still alive and popular. The gender benders have been around for decades but perhaps not as flamboyant now so they merely seems more mainstream now.
I think more men are aware of the existence of toxic masculinity than before and many of them are trying to get out from under it. A lot of young men still are unsure of how to fit into the world, though, which is how the alt-right snaps them up with easy “answers” to complex problems.
I definitely see a lot more women fighting against traditional gender roles than men. They’re killing it, it’s really great to see.
Much of my exposure to younger adults is through my work. It definitely attracts more progressive candidates, although nothing like fields such as social work, psychology, etc., so take all of this with a grain of salt. I do work fairly frequently with more traditionally “macho” workers like the trades, and they’re starting to reject toxic masculinity simply because it’s bad for business.
The expense of tools, equipment and supplies can be a huge barrier to car maintenance but there is so much legitimately free software for computers (even ignoring the pirated stuff) that people never had so much opportunity.
If is like learning another language or a musical instrument, people have to be committed and practice to get good and few people can make the effort. Businesses have trained people to seek instant gratification from fast food, social media, tik tok, gambling, loot boxes, and consumerism in general because short lived and unfulfilling experiences produce an endless monetization opportunity. The rare people with the discipline and support to focus their efforts have massive advantages with access to information and tools which were very difficult in the past. There are some prodigies out there in a sea of mediocrity.
Yeah I think that’s a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it’s not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.
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The best pirates are librarians with legit ethics.
Preserve human knowledge and make it available to everyone.
I hate that you are right about mostly just greedy dipshits pissing in the high seas without contributing.
We should have taken up arms after Aaron Swartz…
I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
To complete if you share back and join or multiple private trackers you can get all latest contents.
I remember learning the whole torrenting process after years of irc, newsgroups and p2p clients. It took a bit of time but, man, was I passionate about dumping everything I could on to SuprNova way back.
Anymore, I only package and share on private trackers, its just too much of a risk to seed out to public ones. And being completely honest, the majority of my dl’s are coming from newsgroups again. It’s just a simpler process and I don’t feel the leech anxiety.
That said, I also keep an eye out for requests and try to fill bounties whenever I can.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.
> restricted
More like walking into fansub channels and doing !get and walking away with DC++ info
I miss my college days, Terabytes upon terabytes of “Linux ISOs” accessible via the blazing fast internal university network. And the IRC channel, where I learned what trolling was, but never learned to not feed the trolls.
Linux came out after I graduated. In my era I had 100s of 3.5inch floppy disks to hold the plunder from sailing the high seas.
Unless you killed somebody, the statutes of limitations have run.
I still remember the “dumb” tech was AOL warez chatrooms where you interacted with a chat bot to get an email with lists of scene games, movies and other stuff in the traditional multi-RAR parts, and you’d individually request them a few at a time to be emailed. Then you’d move to IRC when you found out could be done faster, or BBSes.
I’ve probably forgotten most of how things worked.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did
They watched tv and traded tapes.
I seen teens without being able to make a folder in windows because they only use phones, so.
I truly hate that phones don’t readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren’t effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It’s not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone’s drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files “in the cloud.”
Super annoying because all the earlier smart phones did have all that, even early Android. The OSes just keep getting more dumbed down and locked down to the point that I went from a phone enthusiast to despising all smart phones.
Not only that but the physical phones themselves are dumping features while charging the same or often increased prices…
My current phones literally being held together with tape but wanting a current phone with an SD card and headphone jack has seriously limited my options.
I am right there with you. My Pixel 4a is still going, but there doesn’t appear to much anything on the market to replace it that doesn’t have a boatload of caveats.
There’s torrent clients on Android. You don’t need a computer
Torrenting on Android does exist, but it’s such a battery suck that seeding is unsustainable unless your mobile device is plugged in all the time. Which makes it not-so-mobile.
And then there’s mobile plan data limits.
many such cases.
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven’t in at least a decade, and wouldn’t unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don’t really give a shit about their daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they’re actually interested in doing so.
I’m in this comment, and I don’t like it. I still fix “computers” for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.
Which is actually extremely complex…
Edit: the phone not the interaction
I almost clarified “in external form”, but you’ve really hit the nail on the head.
Unless they’re interacting with a landline.
Which, to be fair, is still pretty complex.
I like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they’re all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer. Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.
Teach those that dont know and continue to seed. 🏴☠️🛶
The only correct answer
Some people just stick to the ez pz apps and don’t care about their privacy or to understand what they’re working with. With modern phones and pc’s that treat people like toddlers, a lot of people don’t develop skills further than that
Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don’t think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn’t have this weakness I would always choose to use them but…
The usenet has many treasures
Usenet is awesome, but the fact that you have to pay for Usenet access defeats the main purpose of pirating for a lot of people.
Don’t get me wrong, it is super cheap(60$-100$/year?) and worth it to pay for Usenet from what I understand, but as a poor kid that discovered torrenting out of necessity, paying for Usenet back then would’ve been out of the question. I imagine a lot of Gen Z kids feel the same about it at this point in their lives.
I scored a year of unlimited Usenet for 32 bucks
Sure, but as treasure hunters, it is a necessity, if you are not using private tracker for finding torrents
And, you don’t kill torrents if you use the usenet instead of leaching (e.g. because seeding is illegal in your country but leaching is allowed)
Especially if you buy access via 2 providers on different backbones. Haven’t had a single failed/incomplete download since.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, memes from an older generation saying they’re better than the younger generation are ALWAYS cringe
I’m a millennial
